Inpress Catalogue July - December 2016

INPRESS BOOKS JULY - DECEMBER 2016 BOOKS FOR INDEPENDENT THINKERS

Our Locations

(Moscow)

(Brooklyn, New York)

Aberystwyth: Ylolfa

Blaenau Ffestiniog: Cinnamon Press

Hull: Wrecking Ball Press

The London Magazine Tilted Axis Press

Birmingham: The Emma Press

Cullercoats: Iron Press

Leeds: Dog Horn Publishing Peepal Tree Press

Manchester: Comma Press Dead Ink Publishing

Bridgend: Seren Books

Cliffs of Moher: Salmon Poetry

Mayfield: Agenda Editions

Brooklyn, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse

Dublin: Dedalus Press Poetry Ireland

London: Arachne Press Banipal Publishing Boatwhistle Books CB Editions Hearing Eye Menard Press Out-Spoken Press Papillote Press Penned in the Margins Sidekick Books Snowbooks

Brentwood: Oxygen Books Brixham: Acumen Bristol: Burning Eye Books

Folkestone: Calisi Press Houghton le Spring: Mayfly Publishing

Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books Moscow: Glas Newbury: Holland House

Newcastle: Flambard Press Myrmidon Norwich: Egg Box Publishing Elastic Press

Stroud: Little Island Press Sheffield: Smith/Doorstop Scarborough: Valley Press

Oxford: Modern Poetry in Translation Waywiser Press

Todmorden: Arc Publications

Peterborough: Stonewood Press

Ware: Rockingham Press

Rugby: Nine Arches Press Reading: Two Rivers Press

DEAR READER, Welcome to our second catalogue of the year, covering titles from July to December 2016. And what a huge edition it is!

We’re not only introducing new titles, but also have features on eleven publishers who have joined Inpress over the course of 2016. These publishers mean the range of genres we represent is now broadening, including a further diverse range of poetry, literary fiction, literature in translation and introducing travel, crime, sci-fi/fantasy and even a bit of horror.

You’ll find the titles listed chronologically by month with a very clear spot on each book stating if it is poetry, fiction or non-fiction, so we are hoping it will be very user friendly.

What we are constantly amazed and inspired by at Inpress is the depth and variety of publishing produced by our wonderful publishers. Each book absolutely deserves its place in the catalogue and we hope as you browse the entries, you’ll be motivated to try something you might not have thought was for you and shake up established genres. Why not add some poetry to the Health and Well Being section with Agnes Török’s Happiness is an Art Form – a collection based on the author’s own happiness research (pg. 33) or to the History section with Written in the Dark, a brutally hard-hitting collection of poems written during the siege of Leningrad, from Ugly Duckling Presse (pg. 62)?

We have a wealth of really beautifully illustrated and photographic titles in this half of the year, Finders Keepers, a collection of poems and illustrations on Britain’s vanishing wildlife (pg. 11), Mametz, a collection of old and new photos of Mametz Wood publishing to coincide with the anniversary of the battle (pg. 14), Wild Plant Year a hybrid guide to English folklore and the uses of local flora, beautifully illustrated by Christina Hart-Davies (pg. 30), The Emma Press continue their children’s poetry collections with the star-gazing Watcher of the Skies (pg. 36), the delicate and delightful The Book of Snow will make a gorgeous Christmas gift (pg. 48), Outcome the book of Tom Dingley’s #Outcome project, photographing LGBT people with attributes of their everyday lives and a picture of themselves as a child (pg. 57) and Iolo Williams’s Wild Places, picking his 40 top spots of natural beauty across Wales (pg. 58).

As ever, there is just too much to mention in this collection of titles, I feel I must point out Andy Seed’s witty Poems for Pensioners which I have high hopes for this Autumn (pg. 35) and the collection of Night Poems and Lullabies, All Through the Night, edited by Marie Heaney (pg. 25). Seren will be making headlines with their Robert Graves War Poems which includes previously unpublished poems from the great war poet (pg. 43). All are easy gift picks!

We have some really wonderful and cutting edge forthcoming fiction including Diane Williams’s Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine published in the US to critical acclaim by McSweeney’s, taken on in the UK by the brilliant CB editions. Novels set across the globe; from Tokyo, My Falling Down House (pg. 34) to Seoul, All Our Shadows (pg. 39), Jamaica in The Marvellous Equations of the Dread (pg. 58) alongside Eve Out of Her Ruins, set in a fictitious Mauritian city based on Port Louis (pg. 33) and the exotic North of England is well represented with Wes Brown’s When Lights are Bright set in Leeds (pg. 40), Hard Wired based in our Newcastle homeland (pg. 18) and Turning Blue from Benjamin Myers located in the atmospheric Yorkshire Dales (pg. 23). Finally, we introduce a brilliant new crime voice, with his first in a series from the Caribbean, Jacob Ross and The Bone Readers (pg. 39).* And that is just a small sample of the wonders in the following pages, there is something for everyone in here. I hope you enjoy browsing the titles, if you would like more information on any of our books, publishers or authors, please don’t hesitate to be in touch – we would love to hear from you.

Happy reading!

Sophie O’Neill | Managing Director sophie@inpressbooks.co.uk *Reading copies are available, please contact us if you would like an early copy.

DEBUT POETS Talent is everywhere, just waiting to be unearthed, and the publishers we work with are tireless in their pursuit of the bold, the exciting and the new. This catalogue is full to the brim with debut collections from the brightest and best rising stars of the poetry world, here’s just a small taste of what’s on offer…

Hello you I am discussing you with myself in pieces bit by bit but remember there will

be enough I promise for you when you need yourself back particularly if you let it be this way

for a moment longer Hello you I will tell you if you remember how what is never sad is only what can be soaked in this kind of water the kind of water that will flood to you silently when you feel that I love it Remember this harm and this valley the side channel river through which another world can be reached where everything is the same just in reverse remember?

Extract from Ada Kaleh by Freddie Mason, pg. 14

Window-cleaner Sees Paintings Calls and cries, the traffic’s roar: it all falls away by the seventh floor. I only hear my sponge and the asthmatic creaking of the steel that holds me up. A cloud might speak to me or I might guess what a gull has got to say.

The people: busy, white, mute, behind glass.

The eighth has art. That girl there with her smile.

Who caught her so discreetly she’s immune to compliments as she returns my gaze?

When will that sparrow hawk burst from its frame?

I’m hung here like an icy masterpiece no one appreciates, month after month I huff and scrub and clarify the view – touching up the clouds that show the master’s hand.

Look. Some sunlight’s slipped into my canvas.

Extract from Window-cleaner Sees Paintings by Menno Wigman, pg. 59

2

Grey lady

Illustrious and glorious mistress, let women learn from you!

Flung, her wings collapsed, elbows bent, intact, as if heaving a huge sigh, her beak wrenched this way or that, brought in by the tide – grey lady, wheezed of life, morning in, morning after.

Bodies too, on this stretch of river, cast up bloated with weeds in their hair, not pristine as this old lady here.

She’s only closed her eyes, as if temporarily, only temporarily forgetting to shake her wings, take flight, as if any moment, she might ...

Suicide, murder, accident?

We’ll never know: a picture in the paper – party night – walking home, last seen saying goodbye to friends ...

Hunched queen of Eel Pie Island, shriven, mute, a grey flush of wings flying high over the slatey Thames; no rescue boat, police cordon, diver, journalist to document her demise, but for a short time only she’s foreshore news for Sunday joggers, dog-walkers, winos and old couples who walk the towpath down by the brewery; arms crooked, counting the days till spring.

They have their everyday vexations in vanity, varied, and passions made supple with delights and menstrual devices.

Judith returns to Bethulia unburdened, bearing olives, her maidservant Abra clasping a trammel of neurological functions.

This is what dialogue looks like.

Circa Assyria, someone stole the tent pegs to give to Jael, taking the head of the general; jugular periodically severed.

They don’t speak, their tongues supplanted with lax hands on the back of the forehead.

This is what scripting should be.

One might say she should take a scalp as a trophy

Taken from Small Disturbances by Isabel Bermudez, pg. 52

substitute for miserly apostrophes — subservient sophistry, convenient humanist exempla.

Counterpart, daresay, for those animalistic and diabolical lusts that trussed her speakerly minutes and gave them to co-stars; philistine armies never know how to hold their peace.

Taken from Trammel by Charlotte Newman, pg. 47

i have never felt safe in manhood and thirty years since i last set foot in queens park oval just below the surface of my grand gesture of godfatherhood is the panic like that day at being discovered as a fake or worse discovered to be faking Extract from 'Manhood at the Oval', taken from You Have You Father Hard Head by Colin Robinson, pg. 15

3

DEBUT POETS

The Bechdel Test Botticelli

THE SIX SERIES

NEW VOICES FROM EUROPE AND BEYOND This series of anthologies from Arc Publications compile the work of contemporary poets from across Europe into bilingual editions, with introductions which set the poetry in a historical and literary context for the English-language reader.

Twelve in total, these are our top five.

SIX ESTONIAN POETS Doris Kareva (ed.)

In Six Estonian Poets, the editor, Doris Kareva, presents us with the work of five highly individual poets of the younger generation together with that of one of the most influential figures of their parents’ generation.

For Estonians, poetry has always been far more than entertainment; it is a way of keeping their language alive, a cultural thread which, throughout their history and under the sway of a series of masters, has preserved and nourished their sense of national identity.

Estonian poetry is simultaneously a valid contemporary currency and a kind of secret code, a language of elves, known to few. In this volume, readers of English are offered a rare gateway into this world of spirits and humans, a world that is both vulnerable and resilient, a world that lies at the heart of Estonian culture.

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £10.99 | 9781906570972 PB | 234 X 156MM | 116PP | 1 DECEMBER 2014

SIX FINNISH POETS Teemu Manninen (ed.)

The poets in this collection offer a refreshing mix of narrative, cinematic and experimental devices, ranging from science fiction to punk to whimsical subject matters.

Several of the poets in this anthology collaborate with other artists and this engagement is evident as the poems speak to each other across the collection.

Features the work of six of Finland’s most exciting living poets: Vesa Haapala, Janne Nummela, Matilda Södergran, Henriikka Tavi, Juhana Vähänen and Katariina Vuorinen.

Translated by Lola Rogers, Fleur & Emily Jeremiah and Helen R. Boultrum.

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £10.99 | 9781906570880 PB | 234 X 156MM | 160PP | 3 OCTOBER 2013

4

Hrachya Saroukhan creates poems using various tricks, weaving pictures with micro-strokes as a confession, as a memory, or sometimes with the thorn wreathes of their losses, throwing a not very confident glance at the other world.

Khachik Manoukyan’s struggle against the inhuman nature of this world starts with The Scriptures, with the Old and New Testaments.

Violet Grigorian and Hasmik Simonian belong to the new and younger generation.

However, with a united philosophy, they have no fear of endangering the “poetry” in favour of the consolation of creating something from the ruins of their inner worlds.

Azniv Sahakyan makes it clear the social creature people see only represents the physical picture of her distorted existence.

Anatoli Hovhannisyan does not aim to cause suffering to the reader by his own torment, rather, he brings about a feeling of consolation.

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £10.99 | 9781906570873 PB | 234 X 156MM | 130PP | 29 JANUARY 2013

SIX SLOVAK POETS Igor Hochel (ed.)

Six Slovak Poets is the sixth volume in a series of bilingual anthologies of contemporary verse from Europe and beyond and features the work of poets of an older generation who started publishing in the 1960s. They lived through the difficult times that followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, through the political, social and cultural transformation of the past twenty years since the fall of the communist regime in 1989, and through the division of the country in 1993 which gave birth to today’s Slovak Republic.

The work of these poets continues the experimentation with form and language of the pre-war Central European avant-garde, with added elements of myth, legend, folk tales, and references to religion and the natural world. Also integral to their work are philosophical reflection and exploration of the moral issues raised by the circumstances in which they worked. The result is a densely woven, polythematic free verse representative of the poetics of a generation that has been central to Slovak literary life for four decades, a generation whose approach to poetry younger writers who have subsequently entered the literary scene are still developing or reacting against.

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £10.99 | 9781906570385 PB | 234 X 156MM | 172PP | 1 MARCH 2010

SIX CATALAN POETS Pere Ballart (ed.)

History shows how Catalan culture has overcome critical situations far more adverse than the present. The Catalan language has not been replaced and this anthology contains four Catalans, one Valencian and one Mallorcan, who, although they lived through the tail end of the dictatorship, grew up under a democratic regime. Together, their work could not be more modern, comprehensive or polyphonic: politics and history cohabit with love (both heterosexual and homoerotic), learned allusion and popular image, stanzaic rigour and freedom of form, the song to the land of one’s birth and hymn to the voyage.

Featuring the work of six of Catalonia’s leading poets - Josep Lluís Aguiló, Elies Barberà, Manuel Forcano, Gemma Gorga, Jordi Julià, Carles Torner - translated by a prize-winning translator, and with an introductory essay which sets the poets within a wider literary context.

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £10.99 | 9781906570606 PB | 234 X 156MM | 160PP | 8 MARCH 2013

5

THE SIX SERIES

SIX ARMENIAN POETS Razmik Davoyan (ed.)

WORDS AND MUSIC BY… At Wrecking Ball Press, we got into words through song lyrics – people like Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. Oddly enough, most of the music we listen to in the office is instrumental – Miles Davis, Philip Glass, bits of dub reggae. It’s almost as if any words coming out of the speakers get in the way of the words on the page.

We asked our writers if they listened to music while they wrote and how it affected them in their approach to their work...

RUSS LITTEN “I went through a phase of listening to Ralph Vaughn Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’ when I sat down at my keyboard. It got so I couldn’t start typing until I heard that opening violin refrain. I sacked that off because it was starting to get too much like an emotional crutch.

Nowadays I like listening to 14th century choral music and French hip-hop as I write. I don’t mind words, as long as they’re not in English and I can’t understand them.”

LEE HARRISON “I don’t write to music, but - for good or ill - more than half my writing process is just thinking about writing - and I certainly think to music. Music can form a kind of soundtrack to lend a rousing, cinematic feel to a scene I’m imagining, and this helps identify and focus the emotional aspect of a particular moment, wether it be tragic, triumphant, fatalistic, or bitter. There are emotions in music that are quicker, more expansive and vivid than words.”

DEAN WILSON “Years ago I used to listen to Brian Eno’s “Music For Airports” when I was drafting out poems. But nowadays I don’t listen to anything at all when I’m writing. I do get inspiration from the occasional line of Country and Western songs though, when I’m sat in the Whalebone with my half of lime and soda”

6

“The only music I can write to is that which comes out of the throats of birds - anything else is a horrible distraction.

That said, this morning, with the doors and windows open to the spring, I could hear someone’s country and western but the scene I was writing took place at an outdoor party, with background music always behind the dialogue, so I didn’t mind at all; it was fortuitous, in fact. But, given the choice, I want only ambient sounds when writing. To get fired up, though, well, that’s a different matter; a writing bout is often preceded by a blast of song. Which could be anything - whatever gets the fluids flowing. Yesterday it was ‘Twisted Little Man’ by Michael J Sheehy.”

PETER KNAGGS “The majority of my writing I do at my kitchen table, and always there will be music playing. It could be anything, old favourites such as The Bunnymen or the Violent Femmes, or more recently I’ve been playing Venezuelan rumba, Columbian Cumbia, Bangkok keyboard orchestras or Mali guitar greats such as Boubacar. Brazilian too, love them Brazilians, and Roumanian gypsy brass, gets me going, along with Roumanian polkas, Portuguese klezmer, Belgian rockabilly and I love the funereal wails of the Polish. And surely there is nothing more life affirming than a Mexican Cucaracha? The two things are separate in terms of listening and writing; I can’t imagine a bit of barnstorming Cajun slipping into a poem, just because I’m listening to it.

However, the context of music, as a soundtrack to our lives may affect the content of a poem. I often put snippets of lyrics into poems to give the reader a sense of time and place. For example I worked for a lighting wholesaler in the Eighties and Bronski Beat were popular, so to tell the story of my time, these things sneak in. Also, I have directly used song structures to create new poetry, Bob Dylan Subterranean Homesick Blues, springs to mind. I’ve also used some Steely Dan songs, to build the structure of poems, using the whole thing that is, the sonics of it, the beat.

I think music is such a huge part of our culture it would be impossible for poets to ignore it, and as well as referring to them in our stories - we should sample and nick.”

7

WORDS AND MUSIC BY…

NIALL GRIFFITHS

SOMBRA : (DIS)LOCATE Raina J. León In sombra : (dis)locate, poems weave themselves in and out of place and time, “between glory and tumult,” embodying tales of Josephine Baker, what it means to be in brown/ black skin, in love, in care, in missing—each experience a geological layer, holding memory in “the ghost trail of fingers felt/ on the breast before the seeker searches the hand.”

The real work León is doing is restorative and then transformative; she employs forms like the bop and quotilla, pulls from the beauty of languages like Arabic and French, plays with how the poem appears on the page, and as a result creates poems that are sensorial maps to bring a person, a thing, from the shadow, back here or there or wherever it must land to be at home, at peace. sombra : (dis)locate is “thunder-born, lightning-scarred,” a lyrical work that “gives our human to one another.”

POETRY

SALM0N POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669341 PB | 215 X 135MM | 88PP | 22 FEBRUARY 2016

ONLY MORE SO Millicent Borges Accardi Only More So is a collection of lyric poems. Sometimes a bridge in a sad song, other times an echo that threatens to develop then fades, the images blend, twist, and entangle one another: a marriage is a song, then it’s a body, and finally a boat blind in the sea listening for the fog horn.

We find ourselves alone in the spaces where atrocity meets the marriage bed—in those silences that are chosen, those that are forced, those that must be, and those that kill. “In Prague” is as close to a pure definition of poetry we get, where memory is kinetic action, where language is recorded in the land itself, where the names of things tell us what they really are.

POETRY

SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669280 PB | 215 X 135MM | 78PP | 24 MARCH 2016

SHENANIGANS Patrick Lodge Shenanigans is the highly anticipated second collection by award winning poet Patrick Lodge.

From the Irish sionnachuighim, meaning “I play the fox,” ‘shenanigans’ can be found throughout this cleverly crafted collection – in wry remark and delicate wordplay, in the interweaving of distinct landscapes and voices.

At once familiar and strange, Lodge’s poems are rich in detail and narrative – astute observations that transport the reader to a whole new world with each turn of the page.

POETRY

8

VALLEY PRESS | £8.99 | 9781908853707 PB | 198 X 129 MM | 78PP | 14 APRIL 2016

A beautiful anthology featuring new writing responding to the life and death of David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant to Leeds found drowned in the River Aire in 1969. The anthology also includes selections from previously published works by writers including Kester Aspden, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Zodwa Nyoni, and competition judges Ian Duhig and Caryl Phillips.

“In Claudia Rankine’s Citizen the speaker is asked in England if she will write about Mark Duggan. She replies, “Why don’t you?”

Our competition entrants rose to that challenge over David Oluwale’s story and its continuing echoes for our society in new and moving ways. Their work stands confidently beside that of better-known writers in an anthology all can be proud of, a document of their refusal to be silent in the face of abusive power.” Ian Duhig (judge)

POETRY

VALLEY PRESS | £8.99 | 9781908853714 PB | 198 X 129MM | 134PP | 2 JUNE 2016

THREE SYMPHONIES Tony Conran In his final group of symphonies, revered Welsh poet, Tony Conran explores life, love, theology, creation, creativity and even historical themes using a wide range of poetic and imaginative techniques. The three symphonies compliment and contrast with each other and show the poet still at the height of his imaginative power. The imagery draws on science, religion, family life (in The Magi), work (in Fabrics), the poetic and creative experience (in Everworlds); displaying humour, wonder and compassion for the human predicament.

In his perceptive introduction to the poetry Jeremy Hooker writes: ‘Three Symphonies draws on their maker’s life-story, but as part of the story of life itself, and with an objectivity that subsumes personal emotion in a larger rendering of human experience in relation to the natural and divine creation. What Conran enacts in these poems is a sacred drama.’

POETRY

AGENDA EDITIONS | £10.00 | 9781908527257 PB | 6 JUNE 2016

LIFE IN SUSPENSION Hélène Cardona “Dappled with transparent imagery, like the Mediterranean sunlight she grew up with, Hélène Cardona’s poems offer a vivid self-portrait as scholar, seer and muse.”

John Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Griffin International Poetry Prize, MacArthur “Genius” Grant, and a National Humanities Medal.

“A tour de force of language and phonetics; a deeply felt and deeply spiritual collection which explores the universal human experience from a very personal point of view. This is intimate poetry, and yet it transcends the mundane through its lyricism and its glory in language. Hélène Cardona’s pen moves from the human to the divine and back in a single sentence, and the result is uplifting and magical.”

Joanne Harris, best-selling author of Chocolat

POETRY

SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669297 PB | 215 X 135MM | 108PP | 6 JUNE 2016

9

JANUARY - JUNE 2016

REMEMBERING OLUWALE: AN ANTHOLOGY SJ Bradley

JULY HEATH Penelope Shuttle & John Greening Criss-crossed with desire-lines and flight paths, Penelope Shuttle and John Greening’s Heath is a wild chorus of poems written in call and response across Hounslow Heath.

Through bramble, furze and over wild tracks, we explore the run-out grooves of a rapidly vanishing edgeland that may soon go under the tarmac of the proposed third runway at Heathrow. This is eco-poetry beautifully realised and retold in the form of a contemporary fable.

Alone on the heath, under the constellations of aircraft holding patterns, and with only these eloquent, shape-shifting poems as our guide, we encounter highwaymen, witches and ghosts, follow the tracks of the last wolf in England, and find ourselves incanting the heath’s calendar of spells and enchantments. Heath speaks to us, sings its own centuries-old song of seasons; both born and raised in its shadow, Shuttle and Greening’s deep connection of memory to this place brings forth a remarkable cycle of magical and bitter-sweet poems.

CLARE CURTIS PRINTMAKER/ILLUSTRATOR WWW.CLARECURTIS.CO.UK

10

NINE ARCHES PRESS | £14.99 | 9781911027065 PB | 216 X 138MM | 200PP | 7 JULY 2016

JULY

FINDERS KEEPERS Harry Man Finders Keepers is a collection of poems and full-colour illustrations themed around Britain’s vanishing wildlife.

It’s the culmination of a year-long project which has seen activist-artists Harry Man and Sophie Gainsley geocaching the poems in public spaces across the country to memorialise the many species that have been brought to the brink (and beyond) of extinction.

The final book brings together a selection of the most playful and poignant poems from the project, arranged together with beautiful ink and watercolour images.

POETRY

SIDEKICK BOOKS | £6.50 | 9781909560222 PB | 127 X 190MM | 48PP | 1 JULY 2016

CROSSINGS Nicholas Murray Topically, Crossings is a book about borders. Divided into two parts, it reflects on the many borders that Nicholas Murray has either crossed or confronted – geographic, cultural, linguistic, social, class, religious, sexual – and on the influence which borders have on how we think of ourselves and others.

In the longer section Murray the traveller takes the reader to North Africa, Britain and Spain, on a trip along the Danube, and to Turkey. He also writes about Voltaire, exile, translation, the North/South divide and Eton school.

The second section is less fragmented, drawing on Murray’s experiences as a long-term, but part-time, resident in the English (or are they the Welsh?) Marches, in contrast to his many journeys around Europe.

NONFICTION

SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781723470 PB | 208 X 135MM | 184PP | 2 JULY 2016

KUMINA QUEEN Monica Minott Monica Minott’s poems draw on the enduring cult/culture of Jamaican womanhood in the sites that they command and in which they are empowered. This is not a context of gender separation. The sensuality and sexuality of her poems operate in zones where the male force is not to be excluded, but recognised as a presence, even when negative or oppositional, that helps to define female energy and power.

In Minott’s poetry, sex is sweet, sex is to be welcomed, though men are expected to be sensitive readers of women if they are to be allowed in. Some men, though, are seen to be discombobulated by the sexual power of women whose sensuality is earthy and grounded in the landscape she inhabits.

POETRY

PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £8.99 | 9781845233174 PB | 206 X 135MM | 74PP | 4 JULY 2016

11

TAKE MY WORD FOR IT Ralph Thompson Take My Word For It offers rich insights into the life of one of one of Jamaica’s finest poets who has also been at the heart of the island’s economic development. There are moving chapters of a pre-war boyhood in colonial Jamaica, the years spent at college in the USA, and postwar service in the United States Airforce, in Japan. Thereafter Ralph Thompson’s story is of a life at the heart of Jamaica’s movement towards capitalist modernity and fascinating glimpses of Jamaica’s sharply divided political life. But there is also the artist and poet who has explored the inner life, not least the position of a white man in Jamaica as it decolonises. Ralph Thompson writes with passionate concern for the quality of the education on offer to all Jamaicans, and his contribution to the debate and practical attempts to make improvements. He writes too of his friendship with Derek Walcott and support for his Trinidad Theatre Workshop with warmth and insight.

Amply illustrated with photographs, Thompson’s paintings and extracts from his poetry, Take My Word For It is a beautifully and frankly written record of a significant Jamaican life.

NONFICTION

PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £13.99 | 9781845233181 PB | 234 X 156MM | 216PP | 4 JULY 2016

THE SNAKE WAND Mavis Gulliver Malevolent Witchery is growing. The witches know that The Gift enabled Merryn MacQueen to defeat the witches of Tiree and Kerrera. They are seeking revenge and are never far away.

Merryn and her brother Hamish, together with the children from Gylen Castle, are given the most difficult task of all as they face their three most dangerous adversaries – The Clickfinger Locket, The Grand High Witch and The Snake Wand.

When The Grand High Witch creates the most terrible spell of all, the children, their friend Kester Witchbane, and The Land of Benevolent Wizardry are plunged into unimaginable peril.

Who will be involved in the final battle - and who will be victorious?

FICTION

CINNAMON PRESS | £9.99 | 9781910836224 PB | 197 X 130MM | 250PP | 4 JULY 2016

STILL SEARCHING FOR THE BIG CITY BEATS Glenn Carmichael & Kevin Evans It is the late 80s and Punk is long dead. Not everyone made it. In London E1: the leftovers and left behind are still alive and still dreaming. Facing up to Thatcherism, despondency, drugs and desire. This is a world where everything is negotiable and everyone is searching for something, if only for the way out.

Keith ‘Spike’ Williams is looking for a spark to ignite his life. Going nowhere until his old friend, the mysterious Gene Campbell reappears on the scene with a pocketful of hope and a crazy dream. The Big City Beats are born – a hard-faced Spoken Word act; arbiters of attitude and addiction, holding up a mirror to an apathetic, doom-ridden society. Spike follows in Gene’s litter-strewn wake into the gutters and alleyways of Whitechapel and neon-lit streets of Soho, where dreams turn to nightmares, reality bites hard and not everyone is going to make it out alive.

FICTION

12

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136762 PB | 203 X 133MM | 180PP | 4 JULY 2016

Heterogeneous is the definitive anthology of Anthony Anaxagorou’s poetry - an extensive and revised selection taken from several previous volumes.

The winner of the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award, Anaxagorou offers the reader an insight into his poetry career with work spanning from 2009 to 2016. These seven instructive years highlight the making of a poet who has now subsequently achieved international acclaim as a thinker, writer, polemicist and activist.

The poems themselves are at times raw, visceral and unapologetic then with little indication can become almost separated, taking on a more hushed, sparse and lamenting tone.

POETRY

OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £10.00 | 9780993103834 PB | 138 X 216MM | 4 JULY 2016

LAID BARE Hannah M. Teasdale Laid Bare is the bittersweet reality of a woman with flaws, navigating her way through divorce and child support and settling into new skin.

This journey contains mistakes, blood, sweat and many bottles of wine. Hannah Teasdale’s debut collection explores self acceptance, single parenthood and the grab for clarity when the walls have come crashing down and it is time to rebuild.

POETRY

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136779 PB | 203 X 133MM | 78PP | 4 JULY 2016

BOX ROOMS Laurie Bolger Laurie Bolger’s debut collection Box Rooms shows that poetry can be your friend. With extraordinary warmth, the poems build into a conversation of friendship, communities, vegetables, pubs, tea, love and the meanings we find in these and in each other.

This is a joyful exploration of self and community, of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and introduces Laurie Bolger as an unmistakable, unpretentious voice of British poetry.

POETRY

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136786 PB | 203 X 133MM | 50PP | 4 JULY 2016

13

JULY

HETEROGENEOUS Anthony Anaxagorou

THE IMMIGRATION HANDBOOK Caroline Smith Caroline Smith’s timely book of poems, The Immigration Handbook, is a vividly detailed and deeply felt look at the lives of those she has tried to help over the years in her job as an Immigration Caseworker dealing with the Home Office.

As she helps lead often traumatised immigrants through the labyrinthine bureaucracies they must navigate to survive, she deals with lives fraught with violence and tragedy but also hears many stories of stoic resilience and humorous forbearance, of the kindness of others and of joy in the midst of sorrow.

Detailing the extraordinary trials and moving episodes that make up the greatest crisis of modern times, this is a book that reaches out of the headlines into our hearts.

POETRY

SEREN BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781781723210 PB | 216 X 138MM | 64PP | 7 JULY 2016

MAMETZ Aled Rhys Hughes For five years, photographer Aled Rhys Hughes visited Mametz on the anniversary of the Battle of Mametz Wood to make images which are equally about the battle and about Wales today. His book collects colour photographs of the battlefield – its topography, the military detritus still to be found there, and mementoes made by the soldiers who served there.

He photographed trees surviving from the battle (some with artillery shells entwined in them), and the present day wood with its respectful graffiti and painted Welsh flags left by modern day pilgrims to the site. Hughes also includes an evocative group of photographs taken at dusk – ‘the dangerous time’ for troops in the war.

NONFICTION

SEREN BOOKS | £14.99 | 9781781723289 HB | 210 X 210MM | 96PP | 7 JULY 2016

ADA KALEH Freddie Mason In voices of catastrophe, calmness, longing and frustration, this brilliant poem opens out onto the collective experiences of interference that take the place of what you really need to remember clearly but can’t.

Not since Samuel Beckett’s Whoroscope has there been such a confidently unhinged debut collection of poetry written in the English language. Stunningly illustrated with drawings by artist Alice-Andrea Ewing, Ada Kaleh stretches and contorts language into an unsettling monody for shared experience.

There are teeth, police cars and film crews. From East Finchley to rivers in Finland, fires in the middle of vegetables to plants in the desert at night, Ada Kaleh is a poem like no other.

POETRY

14

LITTLE ISLAND PRESS | £20.00 | 9780993505607 HB | 234 X 156MM | 64PP | 7 JULY 2016

In poems of generous vulnerability and intimacy, Colin Robinson captures the voice of boys on whose spirits and “hard heads” their mothers live out the memory of their fathers. Robinson’s verse, which is acutely aware of the troubled history of race, politics and identity in Caribbean society, is taut, ironic, and richly evocative of various landscapes and cultures that have shaped him over the years. He manages to sustain a tonal authenticity in these polyvalent poems that make use of both terse epigrammatic forms and longer, expansive narrative forms.

Uniquely, and importantly, You Have You Father Hard Head, breaks new ground in Caribbean poetry as it explores with distinctively Caribbean candour, wit and irony themes of sexual love between men and views of life with HIV. Here is poetry of admirable honesty and acute self-awareness.

POETRY

PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £8.99 | 9781845233167 PB | 206 X 135MM | 72PP | 11 JULY 2016

KINGSTON BUTTERCUP Ann-Margaret Lim Jamaican poet, Ann-Margaret Lim, follows her critically acclaimed debut collection, The Festival of Wild Orchid, with an exciting new volume, Kingston Buttercup, a work of fierce honesty, social awareness and lyric complexity. Bocas Poetry Prize winner, Loretta Collins Klobah, writes: “In Kingston Buttercup, her marvelous second book, Ann-Margaret Lim’s fresh, honest, and tenderly-fierce perspective comes through in highly readable lyric poems. Her poems explore a range of locales, from the sea bottom, the underside of bridges, the riverbeds, the Taíno hills, the cane fields, the Kingston cityscape and the Jamaican countryside. She draws from complex subject matter: plantation diaries, slave narratives, slave sale notices and the poet’s own family’s multi-generational, entwined stories from China, West Africa, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. In poems that remain rooted in contemporary Jamaica, Lim writes about life as a woman, daughter and mother with empathy, great love and the sometimes urgent, cleansing fyah.”

POETRY

PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £8.99 | 9781845233303 PB | 206 X 135MM | 72PP | 11 JULY 2016

THE REPENTERS Kevin Jared Hosein When the infant Jordon Sant is taken to the St Asteria Home for Children after the murder of his parents, he sets out on a journey that is a constant struggle between his best and worst selves. Barely a teenager, he runs away from the home to scuffle for a living in the frightening underbelly of Port of Spain. There Jordon reaches the lower depths of both Trinidadian society and himself. In Jordon Sant, Kevin Jared Hosein creates a narrator who gets under your skin. He takes us into the most dreadful places of human experience, confesses doing seemingly unforgivable things. But though Jordan knows how inescapable circumstance can be, he never denies responsibility for his actions. But can this Dostoyevskian figure save himself?

The Repenters takes us to places in Trinidad readers will not have been before. In Kevin Hosein the Caribbean announces a writer whose work is poetic, Gothic, and deeply transgressive, whose creation of a voice for Jordon Sant is troubling, engrossing and not to be forgotten.

FICTION

PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781845233310 PB | 206 X 135MM | 200PP | 11 JULY 2016

15

JULY

YOU HAVE YOU FATHER HARD HEAD Colin Robinson

NEW WORLDS, OLD WAYS Karen Lord (ed.)

Discover some of the best in speculative short fiction from the Caribbean’s up and coming voices. Edited by writer Karen Lord, New Worlds, Old Ways is the third publication of Peekash Press, an imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, and as part of CaribLit project.

Do not be misled by the ‘speculative’ in the title. Although there may be robots and fantastical creatures, these common symbols are tools to frame the familiar from fresh perspectives. Here you will find the recent past and ongoing present of government and society with curfews, crime and corruption; the universal themes of family with parents and children, growth and death, love and hate; the struggle to thrive when power is capricious and revenge too bittersweet. Here too is the passage of everything – old ways, places, peoples, and ourselves – leaving nothing behind but memories, histories, stories.

FICTION

PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £8.99 | 9781845233365 PB | 206 X 135MM | 147PP | 11 JULY 2016

THE HEART GOES BOOM Alex Green Like The Wizard of Oz mets Pulp Fiction, this debut novel from San Francisco writer Alex Green is a hilarious post-modern road trip through the shallow surfaces of a media obsessed America.

After his girlfriend pushes him through a fortune-teller’s window, fading TV star Kieran Falcon realises his life needs to take a decisive turn. Aided by an assorted cast of eccentrics, mavericks and outright maniacs, Kieran sets off on an epic quest for true love and immortality.

Characterised by the type of snappy, witty writing that makes American literature so great, The Heart Goes Boom is one of the most enthralling and original novels you’ll read this year.

FICTION WRECKING BALL PRESS | £10.00 | 9781903110386 PB | 236PP | 24 JULY 2016

FIFTY-SIX Carol Watts & George Szirtes As George Szirtes says in his introduction to this poem sequence - collaboration at its best is a magical form of encounter - and this book has all the marks of an extraordinarily stimulating and creative experience for both poets. Carol Watts opens the batting with a 28-line poem inspired by a painting by Jenny Saville entitled ‘The Red Stare’.

George is unaware of Carol’s starting point, but responds to her rich language and imagistic energy with a 27-line poem. A 26-line poem from Carol follows and thus the trajectory of this poem sequence is set, each poem being one line shorter than its predecessor until a central point of one single line is reached. Then the process of ‘re-building’ begins, until a final poem of 58 lines concludes the sequence.

Unusual and unpredictable, this uninhibited exchange between poets makes for exciting reading.

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345122 PB | 216 X 138MM | 70PP | 29 JULY 2016 HB ISBN: 9781910345122

16

Lunarium is Josep Lluís Aguiló’s fourth and latest collection, and it takes up his recurring theme of the uncertainty of life. These poems speak in a multiplicity of voices, often from the fantastic surroundings of myths and legends – labyrinths, secret libraries, mirrors, hell and the devil, smugglers, pirates of the Caribbean, palaces with golden pillars, apocalypses – and there is a sense that the poet is constantly pushing the boundaries of the possible in an attempt to explore what it means to live on the edge of his imaginary worlds, at the same time using these ‘other worlds’ to explore our own world and what it means to be human.

Aguilo’s language is rich and sensuous, and the beautiful rural and maritime landscapes of the poet’s native Mallorca shine through the fabulous worlds he creates.

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £10.99 | 9781910345467 PB | 216 X 138MM | 102PP | 29 JULY 2016 HB ISBN: 9781910345474

SIX GALICIAN POETS Manuela Palcios (ed.)

Featuring the work of six poets – Chus Pato, María do Cebreiro, Yolanda Castaño, Xosé María Álvarez Cáccamo, Daniel Salgado and Estevo Creus – this anthology aims to give a flavour of some of today’s most significant poetry written in Galician.

Three of them, Pato, Cáccamo and Creus, have already made a name for themselves as poets whose new work is often groundbreaking, always exciting. The other three poets, although younger, have distinguished themselves by winning some important literary prizes, as well as the respect of their peers. The combination of poets of different generations in this anthology is particularly apt in that it reflects the Galician preference for literary collaboration, and here we can see not only a mutual influence but a sharing of common concerns.

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £10.99 | 9781910345450 PB | 156 X 234MM | 160PP | 29 JULY 2016

A CERTAIN KOSLOWSKI Michael Augustin ‘Is it true,’ someone asks, ‘that regardless of what one asks you, one always receives a wrong answer?’ ‘That’s right!’ says Koslowski.

Koslowski is everyone and no one, a tragic figure who stumbles through life in resigned bewilderment at the trials and bizarre coincidences thrown in his path. These brief prose pieces have a style and attraction all their own, by turns wonderfully surreal and laughout-loud funny.

With strange and beautiful illustrations by Hartmut Eïng, this new edition, 24 years on, includes brand-new pieces about Koslowski's life, loves and losses, alongside the classic texts from the original edition.

Koslowski swears, ‘cross my heart and hope to die,’ that many years ago he personally met Huckleberry Finn. ‘But he is merely a literary character!’ someone protests. ‘So am I,’ says Koslowski.

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345566 PB | 216 X 138MM | 90PP | 29 JULY 2016

17

JULY

LUNARIUM Josep Lluís Aguiló

AUGUST 18

HARD WIRED Kathleen McKay September 1996. Newcastle United have just bought Alan Shearer for a record-breaking £15 million from Blackburn Rovers and across the city regeneration and investment are reshaping the landscape.

Charlie works in the local bail hostel where, exhausted and made cynical by the job, she expects the worst of everyone. When her friend’s son is found dead in the local park she is dragged into the hunt for the murderer. Darren was no angel but as she begins to dig into the crime she unwittingly sets in motion a series of threats against the hostel. Her attempts to uncover the truth find her probing failures in the justice system and searching for someone who has fallen through the cracks. As Charlie gets closer to the murderer she places her own family in danger. Meanwhile, her daughter is keeping her own secrets.

MAYFLY BOOKS | £7.99 | 9781911356011 PB | 198 X 129MM | 336PP | 8 AUGUST 2016

The bones are the bones of the poet – integral to the landscape of her body. The bones are the spines of trees, the bone white of the moon. They belong to the hawk, the blackbird, the lion and the deer. They are, too, the bones of the dead and discarded, the martyred and maimed and the simply inconvenient. They are the bones of the forgotten, who have not forgotten us....

The fire is love and lust – a lover’s tongue, a naked woman. It’s the red stones of a canyon.

The fire is the red hair of the poet’s grandfather, the blood of JFK, a warehouse burning in South Philadelphia. Most of all, the fire is destruction; a torching, a bonfire, a clearing of space for whatever comes next.

Bone Fire is what we feel when history unfolds its dark feathers. It wants to know what to hold onto, what to leave behind. Bone Fire asks how: to mourn what’s lost; love what is.

POETRY

SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669419 PB | 210 X 134MM | 88PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

EVEN THE DAYBREAK: 35 YEARS OF SALMON POETRY Jessie Lendennie (ed.)

Salmon’s celebratory anthology Even the Daybreak: 35 Years of Salmon Poetry, highlights its list of Irish, American, British and European poets, all of whom represent the vibrancy of contemporary literature - distinct in style, voice and geography.

Since 1981 Salmon Poetry has published over 500 volumes of poetry and literary nonfiction and has become one of the most prolific and important publishers in the Irish literary world. Salmon has continually taken risks; introducing new writers since its first days with The Salmon journal and with its first books by Eva Bourke and Rita Ann Higgins.

The Salmon catalogue includes initial works by now-established Irish poets Rita Ann Higgins, Theo Dorgan, Michael D. Higgins, Mary Dorcey, Moya Cannon, Joan McBreen, Mary O’Donnell, Eamonn Wall, Mary O’Malley, Eva Bourke, Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmons, Elaine Feeney, Colm Keegan, Sarah Clancy and Kevin Higgins, to name a very few.

POETRY

SALMON POETRY | £20.00 | 9781910669402 PB | 210 X 134MM | 72PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

GHOST OF THE FISHER CAT Alfric McGlichey In this, her second collection, Afric McGlinchey dives into a ‘river of familiars’, inspired by the Parisian urban myth of a black cat and its apothecary owner. Borders between the fantastical and the real blur as characters and relationships are evoked in lyrics that veer from natural to political to perceptual disturbances, from the ghostly to the hallucinatory.

Some characters are frozen in inaction, while others overcome seeming impossible odds.

Across a time-space continuum, what unifies the collection is the power of the imagination and will to transcend our circumstances, to answer the mysterious imperatives of the heart.

POETRY

SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669396 PB | 210 X 134MM | 72PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

19

AUGUST

BONE FIRE Susan Millar Dumars

SLOW CLOCKS OF DECAY Patrick Chapman Symphonic in structure and epic in scale, Slow Clocks of Decay explores universal themes through the lens of one of Ireland’s most imaginative poets. Dealing with crises all-too familiar today – the loss of friends to suicide; the insidious nature of depression; the inevitability of ageing; and living as an atheist in a society not quite recovered from its quasi-theocratic past – the book climaxes in a bravura sequence that imagines the poet’s own final journey as a fantasia of Hitchcockian intrigue set in a Paris of the imagination.

Twenty-five years after his remarkable debut, Patrick Chapman’s work culminates in Slow Clocks of Decay, his most mature and expansive collection to date.

POETRY

SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669426 PB | 210 X 134MM | 80PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

VIRTUAL TIDES Paul Casey “This is a welcome new collection from a poet who has been an exemplary nurturer of other poets through Ó Bhéal, his renowned Cork-based reading series and festival. These vivid and powerful poems are searing indictments of mealy-mouthed hypocrites; they hex anyone who stands in the path of goodness and light; and they ritualize expressions of compassion and love into powerful medicine for the head. Sophisticated and complex, they yet manage to be generous and open-hearted, much like Paul Casey himself.”

Paula Meehan

POETRY

SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669389 PB | 210 X 134MM | 72PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

FALLING IN LOVE WITH BROKEN THINGS Alvy Carragher “Falling In Love With Broken Things can be described as a coming-of-age narrative or Bildungsroman. Alive with crisp images, the poems range from childhood memories of freedom and enchantment to the uncertainties of adolescence and young adulthood.

Unflinchingly, they look at early experiences of loss, at complex and ambivalent family relationships and the mysteries of love and heartbreak. Moving outward geographically from the nucleus of family, countryside and school, to university years and further to a wider world beyond Ireland, the poems’ courageous and attractive honesty and emotional depth are achieved through the poet’s control of poetic techniques and language. Alvy Carragher is a skilful and sensitive poet who, astonishing in someone so young, possesses a high degree of psychological insight and tact, and her portrayal of the emotional undercurrents between people is at the same time forceful and subtle. It is a first collection that will resonate with and delight readers, a book they won’t want to put down until they have finished it in one sitting.” Eva Bourke

POETRY

20

SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669433 PB | 134 X 210MM | 80PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

Marie Cadden’s debut collection, Gynaecologist in the Jacuzzi, is sassy and sensuous – at times wickedly dark, often rueful and nostalgic, always lyrically female – curving on the ear, easy on the eye, ‘juicing on the tongue’.

Her work – as a teacher of children with autism, teacher of the deaf, play therapist – has fine-tuned Marie’s succinct poetry and she delivers it with style, humour, bite.

From hammocks and shooting stars to mammograms and the adventures of ageing, the poems move onward, ‘possibilities trembling’ towards ‘the relentless wobble’ of ‘one last sashay’. These are poems of hope, enchantment, disenchantment and acceptance.

POETRY

SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669440 PB | 134 X 210MM | 72PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

STILL FALLING Sara Hirsch Still Falling is Sara Hirsch’s debut poetry collection which seeks to celebrate people, positivity and the power of perspective. Through wit, rhyme and unadulterated honesty, Sara plummets through the friendships, relationships and encounters that have shaped her perception of her place on this planet.

From ex lovers to total strangers, no one is spared in this deeply moving, life affirming descent into death, dreams and determination, that laughs in the face of an easy life.

We all stumble at some point. With her boundless optimism and inspired wordplay, Sara Hirsch invites you to join her in enjoying the fall.

POETRY

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136854 PB | 133 X 203MM | 100PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

AIM AT THE CENTAUR STEALING YOUR WIFE Jennifer Nelson In the United States and Europe in the early twenty-first century, a person of mixed ethnicity finds herself questing inside old European art and ideas. Terrible as these things often are, she enjoys recalibrating them, and she is optimistic.

Aim at the Centaur Stealing your Wife is the first full-length collection of poetry for American writer and art historian Jennifer Nelson. Publisher’s Weekly has hailed Aim at the Centaur Stealing your Wife “a debut notable for its delightfully volatile free verse, Nelson tumbles back and forth between the slangy, plugged-in anxieties of a post-Great Recession generation and the resources of traditional art history…Nelson’s compositions display the techniques and attitudes of a restless generation.”

POETRY UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE | £10.00 | 9781937027513 PB | 108 X 190MM | 88PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

21

AUGUST

GYNAECOLOGIST IN THE JACUZZI Marie Cadden

MISSING Malcolm Povey Malcolm Povey began writing these poems when Jackie, his wife of forty years, a teacher, painter and print-maker, was diagnosed with cancer. After her death in 2008 he found himself stranded on ‘grief’s glacier’, adrift ‘on loss and loneliness’ and talking to his dead wife. Missing is part of that continuing conversation.

Refusing the consolations of religion, or comforting ideas about an afterlife or an immortal soul, he forces himself to contemplate the unbearable facts of death. Learning to live with the ‘ever-present absence’ of his wife, Malcolm Povey insists that people are worth loving, that love does not die with the flesh, that poetry can sometimes help us cut through the well-meaning drivel the bereaved must often suffer, and that we survive in the memories and practices of those left behind.

POETRY

SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.95 | 9780993149092 PB | 197 X 127MM | 116PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

DOWNPOUR Ruth Valentine Ruth Valentine has worked as an undertaker and as a celebrant at secular funerals. In this new collection she draws on her experiences to compose an extended meditation on dying and death, its emotional grammar and its painful but necessary rituals.

Bleak and brave, serious and sad, Downpour is an unflinching study of the physical realities of dying. Bodies are prepared for burial, coffin lids are closed, and scattered ashes sail downriver. Valentine explores the geography of death – hospital corridors and waiting rooms, winter tides, tearful winds and rain-swept cemeteries – and considers the strangers – doctors, mortuary assistants and undertakers – who must escort us towards oblivion, conscious of ‘their own death and your death, / the death of the planet and the death of hope’.

POETRY

SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.95 | 9780993149085 PB | 197 X 127MM | 64PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

BRANDON PITHOUSE John Seed There were once more than a thousand men and boys worked at Brandon Pithouse in County Durham. Today the site of the colliery is a green wilderness. John Seed has set out to recover the lost and silent world of Durham pitmen – in the company of Walter Benjamin, Sid Chaplin and Charles Reznikoff.

Composed of fragments of recorded speech, parliamentary reports and newspapers, Brandon Pithouse is a book about the experience of labour – about the pain and danger of working underground, about the damage to the human body and about the human relationships created in such conditions. It is a study in the attachments and distances which shape our relationships to place and time, the negotiations required to reconnect ourselves to a world that ceased to exist in the 1990s.

POETRY

22

SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.95 | 9780993454707 PB | 197 X 127MM | 100PP | 1 AUGUST 2016

Curse of the Assassin is written and designed by S.P. Osborne, author of GA1, and takes you back to the familiar surrounds of Orlandes City where you pick up your life some time after the events in An Assassin in Orlandes.

You’ve risen through society after dealing with Eltane and saving the city, and captured the affections of the Duke’s daughter along the way. But the mysterious death of a friend arouses your suspicions, and once again you find yourself at the heart of a conspiracy that takes you back to your home village and a meeting with the old adventuring party from your youth.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781909679641 PB | 198 X 129MM | 320PP | 1 AUGUST 2016 HB ISBN: 9781909679643

SHAKESPEARE VS. CTHULHU Jonathan Green (ed.)

Imagine if it had been William Shakespeare, England’s greatest playwright, who had discovered the truth about the Great Old Ones and the cosmic entity we know as Cthulhu, rather than the American author H P Lovecraft.

Imagine if Stratford’s favourite son had been the one to learn of the dangers of seeking after forbidden knowledge and of the war waged between the Elder Gods in the Outer Darkness, and had passed on that message, to those with the eyes to see it, through his plays and poetry. Welcome to the world of Shakespearean Cthulhu!

Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu is an anthology of short stories featuring tales that are a mash-up of the Cthulhu Mythos and Shakespeare’s most popular plays - as well as the world in which he lived - written by some of the top genre authors in the business, including James Lovegrove, Graham McNeill, Jan Siegel, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Jonathan Green.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781909679863 PB | 197 X 129MM | 416PP | 2 AUGUST 2016 HB ISBN: 978190979856

TURNING BLUE Benjamin Myers It is the depths of winter in an isolated hamlet in the Yorkshire Dales, and a teenage girl is missing. Cold Storage dispatches its best man to investigate. Obsessive, taciturn and solitary, DI Jim Brindle is relentless in pursuing justice. But he is not alone in his growing preoccupation with the case. Sacrificing a high-flying career in London, local journalist Roddy Mace finds himself increasingly desperate; this investigation could offer a shot at redemption – but at what cost?

As Brindle and Mace begin to prise the case apart, they find the rot runs far deeper than the ruined Rutter farm; something unspeakable is happening under the skin of the tightlipped community – and light-entertainer and national treasure ‘Lovely Larry Lister’ has his own hiding places, and his own dark tastes.

A tour de force of plotting and atmosphere, Turning Blue is a terrifying, gripping tale of hidden lives, and hidden deaths.

FICTION

MAYFLY | £7.99 | 9781911356004 PB | 198 X 129MM | 336PP | 8 AUGUST 2016

23

AUGUST

CURSE OF THE ASSASSIN S. P. Osborne [Series: Gamebook Adventures]

THE BASTARD WONDERLAND Lee Harrison “He went out to the balcony as the horizon brightened. That godforsaken silver coast again. That bloody bastard wonderland. Chase it or die. He was the son of pioneers and adventurers, and now he understood.”

In a land not too far away and a time yet to be decided, one man and his Dad embark on an epic journey of war, peace, love, religion, magnificent flying machines and mushy peas.

The Bastard Wonderland is the astonishing debut fantasy novel from Hull writer Lee Harrison.

FICTION

WRECKING BALL PRESS | £12.00 | 9781903110454 PB | 432PP | 15 AUGUST 2016

BIRDBOOK: SALTWATER AND SHORE Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone (ed.)

Birdbook: Saltwater and Shore is the final volume of Sidekick’s hugely ambitious Birdbook series, which in its entirety presents a new poem and illustration for nearly every species of bird native to the UK, sourced from the very best contemporary poets and illustrators.

Like its predecessor volumes, Saltwater and Shore is an alternative guidebook of sorts, finding fresh angles on the birdlife of seaside cliffs, salt marshes, estuaries and islands, seating famous and beloved birds like the puffin next to less well known species like the knot. The style, form and tone of the poems and illustrations are as ranging as the design and personalities of their subjects.

POETRY

SIDEKICK BOOKS | £10.00 | 9781909560215 PB | 216 X 140MM | 148PP | 19 AUGUST 2016

SURREALIST, LOVER, RESISTANT: SELECTED POEMS OF ROBERT DESNOS Timothy Adès (trans.)

This extensive and wide-ranging selection is taken from three collections of the poetry of one of France’s most exciting writers of the twentieth century, the surrealist Robert Desnos.

Hailed as the ‘prophet’ of the Surrealist movement by André Breton, Desnos was a hugely influential figure across all art forms at the time, and yet today his work is completely underrepresented in the English language, with only his children’s poems currently available in English translation. The present volume of nearly 300 poems seeks to redress the balance, moving from youthful, light-hearted material to full-blown surrealism, from poems full of anguish and torment to delightful love poetry, and from whimsical, humorous verses to some of the great poem sequences of the Nazi Occupation period when Desnos was an active resistant.

POETRY

24

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £12.99 | 9781906570699 PB | 216 X 138MM | 450PP | 31 AUGUST 2016

SEPTEMBER

ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT Marie Heaney (ed.)

Night poems and lullabies to prepare readers of all ages for the shelter of untroubled sleep.

Marie Heaney’s selection includes ‘Alicante Lullaby’, Sylvia Plath’s account of her desire for sleep in the hustle and bustle of a Spanish resort; WH Auden’s musical and soothing love poem ‘Lullaby’; Titania’s sleep soliloquy from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’; as well as night poems by Margaret Atwood, Ted Hughes, William Wordsworth and many others.

The anthology also contains many tender poems reflecting a parent’s experience of watching over children while they sleep, including Eavan Boland’s ‘Night Feed’, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Serenades’, Paul Muldoon’s ‘Cradle Song for Asher’ and Peter Sirr’s ‘PPS’.

Lullabies and cradle songs to read to young children are interspersed throughout the book and include Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Bed in Summer’ (presented alongside ‘Grown-up’, Enda St Vincent Millay’s humorous take on having an early night), Gotter’s ‘Sleep Little Prince’ and the much-loved Welsh lullaby ‘All Through the Night’. Ireland’s rich lullaby tradition is represented with ‘Seoithín Seó’, ‘Connemara Cradle Song’ and more.

POETRY IRELAND | £12.99 | 9781902121611 HB | 216 X 138MM | 156PP | 15 SEPTEMBER 2016

25

TODAY THE BIRDS WILL SING Helen Burke Since the mid-1980s, Helen Burke’s poems have appeared in pamphlets, on greetings cards, on pieces of origami, on radio, on tape, on CD, on the side of stray dogs and in a million other places – including, more recently, two collections from Valley Press.

After months of work tracking down all these literary gems, we’re proud to announce the forthcoming publication of Today the Birds Will Sing; which abandons the ‘slim volume’ approach, instead offering a comprehensive, exhaustive treasury of Helen’s work, spanning more than 250 pages in a beautiful (and very red) hardback edition. It is, of course, also filled with Helen’s truly unique illustrations, and reams of notes explaining where all these poems came from.

We feel it’s no overstatement to say this is the one book that everyone should own; an unprecedented and unexpected treat that should entertain Helen’s fans, new and old, for the next few centuries at least.

POETRY

VALLEY PRESS | £12.99 | 9781908853691 HB | 198 X 129MM | 256PP | 1 SEPTEMBER 2016

POETRY IRELAND REVIEW ISSUE 119 Vona Groarke (ed.)

Poetry Ireland Review is a highly-regarded journal of poetry. Published three times a year, it includes the work of both emerging and established Irish and international poets, essayists, critics and visual artists.

Issue 119 includes new poems from over thirty poets from Ireland, the UK, the US and elsewhere, including Sarah Byrne, Frank Ormsby, Evan Costigan, Jackie Gorman, John Hennessy, Michael Coady, Rachel Coventry, Gerald Dawe, Patrick Cotter and Caitlin Newby.

The issue features reviews of more than twenty new poetry collections, including books by Sarah Clancy, Celeste Augé, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Muldoon, Paul Durcan, Fiona Benson, Tom French, Gabriel Rosenstock, Eavan Boland, Kate Tempest, George the Poet and Martina Evans.

POETRY

POETRY IRELAND | £10.00 | 9781902121628 PB | 234 X 156MM | 1 SEPTEMBER 2016

YOU DON’T BELONG HERE Tim Major Daniel Faint is on the run with a stolen time machine. As the house-sitter of a remote Cumbrian mansion, he hopes to hide and experiment with the machine. But is the Manor being watched by locals, his twin brother or even himself? Daniel is terrified about what the future may hold but, as he discovers, there can be no going back.

You Don’t Belong Here is a nightmarish thriller that plays with sci-fi genre conventions.

At first, the novel may strike readers as an updated version of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells – but it has rather more in common with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.

It transpires that the time machine splits Daniel Faint into two distinct personas that alternate possession of his body. Though he considers himself the default persona, Daniel gradually realises that he is the Mr Hyde version and that his very own ‘house-sitter’ may have more right to life than himself.

FICTION

26

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781909679788 PB | 198 X 129MM | 320PP | 1 SEPTEMBER 2016

Phil Lynch’s first poetry collection takes us on a journey of encounter, observation and questioning to places sometimes real and sometimes imagined. His themes range from the personal to the political (with a small p at least) and from the local to the global.

There are poems inspired by love, loss, landscapes and landmarks. They add up to a reflection of a lifetime to date of diverse moments glimpsed through the poet’s own experiences and his encounters with the wider world. The voice is trying to make sense of a world constantly shifting and difficult to grab a hold of for long enough to extract answers to the questions posed to it.

The poetry is lyrical and rhythmic, an accessible mix of styles incorporating rhyme and free verse forms to fit the mood of the moment. The poems are playful at times, more serious and sober at others.

POETRY

SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781910669457 PB | 134 X 210MM | 80PP | 1 SEPTEMBER 2016

A MASSACRE OF HUMMINGBIRDS Paul Blake “People say it can’t be trusted – language, that silvery disease…”

In this startling debut, Paul Blake leads us on a virtuosic journey through language and landscapes – urban, exotic, historical, imagined, erotic, rural – and on the way invites us to find our own destinations, our own cures for the silvery disease, our own ‘rough breathing’ and ‘quietly moving on’.

POETRY

STONEWOOD PRESS | £4.99 | 9781910413135 PB | 110 X 155MM | 40PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

MEMORIAL TO THE FUTURE Volker von Torne It is no coincidence that the poet Volker von Toerne was, for many years, the Director of Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (Action for Atonement – Service for Peace), the German charitable organisation for education and reparation in countries throughout the world that have suffered under fascism and other oppressive regimes.

His father had been a member of the SS in Germany in the Second World War, and as a consequence, his poetry is written from the perspective of someone who suffered, through no fault of his own, from terrible guilt after the war. This selection from von Toerne’s collected poems is particularly significant in that it is a powerful and moving articulation of the psychological burden still carried by countless people today whose voices are not often heard, a burden which von Toerne’s powerful, poignant and sometimes angry poetry helps us all the better to understand.

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345641 PB | 216 X 138MM | 112PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781910345658

27

SEPTEMBER

IN A CHANGING LIGHT Phil Lynch

SUNSHINE Melissa Lee-Houghton “Melissa Lee-Houghton is a bold, observant and daringly honest poet who intuitively knows what she is doing, even when she ventures into the scariest places.” Poetry Book Society Sunshine is the powerful new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems ooze confidence and shine a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision.

Sunshine portrays the extremes of human experience - from sexual desire to suicide and abuse. Written in raw, explicit language that takes poetry into uncharted territory it depicts the failings of Britain’s mental health system alongside stories of love and recovery.

POETRY

PENNED IN THE MARGINS | £9.99 | 9781908058386 PB | 216 X 318MM | 120PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE ALIVE: SELECTED POEMS Deryn Rees-Jones Deryn Rees-Jones’s new book What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems, marks a mid-career milestone in the life of this highly-acclaimed writer.

The book includes generous selections from her previous individual collections including her debut, The Memory Tray, her subsequent Signs Round a Dead Body, her murder-mystery in verse: Quiver, her T.S. Eliot prize-nominated, Burying the Wren, and her long poem inspired by Edward Thomas’ wife, And You, Helen. A poet of intimate lyricism, of thoughtful speculation, close to the natural world, or ‘creaturely’ as John Burnside puts it, this is work which balances a singular musical quality with a profound intelligence as well as a deep emotional power.

The book concludes with a brand new long poem, ‘i.m.’ an elegy which explores the power of memorialisation while testifying to the power of hope. This substantial volume is a tribute to the maturing voice of an essential poet.

POETRY

SEREN BOOKS | £12.99 | 9781781723388 PB | 216 X 138MM | 200PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

BLACK SHEEP COTTAGE Michelle Angharad Pashley Erica has been receiving text messages intended for someone called Dave and all her attempts to inform the various senders that she is not Dave have failed. As the texts continue she learns more about him, and her friend, Maggie, decides they should track him down. After all, what possible harm could there be in playing private detectives?

As Erica and Dave enter a relationship, the facts become increasingly unsettling. Maggie is determined to expose the truth, but Erica is initially more willing to forgive outbursts of rage and unexplained incidents, until the story becomes too uncomfortable and uncertainty, suspicion and fear take hold. But have the two friends exposed a crime and if so, what is the truth buried in the secrets being kept?

FICTION

28

CINNAMON PRESS | £9.99 | 9781910836293 PB | 197 X 130MM | 300PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

Charting a narrative arc from a childhood in Maine, the sense of journeying is never far beneath the surface as the poet’s persona forges new identities.

From the meaning of ‘home’ to the sense of spiritual quest that moves beyond inherited faith, these are poems that are authentic and honest, firmly rooted in the natural world seen through the eyes of a keen intelligence.

Tight, lyrical pieces and compelling narrative sequences combine in this excellent debut collection that convinces with precise language and acute observation.

POETRY

CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836309 PB | 216 X 140MM | 70PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

LOCKDOWN Jane McLaughlin Jane McLaughlin’s meticulously observed and linguistically adept poems brim with fresh imagery and moments of surprise.

She has a gift for taking the quotidian and seeing below the surface of the instant so that new connections are made, chains of small epiphanies that make this collection as human as it is accomplished.

From sustained sequences to tight lyric pieces, the pressure on language and the attention to detail gives this collection an enviable poise.

POETRY

CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836316 PB | 216 X 140MM | 80PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

ALGARAVIAS: ECHO CHAMBER Waly Salomão The fifth and most critically acclaimed volume of poetry by Syrian-Brazilian poet Waly Salomão (1943-2003), Algaravias: Echo Chamber takes its title from an entangled history, referenced in an etymological epigraph: “From al-garb, the West; that language of the Arabs considered corrupted, little understood by the Spanish. Also a name of a plant, given that name for the messiness of its branches.”

Its ruminations on passage, self-placement, virtual geography, human-electronic interaction, poetic consciousness, and mortality are inflected by Salomão’s dual heritage; they also confront the isolating nature of the dictatorship he lived through as well as the aggressively optimistic discourse of post-dictatorship “modernization” efforts: the torrential influx of mass media and multinational corporations, and the sterile, touristic, and militarized landscapes of modern space and spectacle.

POETRY

UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE | £11.00 | 9781937027643 PB | 210 X 140MM | 96PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

29

SEPTEMBER

MOORINGS Kathleen M Quinlan

A WILD PLANT YEAR Christina Hart-Davies A Wild Plant Year takes us through a country year waymarked by special days such as Easter, Mothering Sunday, Hallowe’en and Winter Solstice and features the native flowers and plants traditionally associated with each festival or season.

Country names, plant legends and folk medicine have long been a special interest of Christina Hart-Davies, one of the country’s best known botanical artists and illustrators.

A Wild Plant Year is lavishly illustrated with Christina’s vibrant watercolours. Her precisely detailed and accurate paintings perfectly complement the fascinating stories attached to our flora. Six years in the making, this is a celebration of the long heritage of our relationship with our native plants.

NONFICTION

TWO RIVERS PRESS | £14.99 | 9781909747135 PB | 200 X 200MM | 124PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

ALSO FROM TWO RIVERS PRESS...

9781909747074

30

9781901677799

9781901677966

Keshiki, from Strangers Press, is a series of 8 exquisitely designed chapbooks showcasing some of the most exciting new writing from Japan. It includes stories from well-known writers such as Natsuki Ikezawa and Yoko Tawada and also introduces newer voices such as Masatsugu Ono, Kyoko Yoshida and Aoko Matsuda.

Keshiki is the launch project of the new Strangers Press: a collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Norwich University of the Arts, and Writers’ Centre Norwich. Strangers Press specialises in bringing international writing to new audiences in the U.K. as part of Norwich, UNESCO City of Literature.

Keshiki is funded by the Nippon Foundation and will launch on the 5th of September.

AT THE EDGE OF THE WOOD Masatsugu Ono £6.99 | 9781911343066 | 32PP

MIKUMARI Misumi Kubo £6.99 | 9781911343073 | 32PP

TIME DIFFERENCES Yoko Tawada £6.99 | 9781911343011 | 32PP

FRIENDSHIP FOR ADULTS Nao-Cola Yamazaki £6.99 | 9781911343028 | 32PP

THE GIRL WHO IS GETTING MARRIED Aoko Matsuda £6.99 | 9781911343059 | 32PP

TRANSPARENT LABYRINTH Keiichiro Hirano £6.99 | 9781911343080 | 32PP

SPRING SLEEPERS Kyoko Yoshida £6.99 | 9781911343035 | 32PP

MARIKO/MARIQUITA Natsuki Ikezawa £6.99 | 9781911343042 | 32PP

KESHIKI BOX SET Beautifully designed slipcase set containing all 8 of the titles. £40.00 | 9781911343004

31

SEPTEMBER

KESHIKI

DOGTOOTH Fran Lock Dogtooth is a book about ghosts: ghosts as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends, but also as in the discomforts, paranoias and phobias that haunt a very particular cultural moment. It’s a book about fear, about a background static of suspicion.

It’s about the twin anxieties of identity and assimilation. There’s folklore in it, the current that we carry and that which carries us; the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories can do. It’s also about memory, the strategies that poetry has for keeping those we’ve lost alive.

POETRY

OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £10.00 | 9780993103841 PB | 216 X 138MM | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

HAPPINESS IS AN ART FORM Agnes Török This book was a one-woman spoken word show before it was a book. It was called If You’re Happy and You Know It - Take This Survey. It won awards and toured festivals for science, wellbeing and arts. Before this book was a spoken word show, it was a TED talk. It was called ‘What I’ve Learned From Studying Happiness’ and was praised alongside Török’s online poetry video and viral sensation ‘Worthless’.

Before this book was a TED talk, it was an idea. That idea led Agnes to spend a year living according to current happiness research, do her own academic research on happiness, and learn a lot from other people.

This book is the end of a long line of learning, but also only the beginning.

POETRY

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136861 PB | 133 X 203MM | 100PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

BADMINTON Molly Naylor Badminton can be dipped into at random, but if you read it sequentially you will find an extra layer of thematic pattern and shape. Part one, Beginnings, consists of poems that are young or hopeful or directly speak to the start of things. Part two, Middles, is sticky. The poems here try to unpick and unpack events, feelings or relationships. Part three, Endings, traverses doomed love, failure and acceptance. It’s about lessons learned and letting go.

The book as a whole attempts to address our predicament in a way that is silly, open-hearted and unashamed. These poems have been met, fought with and then abandoned. They were not written in a classroom. They asked to be written, mostly at inopportune times - on trains, in fields, in bars and in the backs of taxis.

POETRY

32

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136878 PB | 133 X 203MM | 100PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

Letters I Never Sent to You is a collection of impressions and encounters; of people briefly met and of places passed through and lived in. It explores the sometimes slippery nature of the word “home”, and how love and heartbreak can be felt just as strongly for a place as for a person. It explores connection and disconnection with places, people and the spaces in which we encounter them.

From Washington D.C. to London, from Accra to Paris and onwards to Berlin, Letters I Never Sent to You tells stories of a life split between places, identities, languages, nationalities, sexualities and of running away and running into yourself, of love lost and found again.

What would you share with someone you would never see again?

POETRY

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136885 PB | 133 X 203MM | 100PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

EVE OUT OF HER RUINS Ananda Devi With startling honesty and lyric power, Eve out of Her Ruins exposes the hidden life of Troumaron, a fictitious Mauritian city inspired by the capital Port-Louis. Through the interwoven monologues of four protagonists on the cusp of adulthood, Devi reveals the poignancy of young lives filled with violence, fear and hopelessness, bound together by the need to transcend their environment at any price.

Eve, whose body is her only weapon and source of power, fascinates her friends and foes; her best friend and lover Savita, the only one who loves her without self-interest, senses mounting danger and wants to get away from the city with Eve but is brutally killed; Saadiq, gifted would-be poet, inspired by Rimbaud, desperately in love with Eve, tries to protect her; Clélio, belligerent rebel, waiting without hope for his brother to send for him from France, is wrongly accused of Savita’s murder.

FICTION

CB EDITIONS | £10.99 | 9781909585232 PB | 180 X 120MM | 176PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

THIS IS THE PLACE TO BE Lara Pawson Disorienting and dramatic, This Is the Place to Be is a stream of sharply etched vignettes shifting astonishingly in time, place and mood. From a Primark changing room in London, a military checkpoint in Ivory Coast and a café in the Silicon Valley to a cat rescue centre in Canning Town, domestic anxieties alternate with scenes of sudden violence and vivid childhood memories. Dead chickens, defecation, bullfights and sexual violence scatter a fragmentary narrative that breaks the boundaries of memoir.

Piercingly honest, Lara Pawson demonstrates that no moment is isolated, and that privilege, conflict, race and gender are inherent in all our encounters, from the banal to the extreme. An earlier, shorter version of This Is the Place to Be was commissioned as a sound installation for the 2014 London International Festival of Theatre programme After a War. It was directed by Tim Etchells and performed by Cathy Naden.

POETRY

CB EDITIONS | £8.99 | 9781909585218 PB | 198 X 129MM | 136PP | 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

33

SEPTEMBER

LETTERS I NEVER SENT TO YOU Paula Varjack

MOON JUICE Kate Wakeling Meet Skig, who’s meant to be a warrior (but is really more of a worrier.) Meet a giddy comet, the ‘top galactic jockey’ who skids across the sky with its tail on fire. Put a marvellous new machine in your pocket, which promises to solve all of your life’s problems.

Kate Wakeling’s first book of poems for children is full of curious characters and strange situations. The poems she writes are always musical, sometimes wistful, and full of wonder at the weirdness of the world. Kate is also a great performer, who has recently been reading at schools and libraries across the country on the Emma Press ‘Myths and Monsters’ poetry tour.

POETRY

THE EMMA PRESS | £8.50 | 978191039493 PB | 184 X 123MM | 64PP | 6 SEPTEMBER 2016

BEGINNING WITH YOUR LAST BREATH Roy McFarlane This debut collection of poems by former Birmingham Poet Laureate Roy McFarlane explores love, loss, adoption and identity in powerful, precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers and parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love and learning to say goodbye that come along the way.

Themes of place, identity, history, and race interweave personal narratives, with and poems that touch on everything from the ‘Tebbitt Test’ and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that ‘place just off the M6’. Distinct and memorable, McFarlane’s poems are beautifully focused, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love.

POETRY

NINE ARCHES PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911027089 PB | 216 X 138MM | 80PP | 7 SEPTEMBER 2016

MY FALLING DOWN HOUSE Jayne Joso This engrossing read is a fascinating insight into post-financial crisis Tokyo.

After losing his job and his home, a young Japanese man seeks refuge in a woodand paper house. He attempts to reconstruct his identity, but with only a cat and a cello for company, and the menacing presence of a shapeshifter (yokai), his ability to hold on to his sanity disintegrates.

A thought-provoking mediation on architectural and psychological space and what we need from the place we live in to give us inner peace.

FICTION

34

SEREN BOOKS | £8.99 | 9781781723395 PB | 198 X 129MM | 200PP | 8 SEPTEMBER 2016

Here is a book that celebrates the joys, the aches, the lapses, the frustrations and the creaks of the retirement years. With fifty funny, nostalgic and poignant rhymes about childhood memories, hair loss, modern technology, manners, packaging, cats, grandchildren and more it’s the perfect read for those of fifty plus who like a chuckle.

Andy Seed is a writer and humourist based in North Yorkshire. He’s the author of over 30 books including the bestselling ‘All Teachers’ trilogy of memoirs for adults and a range of titles for children including The Silly Book of Side-Splitting Stuff – winner of the 2015 Blue Peter Book Award – and the acclaimed funny children’s novel Prankenstein.

POETRY

VALLEY PRESS | £7.99 | 9781908853721 PB | 198 X 129MM | 96PP | 8 SEPTEMBER 2016

WE GO WANDERING AT NIGHT AND ARE CONSUMED BY FIRE Rowyda Amin We Go Wandering At Night And Are Consumed By Fire is a tale of moths and mirrors, told in the smoky, sensuous poems of Rowyda Amin, a writer who “specialises in controlled fantasies” (Alan Brownjohn, Poetry Review).

Accompanying the poems are illustrations by Heather McArthur. This is the seventh in Sidekick’s ‘Team-Up’ series of full-colour short books which pair up an upcoming poet with a visual artist on a project they conceive and realise together.

Dr Nathalie Teitler has previously remarked of Rowyda’s poetry: “Her poetry is unusual in that it offers a completely fluid position with regards to race, culture and sexuality … This is not so much the voice of the outsider but rather the voice of the chameleon.”

POETRY

SIDEKICK BOOKS | £6.50 | 9781909560239 PB | 190 X 127MM | 48PP | 9 SEPTEMBER 2016

MERRILL MOORE: XxX 100 POEMS David Slavitt (ed.)

David R. Slavitt, poet and novelist, has distilled and presented the very best of Merrill Moore’s work from amongst the many published and unpublished poems available.

Merrill Moore was a poet and key member of the Fugitive group of poets, alongisde John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. His fascinating and now forgotten poetry relies on a keen, almost clinical study of his subjects, and is marked by a perpetual struggle with form: his beloved sonnet, of which he wrote several thousand.

This ‘re-introduction’ will help establish the important but overlooked work of Merrill Moore, building to form ‘a persuasive account of a time in the life of America’.

POETRY

LITTLE ISLAND PRESS | £25.00 | 9780993505614 HB | 234 X 156MM | 128PP | 14 SEPTEMBER 2016

35

SEPTEMBER

POEMS FOR PENSIONERS Andy Seed

SADAKICHI HARTMANN: COLLECTED POEMS Floyd Cheung (ed.)

Sadakichi Hartmann is one of the missing links in American poetry, between Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. He influenced a whole generation of writers and artists in New York where his exuberance and bohemian lifestyle led to him being crowned ‘The First Hippy’.

Hartmann was amongst the first to experiment in English with the intricate verse forms of Japanese poetry. In his 1904 collection, Drifting Flowers of the Sea he created a set of carefully patterned poems, beautifully intricate verse delivered with the ease of contemporary speech.

Edited and introduced by poet and academic Dr Floyd Cheung, this book will help uncover one of modern poetry’s most unique and overlooked characters.

POETRY

LITTLE ISLAND PRESS | £35.00 | 9780993505621 HB | 234 X 156MM | 192PP | 26 SEPTEMBER 2016

SHTUM! : THE STUTTER POEMS David Bateman Shtum! is a highly individual collection of humorous/serious poems centred on the experience of stuttering and speech therapy, but also touching on wider themes of communication.

Several of the poems have previously appeared in various publications, and in Gary Hastie’s BBC Radio Merseyside documentary on stuttering, The Queen’s English.

POETRY

IRON PRESS | £8.00 | 9780993124549 PB | 210 X 148MM | 72PP | 22 SEPTEMBER 2016

WATCHER OF THE SKIES: POEMS ABOUT SPACE AND ALIENS Rachel Piercey & Emma Wright (ed.)

How big is the universe? Are there dogs in space? What if your friend – or your grandad – was an alien? Join the poets in wondering in Watcher of the Skies, a sparkling collection of poems about the outermost possibilities of space, life and our imaginations. Fully illustrated and accompanied with helpful facts about space, this is the perfect companion for any budding stargazer or astronaut.

With poems from Mandy Coe, David Harmer, Phil Monks, Cheryl Moskowitz, Dale Neal, Abigail Parry, Jon Stone, Camellia Stafford, Kate Wakeling, Kate Wise, Rachael Nicholas, Julie Douglas, Suzanne Olivante, John Canfield, Robert Schechter, Dharmavadana, Lawrence Schimel, Mike Sims, Richard O’Brien, Rob Walton, Mary Anne Clark, Rebecca Colby and Sarah Doyle.

POETRY

36

THE EMMA PRESS | £8.50 | 9781910139431 PB | 198 X 129MM | 128PP | 22 SEPTEMBER 2016

Someone is killing doctors in the style of the murders in Vincent Price movies, leaving the Bristol police baffled. The only man who could possibly be responsible died years ago... or did he...?

The police in Bristol have been confronted by a series of the most perplexingly elaborate deaths they’ve ever encountered in all their years of murder enquiries. The only thing which connects them is their seemingly random nature and their sheer outrageousness.

As Detective Inspector Longdon and his assistant Sergeant Jenny Newham (with the help of pathologist Dr. Richard Patterson) race against time to find the murderer, they eventually realise that the link which connects the killings is even more bizarre than any of them dared to think...

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390909 PB | 129 X 198MM | 96PP | 23 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781911390886

THE HAMMER OF DR VALENTINE John L Probert It had been two years since Dr Edward Valentine’s murderous rampage saw nine medical practitioners murdered in a series of elaborate deaths; each one inspired by deaths from within Vincent Price films. Now, with the silhouette of Castell Coch providing a suitably fitting background, the body of Dr Valentine’s next victim is catapulted into the darkened mouth of the Welsh valley. Having been meticulously arranged to ensure the moment of death is just as he wants it, the still-living body of his victim lands squarely on a heavy golden cross placed at the very bottom of the gaping valley.

Before the police have had a chance to learn of this elaborate death, Dr. Valentine has struck again. Thirtyone-year-old journalist, Margaret Upchurch, whose article “Doctor Death – The Mad Medic Who Slew His Own Kind” accepts an invite to the British Museum where she believes she will be reporting on an evening of ‘Ancient Egyptian Splendour and Excitement’ courtesy of a Professor Fuchs. However, what awaits her is another elaborate murder at the vengeful hands of Dr. Valentine. How far will Valentine go with his murderous campaign this time around?...

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390930 PB | 129 X 198MM | 96PP | 23 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781911390916

ALBION FAY Mark Morris Albion Fay, a holiday house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nature’s bounty.

For the adults, a time for relaxation and to recharge the batteries, while for the children, a chance for exploration and adventure in the English countryside. A happy time for all: nothing could possibly go wrong. Or could it? What should be a magical time ends in tragedy – but what really happened that summer?

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390985 PB | 129 X 198MM | 96PP | 23 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781911390978

37

SEPTEMBER

THE NINE DEATHS OF DR VALENTINE John L Probert

SCOURGE Gary Fry Felachnids: a race of mythical creatures rumoured to live in Yorkshire’s dark countryside.

The yellow eyes, the double-jointed limbs, the heads that turned backwards whenever that was necessary.

These creatures, which otherwise resembled humans, appeared to occupy a small village in North Yorkshire called Nathen, about sixty miles from Bradford, up through the valleys at the foot of which the city rested.

And Lee Parker is determined to track them down.

Scourge is a traditional, plot-driven horror novel of suspense and excitement.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390817 PB | 129 X 198MM | 96PP | 23 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781911390800

WITHIN THE WIND, BENEATH THE SNOW Ray Cluley Gjerta knew there were darkteeth in the woods. They lived amongst the trees and in the shadows between them. And they were always there. Hidden. Quietly waiting. Out of sight, but always in her mind… “...painted a deeply evocative and wonderfully atmospheric vision of the sub-zero snow-covered expanses of north-east Greenland during the relentless dark winter months... stark and honest and in some ways coldhearted and brutal. But through its evocative prose and the deeply atmospheric rendering of this bleak environment, it ultimately casts an enchanting and strangely moving story that finally ends with the weight of a stomach-full of ice in your gut.” DLS Reviews

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390879 PB | 129 X 198MM | 96PP | 23 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781911390855

THE BUREAU OF THEM Cate Gardner “You’re not the first to talk to your dead here,” the vagrant said. The living always chase after their dead until they come upon their own.

Formed from shadow and dust, ghosts inhabit the abandoned office building, angry at the world that denies them. When Katy sees her deceased boyfriend in the window of the derelict building, she finds a way in, hoping to be reunited. Instead, the dead ignore, the dead do not see and only the monster that is Yarker Ryland has need of her there.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390954 PB | 129 X 198MM | 96PP | 23 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781911390947

38

Two green-skinned children are discovered who claim to have come from within the earth.

The local legend states that the boy died, and the girl married but had no children. Is the legend true?

OCD sufferers often perpetuate their rituals believing that if they fail to do so their families will suffer. But what if they are correct – that their rituals are necessary to maintain life’s balance? And what if it was discovered that many OCD sufferers are descendants of the green children...

The Greens is a modern fantasy/horror novella which merges two concepts: that of the 12th Century Suffolk legend of the green children and sufferers of obsessive compulsive disorder.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390190 PB | 129 X 198MM | 96PP | 23 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781911390183

THE BONE READERS Jacob Ross When Michael (Digger) Digson is recruited into DS Chilman’s new plain clothes squad in the small Caribbean island of Camaho he brings his own mission to discover who amongst a renegade police squad killed his mother in a political demonstration.

Sent to London to train in forensics, Digger becomes enmeshed in Chilman’s obsession with a cold case – the disappearance of a young man whose mother is sure has been murdered. But along with his new skill in forensics, Digger makes rich use of the cultural knowledge he has gained from the Fire Baptist grandmother who brought him up, another kind of reader of bones.

And when the enigmatic Miss K. Stanislaus joins him on the case, Digger finds that his science is more than outmatched by her observational skills. Together, they find themselves dragged into a world of secrets, disappearances and danger that demands every ounce of their brains, persistence and courage to survive.

FICTION

PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781845233358 PB | 206 X 135MM | 224PP | 24 SEPTEMBER 2016

ALL OUR SHADOWS Hwang Jung-Eun An oblique, hard-edged novel tinged with offbeat fantasy, All Our Shadows is set in a slum electronics market in central Seoul - an area earmarked for demolition in a city better known for its shiny skyscrapers and slick pop videos. Here, the awkward, tentative relationship between Eun-gyo and Mujae, who both dropped out of formal education to work as repair-shop assistants, is made yet more uncertain by their economic circumstances, and the fact that the shadows of the slum’s inhabitants have started to ‘rise’.

Hwang’s spare prose is illuminated by arresting images, quirky dialogue and moments of great lyricism, crafting a deeply affecting novel of perfectly calibrated emotional restraint.

As well as an important contribution to contemporary working-class literature, All Our Shadows depicts the little-known underside of a society which can be viciously superficial, complicating the shiny, ultra-modern face which South Korea presents to the world.

FICTION

TILTED AXIS PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911284024 PB | 198 X 129MM | 128PP | 26 SEPTEMBER 2016

39

SEPTEMBER

THE GREENS Andrew Hook

WHEN LIGHTS ARE BRIGHT Wes Brown A day in Leeds. The English Defence League and anti-globalisation protesters are clashing in the streets. A schoolgirl is missing from a council estate and the parents are on the television. Contrarian journalist, James Oisin, is haunted by her face on the missing posters. He suspects the mother is behind it.

In a story about class, identity and capitalism, James’ search for the missing schoolgirl leads him to confront the truth of his past, the white working class and the consequences of his contrarianism. For James, anonymity may be the most radical act of all.

When Lights Are Bright is a visceral novel that, as it climbs to its confrontational climax, asks, “Who do we think we are?”

FICTION

DEAD INK BOOKS | £14.00 | 9780957698550 PB | 220 X 140MM | 27 SEPTEMBER 2016

SIX GEORGIAN POETS Gaga Lomidze (ed.)

The poets in this anthology, two women – Maya Sarishvili and Lela Samniahshvili – and four men – Rati Amaglobeli, Shota Iatashvili, Gaga Nakhutsrishvili and Irakli Charviani – represent the ‘here and now’ of Georgian poetry in six very distinct voices.

By turns lyrical and moving, surreal and ironic, hard-hitting and comic, the poems in this anthology are an excellent starting-point from which to discover the richness of contemporary Georgian poetry.

This is a bilingual edition, with poems in Georgian and English translation on facing pages, and an introductory essay placing the poets’ work in context.

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £10.99 | 9781908376978 PB | 234 X 156MM | 160PP | 30 SEPTEMBER 2016

XENIA Eugenio Montale In its literary impact, Eugenio Montale’s Xenia, published in 1966 in an edition of just 50 copies, might be described as Italy’s Four Quartets. This now-famous sequence came in profound response to the death, in 1963, of his beloved wife whom he nicknamed Mosca, a woman so short-sighted as to have reputedly apologised when bumping into a mirror.

At the end of the Xenia sequence, Montale allegorises the story of his Florentine ark of precious artefacts overwhelmed in the 1966 flood of the Arno. Those objects resurface in the poem as a metaphor for a loss that is as personal as it is historical. Montale’s personal past with Mosca has been submerged, but also Europe’s high literary culture.

Eugenio Montale (12 October 1896-12 September 1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature.

POETRY

40

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345535 PB | 216 X 138MM | 64PP | 30 SEPTEMBER 2016

Cevat Çapan’s poetry manages to sound ancient and traditional while being firmly rooted in today’s world; it is both thoroughly Turkish and at the same time European – and beyond that, part of a greater world literature.

Many of his poems are personal, and in this book he looks back at times past, remembering friends and family and places that have touched his life for ever.

The natural world is ever-present, especially the sea which moves restlessly, powerfully, relentlessly throughout, and the lucidity and simple beauty of these poems in Ruth Christie’s exquisite translation remain with you long after you have put this book down.

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345672 PB | 216 X 138MM | 112PP | 30 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781910345689

SUBTERRANEA Jos Smith Jos Smith’s debut collection is shaped by an intense sense of the interrelationship between the human and the natural, and has a strong and particular ecological ethic.

Complex, and yet at the same time fluent and lucid, these poems move from the seashore (there’s a powerful sequence about the Torrey Canyon oil spill disaster of the disaster of 1967) to Dartmoor’s boggy wastes, from ancient earthworks to the route of HS2 through the heart of England. The natural world and the human presence within it are ever-present, and the music of these poems continues to reverberate long after the book is closed.

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345702 PB | 216 X 138MM | 60PP | 30 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781910345719

THE HERRING LASS Michelle Cahill Sarah Holland-Bhatt writes: “Michelle Cahill’s characteristically bold and restless poems in The Herring Lass migrate across continents and vast bodies of water, fearlessly interrogating dynamics of power and subjugation in both human and animal worlds, always striking against the tyranny and subjugation of the ‘desiccating colonies’ with a supple intellect and graceful musicality.

Cahill fossicks through the detritus of language with a bowerbird’s gleaming eye, producing a powerful and muscular lexicon that is hers alone, while always guarding against language’s capacity to oppress and wound. The resulting poems are richly lyrical, intelligent and incisive. Cahill’s elegant and memorable critiques of the forces that impinge upon our freedoms have never felt more urgent or necessary.”

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345764 PB | 216 X 138MM | 112PP | 30 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781910345771

41

SEPTEMBER

THE VOICE OF WATER Cevat Çapan

OVER THE RAINBOW: MONEY CLASS & HOMOPHOBIA Nicola Field Written at the time when commercialisation of the LGBT+ movement was just beginning to take hold in the UK, the book is a searing indictment of those who claimed we could use lifestyle politics and the free market to buy our way out of discrimination and persecution.

Over the Rainbow offers an uncompromising critique of the weakness of identity politics and an irrefutable class analysis of LGBT+ oppression. The original book was first published

by Pluto Press in 1995 and is now out of print. This revised edition provides a detailed political analysis of the role of homophobia in class society.

NONDOG HORN PUBLISHING | £12.99 | 978107133947 FICTION PB | 229 X 152MM | 316PP | 30 SEPTEMBER 2016 CATACOMBS OF THE UNDERCITY Andrew Wright [Series: Gamebook Adventures] Captured by one of Orlandes City’s most infamous brotherhoods, the Red Hand Guild, you are thrown to the mercy of the subterranean world deep beneath the streets of the great capital.

Wading through the sewers and other dark, menacing places, your goal is to reach Undercity, the City beneath the City! Only there can you find the help you need to escape this underground horror, and bring down the dark brotherhood from within.

If you are familiar with the Choose You Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Fabled Lands or Grail Quest series then this is the book for you.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781909679665 PB | 129 X 198MM | 320PP | 30 SEPTEMBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781909679658

ALL DAMN DAY Jemima Foxtrot All Damn Day is a 24-hour dance through a woodland of strange and brilliant images, snatches of song, drunken jaunts, female friendships, blazing or boring sexual encounters, conflicting desires and musical introspection.

Jemima Foxtrot’s nimble, capering insight shows you anew the life you know you’re living and the life you don’t.

POETRY

42

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136809 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 30 SEPTEMBER 2016

OCTOBER

WAR POEMS Robert Graves War Poems is single volume that draws together all Robert Graves’s poems about war, consisting of Graves’s first two major published volumes: Over the Brazier (1916) and Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), and Goliath and David (1916), a collection subsequently absorbed into Fairies and Fusiliers. Most importantly this collection also includes the previously unpublished The Patchwork Flag (1918), which makes War Poems a significant publishing event. It also includes subsequent poems from the volume Country Sentiment onwards which consider the subject of war. The poems will be published in their first edition, first impression form.

Editor Charles Mundye provides a substantial introduction giving biographical and historical context and locating Graves’s importance amongst the solider poets of World War One. Explanatory endnotes clarify specific cultural and historical contexts in the poems, and provide a sense of publishing history.

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was a poet, novelist, critic, and classicist. He published more than 140 works, including Goodbye to All That, his classic memoir of World War 1, The White Goddess, a speculation on poetic inspiration, and the novels I Claudius and Claudius the God. He was an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in World War 1 and was one of the first to write realistic poems about front line experience.

SEREN BOOKS | £19.99 | 9781781723296 HB | 216 X 138MM | 260PP | 31 OCTOBER 2016

43

OCCUPIED CITY Paul van Ostaijen Occupied City is Paul van Ostaijen’s most important work. It is also one of the key works of the Dadaist movement. First published in 1921 as a work of ‘rhythmical typography’, it is primarily about the German Occupation of Antwerp during the First World War. But it is also a love-song to the modern city, and a declaration of war on post-1918 Europe.

Designed and illustrated by the Flemish artist Oskar Jespers, this epic poem was originally advertised as, ‘a book devoid of Biblical beauty / a book for royalists and republicans / for doctors and illiterates / a book that lists every important song of the last ten years / in short: as indispensable as a cookbook / “What every girl should know.”’

Paul van Ostaijen (1896-1928) was one of the most original and influential Belgian writers of the twentieth century. An avant-garde poet, satirist and revolutionary critic, he opened up Flemish poetry to modern city life, introduced Expressionism into Belgium, and was the first writer to translate Kafka from German.

POETRY

SMOKETACK BOOKS | £12.00 | 9780993454714 PB | 197 X 127MM | 168PP | 1 OCTOBER 2016

THE LONG WHITE THREAD OF WORDS Amarjit Chandan, Gareth Evans & Yasmin Gunaratnam (ed.)

The Long White Thread of Words is an international celebration by poets from all over the world for the ninetieth birthday of the critic and novelist John Berger.

Edited by Amarjit Chandan, Gareth Evans and Yasmin Gunaratnam, it features poets from Iraq, Macedonia, Italy, Turkey, France, Bulgaria, India, Canada, Kenya, Spain, Greece, Nigeria, China, Cuba, Palestine, the US and the UK, including Michael Ondaatje, Elaine Feinstein, Sean O’Brien, Anne Michaels, George Szirtes, Valerio Magrelli, Nikola Madzirov, Andrew Motion, Dalgit Nagra and Claudia Rankine. Introduction by David Constantine.

Novelist, draughtsman, film-maker, essayist and critic – John Berger is one of the major European intellectuals of our time.

POETRY

SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £9.99 | 9780993454745 PB | 197 X 127MM | 160PP | 1 OCTOBER 2016

NEW BOOTS AND PANTISOCRACIES W.M. Herbert & Andy Jackson (ed.)

The 2015 General Election made manifest changes that have been taking place in UK politics this century. Previous certainties like Labour’s Scottish hegemony are no more.

Older patterns like the Conservative dominance of England have reasserted themselves.

The idea of the UK as a single country has been replaced by a plurality of national, regional, generational and class identities.

The week after the election Bill Herbert and Andy Jackson decided to chart the responses of those unacknowledged legislators of the world – poets – to the new dispensation.

For the first 100 days of the new government they published a poem a day on their New Boots and Pantisocracies blog, recording life under the new unrealpolitik. Now it is a book by over a hundred of the most compelling and distinguished poets of our time, including Sean O’Brien, Sheenagh Pugh, Daljit Nagra, Claudia Daventry, Ian Duhig, Michael Rosen, Polly Clark, Ian McMillan, George Szirtes and Malika Booker.

POETRY

44

SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £8.99 | 9780993454752 PB | 197 X 127MM | 160PP | 1 OCTOBER 2016

In classical rabbinic literature the unpronounceable name of God produces and sacralizes a host of synonyms around what can’t be said. Residual Synonyms for the Name of God performs the proliferation of language and culture in our late capitalist moment as a residual structure of a religious past.

In Residual Synonyms for the Name of God American author Lewis Freedman has heretically rewritten the work of his ancestors to create an annotated index of this inherited structure, in which our contemporary drive for total finitude profanes the infinite primarily by being indistinguishable from it.

POETRY

UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE | £11.00 | 9781937027650 PB | 70 X 184MM | 160PP | 1 OCTOBER 2016

TURN/RETURN Jan Fortune Turn/Return is a poetry sequence of 25 short, inventive poems that arose from interaction with Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s box of cards, ‘Oblique Strategies’. Conceived to break creative impasses each card offers an often quirky, sometimes cryptic, sometimes challenging solution to artistic dilemmas.

In this sequence four cards provided the skeleton of each poem until the whole deck was used. These phrases, transformed and often obliterated in the process of writing mingled with other influences, from art works by George Condo and Rebecca Horn to watching couples tango by the Seine on an April Sunday afternoon; from living through a long Welsh winter when spring seemed never to arrive to re-visiting Teesside. Fragmentary, elliptical, rich in imagery, yet formally distinctive and pared back, Turn/Return is an exquisitely produced limited edition poetry pamphlet to savour.

POETRY

CINNAMON PRESS | £5.99 | 9781910836477 PB | 216 X 140MM | 80PP | 1 OCTOBER 2016

COMPLICITY Tom Sastry The 2016 Laureate’s Choice Series, Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy Tom Sastry was born in 1974. He is a second generation Original. His mother is Originally English and his father Originally Indian. He grew up in Buckinghamshire and has lived in Bristol since 1999. He thinks that not belonging is more interesting than belonging. He has spent most of his life in bedrooms, classrooms and offices. He enjoys having to deny that he is an anarchist. This is his first pamphlet.

POETRY

SMITH|DOORSTOP | £7.50 | 9781910367703 PB | 30PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

45

OCTOBER

RESIDUAL SYNONYMS FOR THE NAME OF GOD Lewis Freedman

SPITTING DISTANCE Mark Pajak The 2016 Laureate’s Choice Series, Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy Mark Pajak was born in Merseyside. His work has been published in Magma, The North and The Rialto, been short-listed for the Bridport Prize, highly commended in the Cheltenham Poetry and National Poetry Competitions. He is this year’s Apprentice Poet in Residence at Ilkley Literature Festival. Spitting Distance is his first pamphlet.

POETRY

SMITH|DOORSTOP | £7.50 | 9781910367681 PB | 30PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

DORA INCITES THE SEA-SCIBBLER TO LAMENT Geraldine Clarkson The 2016 Laureate’s Choice Series, Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy Geraldine Clarkson lives in Warwickshire. Since she began writing, she has been selected as an Arvon/Jerwood mentee, and received a Writers’ Centre Norwich Escalator award.

In 2015, she received a commendation in the UK National Poetry Competition, and in the same year won the Poetry London and Ambit competitions, as well as the Magma Editors’, Ver Poets, and Anne Born prizes.

Her poems have appeared in many journals including Poetry, The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Poetry London, Ambit and Magma. and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 Proms Extra.

POETRY

SMITH|DOORSTOP | £7.50 | 9781910367698 PB | 30PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

THERE WAS AND HOW MUCH THERE WAS Zeina Hashem Beck The 2016 Laureate’s Choice Series, Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her first collection, To Live in Autumn, won the 2013 Backwaters Prize, and her chapbook, 3arabi Song, won the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize.

She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Forward Prize. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and The Rialto, among others. She performs her poetry both in the Middle East and internationally.

POETRY

46

SMITH|DOORSTOP | £7.50 | 9781910367711 PB | 30PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

Disobedience and dissent abound in this richly visceral debut from prize-winning young experimental poet Charlotte Newman, a bold new avant-garde voice in British poetry.

Linguistically meticulous and academically aware, these poems burst with the kinetic energy of dagger attacks and huntresses. The book’s overarching themes of protest and transgression are represented in poems about the female body, medicine, art and politics.

From New Testament feminists and Symbolist art to Martians in 90s video game manuals, Trammel is forensic in its search for protest and transgression in the world a jilted generation have inherited.

POETRY

PENNED IN THE MARGINS | £9.99 | 9781908058393 PB | 216 X 138MM | 70PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

THE PAINTERS WHO STUDIED CLOUDS Will Kemp Brimming with wit, moments of acute observation and imagination, and written in a wry, self-deprecating Billy Collins-esque style, Will Kemp’s third collection is replete with refreshing images for the things that enrich life, from clouds to sport, art to music.

The Painters Who Studied Clouds is upbeat and positive, but never glib, expanding Kemp’s range and tone in this outstanding collection.

POETRY

CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781909077805 PB | 216 X 140MM | 80PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

THE FETCH Gregory Leadbetter Gregory Leadbetter’s first full-length collection, The Fetch, brings together poems that reach through language to the mystery of our being, giving voice to silence and darkness, making what is hidden both visible and captivating.

Ranging from invocation to elegy, from ghost poems to science fiction, Leadbetter conjures and quickens the wild and the weird. His poems bring to life a theatre of awakenings and apprehensions, of births and becoming, of the natural and the transnatural, the hinterlands where life and death meet. Sensuous, lyrical and precisely realised, The Fetch is also poignant and humane – animated by love, alive with the forces of renewal.

POETRY

NINE ARCHES PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911027096 PB | 216 X 138MM | 80 PP | 7 OCTOBER 2016

47

OCTOBER

TRAMMEL Charlotte Newman

CONKERS James Bunting “Everyone who has seen the film Donnie Darko will remember the scene where Drew Barrymore tells her students that an eminent scholar considered “Cellar Door” the most beautiful combination of words in the English language. I don’t know what this scholar meant when he or she used those words, but I do know they are beautiful. This is the concept I cling to when I write: I want every word to sit with the words surrounding it so people feel something beautiful from the sound even if they aren’t certain of the meaning. As for the actual meaning, well, let me know what you think. I don’t doubt you’ll find something I’ve missed — which is certainly part of the joy of writing.

What I do know is that at their heart these poems are about Bristol — a love affair that I will never tire of. And about a girl. I’ll leave that story in just those four words.” James Bunting

POETRY

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136892 PB | 133 X 203MM | 100PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

INTERFERENCE EFFECTS Claire Dyer Whether focusing in on catching fish off a pier, learning to speak Bird at night school, riding towards inspiration on horseback or thinking about manatees, the poems in Claire Dyer’s second collection offer a slantwise look at some of the experiences, both real and imagined, that can shape our lives.

Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop and the Morpho butterfly, the pieces in Interference Effects shift and alter depending on the reader’s viewing angle. Infused by the colour blue, they compare a farmer harvesting to a recipe for Victoria sponge; show boys learning to swim as another is buried at sea; tell of a heart that’s left at a checkout as a curator’s assistant gives hers in for safekeeping.

POETRY

TWO RIVERS PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909747227 PB | 210 X 135MM | 63PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

THE BOOK OF SNOW Robert Seatter The Book of Snow is a collaboration of word and image by poet Robert Seatter, artist Jessica Palmer and designer Sally James.

The poet said of the project, “I wanted to describe the arc of a relationship through one image: snow. I then gave these snow-inspired poems to artist Jessica Palmer, who interpreted them in paper cut, collage and collograph. Fascinated by her artistic process, I wrote a parallel sequence of poems exploring the art of her interpretation.

These were unified in a stark and powerful, black and white design by graphic designer Sally James. The result is, I hope, a work of connection, definition and revelation.”

POETRY

48

TWO RIVERS PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909747210 PB | 200 X 200MM | 48PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

A new collection from a performance poet and self-styled crone who makes it her mission to give voice and visibility to the elderly, regarding dressing with inappropriate zest as a political act.

This book is about being human and resilient and transgressive, and how you don’t need to have a personality lobotomy when you pass 60. I think it is the book GB Shaw had in mind when he wrote “Life does not stop being funny when people die any more than it stops being serious when people laugh.”

POETRY

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136922 PB | 133 X 203MM | 100PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

NUMBERED BOXES Peter ‘the Temp’ Beader Numbered Boxes is a journey through the stanzas of school days, family, work addiction, heartbreak and back into school as a teacher. Much of the book was written while Pete was a full time poetry teacher in a secondary school in East London, as part of a world first pilot project, the Spoken Word Education Programme. Many of the poems present formats that invite young poets to tell their story. The result is an edifice filled with confessions on his own youth, and the continued troubles of adulthood. The rooms we inhabit make up the story of our lives. They are all connected, sometimes as points of intense isolation. The book opens the lid on containers built by institutions and those harder to unpack, the ones built by ourselves. The final section of the book breaks free from the shadows of these confines and escapes into the debauchery of mid-summer, drawing on a body of work written while Pete was Glastonbury poet in residence, 2015. Numbered Boxes channels the energy and wit of his stage poetry to a body of lyric, narrative and comically surreal poetry, crafted to deliver on the page.

POETRY

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136908 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

VIVA LOCH LOMOND! Elvis McGonagall Viva Loch Lomond! is the first full length collection of poems published by the stand-up poet, comedian and broadcaster Elvis McGonagall. It features pieces from his hit Edinburgh Fringe Festival shows “One Man and His Doggerel” and “Countrybile” together with a number of greatest hits, B-sides and previously unpublished gems.

Deftly witty, satirical but not afraid to be plain daft, Elvis McGonagall’s work takes aim at our septic isle of zero-hours contracts, food banks and Kirsty Allsopp cup-cakery and beyond. From Scottish independence to the “war on terror” via turbo-capitalist greed, from Blair and Bush to Dave and Boris via the death of Thatcher, from William Wallace’s taste for cheese to the Queen’s love of gangsta rap, Elvis kicks against the pricks and the injustices inherent in austerity Britains.

His tightly written quick-fire verse, shot through with his customary moral umbrage and rhetorical power, is here annotated with his own irreverent explanatory notes highlighting the workings of his befuddled mind.

POETRY

BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781909136915 PB | 203 X 133MM | 100PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

49

OCTOBER

CRUMBS FROM A SPINNING WORLD Crysse Morrison

EMPIRES OF CLAY Becky Cherriman Confident, deft and inventive, Empires of Clay is the first full-length collection from performer, poet and community activist, Becky Cherriman.

Taking us into a world that is at once anchored and real, yet never predictable or what it seems, these poems are alive with surprising moments. So a doctor collects droplets from a couple making love in the shower ‘for tinctures and ointments, / cures for lonely hearts / and hopelessness’, whilst a mother and daughter share ‘a Eucharist of grain and fruit’.

Spanning territory from self-harming to single motherhood, from austerity to living with wolves, these are a vibrant, evocative and challenging poems that resonate long after reading, impressing their distinctive and humane narratives onto us.

POETRY

CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836361 PB | 216 X 140MM | 70PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

STUFF Charlie Hill When all the fire has gone and there’s nothing but stuff left, how do you find the will to keep going...?

Stuff takes on the emptiness of Consumerism and the essential meaninglessness of British culture at the beginning of the 21st Century: the clutter and trivia of our day-to-day urban lives, the absurd posturing of the workplace and the provisional landscapes of our personal relationships.

Yet, as dark and sometimes bleak as this novella is, it is also very funny, acutely observed and brilliantly written.

FICTION

CINNAMON PRESS | £5.99 | 9780993168253 PB | 130 X 198MM | 40PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

A TIME FOR PEACE Marg Roberts When the vast army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire marches on Belgrade in 1915, hundreds of Serbians are forced to evacuate in a mass exodus to Corfu during the worst Balkan winter in living memory. In the midst of the violence and the hardship each person struggles with their own pain in the face of countless atrocities, and the lives of a brave soldier and a patriotic medical orderly interweave. Stefan, brutalised by the horror and torn by loyalty to his men, and Ellen, burying the memory of women’s rotting corpses piled in a church.

With the weather closing in and the roads treacherous, Stefan leads the rear guard of the army in their efforts to help tens of thousands of civilians with dwindling food and supplies make the last push towards the Adriatic coast, while Ellen fights to keep them alive to see their sanctuary. In the most important journey of their lives, their survival depends on facing what they fear most.

FICTION

50

CINNAMON PRESS | £9.99 | 9781910836378 PB | 130 X 198MM | 400 PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

In this long awaited debut collection following an award wining pamphlet (No Theory of Everything) Martin Zarrop combines quiet imagery and a reflective tone to powerful affect.

Meticulous observation and attention to detail is coupled with a humane sensibility; intelligent probing paired with a gentleness of spirit. These are poems to read and read again.

“Written with a mathematician’s eye and a poet’s heart, these poems are wide-ranging and thoughtful, with a quiet and insistent energy moving through them. The intersection of personal and world history is an on-going concern in this collection, and Martin Zarrop’s closely observed poems explore this with both tenderness and humour.” Kim Moore

POETRY

CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836330 PB | 216 X 140MM | 74PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

THE DEEP HEART’S CORE Eugene O’Connell (ed.)

The Deep Heart’s Core is a unique anthology of contemporary Irish poetry in which invited poets choose one of their own key or ‘touchstone’ poems and offer a prose sketch of its genesis, background or composition.

The resulting volume is both a timely reminder of the diversity and vitality of contemporary poetry from Ireland, but also a fascinating insight into poem-making itself and, as such, is sure to be of interest to writers and students as well as general readers of verse.

POETRY

DEDALUS PRESS | £13.99 | 9781910251188 PB | 240PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

TRIO & OTHER POETS Various Authors In Trio three emerging poets unite voices with the shortlisted poets of the Cinnamon Press Debut poetry collection competition to produce an eclectic and convincing anthology; lyrical, honed and richly layered.

Kate Carruthers Thomas’s poetry draws on landscape, on memory and relationship as well as life’s large and small events.

Anne Hine is a nun, a Sister of the Society of the Sacred Heart, who lived in the North-East for thirty years. She started writing in the early 90’s and her first Pamphlet Dark Matters, published by Vane Women Press, appeared in 2001.

Ian Marriott has been writing poems for over 20 years; part of his internal process is that personal experience is often refracted – directly or indirectly – through the natural world.

POETRY

CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836385 PB | 216 X 140MM | 90PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

51

OCTOBER

MOVING PICTURES Martin Zarrop

SMALL DISTURBANCES Isabel Bermudez Small Disturbances – Isabel Bermudez’s first full-length collection – is populated with family arrivals (often sad and confused) from Colombia and France, with river-birds and other creatures on the banks of the Thames, as well as the ‘small disturbances’ of the heart at finding an abandoned bee hive.

“This collection speaks truly to anyone who carries strong images of another land, the place of childhood – and that is all of us.” Candy Neubert “These poems understand the past is forever seeping into the present, even generations later; they are vibrant, colourful acts of personal, cultural and historical recovery.” Martyn Crucefix

POETRY

ROCKINGHAM PRESS | £9.99 | 9781904851660 PB | 210 X 148MM | 64PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

SOMETIMES I’M SO HAPPY I’M NOT SAFE ON THE STREETS Dean Wilson Dean Wilson suffers from Poetry Tourettes, a condition that affects one in every thirty-six males in Kingston Upon Hull, the home of beautiful poetry.

But being Hull’s fourth best poet is not without its complications. Sometimes Dean gets overcome with the emotion of it all and has to escape to the seaside.Sometimes Dean is sad, but he doesn’t mind because at least he’ll get a poem out of it.

But most of the time Dean is a happy soul.And sometimes he’s so happy he’s not safe on the streets.

POETRY

WRECKING BALL PRESS | £8.95 | 9781903110331 PB | 3 OCTOBER 2016

HOW YOU MIGHT KNOW ME Sabrina Mahfouz How You Might Know Me is Sabrina Mahfouz ‘s debut full poetry collection, written from the fictional perspective of four very different women who are brought together by their shared experience of street-based sex work.

Partly inspired by workshops and interviews with those working in the sex industry, as well as by her own experience working in stripclubs, How You Might Know Me explores the lives behind the judgements, the survival behind the sex, the love behind the hate.

POETRY

52

OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £10.00 | 9780993103865 PB | 3 OCTOBER 2016

1996, London. The Troubles are in full flow.

A young Irish officer, Ronan Frost, is deep undercover inside an IRA cell in London.

Something big is happening. Something devastating. Something that will shake the foundations of Anglo-Irish relations and make sure the peace process stalls.

The Ogmios Team doesn’t exist.

Sir Charles is not confined to a wheelchair.

This is where it all begins.

With a betrayal.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911390121 PB | 129 X 198MM | 320PP | 3 OCTOBER 2016

TROJANS Philip Purser-Hallard For the first time since the Dark Ages, 21st-century Britain has a High King.

The Pendragon device has returned, wielded by former paramilitary officer and eco-activist Jory Taylor. Under his rule, the UK faces an unparalleled social, economic and artistic renaissance – and an unprecedented challenge, for the original King Arthur’s reign was a brief flowering ending in devastation and betrayal.

While a man claiming the device of Corineus the Trojan foments political unrest, and other nations’ devicial agents probe the realm mercilessly for weaknesses, High King Jordan must somehow rewrite his story’s ending, and usher in a true new order.

One that stands some chance, at least, of outliving him.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £7.99 | 9781911390831 PB | 129 X 198MM | 320PP | 4 OCTOBER 2016

FROM PROFESSOR MURASAKI’S NOTEBOOKS ON THE EFFECTS OF LIGHTNING ON THE HUMAN BODY John Latham Having trained as a physicist – specialising in the science of cloud formation – and then later emerged as one of the more curious voices in British poetry, John Latham is not a writer you’re ever likely to forget. Merging the intricate beauties of his scientific perspective with a highly playful treatment of memory, landscape, and the imagination, Latham’s poems are masterpieces of British surrealism. Passionate, comedic, mysterious, the poems in this, his fifth collection, capture the vibrancy of a childhood that still fascinates him, alongside the cruel betrayals of old age, with equal grace. The wonders of the cosmos are no mysterious to Latham, than the simple oddity of other human beings. And, as the title poem demonstrates, every last quantum of detail, even the mistakes of a makeshift translation, are capable of the profound revelation.

POETRY

COMMA PRESS | £9.99 | 9781910974285 PB | 198 X 128MM | 80PP | 5 OCTOBER 2016

53

OCTOBER

CRUCIBLE Steven Savile & Steve Lockley

WILLIAM PLOMER: SELECTED POEMS Neilson Mackay (ed.)

He was E.M. Forster’s “favourite contemporary poet”. W.H. Auden extolled his “first-class visual imagination”. Stephen Spender considered his output “among the best English poems written in the present century”. Yet for most readers, William Plomer (1903–1973) is now a faintly-remembered name. Born in Pietersburg, South Africa, William Plomer settled in London in 1929, where he went on to occupy a central position in English letters.

By turns lyrical, amatory, satirical and dramatic, Plomer addresses his favourite subjects – Africa, the divided self, aesthetic pleasure, the macabre and the absurd – with a formal assurance, bleak wit and urgency of feeling. This rich and thorough selection presents, for the first time in almost fifty years, Plomer’s best.

POETRY

LITTLE ISLAND PRESS | £25.00 | 9780993505638 HB | 234 X 156MM | 128PP | 5 OCTOBER 2016

BINK NOLL: SELECTED POEMS David Slavitt (ed.)

For those few who remember Bink Noll or know his work, he remains the Vermeer of American poetry, with a delicacy of hand and eye that again and again presents us with domestic perceptions that have what Melville called “the shock of recognition."

Here we have that last book of his as well as selections from his first, The Center of the Circle, and The Feast. In a voice that is rich and accomplished, Noll offers us lessons in alertness that are, unlike most lessons, delightful.

POETRY

LITTLE ISLAND PRESS | £25.00 | 9780993505652 PB | 234 X 156MM | 128PP | 6 OCTOBER 2016

LOLA RIDGE: COLLECTED EARLY POEMS Daniel Tobin (ed.)

Transnational long before the term gained currency, Lola Ridge was one of the most notable poets writing in America from the publication of her first book, The Ghetto, in 1918 until her death in 1941.

Political anarchist, staunch advocate for women’s rights, worker’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of African Americans, Ridge was a social and literary trailblazer whose poetry set its sights on the neglected, the transgressed, just beyond the pale of mainstream modernism.

This new edition of Lola’s Ridge’s collected early poems intends to redress the serious neglect her own work has endured over the past seventy-five years. With this publication Lola Ridge’s important place in the history of twentieth-century poetry takes a significant step toward being recognised and restored.

POETRY

54

LITTLE ISLAND PRESS | £35.00 | 9780993505645 HB | 234 X 156MM | 412PP | 7 OCTOBER 2016

“Diane Williams is one of the true living heroes of the American avantgarde.” Jonathan Franzen “She is one of the very few contemporary prose writers who seem to be doing something independent, energetic, heartfelt.” Lydia Davis The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called ‘folktales that hammer like a nail gun’ and these forty new ones are sharper than ever. Their originality, precision, and power bring the familiar into startling and enchanted relief.

Published earlier in 2016 in the US by McSweeney’s, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine was greeted with rave reviews in the New York Yimes, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the San Fransico Chronicle, the Oprah Review and others.

FICTION

CB EDITIONS | £8.99 | 9781909585201 PB | 198 X 129MM | 128PP | 12 OCTOBER 2016

FROM THE FORTUNATE ISLES: NEW & SELECTED POEMS Tony Curtis From the Fortunate Isles: New and Selected Poems by the Welsh poet Tony Curtis marks a milestone year, the 70th anniversary of his birth, and celebrates the career of an author who has won numerous prizes for this poetry.

One can see the continuity of his concerns: the history and countryside of Pembrokeshire; war in all of its manifestations in the 20th century; and the fine arts, particularly painting and sculpture and poetry produced by the finest minds in Wales such as Dannie Abse, Dylan Thomas, John Tripp, Peter Prendergast, Gwen and Augustus John. The paintings of the American artist Andrew Wyeth also inspire a sequence of poems. As does his collaboration with the Long Island-based artist John Digby, ‘The Arches’: poems are accompanied by the surreal collages that inspired them.

POETRY

SEREN BOOKS | £12.99 | 9781781723302 PB | 216 X 138MM | 260PP | 13 OCTOBER 2016

THE OTHER CITY Rhiannon Hooson A thoughtful and lyrical first collection, inspired by personal history and stories from classical mythology, it uses gorgeous detail to bring poems to life.

The poems have lively narratives, pulling one into a story about Zeus, or a lover’s infatuation with hair, or a cat tracking finches. Poems also reflect on her childhood on a farm in Wales.

A compelling, provocative and complex debut for fans of Alice Oswald and Louise Gluck.

POETRY

SEREN BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781781722992 PB | 216 X 138MM | 64PP | 13 OCTOBER 2016

55

OCTOBER

FINE, FINE, FINE, FINE, FINE Diane Williams

STONE FRUIT Stephen Yenser The locales in Stephen’s Yenser’s new volume are California, Kansas, and Greece, where the titular fruits include respectively the date palm, the blackberry, and the olive. But the sculpted fruit on a grave marker qualifies as well, along with the stone wall that is the yield of hard labor, both of which also figure in this book.

Words too may be fleshy and hard at once, may be elegiac and memorial, and may build a structure. To cultivate, to commemorate, and to construct are the poet’s objects, each involved with the others.

POETRY

WAYWISER PRESS | £9.99 | 9781904130819 PB | 198 X 129MM | 96PP | 15 OCTOBER 2016

PLEASURES OF THE GAME Austin Allen Pleasures of the Game is a book of deceptively playful poems, of sparkling surfaces that conceal dark undercurrents. Its subjects include games of all kinds: from schoolyard Double Dutch to the chess match of love, from painters’ illusions to professional ice hockey, from the stratagems of spies to the life-and-death game we play against the universe.

Though this is Austin Allen’s first published collection, it displays the formal dexterity, the thematic range, and the emotional depth of a master.

POETRY

WAYWISER PRESS | £9.99 | 9781904130826 PB | 198 X 129MM | 80PP | 15 OCTOBER 2016

PLUNDERED HEARTS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS J. D. McClatchy With his first several books, J. D. McClatchy established himself as a poet of urbanity, intellect, and prismatic emotion, in the tradition of James Merrill, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop––one who balances an exploration of the underworld of desire with a mastery of poetic form, and whose artistry reveals the riches and ruins of our “plundered hearts.”

Now, opening with exquisite new poems, this selection is a glorious full tour of McClatchy’s career. It includes excerpts from the powerful book-length sequence Ten Commandments (1998) and his more recent works Hazmat (2002) and Mercury Dressing (2009)—books that explored the body’s melodrama, as well as the heart’s treacheries, grievances, and boundless capacities.

POETRY

56

WAYWISER PRESS | £13.99 | 9781904130864 PB | 198 X 129MM | 248PP | 15 OCTOBER 2016

In 2014 Photographer Tom Dingley set up his #Outcome project - to photograph LGBT people with the attributes of their everyday life - their work, or their interests; and holding a picture of themselves as a child.

The message was, no matter how hard it is growing up, no matter who you were, you become who you become, and you are amazing. Several well known people are included.

Two years and several exhibitions later, this is the Outcome.

NONFICTION

ARACHNE PRESS | £25.00 | 9781909208261 PB | 234 X 156MM | 160PP | 16 OCTOBER 2016

DEVIL’S HIGHWAY Simon Bestwick In the haunted desolation of post-nuclear Britain, the Catchman walks. Spawned from the nightmare of Project Tindalos, it doesn’t tire, stop, or die. It exists only for one purpose: to find and kill Helen Damnation, leader of the growing revolt against the tyrannical Reapers and their Commander, Tereus Winterborn.

Meanwhile, Helen is threatened both from without and within. Her nightmares of the Black Road have returned, and the ghosts of her murdered family demand vengeance, in the form of either Winterborn’s death or her own. And close behind the Catchman, a massive Reaper assault, led by Helen’s nemesis, Colonel Jarrett, is nearing the rebels’ base. Killing Helen has become Jarrett’s obsession: only one of them can emerge from this conflict alive.

With the fate of the rebellion in the balance, Helen faces her deadliest challenge yet, pitted in single combat against an unstoppable killer, commanding armies in a bloody and pitiless battle – and, at last, confronting the demons of her past on the Black Road.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £25.00 | 9781909679900 HB | 129 X 198MM | 320PP | 17 OCTOBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781909679900

THE EMMA PRESS ANTHOLOGY OF THE SEA Eve Lacey (ed.)

From Moby Dick to Master and Commander, writers have been fascinated by the vast, untameable power of the sea. Eve Lacey’s anthology of maritime poems is a work of ‘literary salvage’, bringing together work which asks how the human mind can fathom the ocean’s depths today.

In the wake of the European refugee crisis, the sea has a potent political sting. Poets explore the environmental implications of our actions on the waters which nourish us, and embark on voyages of self-discovery.

The image of the sea which emerges is at once strange and familiar, bearing witness to storms, naval history, ocean creatures and the human desire for freedom. The sea itself is at the heart of the book, lapping at the boundaries of language, offering both mystery and solace to the reader.

POETRY

THE EMMA PRESS | £10.00 | 9781910139455 PB | 198 X 129MM | 88PP | 20 OCTOBER 2016

57

OCTOBER

OUTCOME: LGBT PORTRAITS Tom Dingley

WILD PLACES: WALES’ TOP 40 NATURE SITES Iolo Williams In Wild Places television naturalist Iolo Williams picks his favourite forty from the many nature reserves in wales. From the Great Orme to Magor Marsh, from Oxwich on the Gower to Gronant Dunes, Williams criss-crosses Wales. His list includes coastal sites from estuaries to inaccessible cliffs – plus Skomer and other islands – valleys, mountains, meadows, bogs, woods and former industrial land. These wild places vary in size from Lake Vyrnwy to Kenfig, squeezed between Porthcawl and Port Talbot steelworks. They include sites of international significance, like Cors Caron, and the managed beauty of Cosmeston Lakes Park near Barry.

As Wild Places shows, the sites are full of the widest variety of trees, plants, birds, animals and insects. Williams draws on his many years as a naturalist in Wales to provide a survey of natural delights of each site. Readers will learn where to find birds of all descriptions, snakes, dragonflies and damselflies, foxes, badgers, hares, eels, salmon, dolphin, hawks, owls, rare wildflowers, fungi, bats: the whole abundance of nature in Wales.

NONFICTION

SEREN BOOKS | £19.99 | 9781781723272 PB | 250 X 193MM | 192PP | 24 OCTOBER 2016

THE OTHER TIGER Richard Gwyn (ed.)

The Other Tiger: Contemporary Latin American Poetry is a refreshing new anthology of Spanish language contemporary poetry, focused particularly on writers born since 1945.

The collection presents an eclectic and vibrant mix of fine poetry and fine translation that opens a window on to a relatively neglected group of literary worlds. The poems are at once exotic and other yet recognizably drawing on a poetic tradition that includes Nobel prize-winner Octavio Paz. They conjure big landscapes and moments of tenderness, celebrate the individual but also engage with the politics of so many repressive regimes in Latin and South America. The Other Tiger vividly reflects the many contrasts present in the lives and literatures of the peoples of this continent.

POETRY

SEREN BOOKS | £14.99 | 9781781723340 PB | 216 X 138MM | 352PP | 24 OCTOBER 2016

THE MARVELLOUS EQUATIONS OF THE DREAD Marcia Douglas Bob Marley is dead. The Emperor Haile Selassie has been brutally murdered. The armed gangs of Kingston are at war and the murder rate soars. The people have lost all trust in self-serving politicians. It is hard to imagine worse times.

The Marvellous Equations of the Dread tells the twin stories of Jamaica’s nihilistic violence and its wondrously creative humanity and does truthful justice to both. It takes place in the worlds of the living and in the vivid afterlife of the dead, spanning the Kingston ghettoes, the Emperor’s palace in Addis Ababa and heaven. There is even a fallen angel.

At its heart are the human stories of the deaf-mute Leenah who with her mother and daughter writes a powerful woman version of events; the relationship between Fall-down (the street madman and fallen angel) and Delroy the orphaned street-boy, and the meetings in the clock tower at Half Way Tree between Bob Marley and the whiteman father who abandoned him.

FICTION

58

PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781845233327 PB | 206 X 135MM | 224PP | 24 OCTOBER 2016

Antony Dunn has been described as one of our most subtle and expert observers of intimate life. His voice has been praised as “unique” (Poetry Review), his verse “inventive and highly enjoyable” (The North), his vision as “very much alive to the slips and lapses that shadow any attempt to describe the world” (Times Literary Supplement).

The poems in Take This One to Bed explore the passions and tensions of how we live together – as neighbours, as families and as lovers – and as companions to our own various selves.

Take This One to Bed is a memorable, thought-provoking and ultimately uplifting response to these crises, in a poetry “made delightful by the elegance of Dunn’s art” (Acumen).

POETRY

VALLEY PRESS | £10.99 | 9781908853745 PB | 198 X 129MM | 80PP | 27 OCTOBER 2016

WINDOW-CLEANER SEES PAINTINGS Menno Wigman Menno Wigman is one of today’s most exciting and innovative Dutch poets, and this present selection draws upon his six collections published since 1997 including his most recent, published in 2016.

His themes are unrestrainedly contemporary, whether his poems are autobiographical, fictionalised or inhabiting other characters, and he has the ability to use poetic form to make apparently straightforward content deepen with empathy, emotion and humour, something which his translator, David Colmer, has managed to capture in his beautifully lucid translations.

As Colmer says: “Wigman has the uncanny ability to produce poems that seem as if they’ve always existed. When you read them the first time, they feel like much-loved, much anthologised standards.”

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345610 PB | 216 X 138MM | 112PP | 31 OCTOBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781910345627

ACRES OF LIGHT Katherine Gallagher As its title suggests, this book is full of Australian sunshine and the brilliance of its bright, clear air. It’s also full of love -- love of people, especially family, love of the natural world and journeying through it, and love of life itself.

The poet Martyn Crucefix writes: “Katherine Gallagher’s new collection is bejewelled throughout with haiku-like moments of vivid observation. Her delighted responses – in particular to the natural world – serve to peel away the film of familiarity through which we usually gaze. Yet Gallagher combines such excited observation with a quality of restraint, a respect for what she encounters in a process of self-creation – ‘from myself into myself’ as her epigraph from Rose Auslander puts it. Sequences about her Australian mother and the loss of her brother are imbued with this same gift: life is celebrated in poems that never forget our mortality: as the poet writes in ‘Quotidian’, “This is time we have underlined, / remembering what we’ve done, where we’re going.”

POETRY

ARC PUBLICATIONS | £9.99 | 9781910345733 PB | 216 X 138MM | 72PP | 31 OCTOBER 2016 HB ISBN: 9781910345740

59

OCTOBER

TAKE THIS ONE TO BED Antony Dunn

INDIGENOUS SPECIES Khairani Barokka A contemporary, feminist take on a Heart of Darkness-esque tale of an upriver journey through a landscape scarred by ecological destruction, and a culture scarred by historical greed. A young girl is abducted and smuggled about a boat bound for the Indonesian interior. As her captors take her ever deeper into the jungle, her uncertain fate is compounded by the sense of her environment as a place of violence, destruction and jeopardy.

A long poem accompanied by the author’s own ‘rainforest gothic’ artwork, the book is also a bold and necessary experiment in making a sight-impaired-accessible art book. Sales from the regular edition will go towards a funding a separate edition featuring Braille alongside conventional text, and tactile, textured images.

TILTED AXIS PRESS | £11.99 | 9781911284048 HB | 16 NOVEMBER 2016

NOVEMBER 60

Chester is a place where history lies not just below the surface but frequently on top of it too. A Roman regional capital, its location gave it strategic importance across the centuries. Saxon and Norman castles, the city walls (and their many gates), the many medieval churches and the cathedral, the destruction of the Reformation and of the Civil War, the eighteenth and nineteenth century booms: all have left their mark on the city.

Now history seems to be Chester’s raison d’etre, underlying the present like the Roman hypercaust under Spud U Like in Bridge Street. Yet modern Chester is also the racecourse, the zoo, the birthplace of a slew of footballers and other sportsmen, and the home of Hollyoaks.

Real Chester explores the history and the contrasting reality. Author Clare Dudman walks its streets, seeking out its mysteries and informing them with her own experiences of the city. The result is a joyfully informative book which surpasses any guidebook in its offbeat views and insider information.

NONFICTION

SEREN BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781781722633 PB | 208 X 135MM | 240PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2016

NEG MAWON Lennox Honychurch The Maroons (escaped slaves) of Jamaica are famous. Not so the Maroons of another Caribbean island - Dominica, also a former British colony. Dominica’s Maroons once controlled much of this wild and mountainous island but few details of their story of resistance and ultimate defeat have been known - until now. Written by Dominica’s leading historian, Neg Mawon is a stirring account of how a displaced and enslaved people challenged the British empire in their struggle to create a free and self-sufficient society.

From the Africans who took refuge on the island in the 16th century, through the two brutal Maroon Wars in the last decades of slavery, to the building of a post-emancipation nation, Neg Mawon takes the reader deep into the hinterland of the Dominica story. A brilliantly researched analysis of a people’s fight for human rights, this is popular history of the highest quality.

NONFICTION

PAPILLOTE PRESS | £9.99 | 9780993108662 PB | 197 X 130MM | 120PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2016

AN IRAQI IN PARIS Samuel Shimon Providentially leaving Iraq just before Saddam Hussein installs himself as President, the Assyrian boy dreams of becoming a Hollywood film-maker like his hero John Ford, but after arrest and torture in Syria – accused of being a Jewish spy on account of his name, similar treatment in Jordan, and escaping execution in Lebanon by armed militia, he eventually lands up on the streets of Paris. Meeting up with Jean Valjean he tries to escape his fate as a homeless refugee with wit, humour and amorous adventures, all the while writing the story of his childhood, his deaf-mute father Kika, and film buff Kiryakos.

After all his experiences, Samuel Shimon, ‘the runaway from museums’, writes an urgently needed and timely ‘manifesto of tolerance’.

FICTION

BANIPAL BOOKS | £9.99 | 9780957442481 PB | 198 X 129MM | 282PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2016

61

NOVEMBER

REAL CHESTER Clare Dudman

SOLOMON’S SEAL Steven Savile and Steve Lockley With the discovery of the long lost Seal of Solomon, Konstantin Khavin and Orla Nyrén find themselves in Jerusalem and Palestine fighting for their lives with enemies on all sides.

They don’t know who they can trust. They don’t know which way to turn next.

All they know is they have to find the Seal while diverting the detonation of a dirty bomb at one of Jerusalem’s most holy sites. Which would be fine, but Orla’s been here before, during the worst days of her life when she was a prisoner in Jenin, a refugee camp on the border.

She was brutally abused by a sadist she remembers only as The Beast - a man she thought she’d killed during her escape. He isn’t dead. He’s the man who has the Seal. And Orla is going to have to face The Beast alone.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390145 PB | 129 X 198MM | 240PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2016

WRITTEN IN THE DARK Polina Barskova (ed.)

Written during the seige of Leningrad and intended to exist in striking contrast to state-sanctioned, heroic “Blockade” poetry in which the stoic body of the exemplary citizen triumphs over death, the poems gathered here show the Siege individual (blokadnik) as a weak and desperate incarnation of Job. These poets wrote in situ about the famine, disease, madness, cannibalism, and prostitution around them—subjects so tabooed in those most-Soviet times that they would never think of publishing.

The formal ambition and macabre avant-gardism; of this uncanny body of work match its horrific content, giving birth to a “poor” language which alone could reflect the depth of suffering and psychological destruction experienced by victims of that historical disaster.

POETRY

UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE | £11.75 | 9781937027575 PB | 127 X 177MM | 160PP | 1 SEPTEMBER 2016

CREOLE CHIPS Edgar Mittelholzer This compendium of Edgar Mittelholzer’s uncollected writings, compiled and edited by Juanita Cox, brings together his early collection of sketches of Georgetown life, Creole Chips, his speculative novella, The Adding Machine, twenty-four short stories, two short plays, his published and unpublished poetry and essays covering travel, literature and his personal beliefs.

This is mostly work written before Mittelholzer came to England in search of publishing opportunities. It shows a writer still deeply concerned with the Caribbean, a writer of playful humour who is committed to entertain, not to preach as his later work tends to do, and a writer who wrote in a variety of genres (speculative fiction, crime, and the Gothic) that contemporary Caribbean writers are rediscovering.

POETRY

62

NONFICTION FICTION

PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £22.99 | 9781845233006 PB | 234 X 156MM | 400PP | 7 NOVEMBER 2016

Angela Readman’s The Book of Tides is treasure trove of luscious, visceral poems, full of delightful risks, utterly thrilling and always pleasurably close to the bone.

These poems teem with strange and beautiful gems, the dark sparkle of a particular strand of skewed folklore; we encounter mermaids and Joan of Arc, a man with a beard of bees, a Tattooist’s daughter and Beatrix Potter’s bed.

“Readman casts her eye on ordinary life with a sharp knife. This is witty, astute poetry of the inventive kind and feels important, as all good poetry should... Poetry with an edge.”

Julia Darling

POETRY

NINE ARCHES PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911027102 PB | 216 X 138MM | 80PP | 7 NOVEMBER 2016

UEA MA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY: PROSE Various Authors For decades, UEA’s groundbreaking creative writing programme has built the foundations for thought-provoking, prizewinning and critically acclaimed fiction and non-fiction. Housed within these pages are the creative visions of this year’s Prose Fiction graduates, spanning the breadth of space, time and genre. There are glimpses into diverse and richly-imagined worlds, from New Delhi to Johannesburg, from the Renaissance to post-apocalyptic futures, from experimental short fiction to crime thriller writing.

Equally original, insightful and inspiring, this year’s Biography and Creative Non-Fiction graduates explore what it is like to grow up in rural Ireland, to volunteer in the hot and humid jungle of Thailand, or to grieve the death of a mother. From an attempt to rescue the reputation of Dolly Henry, a model shot dead by her lover in 1914, to a consideration of the truth behind Lady Stafford’s nineteenth-century letter to her son, this year’s non-fiction writers reveal hidden and fascinating stories.

NONFICTION FICTION

EGG BOX PUBLISHING | £9.99 | 9781911343097 PB | 210 X 148MM | 198PP | 7 NOVEMBER 2016

UEA MA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY: POETRY Various Authors With an introduction by Tiffany Atkinson, this diverse collection of new poems represents the latest work of the most recent cohort of poets from UEA’s renowned Creative Writing MA. “These very different poems are full of tireless invention, vigilant attention, colour, wit, kindness. To read them is to feel read by them: they walk steps ahead of you and your expectations as you jog excitedly to catch up.” Sam Buchan-Watts, Faber New Poet 2015-16

POETRY

EGG BOX PUBLISHING | £9.99 | 9781911343127 PB | 210 X 148MM | 80PP | 7 NOVEMBER 2016

63

NOVEMBER

THE BOOK OF TIDES Angela Readman

UEA MA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY: SCRIPTWRITING Various Authors This anthology comprises eight original pieces from the latest cohort of students on the UEA MA Scriptwriting course, showcasing some of the UEA’s finest storytelling.

“Plays need not only to be written and seen: they also need to be published. This is very important and allows them to be thrown into the future. I often imagine someone, someday, even many generations from now, browsing through published texts and suddenly finding the one play that speaks to him, to her. The calibre of the writers I met on this course makes it more than possible that one of these will be in this book.” Timberlake Wertenbaker

FICTION

EGG BOX PUBLISHING | £9.99 | 9781911343110 PB | 210 X 148MM | 160PP | 7 NOVEMBER 2016

LAND MUSIC / BLACK MOUNTAINS Ruth Bidgood Land Music sees Ruth Bidgood writing at the top of her powers. Fluent, yet unerringly exact, always searching for new perspectives, we move with the poet from landscape to memories, each evoked with such precision that we enter them fully. This is a world in which nothing is insignificant, from the tiles of pre-Raphaelite girls by the fireside, to the visual trick of leaves in the wind that seem to conjure a lizard on a window-pane.

Drawn from previous collections spanning forty-four years, Black Mountains represents a strong thread through Ruth Bidgood’s poetry. Never embracing an Arcadian pastoral, Ruth Bidgood writes with extraordinary depth that is matched by measured control.

POETRY

CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836354 PB | 216 X 140MM | 100PP | 7 NOVEMBER 2016

WIND PLAYING WITH A MAN’S HAT John Barnie Deeply perceptive, always dipping below the surface of things – Wind Playing with a Man’s Hat combines a plaintive honesty about change, mortality and darkness with a precise and lyrical vision that also sees the light.

Never sentimental, there is a keenness of wit that penetrates to the heart of things, the poems uncurling in single sentences that reverberate with gentle, but profound moments of epiphany.

POETRY

64

CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781910836392 PB | 216 X 140MM | 80PP | 7 NOVEMBER 2016

The Island That’s Hard To Find In English is a collection by British Jamaican poet, Raymond Antrobus. After the death of his father, Raymond returns to Jamaica but restless questions begin to unearth inside him (Who I am now is something I need to remember).

Raymond, upon returning to the UK travelled to Bristol, Liverpool, Hastings, Hull and around London to meditate in the places where the pain and grief of history is bigger than his own.

“His monologues are stunning studies of voice and substance, and his lyric poems are graceful and finely crafted.” Kwame Dawes

POETRY

OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £10.00 | 9780993103872 PB | 7 NOVEMBER 2016

FROM THE LINES OF DISSENT Media Diversified Anthology Media Diversified has opened up a space where people of colour can express their experiences and perspectives without fear or favour from the Eurocentric media establishment. It has fast become the UK’s number one source for thought-provoking opinions outside of the mainstream.

From the Lines of Dissent is Media Diversified’s first book anthology, bringing together the best of comment, journalistic and academic essays they have commissioned and published in the past year. They tackle structural and prescient issues from racism to the refugee crisis, the economical to the environmental, culture to commodity. The voices found on these pages are urgent and necessary.

NONFICTION

OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | 9780993103889 PB | 7 NOVEMBER 2016

GEOMANTIC Paula Meehan Comprised of eighty-one 9-line poems, Paula Meehan’s extraordinary new collection is both a free-form dance and a controlled meditation on the nature of memory, community, love and poetry itself.

Whether the world explored in these poems is bordered, like that of a child, by “sweet privet hedge” or only by the limits of the poet’s imagination, Meehan’s immersion is total.

Like the turning of tarot cards or the casting of i ching hexagrams, these carefully packed poems seem suddenly to expand reality. Her celebration of the power of dream and of song is neither escape nor hermetic retreat but a means to navigate “the long night’s journey into day”.

A true citizen poet, Meehan’s work begins in intimate feeling but is ever focused on the world that is considerably more than its parts.

POETRY

DEDALUS PRESS | £11.00 | 9781910251157 PB | 140 X 216MM | 98PP | 7 NOVEMBER 2016

65

NOVEMBER

THE ISLAND THAT’S HARD TO FIND IN ENGLISH Raymond Antrobus

SPARKS Norah Hanson Sparks is the third collection of passionate, poignant poetry from much-loved Hull-based author Norah Hanson. The fiery wit and hard-won wisdom that characterised her previous collections are here, intact, with a new level of clarity and purpose adding weight to the words – without losing the warmth, wonder, and laugh-out-loud observational skills that have won Norah readers across the world.

Now six-times a great-grandmother, the poet’s life experience shines through each page, shedding light on the past and illuminating the heart of our human experience.

There are no riddles or literary exercises here; Norah’s refreshingly direct language seems to rise from the earth itself, channelled through the writer’s pen into each new verse.

POETRY

VALLEY PRESS | £8.99 | 9781908853769 PB | 198 X 129MM | 72PP | 10 NOVEMBER 2016

CENOTAPH SOUTH Chris McCabe The second in a series of poetic investigations into the inhabitants of London’s great Victorian cemeteries. Join Chris McCabe as he puts an ear to the earth for voices forgotten by the literary canon.

Travel back in time through south-east London – along its underground rivers, through the halls of its asylums – as McCabe discovers the intense poetic activity of an area that encountered Robert Browning, Barry MacSweeney & Charlotte Mew and explores the childhood playground of William Blake.

POETRY PENNED IN THE MARGINS | £12.99 | 9781908058409 HB | 216 X 138MM | 250PP | 12 NOVEMBER 2016

BAD KID CATULLUS Jon Stone & Kirsten Irving (ed.)

Gaius Valerius Catullus: acid-tongued socialite, scandal-monger, lovelorn wretch and filthy-jokesmith. Softened and censored for centuries, his poems are sexy and tender, savage and scurrilous, and often shockingly explicit.

In this new anthology, contemporary poets and artists conjure up blistering new versions of Catullus, expanding the boundaries of literary translation into a full-blown metamorphic cornucopia – colour shape-poems, text art and calligrams, sci-fi Catullus, feminist Catullus, Catullus as Batman villain, and much more besides.

We’ve even included some of the older, classical translations so you can watch this irrepressible post-mortal poet transmogrify before your very eyes.

POETRY

66

SIDEKICK BOOKS | £10.00 | 9781909560253 PB | 130 X 184MM | 96PP | 14 NOVEMBER 2016

2015 marked the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta and Arachne Press celebrated with an evening of stories, poetry and song on the subject of Liberty, now collected together in book form. Some directly relate to specific clauses of the document signed by King John, others more concerned with how we experience and search after freedom in the 21st Century.

The call out continued until the end of the year, and here are the collected and eclectic responses, from authors and poets from all corners of the UK and further afield, including Sarah Evans, Nick Rawlinson, Helen Morris, Owen Townend, Olivia Byard, Alison Lock, Peter de Ville, Cassandra Passerelli, David Guy and Carolyn Eden.

FICTION

ARACHNE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909208315 PB | 198 X 129MM | 128PP | 17 NOVEMBER 2016

BELLA MIA Donatella Di Pietrantonio Shortlisted for the prestigious Premio Strega in Italy in 2014, this is the story of a broken family coming to terms, in the aftermath of the earthquake in L’Aquila in 2009, with the loss of one of them - a twin sister, a daughter, a mother – while living in temporary accommodation on the outskirts of the city.

The terse and clean voice of the spiky, single, thirty-something female narrator wards off sentimentality while guiding us through the inner reconstruction undertaken by each character individually and by the family as a whole, letting us witness the extraordinary poetic power of love and the renewal of hope.

FICTION

CALISI PRESS | £12.00 | 9780993238024 PB | 214 X 149MM | 186PP | 23 NOVEMBER 2016

WHEN YOU LIVED OUTSIDE THE WALLS AND OTHER STORIES Krishan Coupland This is the sixth book in the Thumbprint pocket book series and Krishan’s first collection of stories. At once dark and tender, mundane and extraordinary the stories here speak of strange realities where a child takes to living in the walls with the friends who love her, and a young man preserves the body of his lover who has returned from the dead in a freezer in his garage.

Coupland writes in language elegant yet simple as if he were telling you a story while you shared a pot of tea or a bottle of beer. It’s this simplicity that belies a complexity of ideas and a mastery of the short form that is such a pleasure to read and makes this debut collection truly remarkable.

POETRY

STONEWOOD PRESS | £4.99 | 9781910413265 PB | 155 X 110MM | 48PP | 30 NOVEMBER 2016

67

NOVEMBER

LIBERTY TALES Cherry Potts (ed.)

ANGELA Chrissy Williams & Howard Hardiman Chrissy Williams and Howard Hardiman’s unnerving journey through the mind of a small screen icon. Who, after all, can explain the mysterious allure of Angela Lansbury?

Williams and Hardiman gaze upon (and into) the many facets of Angela and her most famous fictional counterpart, Jessica Fletcher, as wonderstruck miners might scrutinise a fist-sized diamond freshly cut from the rock.

But like a tesseract, Angela seems to exist in four dimensions, beyond Euclidean space, her limits impossible to define through observation alone. Thus, further and deeper must our fearless duo travel, through the televisual glass, past all the iterations of ode and approximation, into the parallel universe that is Angela.

SIDEKICK BOOKS | ÂŁ6.50 | 9781909560178 PB | 148 X 210MM | 24PP | 1 DECEMBER 2016

DECEMBER 68

A captivating debut of creative non-fiction exploring landscape and Englishness across the South Downs.

Through a series of psychogeographic encounters with the dark history of our open spaces and suburbs, American writer and artist Justin Hopper travels across the Sussex homeland of his ancestors in an attempt to reconnect with the land and himself.

NONPENNED IN THE MARGINS | £9.99 | 9781908058379 FICTION PB | 216 X 138MM | 200PP | 1 DECEMBER 2016 FIRST FLEET Michael Crowley Between 1787 and 1850 over 160,000 convicts were sent from Britain to penal colonies in Australia. First Fleet tells the story of the first eleven ships that sailed from Portsmouth on a 15,000 mile voyage to establish the first British penal settlement at Sydney Cove.

Drawing on the surviving journals from some of those on board the prison convoy, these poems inhabit the imaginary voices of convicts, crew, marines and Aboriginal people to give intimate voice – lyrical, poignant and unsentimental – to the poverty they left behind and the terrible ‘starvation years’ they faced when they reached Australia. This is a book about history and landscape, imprisonment and environment.

POETRY

SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.95 | 9780993454721 PB | 197 X 127MM | 90PP | 1 DECEMBER 2016

WARGOD Steven Savile and Sean Ellis It’s the middle of the night. Ronan Frost receives a plea for help from his former commanding officer, Tony Denison. Denison is running for his life. An outspoken opponent of globalization and fascinated in Arthurian lore, Frost’s old comrade is the target of agents of the New World Order, a shadowy conspiracy trying to prevent him from finding the Crocea Mors, the sword of Caesar, and perhaps the very blade that King Arthur pulled from the stone to win his kingdom.

Frost is sceptical, most of what Denison claims strikes him as bullshit, plain and simple, but there’s no denying that someone is trying to kill him. So he’s going to help. No matter the risk. That’s just who he is. Across London, Sir Charles Wyndham, leader of the Ogmios Team, dispatches Konstantin Khavin to learn the truth behind the attempted assassination...only to discover that the British government wants Denison dead at all costs. And because Frost is with him, Sir Charles is forced to make a choice— abandon Frost, or lose Ogmios for good.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390169 PB | 129 X 198MM | 24PP | 1 DECEMBER 2016

69

DECEMBER

THE OLD WEIRD ALBION Justin Hopper

CRUDE LOVE Kim Rosenfield and Steven Zultanski (ed.)

In the last decade, a range of contemporary conversations (political, aesthetic, and technological) have dramatically shifted the form and function of poetry. Crude Love is an intimate essay collection responding to recent changes in experimental and post-conceptual writing, with contributions from fifteen New York poets: Mónica de la Torre, Andrew Durbin, Rob Fitterman, Kristen Gallagher, Diana Hamilton, Josef Kaplan, Shiv Kotecha, Sophia Le Fraga, Trisha Low, Holly Melgard, Kim Rosenfield, Danny Snelson, Chris Sylvester, Joey Yearous-Algozin, and Steven Zultanski.

By keeping it local, Crude Love avoids broad generalizations about the state of the art, and instead focuses on the innards of a regional poetic discourse in order to highlight a specific poetic conversation in flux. Post-conceptual poetry is messy, ugly, personal, political, violent, and sometimes confounding, and so is this book.

NONUGLY DUCKLING PRESSE | £11.00 | 9781937027711 FICTION PB | 127 X 190MM | 224PP | 1 DECEMEBER 2016 THE LIMERICKIAD: VOLUME IV Martin Rowson Despite being unceremoniously sacked by The Independent on Sunday in 2013, the award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson has continued to churn out the ridiculous series of limericks they once paid him to write for them. It’s almost as though he enjoys making a fool of himself by reducing the work of some of the world’s best-loved writers to a series of puerile and filthy limericks.

Following the embarrassing success of the first three volumes (from Gilgamesh to Baudelaire) The Limerickiad Volume IV lowers the tone further by abusing all the early Modernists from Eliot to Eliot. Rowson joshes with Joyce and James, has a hoot reading Hardy, insists on trying to be funny in the company of some gloomy Russians and Scandinavians, and pisses himself with Prufrock. Unbelievable.

POETRY

SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £9.99 | 9780993454776 PB | 197 X 127MM | 124PP | 1 DECEMBER 2016

THE RED ONE? Duncan Mackay This is a book about the landscapes and townscapes of the place called Reading. Reading’s name is derived from ‘the place of the people of the red one’, an Anglo-Saxon settlement for which no physical trace remains. The ‘Red One’ was a leader called Reada although absolutely nothing else is known about him or his people apart from the fact that they migrated here probably from the region of what is now north west Germany or south west Denmark, possibly around 1400 years ago.

Starting 65 million years ago the prehistory of Reading’s natural landscape provides the context for its future development and this story is told in terms of the town’s location (at the junction of the Thames and Kennet), its geology and the living requirements of its Stone Age inhabitants, medieval communities and industrial forebears. Reading is also a place where multiple migrations, invasions, battles, plagues, wars, tragedies, songs, literature, arts, religious dogmas, technologies and ideas have shaped both its people and the fabric of the town. Be a part of writing its next chapter by understanding its past.

NONFICTION

70

TWO RIVERS PRESS | £8.99 | 9781909747234 PB | 125 X 170MM | 84PP | 5 DECEMEBER 2016

Winner of the 2015/16 Book and Pamphlet Competition John Foggin has been a teacher, lecturer and LEA English/Drama Adviser. He lives in West Yorkshire where he jointly organises Puzzle Poets Live in Calderdale, and writes a weekly poetry blog, the great fogginzo’s cobweb. His work has appeared in The North, The New Writer, Prole, and The interpreters house, among others.

His poems have won first prizes in competitions including The Plough (2013,2014), and The Mclellan (2015). He has authored four pamphlets and his latest is Outlaws and fallen Angels (Calder valley Poetry 2016).

POETRY

SMITH|DOORSTOP | £9.98 | 9781910367636 PB | 5 DECEMBER 2016

LANDLOCKED John Eppel Winner of the 2015/16 Book and Pamphlet Competition Born in South Africa in 1947, John Eppel was raised in Zimbabwe, where he still lives, teaching English at Christian Brothers College in Bulawayo. His first novel, D G G Berry’s The Great North Road, won the M-Net prize and was listed in the Weekly Mail & Guardian as one of the best 20 South African books in English published between 1948 and 1994.

John’s poetry collections include Spoils of War, which won the Ingrid Jonker prize, Sonata for Matabeleland, Selected Poems: 1965 – 1995, and Songs My Country Taught Me.

POETRY

SMITH|DOORSTOP | £9.95 | 9781910367650 PB | 5 DECEMBER 2016

SPIRAL STAIRCASE: COLLECTED WRITINGS Hirato Renkichi Once called “the Marinetti of Japan” by David Burliuk, Hirato Renkichi produced a unique brand of Futurism from the late 1910s and early 1920s through poetry, criticism, and guerrilla performance.

Contributing to the earliest productions of Japanese avant-garde poetry, his aggressive experimentation with speed, spatialization, and performability would later influence what became a lively community of DADA and Surrealist literature in pre-war Japan.

POETRY

UGLY DUCKLING PRESS | £12.00 | 9781937027667 PB | 135 X 203MM | 224PP | 5 DECEMBER 2016

71

DECEMBER

MUCH POSSESSED John Foggin

AQUANAUTS Jon Stone & Kirsten Irving (ed.)

An epic collective ode to the underwater realm, from the rich broth of the garden pond to the immutable dark of the deep sea, plunging between lionfish, lanternfish, sharks and skates, monsters and manta rays, plankton and plesiosaurs.

Aquanauts is a sumptuous, multi-tentacled, technicolour haul of visual poetry, a collaborative coral forest of lyrical dive-versity that takes the poetry anthology to new depths.

A special section of the book focussing on deep sea monsters will use white and coloured text on black paper and the whole collection places an emphasis on virtuoso, visually striking poems and word art that make full use of colour, shape and space.

POETRY

SIDEKICK BOOKS | £10.00 | 9781937027667 PB | 130 X 184MM | 96PP | 8 DECEMBER 2016

POETRY IRELAND ISSUE 120 Vona Groarke (ed.)

Poetry Ireland Review’s editorship rotates every six issues, and Issue 120 will be the last issue from Vona Groarke. Vona’s remarkable contribution to Poetry Ireland Review has included the best-selling Seamus Heaney Special Issue, the insightful and diverse WB Yeats Special Issue, and The Rising Generation issue. As an accomplished poet, Vona has published six poetry collections with Gallery Press.

The latest, X (2014), was shortlisted for The Irish Times Poetry Now Award, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her poems have recently appeared in Yale Review, The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Guardian, The Times and Poetry Review. She is a Senior Lecturer teaching poetry in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

POETRY

POETRY IRELAND REVIEW | £10.00 | 9781902121635 PB | 234 X 156MM | 19 DECEMBER 2016

SHORTEST DAY LONGEST NIGHT Cherry Potts (ed.)

The Solstice Shorts festival celebrates the shortest day of the year, which is also short story day, with stories poems and songs to an appropriate theme. In 2015 that theme was Longest Night, in 2016 it will be Shortest Day, and will be celebrated (appropriately) with flash fiction. This anthology presents the combined stories and poems for both events.

Featuring work from Abby Beckel, Bob Beagrie, Cherry Potts, David Mathews, David McVey, Frances Gapper, Neil Brosnan, Pauline Walker, Sarah Evans, Sarah James and Wendy Gill with themes as various as friendships betrayed, birth, atheism, searching space, strangers in the night... and genres from fantasy and science fiction to poetry and realism.

FICTION

72

ARACHNE PRESS | £9.99 | 97819109208285 PB | 198 X 129MM | 160PP | 21 DECEMBER 2016

MAGAZINES

MAGAZINES

ACUMEN January, May & September

AGENDA April & September

BANIPAL March, June & November

BRITTLE STAR Two issues per year

ENVOI February, June & October

MPT Three issues per year

SONOFABOOK Two issues per year

THE LONDON MAGAZINE Six issues per year

UNDER THE RADAR March, August & December

73

CALISI PRESS Calisi Press is my dream come true. A lifelong love affair with words, with books and the stories they tell, made me wish that one day I might be able to work on the sort of books that opened my eyes and showed me glimpses of yet unknown worlds when I was young, and that intrigue, challenge and comfort me now that I am not so young. Life got in the way, as it does, but I never stopped hoping that “one of these days” I would. Then a family loss made me face up to the fact that I had fewer days ahead than I had behind and that the time for dreaming was gone – it was time to take action, or put my dream to rest.

The business of making dreams come true, I have found, is a surprising process, and so it has been for me, because along the way I have also found a way back to my roots, I have remembered how truly amazing and fascinating Italian women can be, and I have discovered a wonderfully rich seam of beautifully crafted stories. This is where Calisi Press, and my wish to concentrate on the publication of creative works

by Italian women writers, comes from. My Mother is a River,

by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, was Calisi’s first title, published in November 2015. A powerful, touching story without sentimentality, a story that moved and comforted me, beautifully told. There will be others, and I will love each and every one of them with a passion. I hope you will too.

Franca Simpson, Publisher

MY MOTHER IS A RIVER Donatella Di Pietrantonio The sensitive and powerful story of the love between a mother and her daughter, a love “gone wrong from the start”. When Esperia exhibits the symptoms of a disease that robs her of her memory and the very sense of her existence, it is time for the daughter to take care of her and help her to rebuild her disintegrating identity. So the daily recounting of the past begins. Day after day we learn about the characters of the extended family, the inhabitants of the small village still without running water or electricity, in a “bright and harsh” Abruzzo, which emerges from the pages like a mythological distant land. They are bittersweet memories, full of life and truth, that rebuild the story of a relationship and of an Italy that appears so very distant and yet it is still present in our characters’ history.

And, in the telling, the mother and daughter relationship slowly changes, fluctuating between love and hate, nostalgia and denial.

A surprising new novel, revealing a strong voice weaving a compelling magic spell.

FICTION

74

CALISI PRESS | £10.00 | 9780993238000 PB | 216 X 138MM | 176PP | 4 NOVEMBER 2015

“In today’s publishing market we want to focus on tactility: producing hardback, tactile editions with an emphasis on permanence.”

Little Island Press is a literary publisher that concentrates its current efforts on three collectable series – Budding New Poets, Memento and Transits – creating aesthetically pleasing hardback books that aptly mirror the quality of the writing within them: “The more our world becomes digital, the more people are starting to realise that reading is a threedimensional experience. As a reader, there’s a lot you miss out on when you’re in the voyeuristic zone of looking at a screen ... That’s why we are committed to the printed book, and especially to bringing poetry into print.”

Both the Budding series and the Memento series deal exclusively with poetry. Whilst the latter focuses on the work of established poets who have posthumously fallen out of public consciousness, the former works as a foot ladder for new poets intent on making a name for themselves. Andrew’s passion for poetry is evident in the compilation of these two series: “I often choose the Memento poets based on a quality that I feel is lacking in contemporary poetry, so it’s like reinvigorating the soil of the work produced at present.”

Under the Transits banner, Little Island Press will publish literature in translation – a skill that, whilst intrinsically creative, is often under-appreciated and one that Little Island Press is keen to promote.

It is this slow yet considered approach to publishing that epitomises Little Island Press and will give readers the confidence in the titles they intend to publish.

Interview with managing editor Andrew Latimer by Leah Grant

SEE PG. 54

SEE PG. 14

SEE PG. 35

75

NEW PUBLISHERS

LITTLE ISLAND PRESS

MAYFLY PRESS Mayfly Press are a brand new collaboration between My World and New Writing North, who also worked together to create Moth Publishing in support of new Northern crime fiction. Mayfly Press was initially created to launch a commemorative edition of Crocodile Soup by award-winning author Julia Darling. Moth Publishing are now in imprint of Mayfly Press.

CROCODILE SOUP Julia Darling Gert Hardcastle leads a life of isolation cataloguing the Egyptian artefacts at a northern museum – until the First Letter drops onto her desk. That’s the day she meets ballroom-dancing, iris-eyed Eva, and her careful, stilted existence begins to unravel.

As Gert begins her strange courtship of Eva, she looks back on her eccentric, surreal upbringing – the rambling house with its resident Victorian ghost, her peculiar, telepathic twin, her father George with his family crocodile farm, and her beautiful, neglectful mother Jean, whose letters continue to disturb her peace.

Award-winning author Julia Darling’s classic tale of the search for love, identity and acceptance is funny, poignant and bizarre by turns, as Gert gradually learns that her journey to the future must go via the past.

This commemorative edition of the Orange Prize long-listed (1998) Crocodile Soup is a celebration of the work and life of the extraordinary woman that was Julia Darling.

FICTION

MAYFLY PRESS | £7.99 | 9781909486157 PB | 130 X 198MM | 336PP | 28 MAY 2015

STOLEN Rebecca Muddiman When Abby Henshaw’s car is run off the road and she is brutally attacked by two strangers, her first thought is for the safety of her baby daughter, Beth, who is on the backseat. But what follows is a mother’s worst nightmare: Beth is gone.

As DI Michael Gardner begins to investigate Abby and her family, he discovers that their relationships are built on secrets and betrayals. Under pressure to find the missing child, he finds himself struggling to stay emotionally removed from the case and from Abby herself. Beth is not found and the case turns cold.

Years later another child goes missing and Gardner is drawn back into contact with Abby who is convinced that her daughter is still alive. Together they set in motion a series of events that culminate in a brutal confrontation with the truth.

FICTION

MOTH PUBLISHING | £6.99 | 9781901888867 PB | 129 X 198MM | 368PP | 17 APRIL 2013

RANT Alfie Crow “Whilst the following story is completely true, I have slightly changed my own identity in order to avoid prosecution and/or violent death – or, at the very least, a good kicking. Not that any of the events contained herein were my fault – or at least none of the important ones. Or only some of them.

Unless you include obtaining money under false pretences. Or the borrowing of various motor vehicles without permission. Or perverting the course of justice. Or the thing about interfering with the dead guy. But I was desperate at the time.

That came out all wrong. No, wait, if you’d just let me explain…”

FICTION

76

MOTH PUBLISHING | £6.99 | 9781901888881 PB | 129 X 198MM | 256PP | 30 MAY 2013

Myrmidon books are written to an exceptionally high standard: crisp and engaging prose; captivating and imaginative story-telling. They value their authors highly and treat them fairly. They use only the best printers, binders and materials for their books to make them pleasurable to handle and easy to read. Their goal is to become the UK’s most influential independent publisher of commercial and literary adult fiction outside the capital.

THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS Tan Twan Eng Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambrige and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh, herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the Emperor of Japan.

Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in Kuala Lumpur, in memory of her sister who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses, but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice ‘until the monsoon comes’. Then she can design a garden for herself. As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to her sensei and his art while, outside the garden, the threat of murder and kidnapping from the guerrillas of the jungle hinterland increases with each passing day.

FICTION

MYRMIDON | £18.99 | 9781905802494 HB | 236 X 160MM | 448PP | 12 FEBRUARY 2012

THE ANATOMIST’S DREAM Clio Gray In a small salt-mining town, Philbert is born with a ‘taupe’, a disfiguring inflammation of the skull. Abandoned by both parents and with only a pet pig for company, he eventually finds refuge and companionship in a travelling carnival, Maulwerf’s Fair of Wonders, as it makes its annual migration across Germany bringing entertainment to a people beset by famine, repression and revolutionary ferment.

Philbert soon finds a caring family in Hermann the Fish Man, Lita, the Dancing Dwarf, Frau Fettleheim, the Fattest Woman in the World and an assortment of ‘freak show’ artists, magicians and entertainers.

But then Philbert meets Kwert, ‘Tospirologist and Teller of Signs’, and when he persuades the boy to undergo examination by the renowned physician and craniometrist, Dr Ullendorf, both Kwert and Philbert embark on an altogether darker and more perilous journey that will have far-reaching consequences for a whole nation.

FICTION

MYRMIDON | £8.99 | 9781910183236 PB | 127 X 193MM | 480PP | 7 APRIL 2016

SPACE CAPTAIN SMITH Toby Frost It’s the 25th Century and the British Space Empire faces the gathering menace of the evil ant-soldiers of the Ghast hive, hell bent on galactic domination and the extermination of all humanoid life forms.

Captain Isambard Smith is the square-jawed, courageous and somewhat asinine new commander of the clapped out freighter John Pym, destined to take on the alien threat because nobody else is available.

Together with his bold crew- a skull-collecting alien lunatic, an android pilot who is actually a fugitive sex toy and a hamster called Gerald- he must collect new-age herbalist Rhianna Mitchell from the New Francisco orbiter and bring her back to the Empire in safety. Straightforward enough – except the Ghasts want her too and, in addition to a whole fleet of Ghast warships, Smith has to confront void sharks, a universe-weary android assassin and John Gilead, psychopathic naval officer from the fanatically religious Republic of Eden before facing his greatest enemy: a ruthless alien warlord with a very large behind…

FICTION

MYRMIDON | £7.99 | 9781905802135 PB | 127 X 193MM | 320PP | 6 MAY 2008

77

NEW PUBLISHERS

MYRMIDON

OUT-SPOKEN PRESS Out-Spoken Press is an independent publisher of poetry and critical writing. It aims to give a literary platform to poets and writers whose work is innovative, sensual and plural.

OUT-SPOKEN 2015: AN ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY Various Authors The first Out-Spoken anthology features poetry written from some of the UK’s most revered poets.

All the writers featured in the book have performed at Out-Spoken, a monthly night of poetry and live music which takes place at The Forge, Camden.

Poets in this edition include Anthony Anaxagorou, Raymond Antrobus, Malika Booker, Tshaka Campbell, Dan Cockrill, Inua Ellams, Charlotte Higgins, Sabrina Mahfouz, Hollie McNish, Simon Mole, Ollie O’Neill, Niall O’Sullivan, Bohdan Piasecki, The Ruby Kid, Joelle Taylor, Yrsa Daley-Ward and Zena Edwards.

POETRY

OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £15.00 | 9780993103810 PB | 215 X 140MM | 142PP | 9 MARCH 2015

TITANIC Bridget Minamore In this debut pamphlet, acclaimed poet Bridget Minamore explores the sensibilities surrounding love, loss, and the subsequent struggles we all face at some point in our relationships.

Themed around a series of popular songs and a certain sinking ship, Minamore riffs from poem to poem with a choice selection of humorous and somber verse.

POETRY

OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £5.00 | 9780993103858 PB | 210 X 145MM | 23 MAY 2016

A SILENCE YOU CAN CARRY Hibaq Osman A Silence You Can Carry stands as a searing debut collection from a startlingly brave new talent. The delicate and almost effortless poetry of Hibaq Osman blends everyday objects and movements into monumental invocations. The collection is filled with beautifully woven observations that are centered on love and loss, family relationships, identity and womanhood.

“Hibaq Osman holds our eyes on the page as tightly as the ears she has captivated on stage. A beautiful, heart-rending debut full of love, despair and courage.” Sabrina Mahfouz

POETRY

78

OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £5.00 | 9780993103827 PB | 210 X 145MM | 36PP | 18 SEPTEMBER 2015

From the hugely acclaimed city-pick series featuring some of the best writing about favourite world cities to books about the joys of reading, plus brand new fiction and humour lists - the little publisher that takes you on big journeys.

All the sights, sounds and flavours of city-life, ideal for city-break travellers, city lovers and lovers of entertaining and compelling writing. A unique and highly acclaimed travel guide series, featuring some of the best writing on favourite World cities and popular holiday destinations.

BERLIN Introduced by Rory Maclean £9.99 | 9780955970047 | 200PP

VENICE Introduced by Jeff Cotton £9.99 | 9780955970085 | 256PP

LONDON Introduced by Peter Watts £9.99 | 9780955970054 | 250PP

ISTANBUL Introduced by Barbara Nadel £9.99 | 9780955970092 | 271PP

ST PETERSBURG Heather Reyes & James Rann (ed.) £9.99 | 9780956787620 | 272PP

PARIS Introduced by Stephen Clarke “Superb, it’s like having your Kindle loaded with different tomes, except with the best passages, bite-sized chunks, just perfect to dip into.” The Times £9.99 | 9780955970009 | 218PP

AMSTERDAM Introduction by Sam Garrett £8.99 | 9780955970023 | 200PP

DUBLIN Introduction by Orna Ross £8.99 | 9780955970016 | 200PP

MIRANDA ROAD Heather Reyes

AN EVERYTHING Heather Reyes

Born in England to an American soldier, Georgina Hardiman can’t wait to escape her step-family.

She has big plans for her life ... but she never does make it to Katmandu.

The much-praised guide to the joys and consolations that reading offers us in both the difficult and day-to-day aspects of our lives.

Miranda Road is a bitter-sweet and wonderfully witty meditation on the various kinds of love and the difficulty of freeing ourselves from the past.

£8.99 | 9780992636418 | 250PP

“A brilliant guide to the city of books: the city we hold within us, and the one we share with all its other citizens...” Helen Dunmore

£8.99 | 9780992636401 | 150PP

79

NEW PUBLISHERS

OXYGEN BOOKS

POETRY IRELAND Poetry Ireland connects people and poetry. They are committed to achieving excellence in the reading, writing and performance of poetry throughout the island of Ireland.

Their commitment to creating performance and publication opportunities for poets at all stages of their careers helps ensure that the best work is made available to the widest possible audience, securing a future for Irish poetry that is as celebrated as its past.

Through their journal Poetry Ireland Review and their literary pamphlet Trumpet, along with special one-off publications, Poetry Ireland showcases the best of all aspects of contemporary poetry, and promotes and protects the island’s outstanding poetic heritage.

EVERYTHING TO PLAY FOR: 99 POEMS ABOUT SPORT John McAuliffe (ed.)

Everything to Play For: 99 Poems about Sport is an anthology that celebrates all aspects of the sporting world. Poems like WB Yeats’s ‘At Galway Races’ and Louis MacNeice’s ‘Rugby Football Excursion’ capture the intoxicating sense of shared existence at sporting events; the electric atmosphere of a sportsground on a Sunday afternoon.

Other poems hail the achievements of great sporting heroes, like Billy Ramsell’s lament for the hurler Christy Ring, Theo Dorgan’s tribute to Sonia O’Sullivan, or the “huge muscled fighters” of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘A Knight at the Tournament’.

Also included are more inward-looking poems, such as Elaine Feeney’s memories of a teenaged infatuation in ‘Ryan Giggs is a Ride’, or Paul Durcan’s description of the companionship of an impromptu table tennis game with his friend Seamus Heaney.

“...a teriffic book...the best writing, full stop. A gold medal here for Poetry Ireland and a good day’s work.” Irish Examiner “A brilliant idea, brilliantly accomplished... A very handsome little volume.” Books Ireland “Forget anything Jay-Z ever said: Everything to Play For has 99 poems but a dud ain’t one... your [Christmas] stocking will overflow with richness thanks to two of our greatest national pastimes poetry and playing games.” The Irish Times Magazine

POETRY IRELAND | £12.00 | 9781902121574 HB | 216 X 138MM | 222PP | 1 DECEMBER 2015

80

Bubbling forth from the infernal book lab of mad alchemist Dr Fulminare, Sidekick Books is a London-based publisher of collaborations, anthologies and lavish treasuries – volatile fusions that blend poetry with visual art and critical writing, taking in pop culture, esoterica and formal experimentation. Sidekick titles have been praised by comics legend Alan Moore and found favour with the video gaming press, as well as winning awards and coverage in traditional poetry journals. Launch events have been held in cinemas, observatories, vintage clothing shops, video game arcades and more. Sidekick was founded in 2009 and is run by poets Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone.

POETRY

POETRY

POETRY

HELL CREEK ANTHOLOGY Poems by J.T. Welsch Images by Dom & Ink

LIVES BEYOND US Kirsten Irving & Sebastian Manley (ed.)

OVER THE LINE Chrissy Williams & Tom Humberstone (ed.)

Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, published in 1915, comprised epitaphs for the community of a fictional small American town. In this supersaurine collaboration, J.T. Welsch and Dom & Ink provide the same service for some of the real life prehistoric residents of Hell Creek, Montana – including Tyrannosaurus rex, his attorney Judge Anklyosaurus, the radical Stygimoloch spinifer, and convicted cop killer Dromaeosaurus albertensis.

The canine stars of Hollywood confess all, two owls provide commentary on Night of the Hunter and Jonesy the space cat finally speaks.

Over 70 pages of brand new poetry comics, with a showcase of work by other artists in the field and a detailed introduction to this exciting hybrid medium.

Spiky, razor-toothed, densely plated poems spill a bleak saga, fringed with savagely assured inks and thunderous colour, as the predators and lovers of Hell Creek come up against their individual and collective doom.

SIDEKICK BOOKS | £6.00 | 48PP 9781909560048 | 7 OCTOBER 2015

Critical and lyrical responses commingle throughout this expansive volume.

Ranging and deep, serious and playful, they address the varied roles animals have played throughout the history of film.

From the first chronophotographic experiments in capturing animal movement to the CGI facsimiles of the modern era, from Hitchcock to Lynch, cartoons to military metaphors, sharks to protozoa, Lives Beyond Us considers an array of cinematic fauna, along with their relationship to humans – as our companions, our subjects, our alter-egos and our guides.

SIDEKICK BOOKS | £12.00 | 300PP 9781909560048 | 1 JUNE 2015

“This is that spine-tingling moment when two attractive and sophisticated forms, both admired for their rhythm and sense of timing, eye each other across the cultural dance floor. In Over The Line, at once an insightful introduction and a comprehensive showcase for the emerging phenomenon of Poetry Comics, Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone provide the best possible venue for what looks like being a breathtaking tango. I really can’t recommend this venture highly enough, and I’d advise you mark your card immediately.” Alan Moore

SIDEKICK BOOKS | £15.00 | 112PP 9781909560024 | 4 SEPTEMBER 2015

81

NEW PUBLISHERS

SIDEKICK BOOKS

SNOW BOOKS Snowbooks started in a spare room in Hackney in April 2003 and soon moved to a couple of rented desks in a business incubator on Old Street -- before it was cool. They hired staff, signed up authors and their first books hit the shelves in 2004.

TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS Eddie Robson The city of Loreto, hanging in the atmosphere of Jupiter, has seen better days as a trading port. By the late 22nd century, it’s become a hive of borderline illegal activity, but also a magnet for bohemian types from across the Jupiter colonies.

Ashton Lang, a psychically gifted scholarship student from Europa, is looking forward to spending her summer working in the city - until her only friend there, struggling artist Winter DeMattis, receives a grant and disappears off to Io, leaving Ashton to fend for herself. Winter is on Io to research a dull public commission, but the trip will change her life irrevocably.

Meanwhile Magic Alex – a minister in a church which worships The Beatles – is trying to find who has framed him for the murder of his blackmailer, a quest which brings him into contact with artificial savant Tomas Darrell. Tomas is new in town after losing his job on Callisto, but in Loreto he finds a new purpose: proving his suspicion that the entire city is doomed.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £7.99 | 9781909679443 PB | 129 X 198MM | 416PP | 1 JULY 2015

HELL’S DITCH Simon Bestwick In dreams and nightmares, Helen walks the Black Road. It leads her back from the grave, back from madness, back towards the man who caused the deaths of her family: Tereus Winterborn, Regional Commander for the Reapers, who rule the ruins of a devastated Britain. On her journey, she gathers her allies: her old mentor Darrow, the cocky young fighter Danny, emotionally-scarred intelligence officer Alannah and Gevaudan Shoal, last of the genetically-engineered Grendelwolves. Winterborn will stop at nothing to become the Reapers’ Supreme Commander; more than anything he seeks the advantage that will help him achieve that goal. And in the experiments of the obsessed scientist Dr Mordake, he thinks he has found it.

To Winterborn, Project Tindalos is a means to ultimate power; to Mordake, it’s a means to roll back the devastation of the War and restore his beloved wife to the living. But neither Winterborn nor Mordake understand the true nature of the forces they are about to unleash. Forces that threaten to destroy everything that survived the War, unless Helen and her allies can find and stop Project Tindalos in time.

FICTION

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781909679696 PB | 129 X 198MM | 416PP | 1 MARCH 2016

WHEN WE ARE VANISHED Nimue Brown Horrified by computers powering war, finance and government, the techies hid their tracks — then turned off the world. Silicon-based computers stopped working overnight, their silence transforming everything. Then came cellulose tech — unpredictable, with something akin to a mind of its own. Epona, Lin, Col and Loz, researchers in the new technology, stumble upon some alarming results. Does this explain why people have been vanishing?

How badly broken is this reality?

When We Are Vanished is a speculative, eerie, funny, counter-culture novel about time travel, paradoxes, and the nature of consciousness.

FICTION

82

SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781909679627 PB | 129 X 198MM | 320PP | 1 MAY 2016

Stonewood Press is an independent publisher dedicated to promoting new writing with an emphasis on contemporary short stories, fiction and poetry. Founded in 2011, Stonewood cares about its authors and its books, nurturing talent from around the world with an aim to develop a list that inspires and delights.

They want to publish challenging and high quality writing in English without the pressures associated with mainstream publishing.

POETRY

POETRY

POETRY

DAD’S SLIDESHOW Di Slaney

HOAD AND OTHER STORIES Sarah Passingham

EARTHWORKS Jacqueline Gabbitas

Dad’s Slideshow is a sequence charting a family’s ancestry over a lifetime and includes a range of different voices – vividly captured in carefully constructed forms. Di Slaney’s deft and evocative poems are a living testimony of what survives long after the events recorded in a family album.

A beautiful young woman walks into Hoad’s gallery to admire a jade vase, and his life changes forever; Ray watches an insurmountable horror take place and wreaks simple and profound revenge; after her paraplegic father dies, a middle-aged woman finds herself in a solicitor’s office, cataloguing her memories…

Earthworks is a collection of celebration, of the lives that are lived above ground, and those that exist deep beneath it.

She writes movingly about relationships, tracing links to the past which informs our understanding of the present.

In the pages of Hoad and other stories, quiet and complex yearnings for change and transformation are revealed in sometimes mysterious, sometimes fantastical, but always surprising ways.

Sarah Passingham’s debut collection is beautifully written, and she makes even the everyday actions of three people’s lives seem elegant.

"The writing is always precise and lyrical, and its formal qualities remarkable.” Hannah Lowe

STONEWOOD PRESS | £4.99 | 40PP 9781910413050 | 1 APRIL 2015

STONEWOOD PRESS | £4.99 | 56PP 9781910413029 | 8 AUGUST 2014

“This wonderful sequence of poems cuts into the earth beneath the thin layer of soil to articulate a voice that knots life to death. Gabbitas’s language is vital, visceral, having its effect directly in our body. The poetics of direct speech and the richness of vocabulary brings the reader in contact with the raw reality of life. This is profoundly moving poetry that repays re-reading and bearing close to the heart.”

Sharon Morris “Her poems have the bedside manner of someone who understands the gravity of death, big sadness, a bit of geology even, but is also used to breaking bad news.

These are skillful and easy poems that underplay their music and profundity.”

Jack Underwood

STONEWOOD PRESS | £4.99 | 32PP 9780956912237 | 24 SEPTEMBER 2014

83

NEW PUBLISHERS

STONEWOOD PRESS

TILTED AXIS PRESS Founded in 2015 and based in south London, Tilted Axis is a not-for-profit press on a mission to shake up contemporary international literature. Tilted Axis publishes the books that might not otherwise make it into English, for the very reasons that make them exciting to us – artistic originality, radical vision, the sense that here is something new.

Tilting the axis of world literature from the centre to the margins allows us to challenge that very division.

These margins are spaces of compelling innovation, where multiple traditions spark new forms and translation plays a crucial role.

As part of carving out a new direction in the publishing industry, Tilted Axis is also dedicated to improving access.

PANTY Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay A woman arrives alone in Kolkata, taking refuge in a deserted apartment while she waits to undergo an unspecified surgery. In this disorienting city, everything seems new and strange: the pavement-dwellers outside her block, the collective displays of religiosity, the power cuts and alarming acts of arson. Her sense of identity already shaken, when she finds a stained pair of leopard print panties in the otherwise-empty wardrobe she begins to fantasise about their former owner, whose imagined life comes to blur with and overlap her own.

Pairing manic energy with dark eroticism, Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s writing has a surreal, feverish quality, slipping between fluid subjects with great stylistic daring. Credited with being ‘the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality into Bengali literature’, Bandyopadhyay is neither superficial nor sensationalistic, equally concerned with debates on religion and nationhood as with gender and sexuality.

“An unnerving, ominous and beautiful meditation on the loneliness of modern life.” The Guardian “Panty is dreamlike yet visceral, surreal but intimate. In these fragments of life, loneliness, curiosity, defiance and sexuality blend to create an uneasy picture of contemporary India. Divided from themselves, Bandyopadhyay’s beguiling creations are as fractured and incomplete as contemporary life itself.” Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman “Vivid, beguiling, passionate, and never less than urgent, with Panty, India has found its Ferrante. You must read this book.” Niven Govinden, author of All the Days and Nights “Delightfully subversive.” Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo

TILTED AXIS PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911284000 PB | 198 X 127MM | 128PP | 6 JUNE 2016

84

Inpress are delighted to announce that as of June 2016 we have taken over the management and running of the membership activities of The Poetry Book Society, continuing to provide members with their quarterly Bulletin and Selectors’ Choice of poetry. Ian Grant, our Inpress chairperson said of the aquisition, "We are pleased and honoured to have been entrusted with maintaining and developing the service to members of the PBS, POETRY BOOK SOCIETY whose loyalty and support of poets and readers has been a significant and positive feature of the poetry world for more than 60 years.”

Sophie O’Neill, Inpress MD said "We are really excited about this acquisition, the Poetry Book Society is a key part of the poetry eco-system and we are really looking forward to developing the book club and making it a more vibrant, diverse and far-reaching organisation.”

As part of our vision for a new revitalised and engaged company we are keen to work more closely with booksellers, making the knowledge of our selectors and members available to help you curate your poetry section and stay up to date with the latest trends. If you would like access to the online edition of the quarterly bulletin free of charge please do not hesitate to contact us on our dedicated phone number 0191 230 8100 or by email pbs@inpressbooks.co.uk.

85

INPRESS ANNOUNCEMENT

THE POETRY BOOK SOCIETY

HAIKU BACKLIST Since 1992 and the original publication of the small collection The Haiku Hundred (now in in a brand new form after six print runs), IRON Press has published a regular list of new haiku books, making it among the UK’s leading promoters of the small verse form.

Where much modern poetry is seen by the general public as obscure, difficult, or even incomprehensible, haiku in the main is lucid and accessible. The best haiku is refreshingly different, often seeing the world around it with an alternative eye. Haiku is best read en bloc, maybe a dozen or twenty haiku at a time to allow the reader to become familiar with its response.

Traditional subject matters – the seasons, the moon, the frog pond etc – still matter but as the form has expanded into different cultures so it has adapted. Modern haiku is as likely to deal with choking exhaust fumes as it is to describe a leaf falling from a tree.

IRON Press books include single collections from many of the country’s finest exponents of the form, plus national anthologies such as The IRON Book of British Haiku, or international collections, Euro Haiku and Global Haiku.

The anthology Film Haiku covers an unlikely subject matter and The Humours of Haiku looks at haiku which cover that once out-of-bounds subject matter for the form – human emotions.

Many of these books also contain forewords discussing just what does or doesn’t constitute a haiku in modern western society as again in medieval Japan - and the jury is still out on this one!

THE HAIKU 100 Peter Mortimer, James Kirkup & David Cobb (ed.)

This historic little book was published initially in 1992 and ran to six prints. it sold more than 10,000 copies making it the biggest selling book of English language haiku in the UK. it has been out of print for many years but is now published in a new format with every one of the 100 haiku intact. The Haiku 100 proved a watershed for IRON press, for the (then) recently formed British Haiku Society and for the haiku form itself in these islands.

This historic little book was published initially in 1992 and ran to six prints. it sold more than 10,000 copies making it the biggest selling book of English language haiku in the UK. it has been out of print for many years but is now published in a new format with every one of the 100 haiku intact. The Haiku 100 proved a watershed for IRON press, for the (then) recently formed British Haiku Society and for the haiku form itself in these islands.

IRON PRESS | £5.00 | 9780993124501

THE IRON BOOK OF BRITISH HAIKU David Cobb & Martin Lucas (ed.)

This anthology offers the very best in haiku to come from these islands in recent years, and is the first major British haiku collection of its type.

More than seventy writers are included, from the famous to the little known, and the editors write a definitive introduction about the remarkable (but often unappreciated) recent rise of haiku popularity in Britain.

IRON PRESS | £6.50 | 9780906228678

86

The gamut of human emotions in a life cycle of haiku.

David Cobb helped to set up the British Haiku society (1990), gained first prize in the Cardiff International Competition (1991), and co-edited IRON Press’s The Haiku Hundred (1992). He has had haiku published in 12 countries, in 8 languages.

IRON PRESS | £4.99 | 9780906228562

THE HUMOURS OF HAIKU David Cobb (ed.)

This anthology showcases 240 haiku by over 100 poets, exploring the full gamut of emotions possible in just a handful of lines. The book includes more than 50 haiku poets, including Ken Jones, Hamish Ironside, Doreen King, David Cobb, Bill Wyatt and Jackie Hardy. The book itself comes in pocket-size A6 format, printed on textured cream paper, cementing Iron Press’ reputation for producing beautiful gift editions of haiku poetry.

IRON PRESS | £7.00 | 9780956572547

ONE HUNDRED FILM HAIKU Mick Haining One Hundred Film Haiku: The Reel Thing features a hundred well-known films from the last 50 years, distilling each one into pocket-sized three-line haiku. The title of each film is printed upside down in small type at the bottom of the page for the ultimate movie trivia challenge. The book is the latest in the Iron Press haiku series – presented in the gift-sized A6 format and printed on high quality textured paper.

IRON PRESS | £5.00 | 9780957503205

OUR SWEET LITTLE TIME Hamish Ironside This distinctive book takes us through a full year of the author’s life in haiku - a main point of which is the birth of his daughter.

Features beautiful illustrations by Barnaby Richards.

IRON PRESS | £6.00 | 9780955245077

INSIDE HIS TIME MACHINE John McManus Themes of loss, fear, violence, isolation and family are repeatedly explored within the narrative of John McManus’ work, but along with these often deeply personal explorations, his poems also explore social issues, such as religion, war, poverty and disability.

The language displayed throughout the collection is clean and precise, but it also shows off John’s gift for linguistic musicality.

IRON PRESS | £6.00 | 9780993124556

EURO HAIKU David Cobb (ed.)

A collection of the very best contemporary examples of the form from throughout Europe.

From Wales to Romania, Herzegovina to Hungary, Russia to Spain, this new anthology offers 80 haiku from 26 countries, each published both in its native language and in English. There’s even one haiku in Latin!

IRON PRESS | £6.00 | 9780955245022

GLOBAL HAIKU George Swede & Randy Brooks (ed.)

Assembled in this definitive collection are twenty-five of the world’s best exponents of this small Japanese verse form.The two editors worked for three years collecting the verse, and they include a thought-provoking introduction to, and history of Western haiku, giving it a specific literary and social context.

IRON PRESS | £7.99 | 9780906228753

87

HAIKU BACKLIST

JUMPING FROM KYOMIZU David Cobb

A

Ades, Timothy . . . . . . . . . . 24 Aguilo, Josep Lluis . . . . . . . . . . 17 Allen, Austin . . . . . . . . . . 56 Amin, Rowyda . . . . . . . . . . 35 Anaxagorou, Anthony . . . . . . . . . . 13 Angharad Pashley, Michelle . . . . . . . . . . 28 Antrobus, Raymond . . . . . . . . . . 65

B

Ballart, Pere . . . . . . . . . . 5 Bandyopadhyay, Sangeeta . . . . . . . . . . 84 Barnie, John . . . . . . . . . . 64 Barokka, Khairani . . . . . . . . . . 60 Barskova, Polina . . . . . . . . . . 62 Bateman, David . . . . . . . . . . 36 Beader, Pete . . . . . . . . . . 49 Bermudez, Isabel . . . . . . . . . . 3, 53 Bestwick, Simon . . . . . . . . . . 57, 82 Bidgood, Ruth . . . . . . . . . . 64 Blake, Paul . . . . . . . . . . 27 Bolger, Laurie . . . . . . . . . . 13 Borges Accardi, Millicen . . . . . . . . . . 8 Bradley, SJ . . . . . . . . . . 9 Brooks, Randy . . . . . . . . . . 87 Brown, Nimue . . . . . . . . . . 82 Brown, Wes . . . . . . . . . . 40 Bunting, James . . . . . . . . . . 54 Burke, Helen . . . . . . . . . . 26

C

Cadden, Marie . . . . . . . . . . 21 Cahill, Michelle . . . . . . . . . . 41 Çapan, Cevat . . . . . . . . . . 41 Cardona, Helene . . . . . . . . . . 9 Carmichael, Glenn . . . . . . . . . . 12 Carragher, Alvy . . . . . . . . . . 20 Carruthers Thomas, Kate . . . . . . . . . . 51 Casey, Paul . . . . . . . . . . 20 Chandan, Amarjit . . . . . . . . . . 44 Chapman, Patrick . . . . . . . . . . 20 Cherriman, Becky . . . . . . . . . . 50 Clarke, Stephen . . . . . . . . . . 79 Clarkson, Geraldine . . . . . . . . . . 46 Cluley, Ray . . . . . . . . . . 28 Cobb, David . . . . . . . . . . 86 Conran, Tony . . . . . . . . . . 9 Cotton, Jeff . . . . . . . . . . 79 Coupland, Krishan . . . . . . . . . . 67 Crow, Alfie . . . . . . . . . . 76 Crowley, Michael . . . . . . . . . . 69 Curtis, Tony . . . . . . . . . . 55

D

Darling, Julia . . . . . . . . . . 76 Davoyan, Razmik . . . . . . . . . . 5 Desnos, Robert . . . . . . . . . . 24 Devi, Amanda . . . . . . . . . . 33 Di Pietrantonio, Donatella . . . . . . . . . 67, 74 Dingley, Tom . . . . . . . . . . 57 Dom & Ink . . . . . . . . . . 81 Douglas, Marcia . . . . . . . . . . 58 Dudman, Clare . . . . . . . . . . 61 Dunn, Anthony . . . . . . . . . . 59 Dyer, Claire . . . . . . . . . . 48

88

E

K

F

L

Ellis, Sean . . . . . . . . . . 69 Eng, Tan Twan . . . . . . . . . . 77 Eppel, John . . . . . . . . . . 71 Evans, Gareth . . . . . . . . . . 44 Evans, Kevin . . . . . . . . . . 12

Field, Nicola . . . . . . . . . . 42 Foggin, John . . . . . . . . . . 71 Fortune, Jan . . . . . . . . . . 45 Foxtrot, Jemima . . . . . . . . . . 42 Freedman, Lewis . . . . . . . . . . 45 Frost, Toby . . . . . . . . . . 77 Fry, Gary . . . . . . . . . . 38

G

Gabbitas, Jacqueline . . . . . . . . . . 83 Gallagher, Katherine . . . . . . . . . . 59 Gardner, Cate . . . . . . . . . . 38 Garrett, Sam . . . . . . . . . . 79 Graves, Robert . . . . . . . . . . 43 Gray, Clio . . . . . . . . . . 77 Green, Alex . . . . . . . . . . 16 Green, Jonathan . . . . . . . . . . 23 Greening, John . . . . . . . . . . 10 Griffiths, Niall . . . . . . . . . . 7 Groarke, Vona . . . . . . . . . . 26, 72 Gulliver, Mavis . . . . . . . . . . 12 Gunaratnam, Yasmin . . . . . . . . . . 44 Gwyn, Richard . . . . . . . . . . 58

H

Haining, Mick . . . . . . . . . . 87 Hanson, Norah . . . . . . . . . . 66 Hardiman, Howard . . . . . . . . . . 68 Harrison, Lee . . . . . . . . . . 6, 24 Hart Davies, Christina . . . . . . . . . . 30 Hartmann, Sadakichi . . . . . . . . . . 36 Hashem Beck, Zeina . . . . . . . . . . 46 Heaney, Marie . . . . . . . . . . 25 Herbert, Bill . . . . . . . . . . 44 Hill, Charlie . . . . . . . . . . 50 Hine, Anne . . . . . . . . . . 51 Hirano, Keiichiro . . . . . . . . . . 31 Hirsch, Sara . . . . . . . . . . 21 Hochel, Igor . . . . . . . . . . 5 Honychurch, Lennox . . . . . . . . . . 61 Hook, Andrew . . . . . . . . . . 39 Hooson, Rhiannon . . . . . . . . . . 55 Hopper, Justin . . . . . . . . . . 69 Hosein, Kevin Jared . . . . . . . . . . 15 Hughes, Aled Rhys . . . . . . . . . . 14 Humberstone, Tom . . . . . . . . . . 81

I

Ikezawa, Natsuki . . . . . . . . . . 31 Ironside, Hamish . . . . . . . . . . 87 Irving, Kirsten . . . . . . . . . . 24, 66, 72

J

Jackson, Andy . . . . . . . . . . 44 Joso, Jane . . . . . . . . . . 34 Jung-Eun, Hwang . . . . . . . . . . 39

Kareva, Doris . . . . . . . . . . 4 Kemp, Will . . . . . . . . . . 47 Kirkup, James . . . . . . . . . . 86 Knaggs, Peter . . . . . . . . . . 7 Kubo, Misumi . . . . . . . . . . 31

Lacey, Eve . . . . . . . . . . 57 Latham, John . . . . . . . . . . 53 Leadbetter, Gregory . . . . . . . . . . 47 Lee-Houghton, Melissa . . . . . . . . . . 28 Lendennie, Jessie . . . . . . . . . . 19 Leon, Raina J . . . . . . . . . . 8 Lim, Ann-Margaret . . . . . . . . . . 15 Litten, Russ . . . . . . . . . . 6 Lock, Fran . . . . . . . . . . 32 Lockley, Steve . . . . . . . . . . 53, 62 Lodge, Patrick . . . . . . . . . . 8 Lomidze, Gaga . . . . . . . . . . 40 Lord, Karen . . . . . . . . . . 16 Lucas, Martin . . . . . . . . . . 86 Lynch, Phil . . . . . . . . . . 27

M

Maclean, Rory . . . . . . . . . . 79 Mackay, Duncan . . . . . . . . . . 70 Mahfouz, Sabrina . . . . . . . . . . 52 Major, Tim . . . . . . . . . . 26 Man, Harry . . . . . . . . . . 11 Manninen, Teemu . . . . . . . . . . 4 Marriot, Ian . . . . . . . . . . 51 Mason, Freddie . . . . . . . . . . 2, 14 Matsuda, Aoko . . . . . . . . . . 31 McAuliffe, John . . . . . . . . . . 80 McCabe, Chris . . . . . . . . . . 66 McClatchy, J.D. . . . . . . . . . . 56 McFarlane, Roy . . . . . . . . . . 34 McGlichey, Alfric . . . . . . . . . . 19 McGonagall, Elvis . . . . . . . . . . 49 McKay, Kathleen . . . . . . . . . . 18 McLaughlin, Jane . . . . . . . . . . 29 McManus, John . . . . . . . . . . 89 Meehan, Paula . . . . . . . . . . 65 Millar Dumars, Susan . . . . . . . . . . 19 Minamore, Bridget . . . . . . . . . . 78 Minott, Monica . . . . . . . . . . 11 Mittelholzer, Edgar . . . . . . . . . . 62 Montale, Eugenio . . . . . . . . . . 40 Moore, Merrill . . . . . . . . . . 35 Morris, Mark . . . . . . . . . . 37 Morrison, Crysse . . . . . . . . . . 49 Mortimer, Peter . . . . . . . . . . 86 Muddiman, Rebecca . . . . . . . . . . 76 Murray, Nicholas . . . . . . . . . . 11 Myers, Benjamin . . . . . . . . . . 23

N

Nadel, Barbara . . . . . . . . . . 79 Naylor, Molly . . . . . . . . . . 32 Nelson, Jennifer . . . . . . . . . . 21 Newman, Charlotte . . . . . . . . . . 3, 47 Noll, Bink . . . . . . . . . . 54

O'Connell, Eugene . . . . . . . . . . 51 Ono, Masatsuga . . . . . . . . . . 31 Osborne, S. P. . . . . . . . . . . 23 Osman, Hibaq . . . . . . . . . . 78

P

Pajak, Mark . . . . . . . . . . 46 Palcios, Manuela . . . . . . . . . . 17 Passingham, Sarah . . . . . . . . . . 83 Pawson, Lara . . . . . . . . . . 33 Piercey, Rachel . . . . . . . . . . 36 Plomer, William . . . . . . . . . . 54 Potts, Cherry . . . . . . . . . . 67, 72 Povey, Malcolm . . . . . . . . . . 22 Probert, John L . . . . . . . . . . 37 Purser-Hallard, Philip . . . . . . . . . . 53

Q R

Quinlan, Kathleen M. . . . . . . . . . . 29

W

INDEX

O

Wakeling, Kate . . . . . . . . . . 34 Watts, Carol . . . . . . . . . . 16 Watts, Peter . . . . . . . . . . 79 Welsch, J.T . . . . . . . . . . 81 Wigman, Menno . . . . . . . . . . 2, 59 Williams, Chrissy . . . . . . . . . . 68, 81 Williams, Diane . . . . . . . . . . 55 Williams, Iolo . . . . . . . . . . 58 Wilson, Dean . . . . . . . . . . 6, 52 Wright, Andrew . . . . . . . . . . 42 Wright, Emma . . . . . . . . . . 36

Y

Yanazaki, Nao-Cola . . . . . . . . . . 31 Yenser, Stephen . . . . . . . . . . 56 Yoshida, Kyoko . . . . . . . . . . 31

Z

Zarrop, Martin . . . . . . . . . . 51 Zultanski, Steven . . . . . . . . . . 70

Rann, James . . . . . . . . . . 79 Readman, Angela . . . . . . . . . . 63 Rees-Jones, Deryn . . . . . . . . . . 30 Renkichi, Hirato . . . . . . . . . . 71 Reyes, Heather . . . . . . . . . . 79 Ridge, Lola . . . . . . . . . . 54 Roberts, Marg . . . . . . . . . . 50 Robinson, Colin . . . . . . . . . . 3, 15 Robson, Eddie . . . . . . . . . . 82 Rosenfield, Kim . . . . . . . . . . 70 Ross, Jacob . . . . . . . . . . 39 Ross, Orna . . . . . . . . . . 79 Rowson, Martin . . . . . . . . . . 70

S

Salomao, Waly . . . . . . . . . . 29 Sastry, Tom . . . . . . . . . . 45 Savile, Steven . . . . . . . . . . 53, 62, 69 Seatter, Robert . . . . . . . . . . 48 Seed, Andy . . . . . . . . . . 35 Seed, John . . . . . . . . . . 22 Shimon, Samuel . . . . . . . . . . 61 Shuttle, Penelope . . . . . . . . . . 10 Slaney, Di . . . . . . . . . . 83 Smith, Caroline . . . . . . . . . . 14 Smith, Jos . . . . . . . . . . 41 Stone, Jon . . . . . . . . . . 24, 66, 72 Swede, George . . . . . . . . . . 87 Szirtes, George . . . . . . . . . . 16

T

Tawade, Yoko . . . . . . . . . . 31 Teasdale, Hannah M. . . . . . . . . . . 13 Thompson, Ralph . . . . . . . . . . 12 Torok, Agnes . . . . . . . . . . 32

V

HERE'S THE BURNING EYE BOOKS DOG GUARDING HIS PRECIOUS POETRY TO FILL SOME SPACE...

Valentine, Ruth . . . . . . . . . . 22 van Ostaijen, Pal . . . . . . . . . . 44 Varjack, Paula . . . . . . . . . . 33 von Torne, Volker . . . . . . . . . . 27

89

MANHOOD AT THE OVAL there was no teargas today just an interminable string of singles the english batsmen hit over hours that made my eyes water from yawning i had no idea i was reprising a manly ritual when i agreed to take my godson to the fifth test at the oval whispering my inability to answer his string of earnest questions because although i can trick him into upholding my adult dignity by dint of the agecraft we practise with children who are charming enough to pretend to be fooled there is no such hoodwinking the men everywhere within earshot for whom cricket is incubated in vesicles between their legs who hold this masculine knowledge (transfused to them by uncles brothers peers bullies and the occasional father) as casually as they might grab their crotches i had no idea my dead father when i left home this morning would be a memory sitting in the same stand i am sure he took me to that once like always when we never got to be male together because the match started late and the crowd got unruly and this was the jittery 1970s (before prices and highways and containers of bulletproof children in shaven vests kept people out of their place) and a young policeman hurled a canister and there was a stampede and the crowd broke down a gate i do not remember if it was football but i remember the press of people and the stinging in my eyes and throat and the fear in my stomach and the panic all around i do not remember my father with nostalgia or warmth that he was my safety my pride his funeral a place of awkwardness erasure margins not tears like that day at the oval chris is awkward with me always sometimes ashamed when i challenge him to multiply or remember but this shrunken wizened 14 year old is my pride and shame he makes me smile try hard feel bad when i am just as neglectful as my father

i have never felt safe in manhood and thirty years since i last set foot in queens park oval just below the surface of my grand gesture of godfatherhood is the panic like that day at being discovered as a fake or worse discovered to be faking until behind me a male voice talks loud on the phone in a trini accent shares that england have declared “we� have gone in to bat and chris guyle is at the wicket gayle another voice corrects him and i am the man laughing

Poem & catalogue cover image taken from: You Have You Father Hard Head by Colin Robinson, published by Peepal Tree Press.

ISBN: 9781845233167

AND THE DEAD INK DOG BLUE, SO HE DOESN'T GET JEALOUS....