Mothersong Amy Acre

A debut excavating trauma and healing in early motherhood - from a poet whose work 'fizzes ... levitating openness of song' (Rebecca Tamás)

My child, months from the womb, hung from my teeth. I ferried her by the neck and saw her death everywhere.

Award-winning poet Amy Acre's debut collection Mothersong is a book for our contemporary moment and the moments which follow it, also; an unforgettable, unflinching excavation of motherhood, what it means to be a female artist, and what it means to be a poet with a deeply integrated community.

Amy Acre is a poet, writer, and the editor of Bad Betty Press. Her pamphlets have twice been selected as a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her poem ‘every girl knows’ won the 2019 Verve Poetry Competition. She featured on The Last Dinosaur’s track, ‘In The Belly of a Whale’, streamed over 600,000 times on Spotify. She lives in London.

Owed Joshua Bennett

'A rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the US' NewYorker

Owed is a book with celebration at its centre. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care.

Spanning the spectrum of genre and form - from elegy and ode to origin myth - these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair. What's more, they ask that we turn to the songs and sites of the historically denigrated so that we might uncover a new way of being in the world together, one wherein we can truthfully reckon with the brutality of the past and thus imagine the possibilities of our shared, unpredictable present, anew.

28 September 2023

PAPERBACK / 9781526650696 / £9.99

EBOOK / 9781526650689 / £7.99

TERRITORY: Commonwealth (excluding Canada)/Europe/Open Market

TRANSLATION RIGHTS:

ANZ Pub Date 01 February 2024

PAPERBACK / AUS $22.99 / NZ $24.99

Dr. Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School — a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is a Professor of English at Dartmouth College.

09 November 2023

PAPERBACK / 9781526665270 / £9.99

EBOOK / 9781526665263 / £7.99

TERRITORY: Commonwealth (excluding Canada)/UK/Open Market

TRANSLATION RIGHTS: ANZ Pub Date 01 December 2023

PAPERBACK / AUS