Shivanee Ramlochan

A light pink graphic with white pills on the bottom border, reading 'www.novelniche.substack.com presents Sick Reading'.

Books aren’t pills. But I do need them like blood.

This is the first of my Sick Reading posts, where I write about being ill, and the books that have saved my life.

First, @nataliediaz.bsky.social's Postcolonial Love Poem (@graywolfpress.bsky.social).

🔗 novelniche.substack.com/p/sick-readi...

Beginning 2026 with the official announcement of a new MM romance from @joannachambers.bsky.social = a pocket of bliss to take into this week!

Joanna writes so beautifully, and with such care, about men in love. This book is going to be exactly what I need in February; I can already feel it.

Happy Eighth Birthday, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting!

I love you. You saved me. You kept me dangerous. You remind me to be wild.

#EveryoneKnowsIAmaHaunting

a cartoon of snoopy dressed as a witch stirring a cauldron with the words happy october Alt: a cartoon of snoopy dressed as a witch stirring a cauldron with the words happy october

Welcome, October 🎃

What spooky reads do you have lined up this month? 💀🥀📚

A 4:5 dimension graphic containing details for the workshop Unstopper the Unsayable: Writing Tough Truths in Poems, taught by Shivanee Ramlochan on September 28th and October 5th, 2025, via Zoom.

Our times are tough, but I have to believe that our poems are (radically, tenderly) tougher.

Join me on my two-part workshop for The Writing School, and unstopper the truths your poems most long to say:

thewritingschool.co.uk/unstopper-th...

The Meaning of Trees Split the trunk of an ancient one.

In greenest gratitude for a new poem, "The Meaning of Trees", to branch out as today's selection for poets.org's Poem-a-Day.

Profound thanks to Nathalie for inviting my work into her thoughtful, seeing curations this month.

Thank you, dear trees, love you bad-bad 🌳🌲🌴

poets.org/poem/meaning...

Extremely excited to read Nazaret's debut! Congratulations!

Deep, deep gratitude for this work in our world, dear Christina.

An image of Shivanee Ramlochan dressed in red, pointing to an off-screen audience.

🔥

Photograph by Shaun Rambaran.

A photo of Alison Sealy-Smith, seated before an artwork of Storm/Ororo Munroe by Nathan Szerdy. Photo taken by Dylan Carter.

I'm beyond elated (electrified) to have interviewed @alisonsealysmith.bsky.social for the newest issue of @caribbeanbeat.bsky.social.

Alison's voice as Storm/Ororo Munroe has carried so many of us through maelstroms. *She* is just as remarkable.

Read online: www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-188/th...

A flyer stating 'Online Masterclass Exploring and Celebrating Bi+Poetry 23 September 19:00-21:00 BST Marking Bi Visibility Day, join queer poet Shivanee Ramlochan for an immersion in poems of power and resistance.' Flyer also has a headshot of Shivanee Ramlochan.

Bring your queerest vibes to this @arvonfoundation.bsky.social Bi+ Poetry online masterclass with me!

📆 September 23rd, 2025
🕖 7-9 PM BST / 2-4 PM AST
💸 £40, or ≈ $360 TTD, or ≈ $53 USD
🌐 via Zoom webinar
🔗 bit.ly/bipluspoetry...

Claim the bi+ poems that are your own. #BiPoems

🦕

What a deep pleasure it will be to be with Anu + Alycia's words.

Now is the time to be thinking about the moves your own art makes. Proceed, won't you, into that wilderness.

andilgosine.persona.co

Now, if you haven't yet, is a wildly exciting time to be knowing the moves Andil is making, full of defiance and glitter, memory and merriment, badmind and outrage purposed to a blooming, incandescent ire.

Thinking with Andil, conceptualizing alongside him, receiving the astonishing, renewing gift of his hand outstretched in collaboration, has made me more of who I am as a writer.

I am a sharper instrument, through the practice of working with Andil. A better bladed self for the world we inhabit, for all the prepackaged, state-sanctioned, despot-stamped humiliations to Black, Brown, Queer, Caribbean bodies yet to come.

-and frolics. The frolicking, folks, is crucial to the times in which we live, in which eradications against our person(a)s happen without ceremony or announcement, with punitive disregard for how we are made and seek to shape ourselves.

Novel Niche | Shivanee N. Ramlochan | Substack Queer & Transgressive Close Readings from the Ungovernable & Dangerous Margins. Click to read Novel Niche, by Shivanee N. Ramlochan, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

--in a world that seems designed to engineer our suffering, and ask us to pay for it.

In fiercely bleak times, a matched and superior ferocity has always served us. Let it be so now.

novelniche.substack.com - please join me with all the dread weaponry you possess.

400 witches! *elated broom swish, potion pour and toad kiss*

Thank you for being with me on Substack, where I'm now training my attention on making my infrequent updates more regular and sustained, fuelled by inquiry, curiosity, rage, and how we persist--

I'd love to read this, Zoë!

Huge stan for a Louise Erdrich recc, and I love this one! Thank you, So x

Featuring @elliottgish.bsky.social, @housmansbookshop.bsky.social, @strandbookstore.bsky.social, @ecwpress.bsky.social, @aaknopf.bsky.social, @issarae.bsky.social 🔖

January Reading: A Knife in the Heart of Being Known James Baldwin, Canisia Lubrin, David Wojnarowicz, and others

🔗 novelniche.substack.com/p/january-re...

Five books on a wooden plank background, framed by foliage and a red flower.

January Reads: A Knife in the Heart of Being Known

A detailed, non-review-related, personal public diary of the books I've read the month previous. I talk about what it feels like to be revealed, utterly, to yourself -- and how one January book above all has shown me how much I've left to learn.

A graphic of Shivanee Ramlochan in side profile, with text overlay that reads "Flank and Cutlass: Writing Love Poems, and the website novelniche.substack.com linked below.

I know. It’s not what you expect from me.

Herein, I unearth a poem that's almost a decade old, talk about two of my major tells, and ask you to join me for a week of love and relationships at @arvonfoundation.bsky.social with @ellafrears.bsky.social

novelniche.substack.com/p/flank-and-...

In a ragged, treacherous world, I'm giving thanks for Han Kang and Deborah Smith.

How astonishing, the gift of Kang in her own language.

How remarkable, the conduit of Deborah Smith to bring her to so many of us, in English.

I don't think I can ever stop being grateful.

Not ever.

You're so welcome! I'm longing for Liberated, no pressure - is there a release date I can put in my calendar to gaze at covetously? 😍

Writing romance is such a skillful navigation of desire + restraint, I remind myself as I reread passages across @joannachambers.bsky.social's Enlightenment series. There's something so clear + propulsive about Joanna's prose that makes holding its intensities of m/m love truly heady, irresistible.

To understand the world’s violent records, I turn to Dionne. To comprehend how to keep myself alive in, or despite, this violence, I turn to Dionne again. There is no book like this book. It’s the one you need for this dangerous time.