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J a n u a r y – J u ne 2 0 1 5
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– J U NE 2 0 1 5
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when october hung them among the leaves, those bulging lanterns, then it was time: we picked ripe quinces, lugged the baskets of yellow bounty into the kitchen Quince Jelly, taken from Self Portrait with a Swarm of Bees by Jan Wagner. pg. 41.
Contents Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Frontlist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 New Publishers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Backlist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Magazines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Sales Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Inpress: supporting leading literary book publishers for over a decade Dear bookseller and reader,
Moth Life
Welcome to our showcase of new titles publishing January to June 2015. We are very pleased to welcome back all of our publishers and proud to welcome to our portfolio Dead Ink, Istros Books, Holland House, Papillote Press and Dog Horn Publishing. It’s shaping up to be an exciting year with highlights including Millie & Bird, by Costa Prize winning short story writer Avril Joy (pg. 13), Timothy Adès’ wonderful new translation of Storysongs by the internationally celebrated French poet and Surrealist Robert Desnos (pg. 16), Judas by the brilliant Damian Walford Davies (pg. 30), the Myslexia prize winning pamphlet The Tailor’s Three Sons and Other New York Poems by Mara Bergman (pg. 29) and Nora Chassler’s latest Novel Grandmother Divided by Monkey Equals Outer Space, a quirky fast paced novel brimming with dark humour (pg. 33).
There is a transparency to moth life. Easy to see how we might long to fly, but find our nubile wings fragment in the dust and cold without that element of sappy gold within our form.
We become cold, old
But there’s more! After the runaway success of The Notebook last year CB editions bring you two more novels by Agota Kristof, The Proof and The Third Lie (pg. 35), on top of this Burning Eye have secured the debut from one of UK’s most hotly tipped performance poets Holly McNish (pg. 40) and from Seren comes the truly unique travel memoir The Road to Zagora, charting writer Richard Collins’ exploring both the world and Parkinson’s disease (pg. 60).
before our time as strings
Creativity and variety, diversity and literary excellence burst out of this seasons eclectic mix of titles and we at Inpress hope you enjoy the collection as much as we do.
of their belonging,
are plucked, detached without permission to wind threads for others to weave the warp and weft
never our own.
Yours, ‘Moth Life’, taken from Life Class by Jo Reed. pg. 41.
Jane Harris
Jane Harris | Acting Managing Director jane@inpressbooks.co.uk Rebecca Robinson | Sales and Marketing Executive rebecca@inpressbooks.co.uk Emily Tate | Finance and Digital Sales Executive emily@inpressbooks.co.uk
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Gl
Ugly Duck
ling Presse
[NewYork]
ow]
osc
M as [
Iron Press [Cullercoats] Red Squirrel [Morpeth] Inpress Flambard Press [Newcastle] Smokestack [Middlesbrough]
Arc [Todmorden]
Salmon [Cliffs of Moher]
Dedalus [Dublin]
Y Lolfa [Aberystwyth]
Comma Dead Ink [Manchester] Nine Cinnamon Arches Press [Blaenau [Rugby] Ffestiniog]
Valley Press [Scarborough]
Dog Horn Peepal Tree [Leeds] Smith Doorstop [Sheffield]
Egg Box The Rialto Elastic Press [Norwich]
Rockingham Press [Ware]
Two Rivers Modern Poetry [Reading] in Translation Waywiser [Oxford] The Emma Press [Winnersh] Burning Eye Books [Bristol] Hogs Back Books [Guildford] Acumen [Brixham]
Seren [Bridgend]
Agenda [Mayfield]
Pighog [Brighton] Arachne Banipal CB Editions Hearing Eye Holland House Influx Press The London Magazine Menard Papillote Penned in the Margins [London]
Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson Firstly, can you describe the book for us – what is it about?
What is your favourite fictional city in literature? And in cinema?
Imaginary Cities is a guide through fictional cities, cities that were, cities that could yet be, in literature, art, film and architecture, and how much the actual cities we live in are influenced by fiction. It’s also an attempt to show that we all view our surroundings so subjectively that the singular names of cities are something of a lie. Each city is plural. So there are the imaginary cities we encounter in art and unbuilt blueprints and then there are the imaginary cities we actually live in.
If I was forced to choose one from many I’d go with China Miéville’s New Crobuzon from his Bas-Lag trilogy. I’m not much of a science fiction or fantasy fan but I’ve tried to educate myself in the past few years (almost making it through the brilliant SF Masterworks series for one) and I’m convinced of the half a dozen writers I really loved Miéville is the greatest. The world he conjures up in books like Perdido Street Station is just amazing, so layered and intricate and exciting and surreal and oddly believable. It leaves most literary fiction in the dust in terms of ideas and execution. There are others who are exceptional like Harlan Ellison, Albert Robida, Grant Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Moebius, Bruno Schulz and so on but Miéville’s feels most like a dazzling world you’re enveloped in. Failing that, Dante’s Inferno as an underground city.
What was the inspiration for Imaginary Cities? Is there a deliberate nod to Italo Calvino? Kierkegaard pointed out that we live life forwards but understand it backwards. In a similar way, I think we attribute significance to influences in hindsight that we weren’t conscious of at the time. I thought the idea came talking to an architect one evening, several years ago, on the roof of the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh with electrical storms rolling in and the river moving backwards below but it seems older than that. I’m not entirely sure. Visiting real but unreal cities at impressionable ages. Being introduced to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and Kenneth White’s The Wanderer and His Charts by a friend. Growing up in a city where even the name was disputed and which had declared itself free in defiance of an empire. Collecting the comic 2000AD obsessively as a boy. Having an over-active imagination whilst listening to longwave radio transmissions from Moscow to Melbourne (particularly the impossibly exotic names of foreign football teams). Poring over Edmund Dulac book illustrations as a child. All those fragments of experience that lodge in your head for unknown reasons. Calvino is a colossal influence (as is the mighty Borges), to the extent I’ve tried to avoid mentioning him at all in the book. You write as a shadow in the light of such writers or orbiting them like space junk. So he and his book Invisible Cities are always there but deeply and silently.
I’m a sucker for noir and futurology so my favourite fictional city in film is probably the Los Angeles of Blade Runner. It’s an obvious one but you had some of the most extraordinary people contributing to that; Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott, Syd Mead, Vangelis. It was like the planets co-aligning and of course people initially hated it. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis deserves a mention as the origin of it all. And it’s more a town but Twin Peaks endlessly fascinates. I used to fantasise I was in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Neo-Tokyo, from Akira, whilst riding around in Asia on a motorbike that had a basket welded to the front but that’s more to do with my delusions.
What is the most fantastical ‘real’ city or building that you feature in the book?
What’s your favourite building that never was? I.e was planned but never actually built.
There are lots of failed utopias like Fordlandia that seem intriguingly deranged but I suppose most cities seem like deranged ideas at their founding. Again, there are dozens of real cities that are fascinating but three stand out for me. One is Venice given its where Marco Polo sets off from at the beginning of the book and it’s also, if we need reminded, an incredibly beautiful atmospheric city built almost impossibly on stilts in a lagoon. I’m not sure if mankind has ever constructed anything quite as amazing as Venice. I have to mention Phnom Penh, which I dearly love despite it trying to kill me on several occasions, given it’s seen dystopias and utopias and remains the most extraordinary place for good and ill. If I had to choose one though, it would be Barcelona, the city I’ve physically returned to the most. You experience certain things at opportune ages and they do something to you permanently, which is my feelings about Catalonia generally. When I was a teenager I got lost in the city, with a little book of Lorca poetry (a few hundred miles off but never mind), and chanced upon not only Gaudí’s buildings but those of the other Catalan modernists. Until that time, I hadn’t quite realised such places were possible and part of me still doubts they are.
I have a soft spot for Frank Lloyd Wright’s unbuilt masterpieces and Archigram’s unbuildable ones and Antonio Sant’Elia’s somewhere in-between buildings. Tatlin’s Tower is hard to beat though. I think it’s not even so much the building, which is remarkable, as the mythology and the crazed ambition of the architect. The way he wound up the Bolsheviks with rotating chambers, how he got into a fistfight with Malevich over hanging paintings in the corner of rooms, how he was a wrestler in the circus, how he acted as a blind busker in Berlin to save money to visit his hero Picasso reputedly receiving a gold watch from the Kaiser in the process or how George Grosz visited him and found him living in a boarded up tenement infested with chickens. That exceptional generation of Russian artists, and that genuinely haunting future that should have happened but didn’t, is all there for me in the blueprints to that building. How do you go about researching a book like this? Living inside strange foreign cities for years and living in strange foreign books for even longer.
Modern poets seem to shy away from addressing political issues in their poems, so this is an unusual and brave anthology of poems which tackle difficult subjects in interesting ways. With poems being written up to a month before the publication date of the book, this book will capture the state of the nation and the modern world.
Dear Sir/Madam, permit me to dispense
or money sunning in some beach retreat
with the delicate dance, the stately sidle-
(technical Virgin, undeclared in Kent)?
up to the tablature of talent, bills and rent,
With so much hanging in the balance-sheet
the awkward pseudo-bridal courtship of the caught-short and the idle,
there is an ocean between ‘broke’ and ‘bent’ – so when all’s said and spent
and in its place submit a simple plea,
if you can outsource creativity
a free-from-frills request: invest in me.
to your accountant, then you don’t need me.
But first, a test: let’s get our money’s worth.
You don’t need me. I’m ornament, gold-leaf,
I’d like a full account of who you are –
no more essential than a mounted moose;
a tender-hearted thug, salt of the earth
a taxidermist you can tax-relief,
or landed, under-handed, oiled from cars,
Gift Aid against a gift with no clear use.
a quaffer of champagne or caviar –
What have you got to lose?
there are some caveats one ought to factor
Preserve me: for a reasonable price
in, when getting into bed with benefactors.
I’ll preserve you. I’ll bring my own supplies
What, exactly, are we all together in?
if you’ve a spare wing you could take me under –
If one of us has to be patronised
my jotting pad, a pack of Bics, my wits.
and it’s the turn of capital to captain,
Keep me in tea; I’ll try to show you wonders
then it’s prudent to ensure we won’t capsize.
beyond any public-private partnership,
Do any of the following apply:
and by the Muse of Calculated Risk,
consorting with consortiums, ex-cons,
if you stand back – resist the urge to edit –
funding hedges I can’t prick my finger on,
I’ll do my best to bring us both some credit.
For more information see pg.39.
Cinnamon Press @ Ten by Jan Fortune
T
en years ago Cinnamon Press started with a tiny poetry magazine, Coffee House Poetry, an anthology of Welsh poets, The Lie of the Land, and a collection competition that funded the publication of our first two sol-authored books, Bill Greenwell’s Impossible Objects, which was short-listed for the Forward Prize for best first collection, and Bruce Ackerley’s Sound of Mountain. 230 books later the view looks very different. The tag line of Cinnamon Press is ‘innovative, independent, international’. We’ve had some wonderful highlights along the way. I Spy Pinhole Eye by Philip Gross won Wales Book of the Year in 2010; TAG by Stephen May was in the final 10, and won the readers’ vote in 2009 and went on to secure a three book deal for Stephen with Bloomsbury. In addition to Bill’s short-listing, How to Pour Madness into a Teacup by Abegail Morley was also short-listed for the Forward Prize for best first collection, We strongly believe that Wales, especially our beautiful corner of North Wales, should be seen as a publishing arena that authors from the UK and the world want to be involved in. Amongst our international titles we have a rolling series
of poetry translations from minority Italian languages. Minorities, Not Minority: A Window on Italian Cultures; which has consistently got stronger. The series was conceived by Andrea Bianchi and Silvana Siviero and we’re now working on our fourth anthology with the Ladin region (having done Sardinia, Romagna and Friuli). Poetry remains a major area of work for us and one we are highly committed to, but we’ve also been excited to expand the fiction list and to add a small amount of excellent creative non-fiction. Most recently, we’ve launched a new pamphlet imprint, Liquorice Fish, that began with a successful competition. Led by Adam Craig, the imprint will concentrate on inventive and experimental publications. In 2013 what might have been our lowest moment came when we lost all funding, but Cinnamon authors rallied – with ideas, and with practical support. Two authors launched ‘Friends of Cinnamon Press’, others helped to revamp the book club, some made generous donations, others gave time – to edit, to contribute to a new creative writing mentoring scheme, which has now become highly successful, to maintain the
website. We’ve been fortunate to have achieved more funding since – the Welsh Books Council and Arts Council England have both been supportive, not only financially, but in giving advice and in providing the services of Inpress, which gives independent publishers access to markets and services we could never achieve otherwise. We remain a small family run press – I do everything from editing to packing book orders, from accounts to events organisation; Rowan provides invaluable editing skills and does a lion’s share of mentoring work; Cottia contributes to cover design and admin; Adam runs Liquorice Fish, contributes invaluable layout, editing and mentoring skills, keeps the newsletters flowing and produces excellent cover designs. Cinnamon is also an extended family that includes our authors, many of whom do a great deal to keep us running, like Adnan Mahmutovic, who maintains our website or Pete Marshall, who co-runs two residential writing workshops with me each year at his lovely Conwy Valley home, Ty’n y coed.
2015 will see us launching a stand-out list of poetry and fiction across Wales and the UK regions, with a rolling programme of exciting events currently in the pipeline and including a celebratory weekend of readings, workshops and launches in Northampton in October. We also have a celebration anthology on creative writing around the theme of place, edited by Gail Ashton and with contributions from ten Cinnamon authors, Meet Me There. It’s been an amazing ten years and it’s a privilege to work with writers who care so passionately about language and art, many of whom have become friends along the way. We still exist on a shoestring, but we’re optimistic about the next decade – with writing this good, surely the readers are out there.
Sonofabook Sonofabook is a new biannual literary magazine being launched by CB Editions in March 2015. Sonofabook aims to offer the reader a serious introduction to the style and concerns of featured writers and as such the work of each contributor will occupy up to 20 pages of the magazine.
Sonafobook 1 will include new or previously untranslated work by authors on the CBe list: among them will be Will Eaves, Nancy Gaffield, Agota Kristof, J. O. Morgan, D. Nurkse, Dan O’Brien, Francis Ponge and MayLan Tan. It will be a showcase for the kind of writing published by CBe over the past seven years. Thereafter, CBe will retire to a purely hosting role, passing the editorial reins into other hands.
The contents of each issue after the first will be chosen by invited guest editors, so each issue will have a distinctive editorial character. Future editors may include writers, editors, critics, booksellers, bloggers; the one thing they will have in common is that each will be sympathetic to the kind of writing published by independent presses. Up-coming guest editors: Sonofabook 2 (September 2015) – Nicholas Lezard, author and Guardian reviewer. Sonofabook 3 (March 2016) – Sophie Lewis, translator and editor-at-large for And Other Stories. Featured writers in the first issue: David Collard Will Eaves Andrew Elliott Nancy Gaffield Agota Kristof Elisabeth Mikesch J. O. Morgan D. Nurkse Dan O’Brien Francis Ponge Adnan Sarwar May-Lan Tan Ryan Van Winkle
Dan O’Brien In Scarsdale Dan O’Brien applies to his own early life the same honesty and insight that were evident in his prizewinning War Reporter. Growing up in a family scarred by past trauma, he makes a bid for freedom – ‘in love with myself and this young stray’s life’ – only to be pulled back into the orbit of the place he had sought to escape. Gradually, possibilities for a more lasting change unfold ‘Dan O’Brien’s poems are powerful and stripped down, but they expand along the mind long after they’ve been read. As in War Reporter, O’Brien captures the reflective gentleness that exists amid the damage of experience, and survives it.’ – Patrick McGuinness.
CB Editions PB £8.99 9781909585027 96pp Poetry (DCF)
The Hard Word Box Sarah Hesketh In 2013 poet Sarah Hesketh spent 20 weeks visiting a residential care home for people with dementia as an Age Concern poet in residence. The result is The Hard Word Box, a book of poems and verbatim interviews that takes the reader on a surprising and enriching journey through memory and imagination. The agility of Hesketh’s poetic voice channels moments of tenderness, suffering and humour, revealing dementia as a negotiation with language and silence. The Hard Word Box is an inventive and compassionate meditation on the things that will be lost.
Penned in the Margins PB £9.99 9781908058225 87pp Poetry (DCF)
Bribery Steven Zultanski Bribery is a long poem in which the author confesses to unsolved crimes in New York City, rants about politics, and lives for thousands of years. Subjects: Anger, Basket-Play, Bickering, Capitalism, Cat in a Bucket, Cheesesteak, Clayton Lamar, Cockroaches, Criminality, Cruelty, Diana Hamilton, English (language), Family, Friendship, Globalism, Guilt, Harassment, Hate, Heterosexuality, Home, Human body, Josef Kaplan, Jumping, Love, Luck, The Monocode, New York City, Obsession, Patriarchy, Poetry, Police, Pomegranates, President Obama, Scooters, Self-hate, Self-love, Sex, Sexual Difference, Speculative Thought, Sports, Symbolism, Tenderness, Time, Twitching, War of 2084, Work, The World.
Ugly Duckling Presse PB £10.00 9781937027308 112pp Poetry (DCF)
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2014 Catch-Up
Scarsdale
Speculatrix Chris McCabe In his most daring collection to date, Chris McCabe delves into the shadowy recesses of London history, bringing forth unsettling anachronisms and revealing the city as a perilous place to exist. Taking its name from the term for a female spy, Speculatrix is at once the voyeur and the observed. Fame and death are McCabe’s subjects, sifted and strained through his poems’ urgent rhythms. At the heart of the book, a sequence of wild, neurotic sonnets tears at the corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to conjure a visceral landscape of decay and financial collapse.
Penned in the Margins PB £9.99 9781908058256 80pp Poetry (DCF)
Jazz Peas Ian McMillan “A force of nature.” – The Guardian Jazz Peas carries on Ian McMillan’s examination of what it’s like to be a middle-aged grey-haired granddad in the former South Yorkshire coalfield in the grip of an uncaring government. It could almost be the 1980s except for the grey hair. As Ian says, “words are the only weapons I’ve got. And The only protection against the cold. And the only torches to shine in the darkness.” Not that it’s all darkness, of course.
Smith/Doorstop PB £5.00 9781910367056 31pp Poetry (DCF)
Familiars Linda Rose Parks Linda Rose Parkes was born in the Channel Islands and studied literature at UEA. She runs poetry workshops in Jersey and also writes lyrics, working in collaboration with her singer-songwriter daughter, Esther Rose Parkes and with Swedish artist, Annika Fehling. She is co-editor, with Alastair Best, of the first Channel Island anthology of poetry, Wavelengths, published by Holland House. Familiars is her third full-length collection, following The Usher’s Torch 2005 and 2010, both from Hearing Eye.
Hearing Eye PB £7.50 9781905082735 60pp Poetry (DCF)
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Avril Joy This collection explores the world of the Costa Prize winning story Millie and Bird: a northern landscape of fragile lives bound by the invisible threads of place. The stories in this haunting collection have appeared in literary journals and on prize shortlists with ‘Millie and Bird’ winning the 2012 Costa Short Story prize. A soldier flees the enemy, a woman buries a pig, a girl goes in search of her father – these are stories of northern lives, of what is lost and found, and of how we survive. A prize winning collection: these are the people who live in Paradise, their lives fragile, caught like sheep’s wool on wire.
Iron Press PB £9.00 9780957503281 92pp Short Stories (FYB)
On bank holidays and Sundays people living on the edge of town, in Eden Row and beyond, bring their picnics to Paradise. They spread out along the banks of its river and cool their lemonade and beer in its waters. They watch the herons, undeterred by the crowd, fishing in the shallows. They eat ice cream, and burgers with onions, from parked vans and they gaze at the water and fret about the river changing its course since the winter flood. I can sit with them now. I can sit by the river. It doesn’t bother me. My fear of water ebbed as Tom’s knack of slipping between places grew. Tom brought me to live in Paradise after he cured me, or so he liked to think. Eden Row was the nearest he could find to a house by the woods that wasn’t totally wild. He knew I wouldn’t live in the wild, even though I’d been brought up on a farm. I knew he couldn’t live without a wood nearby. To say I was cured would be an exaggeration but Tom liked to think so and say so, he was fond of big, grand gestures, like running away. That’s how we came to live in a place with a name like Paradise. A place not found on any map, a country adrift in the borderlands between tame and wild. An extract from ‘Paradise’ taken from Millie & Bird by Avril Joy.
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Millie & Bird
punkPUNK ed. Andrew Hook This eclectic mix of stories shows punk is not simply a static component of history, but a process of evolution and revolution which extends from the heady days of 1976 right into the now. Are you ready to jump into contemporary punk-inspired fiction? It’s not a nostalgia trip. Containing stories by Joe Briggs, Gio Clairval, Gary Couzens, Mat Coward, Sarah Crabtree, Adam Craig, Richard Dellar, Terry Grimwood, Andrew Hook, Alexei Kalinchuk, P.A. Levy, Richard Mosses, Douglas J. Ogurek, Stephen Palmer, Jude Sandelewski, Mark Slade, L A Sykes and Douglas Thompson.
Dog Horn Publishing PB £12.99 9781907133893 216pp Short Stories (FYB)
Solstice Shorts ed. Cherry Potts Past, present, future; morning, noon, night, days, months, seasons, years: time measured, time spent, time lost, time wasted – entropy: clocks, sundials, hourglasses… from nanoseconds to eons: Spanning everything from historical fiction to science fiction, sixteen stories from the first ever Solstice Shorts Festival explore the theme of time, originally read live from sunrise to sunset on the shortest day of the year on the Greenwich Meridian.
Arachne Press PB £8.99 9781909208230 96pp Short Stories (FYB)
In the Eye of the Storm: Edgar Mittelholzer 1909–2009: Critical Perspectives ed. Juanita Cox In the 1950s and early 1960s no Anglophone Caribbean novelist had a higher profile and was more praised than Edgar Mittelholzer. He was the first writer to earn his living from writing and his earlier novels in particular found enthusiastic reviewers in the UK and USA but after his suicide in 1965 his reputation began to sink and for several decades, none of his books were in print. This collection of essays both charts the way Mittelholzer’s work was read in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and shows how a contemporary generation of critics is rediscovering his real merits – the quality of his prose, his literary ambition and the ways in which at least some of Mittelholzer’s ideas about the Caribbean speak to a postnationalist generation.
Peepal Tree Press PB £19.99 9781845231286 352pp Literary Criticism (DSB)
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The Place Where I Left You Sandra Ann Winters “Some things are eternal, for instance the ties that bind fathers and daughters and Sandra Ann Winters’ poems are refreshingly direct, heroic in their address of the issues at the heart of the human condition. A natural empathy for the ‘individual journey’ is leavened by a superb mastery of her chosen craft, what Joyce calls ‘a scrupulous meanness.’ Her experience of growing up in rural North Carolina along with her extensive travels in Ireland bring a unique dimension to a poetry that transcends geographic and socio-cultural divides. How she unpeels the masks that would distract us from an assessment of our true selves is quite unique in modern poetry. A most welcome and timely addition to the canon of Irish poetry.” – Eugene O’Connell (Editor, Cork Literary Review)
Salmon Poetry PB £10.00 9781908836939 70pp Poetry (DCF)
SPOKE: New Queer Voices ed. Adam Lowe Featuring the best writing by young and emerging queer writers in Britain today, SPOKE: New Queer Voices spans poetry, prose, drama, maps, prayers and comics. The anthology includes the very best entries to the Young Enigma Awards 2014, including Janette Ayachi (winner of the Barbara Burford Prize 2014) and Bryony Yates (winner of the Allan Horsfall Prize 2014). Writers in the anthology include Andrew McMillan, Jamal Gerald, Keith Jarrett, Jane Bradley, Tara Ali Din, Michael Atkins and Barnaby Callaby. The anthology is a collaboration between Young Enigma, Commonword, Archives+ and Dog Horn Publishing.
Dog Horn Publishing PB £9.99 9781907133800 128pp Poetry (DCF)
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The End of the Trial of Man Paul Stubbs Confident in his use of Christian icons, nothing is ‘sacred’ to Paul Stubbs who is as prepared to write as God and Pope as he is Adam (and Eve). Using paintings by Francis Bacon as their starting points, these poems delve into baroque realms of psychological and philosophical thought, filling the unknown with urgent possibility. To each neo-operatic poem he brings wit and classical knowledge to build a singular and aesthetic passion. Yet throughout the landscape of these poems, there are reminders of the business of living with pain, desire and faith. This is not a book for the faint-hearted, but those who enter will be well rewarded, emerging with a renewed conviction of their own choices in viewing the world and our construction of it.
Arc Publications PB £8.99 9781908376015 112pp Poetry (DCF)
Storysongs Robert Desnos (Timothy Adès) A charming book for children and adults to sing to any tune, these little whimsies of the animal world have delighted generations of French children. Now at last they have been skilfully put into English by the translator-poet, Timothy Adès. This book is bilingual and is adorned with superb illustrations by the award-winning graphic artist Caterina Zandonella. The brilliant French poet and surrealist Robert Desnos (1900-45) wrote these thirty Storysongs or ‘Chantefables’ in 1943, shortly before he was arrested and deported from France by the Gestapo because of his active role in the French Resistance. They were quickly published, but he never saw them in print, dying in Terezín concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1945 only weeks after the camp’s liberation.
Agenda Poetry PB £11.00 9781908527202 Children’s Poetry (YDP)
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Demeter Does Not Remember Mary Madec This book is a collection of poems held by a narrative, like the one which each of us makes to hold our lives together. These poems take us on a woman’s journey through time and experience to self-realisation and maturity. The ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone provides the lens to help us see the depth and timelessness of the female quest. Many poems trace how our insights come, and how memory functions in shaping our lives. Though not autobiographical, this book is deeply personal. The lyric tenderness of the writing draws us into a sensitive and honed consciousness of what it means, what it has always meant, to be a woman.
Salmon Poetry PB £10.00 9781908836311 70pp Poetry (DCF)
Sampo Andy Willoughby & Bob Beagrie These poems examine the question of what it means to be an artist, how to confront and come to terms with loss of love and life, how modern ideas of masculinity are reinforced or challenged through the myths, the relationship between humanity and mineral resources such as iron in shamanic and secular cultures, and the price we pay for their use. The work has come from an on-going exchange project with Finnish poets spanning more than a decade. The Myth of The Sampo (the undefinable magical object created by the primal smith) allowed these two poets to undertake a quest to find a healing magic through verse.
Red Squirrel Press PB £8.99 9781910437056 68pp Poetry (DCF)
ALL Robert Powell “In Robert Powell’s wonderful new collection we have poems of wisdom and insight, poems which combine lambent descriptions of time and place, of a natural and a spiritual world, all haunted by a younger self. Powell’s ability to understand and convey the messiness, tragedies and beauties of life, demonstrate what a very fine poet he is. Full of startling observations, these are the thoughts and perceptions of a mature writer, gloriously mining free verse and more formal poetic forms to brilliant effect. I read in a kind of hushed awe.” – James Nash
Valley Press PB £8.99 9781908853448 96pp Poetry (DCF)
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Luxury of the Dispossessed Dan Duggan Luxury of the Dispossessed is the debut collection from poet and artist Dan Duggan. It is a book of derelicts, poems from purgatory, stories of incarceration on psychiatric wards under the provisions of the Mental Health Act. Duggan deals with the characters he met over a decade, from those on the acute mental health wards, to specialist units dealing with starvation, depression, suicide attempts and self-harm. Luxury of the Dispossessed is not all darkness and terror; the poems celebrate kindness in awful circumstances; a shared cigarette among friends, communal watching of bad TV, encouragement and support found in the most unlikely of places. Exploring the space of the psychiatric ward through poetry and art, this is a vital new collection from Influx Press, giving a voice to those who so often go unheard.
Influx Press PB £8.99 9781910312032 96pp Poetry (DCF)
(O) Sophie Mayer Sophie Mayer’s fourth published poetry collection, (O), is a bittersweet lovesong to zombies, tattoos, fathers and sisters, Katniss and Pussy Riot, Artemis and suffra gists. In three parts – I DO, I UNDO, I REDO – the poet undoes herself and all around her in a cycle that takes her back to the start as it comes to an end. Spirited, politicised, contemporary and Classical, these poems bring a poetic voice to the women that have lived in the cracks of history. In her own words: “Nothing – and everything – is sacred in this new cosmogony, beginning again with O.”
Arc Publications PB £9.99 9781908376985 112pp Poetry (DCF)
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The History of Western Philosophy in 100 Haiku Haris Vlavianos From the pre-Socratics to Derrida and beyond, Greek poet Haris Vlavianos’ undertakes the daunting task of conveying the breadth and richness of 2,500 years of western thought – through the 3-line form of the Japanese haiku. An ideal and highly entertaining book for both the budding and the seasoned philosopher alike. Translated from the Greek by Peter Mackridge.
Dedalus Press PB £8.50 9781910251010 125pp Poetry (DCF)
28 Portuguese Poets: A Bilingual Anthology Richard Zenith and Alexis Levitin (trans.) Richard Zenith, the foremost Portuguese translator of our day, 28 Portuguese Poets is a major bilingual anthology that surveys more than a century of Portuguese verse, from Pessoa and his ‘heteronyms’ to the generation of poets writing today.
Dedalus Press PB £12.50 9781910251003 320pp Poetry Anthology (DCQ)
E-Le-Menti delle Parole / The Mind-Elements of Words Domingo Notaro Italian painter and poet Domingo Notaro makes his first full-length appearance in English in a bilingual volume of poems that, with the energy of his paintings, dance in and around meaning, and are ever attentive to the accident of the moment. Translated from the Italian by Catherine O’Brien
Dedalus Press PB £11.00 9781906614997 190pp Poetry (DCF)
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New and Selected Sorrows Goran Simic New and Selected Sorrows draws on Bosnian poet Goran Simić’s earlier collections, From Sarajevo with Sorrow, Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman and Immigrant Blues, together with many new poems published in English for the first time. It is a book about passports and borders, rats and wolves, soldiers and ghosts. It is a record of the realities – and the unrealities – of life in the Balkans, narrated by ‘an ordinary man with ears of ordinary silk’, whose sees ‘the face of sorrow’ in ‘the Sarajevo wind leafing through newspapers / glued to the street by a puddle of blood’.
Smokestack Books PB £7.95 9780992740993 132pp Poetry (DCF)
Judas Damian Walford Davies A shattered Judas Iscariot – that byword for betrayal – tells his own story in Damian Walford Davies compelling and finely wrought collection. We follow Judas over the course of five days as he moves through first-century Jerusalem trying to make sense of the bewildering events surrounding the life and execution of Jesus. But this is a man for whom the future is as real as his anguished and traumatized present, and for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict is as urgent as the tension between the Romans and Jews. Emphasising our compulsion to create, and challenge, gospel truths, Judas gives voice to man caught up in the promise and violence of history.
Seren PB £9.99 9781781722220 Poetry (DCF)
Half-Light and Other Poems Yevgeny Baratynsky Half-Light & Other Poems brings together the most important and enduring poems by this neglected writer, one of Russia’s great 19th century poets. In a new translation by Peter France, the philosophical, social and literary struggles of Russia under Tsar Nicholas I are brought to vivid life in the verses of a man who felt profoundly and was highly skilled at expressing his emotions and beliefs in dazzling, often fantastical fashion.
Arc Publications PB £10.99 9781908376886 144pp Poetry (DCF)
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White Coins James Byrne Expanding on themes present in Blood/Sugar, James Byrne refuses one defining aesthetic or mode of writing in his work, instead choosing to fluctuate between the lyric, experimental, confessional and the political. These are poems that explore aspects of childhood, social activism and satire. There are correspondences with existing texts; Philomela finds herself in Nazi-occupied Paris during the Second World War and the villanelle re-tracks Rimbaud through London. Elsewhere Byrne seeks to defy Robert Graves’ notion that there is “no poetry in money”, preferring to rally against issues of austerity and hierarchical power in society. White Coins rewards the reader with a nomadic poetry for the 21st century; one that mingles personal, social and historical spaces whilst celebrating, at all times, linguistic versatility and innovation.
Arc Publications PB £8.99 9781908376473 80pp Poetry (DCF)
When We Were Almost Like Men Martin Hayes When We Were Almost Like Men explores the world of the modern courier industry, the working lives of the men and women caught inside the machinery of the modern city. From controllers to couriers, telephonists to mechanics, supervisors to sales reps, Martin Hayes is a guide to a kind of hell that is simultaneously fascinating, depressing, hopeless and hilarious, exploring what it means to hold down a job when all the odds seem to be stacked against you.
Smokestack Books PB £7.95 9780992958107 64pp Poetry (DCF)
The Bright Rose: Early German Verse 800–1250 Philip Wilson (trans.) Never published in verse form before, these translations of some of the earliest known German poetry give us a rich glimpse of a life that, while alien in so many ways, was not so different after all. The Minnesang poets, for example, engage in a highly professional ritual, but compose in cognitive metaphors that still ring true: love is a trap; love is a game; love is war. A beautiful, lyrical journey through the passions and fears of pre-Medieval German life, told by some of its finest poetic voices.
Arc Publications PB £9.99 9781908376718 128pp Poetry (DCF)
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Skein Island Aliya Whiteley Marianne Percival has been summoned to Skein Island by its owner, the reclusive Lady Amelia Worthington. There’s only one problem – Lady Worthington has been dead for years. So who wrote the summons? And what does it have to do with the disappearance of Marianne’s mother? All the answers lie on Skein Island. It’s a retreat, and it holds many strange relics from a time of heroes and villains. At its centre stands a library that holds the stories of thousands of women. And underneath the library there is a secret that Amelia Worthington kept from the world. A secret that is about to be uncovered.
Dog Horn Publishing PB £10.00 9781907133855 200pp Fantasy Fiction (FM)
The Night Game Frank Golden In her late thirties and obsessed with her ex-husband, Mary lives in her childhood home – a rambling brownstone on New York’s Lower East Side. Returning from work her thoughts are on a therapy session from earlier that day, and on the group meeting she will attend later in the week. One of the other members of the group is an old flame, Vincent, whose re-emergence into her life two years previously sparked the breakdown of marriage. Unnerved by a series of threatening phone calls and what she believes is evidence of a stalker, Mary reaches out to Sarah, one of her oldest friends, who offers to move in until the situation is resolved, but when Vincent moves in too things take a sinister turn. Unnervingly dark, The Night Game offers up psychological intrigue and emotional depth that make it a compelling read.
Salmon Poetry PB £10.00 9781910669006 140pp Fiction (FA)
Five Selves Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein A man lies in a hospital bed and experiences an internal world disconnected from his old life, an irrational fear of dogs has consequences for a young man seeking to find his place in the world, a teacher stuck in her ways finds everything she believes in challenged, after the death of her father a woman travels to an academic symposium in Chicago and finds her host fixated on her bereavement as he tries to reach understanding of his own recent loss and another woman’s choice of earrings becomes symbolic of her desire to establish her own identity separate from the clashing ways of her mother, born in Israel, and her grandmother who emigrated from Europe. Five powerful stories exploring identity and selfhood. With haunting, Kafkaesque prose, Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein creates a series of profound, internal narratives.
Holland House PB £8.99 9781909374799 204pp Fiction (FA)
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Farewell, Cowboy Olja SaviCˇeviC´
A suicide, a quest for truth, a reason for revenge and a love story thrown in, all set in a landscape redolent of transient glamour and unrealized small-town dreams. Farewell, Cowboy is a modern and hard-hitting novel by one of Croatia’s best-known writers. It tells the story of Dada, who returns to her home town on the Adriatic coast, and tries to unravel the mystery of her brother Daniel’s death. Daniel, although young, smart and popular, threw himself under a train in mysterious circumstances. In search for clues, Dada meets an array of eccentric characters and passionately falls in love with the young gigolo Angelo, who is a part of a film crew shooting a Western on the nearby prairie. Slowly and painfully she discovers all there is to know about her brother’s death, and how she has been betrayed by someone close to her. In her debut novel, Olja Savičević playfully transposes the genre of a Western into the contemporary world, challenging the omnipotent heroes of childhood and questioning what makes a modern-day hero.
Istros Books PB £9.99 9781908236487 200pp Fiction (FA)
Leaving by Plane Swimming Back Underwater Lawrence Scott “A magnificent prose style.” Bernardine Evaristo, the Guardian This new collection of short stories from an awardwinning writer, previously long-listed for both the Whitbread Prize and the Booker Prize, explores a Caribbean world of yearnings and memory, of escape and return underpinned by the disturbing tensions wrought by religion, race, sexuality and crime. Sensuous and evocative, Scott’s prose has a glorious lightness of touch and tone that exhilarates and illuminates.
Papillote Press PB £9.99 9780957118782 176pp Short Stories (FYB)
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Place House, Ware, and the Bluecoat Children Violet A. Rowe From 1685 to 1761, Place House was the schoolhouse for young children (mostly boys) from Christ’s Hospital in London. But for more than a century before the London foundation had been sending children to the Hertfordshire town to be cared for by foster-parents or ‘nurses’. In 1983 Dr. Violet Rowe – a retired schoolteacher – carried out extensive research into the schooling, health and welfare of these ‘Bluecoats’, publishing her work in journals. Here the research by the late Dr. Rowe is brought together in one publication, illustrated by photographs and maps from the Christ’s Hospital archives.
Rockingham Press PB £5.00 9781904851592 64pp History (AHB)
Your Time is Done Now ed. Polly Pattullo “A horrific account of unjust justice.” – Lord Gifford QC Your Time Is Done Now tells the story of the Maroons (escapes slaves) of Dominica and their allies through the transcripts of trials held in 1813 and 1814 during the Second Maroon War. Using the evidence to explain how the Maroons waged war against slave society, the book reveals for the first time fascinating details about how Maroons survived in the forests and also about their relationship with the enslaved on the plantations. It also examines the key role of the British governor who succeeded in suppressing the Maroons and how the Colonial Office in London reacted to his punitive conduct. Read the evidence and hear the voices of the oppressed in resistance and defeat.
Papillote Press PB £9.99 9780957118775 164pp History (HBTS)
From the court martial of Peter of Hillsborough plantation, Dominica, January 15 1814. Peter was found guilty of, “exciting a mutiny” and hanged. Evidence of Mr Venn of Hillsborough estate: “In the watch house I examined, I found nothing, but in the one examined by John Louis he found Peter with a large stick and cutlass and three other Negroes who made their escape. Peter then came down and joined the whole party. I asked if he would show me the place where the runaways were. He said yes he would show me where they had been... I asked him some further questions to which he gave no other answer than, ‘Your time is done now’.”
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MARCH
“So many debut poets who have honed their craft and are ready to publish are chasing so few publishers. Others who have published already have specific projects, tightly themed or sequenced pieces that stand alone. So, always on the look out for the next innovation and about to celebrate our tenth anniversary in 2015, we launched the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition. The winners are a mix of themes, a mix of established and debut writers; all excellent, distinctive voices. With Ian Gregson, previously short listed for the Forward Prize for his own debut collection, judging we’ve been able to choose four fantastic winners and with a huge post bag we’re confident this prize will run and run.” – Jan Fortune, Cinnamon Press
Paga Maria Apichella An original and compelling collection. There are jagged free verse rhythms, an expressionist colouring to the imagery, and a constant spiritual questioning, with a Jewish background.
Cinnamon Press Pamphlet £4.99 9781909077577 36pp Poetry (DCF)
No Theory of Everything Martin Zarrop “A very intelligent collection that draws upon a knowledge of science to describe, in effective poetic terms, the impact of scientific thought and discovery in the twentieth century.” Ian Gregson.
Cinnamon Press Pamphlet £4.99 9781909077584 36pp Poetry (DCF)
The Missing Girl
Keeping Secrets
From We to I
Accent
Will Kemp
Jenny Morris
Kathleen M Quinlan
Ellen Davies
This collection finds a way to renew Greek & Roman myth by presenting it in more mundane contexts and by adding to it refreshingly contemporary, detailed and vivid images.
A sequence that explores the image, and the actuality, of spies, and draws upon that image to explore a cluster of metaphorical associations of spying, including secretiveness and paranoia.
This finely tuned, brave and ultimately hopeful, collection talks unflinchingly about domestic abuse. It is a compelling, assured and humane debut.
Feisty, visceral and vivid, Ellen Davies brings an individual and uncompromising voice to her debut poetry collection.
Cinnamon Press Pamphlet £4.99 9781909077591 24pp Poetry (DCF)
Cinnamon Press Pamphlet £4.99 9781909077607 36pp Poetry (DCF)
Cinnamon Press Pamphlet £4.99 9781909077614 36pp Poetry (DCF)
Cinnamon Press Pamphlet £4.99 9781909077690 32pp Poetry (DCF)
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Boy Running Paul Henry Cut adrift by marital break-up, the poet must sort through the emotional fallout and the various ‘chattels’ left behind; a sea of characteristic props: tables, lamps, metronomes, pianos, guitars. The poet’s sons are at the heart of this collection where pathos is balanced by humour amidst the characters of a small country town. This is a beautiful sixth collection by the Wales-born author who has gained a reputation as one of the best poets in the UK. “I am at a loss to understand why this poet, who not only concerns himself with themes that would resonate with most readers but has the verbal and musical skill to make them resonate, is not more widely known and admired.” – Sheenagh Pugh
Seren PB £9.99 9781781722268 72pp Poetry (DCF)
More New and Collected Poems Lotte Kramer Lotte Kramer has been described as a ‘Holocaust poet’ and it is true that she writes feelingly about the family and friends she left behind when she came to Britain in 1939 in the Kindertransport. But her canvas is much broader. She writes about the landscapes of modern Europe, about the Fen Country where she now lives and about paintings and literature. Her poems have been translated into German and Japanese and published in both Germany and Japan, and she herself is a notable translator of German poetry, particularly of Rainer Maria Rilke. This new and expanded edition of Lotte Kramer’s ‘Collected’ contains all her translations, her own poetry from fourteen collections and new poems, which have not been published before.
Rockingham Press PB £12.99 9781904851622 416pp Poetry (DCF)
Bones of Birds Jo Colley Bones of Birds is a book about flying and falling, about the earth and the sky, a celebration of all those who achieve the miracle of flight, and of those who struggle to accept our earth bound lives. Zeppelins and birds, transported lovers, angels and witches, Soviet women fighter-pilots and pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart fill the skies of Jo Colley’s imagination, wings beating frenetically in an attempt to rise above the constraints of the everyday. As ‘the chicken daughter of an eagle and a wren’ the longed for meridian is always beyond her grasp, although this doesn’t stop her launching herself into the fathomless blue.
Smokestack Books PB £7.95 9780992958114 64pp Poetry (DCF)
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Kissing Angles Sarah Fletcher Sarah Fletcher is an American-British poet. She received The Christopher Tower Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2013 and in 2012 was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year. She was also commended in the Stephen Spender Translation Prize. In this, her first collection, Fletcher extracts uncommon poetry from common and extraordinary events alike. Dates disappoint in surprising ways. Matadors give way to hairdressers. 21st century life is shadowed by the glamour and squalor of a 20th century that refuses to die. Fletcher’s coyly confessional poetry spurns mid-Atlantic grey and instead places us, shiny, tender, and bruised, in the here and now.
Dead Ink Pamphlet £5.00 9780957698574 30pp Poetry (DCF)
Vision of My Lover Dressed in Drag Sweet boy, pearled boy, take me to Berlin. Take me to nightclubs dressed in flapper-black. Tell bouncers that Your veins are lace— they’ve risen to the surface
A Hindu Goddess in one light, a fifties housewife in the next. You are eyelinered, sexed-up; scaled: a Mayan snake upon the terrace. Sweet boy, pearled boy, take me to Paris.
of your skin, inked green. They tessellate. You are all slink, all water-hips, a screech of smoke escaping from your lips. So chic.
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MARCH
Laventille Sheree Mack This book is a ‘shrine of remembrances’ for the ordinary people behind the headlines. It is an attempt to stay close to the facts as well as breathing life into the lost and hidden history of the Black Power revolution when, for forty-five days an uprising of students, trade unions and the disaffected poor threatened to overthrow the government. These poems lament, rage and mourn. But they also offer a song of healing, a celebration of survival, a glimmer of the flames that burn in the hearts of a people still living in slavery’s dark shadow. Sheree Mack is a major new voice in black British poetry.
Smokestack Books PB £7.95 9780992958121 72pp Poetry (DCF)
Zones of Avoidance Maggie Sawkins Zones of Avoidance grew out of a sequence of poems inspired by the writer’s personal and professional involvement with people in recovery from addictions and combines her own moving testimony with the voices of addicts in recovery. Already featured at many festivals, the book will accompany future tours of the ambitious, award-winning multimedia performance of this brave, inspiring and moving collection. “It is a challenging, painfully open account of a daughter’s addiction, yet it’s an account which also offers graceful good humour. Beautifully written and uncompromising, it’s a modern story that we felt the writer was compelled to tell; it acts as a vivid witness of harsh experiences which aren’t often described in poetry.”- Denise Riley, judging the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.
Cinnamon Press PB £8.99 9781909077966 80pp Poetry (DCF)
A Fold in the River Philip Gross & Valerie Coffin Price Coming to South Wales, TS Eliot-Prize winning poet Philip Gross lived on the banks of the River Taff near Quakers Yard. Here, his poems and journals from that encounter meet the visual responses of artist Valerie Coffin Price grounded, through walking, in an immediate engagement with place. Together they in-fold past and present landscapes, in a subtle creative conversation with each other’s art, as well as with the river itself. The result is A Fold in the River, a stunning collection of poetry and original artwork.
Seren PB £12.99 9781781722336 96pp Poetry (DCF)
MARCH
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The Tailor’s Three Sons and other New York Poems Mara Bergman The Msliexia Prize-winning pamphlet 2014. Mara Bergman, a native New Yorker who has lived in England now for many years, says, “My love for the city goes back to childhood and these poems were written over quite a long time. A more recent one, ‘The Tailor’s Three Poems’; was influenced by a visit to the Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side, while others were inspired by friends and family... I have tried, in my writing, somehow to meld my life in England with the one I left in New York. Here are poems about people, the process of work and art, and distance, in time and place.” Her work has appeared widely in such magazines as Ambit, The North, The Rialto, Poetry Review, Stand and many others, as well as in anthologies. Mara works in London as an editor of teenage fiction and also writes picture books. “These are fluent, communicative, unselfconscious poems, yet they display great emotional tact. Mara Bergman knows instinctively what to include and what to leave out. Her poems, with their American inflection, hold a mirror to here and there, to people, places, incidents and to the human heart. Quietly stylish, quietly risk-taking, they show just how much felt life poetry can illuminate.” – Moniza Alvi
Seren Pamphlet £? 9781781722619 25pp Poetry (DCF)
Seahouses Richard Barnett In his first collection of poetry, Richard Barnett turns a precise gaze and a musical sensibility on the worlds we inherit and the worlds we make for ourselves. In the award-winning title sequence, the sea sifts and rolls through the dreams of an old man asleep in a deckchair, conjuring a vision of England’s history and our human crossings. Seahouses is a distinctively English work of low modernism, cranky, eloquent, broken-hearted. It is a book for people who read Hill, but who wish he’d be less marmoreal; people who read Paterson & Robinson, but who wish they’d drop the pose sometimes & fucking well cheer up; people who are smart and musical and angry, but who don’t want to read yet another version of the Duino Elegies or ‘The Wood of Suicides’; people who love history, but hate National Trust Houses; people who read nature poetry, but who don’t hate cities; people who walk by the cliffs; people who’ve had their hearts broken & who’ve broken someone else’s.
Valley Press PB £8.99 9781908853462 64pp Poetry (DCF)
SKIPPER Christy Ducker Skipper introduces an intriguing and readable new voice. Christy Ducker plays between light and dark, music and texture to take us into the swim of life. Warm, but never sentimental, the poems teem with people and everyday wonders: St Cuthbert appears at a laser clinic; breasts talk; a horse dentist perseveres; and Grace Darling learns to count. Ducker extends her vision from the deeply personal to the historical, engaging us in volatile questions of self and place. This is a bold first collection, from a poet of energy and wit.
Smith Doorstop PB £9.95 9781910367360 53pp Poetry (DCF)
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Haunt Mark Granier “Mark Granier’s Haunt unfolds in tender, observant gestures. There is much sadness here regarding personal memory, death, and a sense of generations passing. This makes for an elegiac collection but Granier’s elegies are not made of pieties. They are spiced with wit and live on their precisions. The sequences in the book are accumulations of what it is to be human, vulnerable, sharp-eyed and a part of things.” – George Szirtes
Salmon Poetry PB £10.00 9781910669013 70pp Poetry (DCF)
Estuary Cynthia Fuller Cynthia Fuller’s sixth collection looks back to the shifting estuary landscape of her youth and its continuing haunting presence. She writes about the characters and events that never go away, the changing sense of family relationships, the unexpected encounters, and the different ways in which we carry the past with us. “Fuller has the confidence and artistry to speak quietly, knowing she will be heard; apparently simple language, with subtle resonance, brings to life the previous generations and those just beginning.” – Mslexia
Red Squirrel Press PB £8.99 9781910437063 68pp Poetry (DCF)
MARCH
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Lost Evenings, Lost Lives: Tamil Poetry from the Sri Lankan Civil War Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling (trans.) In May 2009, the Sri Lankan government officially announced the end of a civil war that had been ravaging the island for almost three decades. During all these years, Tamil poets have commented on the war and its vicissitudes in what constitutes an extraordinary body of poetry. We find poems on violence and trauma, loss and exile, as well as courage and hope. Together these poems can be read as an alternative history of the war. This collection, translated from the original Tamil, comes with an afterword that will provide readers with the historical and political context of Sri Lanka’s war, while also mapping literary developments during that period.
Arc Publications PB £10.99 9781904614999 128pp Poetry (DCF)
The Healing Station Michael McCarthy “I love these poems. The voice overall has strength and confidence, but what matters most is its humanity. The Healing Station is a tribute to the courage and incorrigibility of the common men and women encountered by Michael McCarthy in the course of his residency. Faced with the ailments of our time – stroke, heart attack, onset of dementia – they never lose their humanity or their humour. Here’s love in the form of laughter – and its tonic. With the health workers ever on call I say to both the chronicled and chronicler: ‘Good man. Good man yourself.” – Gillian Allnut
Smith Doorstop PV £9.95 9781910367346 78pp Poetry (DCF)
Shakespeare’s Horse Joseph Harrison Writing in Standpoint magazine, the poet and critic Eric Ormsby said of Joseph Harrison that he “is a poet of great formal flamboyance,” one for whom “[t]here seems to be no measure, no verse-form, at which he is not quite utterly dazzling.” Ormsby went on to say that Harrison’s “poems exhibit a resonant awareness of the entire tradition of English verse. . . If he revels in echoes, these are mastered echoes, audaciously launched both in homage to tradition and in its defence.” Harrison’s latest collection, Shakespeare’s Horse, amply attests to the justice of Ormsby’s words, the poems displaying all the formal adroitness that characterized his two previous books, now applied to a still greater range of subjects and poetic genres. Shakespeare’s Horse blends the past with the present, the personal with the universal, and a resonant music with an idiosyncratic vision that sees the world afresh.
Waywiser Press HB £11.99 9781904130802 120pp Poetry (DCF)
Not Even Laughter Phillip Crymble A clearance bin of corner-cut records, remaindered paperbacks, and canisters of faded film, Phillip Crymble’s first full-length collection strives to rescue, celebrate, and preserve the works and sensibilities of those whose visions and values have been long overlooked by posterity. Crymble’s technical acumen, ear for music, and emotional sincerity are the adhesive agents that bring the vernacular ethnographies, high-brow ekphrastics, tender elegies, forlorn love lyrics, and acutely observed accounts of plain and seemingly unremarkable domestic experience together in this formidable debut. Working in forms and approaches as varied as conventional Sapphics, blank-verse sonnets, and telegraphic collage, and from a personal poetics informed as much by Larkin, Bukowski, and Kees as by the writing of present day innovators like Simon Armitage and Sean O’ Brien, Phillip Crymble comes to us with an oblique wit, a native ability to genuinely astonish, and an empathic mindfulness seldom encountered in the work of his contemporaries.
Salmon Poetry PB £10.00 9781910669020 80pp Poetry (DCF)
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MARCH
Unfolding Origami David Olsen Skillful and affective, David Olsen’s poetry explores liminal states and identity in a confident, graceful voice. His lucid style and keen observation exhibits depth and precision. Images are delicate and metaphors are controlled; resonant with humanity. There is poignancy here, but never sentimentality; always maintaining the tension of the poetic form. Insightful, affectionate, and always accessible, this is an accomplished, mature and long awaited full-length debut.
Cinnamon Press PB £8.99 9781909077621 80pp Poetry (DCF)
It’s Hard to Say: Selected Poems Mary Jo Salter Mary Jo Salter is one of the most gifted American poets of her generation. Gathering together the best of her work from the 1985 collection Henry Purcell in Japan up to the 2013 collection Nothing by Design, It’s Hard to Say amply attests to the skill, range and depth of this deft, witty, touching and ambitious poet, each of whose books has excited the very highest praise. Salter deserves to be far better-known in the UK than she is, and Waywiser is delighted to be making her Selected Poems readily available for the first time to a British audience.
Waywiser Press PB £14.99 9781904130765 216pp Poetry (DCF)
skindancing Susan Richardson Inventive form, innovative language and an ability to push at the boundaries of poetry are hallmarks of Susan Richardson’s distinctive and vivid poetry. These poems are alive on the page; challenging, full of wordplay, but always deeply thoughtful and engaging. Enriched by Pat Gregory’s extraordinary black and white prints, skindancing moves beyond us, beyond our comfort zones with poetry that is as visually exciting as it is linguistically and conceptually textured. Visceral and original, skindancing weaves myth with text-speak, shamanic lore with ecological angst, language poetry with the quotidian, to produce a collection that inspires, excites and demands to be read again.
Cinnamon Press PB £8.99 9781909077638 96pp Poetry (DCF)
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Prologue NYC, 1966 Vivian, three-inch make-up wand poised, opened her eyes wide in the Maybelline compact to put on her blue mascara. Then – feeling the sunset on her smooth thick skin – she returned the little brush to its place on the floor without having used it. It was the eighth item in the clock-circle of pots, wands and compacts that were arranged around her. Viv was sitting Indian-style in the center of the circle, still holding her small pisshole-in-the-snow-eyes (as her dead father had called them) as wide as they would go. Then she rose very slowly, her too-small head held very straight – as if she were balancing a book on it, like a girl practicing for the Miss America title – and walked over to her big curved bay window. Her face is tighter than when we’ll see it next, but less sharp. She’s coated in a layer of dishwashing liquid and 50s kitchen radio. But the soft cheeks don’t hide the look she’ll still have 16 years later – the look that makes her appear always to be plotting something. Viv stood straight and motionless at the open window that faced the Hudson River and New Jersey, which had only Palisades, and no high-rises yet. She listened to the rhythm of the needle hitting the end of side 1 of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, over and over and over again.
Grandmother Divided by Monkey Equals Outer Space Nora Chassler Grandmother Divided by Monkey... is a quirky, fast paced novel brimming with dark humour. Carrie (11), Eli (13) and Viv Martian (41) are living in small flat on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1982. They are broke and Viv is a pothead with unconventional ideas. Her boyfriend, Alex Woods (21) lives with them in the one bedroom flat. The children fight; Viv gets pregnant; Eli tries to make it to a showing of the Shining that isn’t sold out. When the family are befriended by an old lady who lives around the corner who makes her living as psychic she reveals a different part of her life story to each of them. She lived in a bohemian community in Rhinebeck (Upstate NY) in the early 1900’s and was involved in the murder of a young boy. Miss Rosa, aka Phoebe Curtis, the psychic, has a burning need to tell someone her story and this dysfunctional family is the best she can do.
Valley Press PB £8.99 9781908853455 224pp Fiction (FA)
Viv waited. She drank some Tropicana out of the carton (the one with the racist graphic of the native girl in a grass skirt, with huge eyes and a basket of oranges balanced on her head). She followed the progress of a rusty, high-heaped garbage barge ploughing downtown in the wine-red river, the seagulls circling above it, as if on stiff wires. Thank God, she thought, as the last thick drip of orange juice slid to the back of her throat. It’d been six years, and there were several moments every day where she actually thanked god to be out of her mother’s house. Viv ripped a piece of paper from a composition book that was on the sill, got to her knees above the rathe-ate-her so she could see the river, and wrote:
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Closure ed. Jacob Ross The standout feature of Closure is its richness – of styles, forms, themes, and ways of telling that display a keen awareness of the contemporary short story. The richness is also in the tremendous array of moods and levels of intensity of these stories. Raw realism gives way to pure lyricism; the fanciful rubs shoulders with the speculative. There is trauma and humour; tenderness and transgression. These narratives are about our humanity: the ways in which we do and do not love, unrequited yearnings, the quiet unstated violence in our lives, the way we obscure loneliness, and of course the precious moments of jubilation. This luminous anthology of short stories features award-winning writers Bernardine Evaristo, Fred D’Aguiar, Leone Ross and Jennifer Makumbi alongside gifted debut writers.
Peepal Tree Press PB £9.99 9781845232887 196pp Short Stories (FYB)
Talk You Round ’Til Dusk Rebecca Tantony Every one of us is a complex and beautifully woven fabric of stories, and whether we tell them or not, there are no measuring tapes or weighing scales to speak of their worth. Talk You Round ’Til Dusk is a collection of tiny stories and big ideas celebrating the wonder of the moment. It’s about those journeys in a car driving across a desert, or walking from the bedroom to the kitchen, where we discover that what we have is enough. Stories so small they fit in the palm of a hand, yet carry the weight of the world with them.
Burning Eye Books PB £8.99 9781909136519 60pp Short Stories (FYB)
Water With Berries George Lamming Teeton lives multiple lives in England. One is with a bohemian group of Caribbean artist exiles; another is his curiously intimate motherson relationship with his English landlady. He is also enmeshed in a revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow a reactionary Caribbean government. Teeton keeps each aspect of his life in compartments but when the revolt begins, his once separate worlds begin to fuse together with disastrous results. George Lamming’s writing career has encompassed several genres, gaining acclaim not simply for fiction but also poetry and critical work. His first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, was published in London in 1953. It won a Somerset Maugham Award and was championed by eminent figures the like of Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright.
Peepal Tree Press PB £11.95 9781845231675 270pp Fiction (FA)
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Rust Margaret Callow What happens when ambition becomes obsession- and what is the true price to be paid? Hilda Hastings gives birth in shame, but when John Rust proposes marriage, it seems her son can only benefit. But even as a child, Alfred is discontented. In his quest to become prosperous and with an obsessive desire to own Ridley Hall and its estate, he cheats his wife, takes a mistress and schemes his way to amassing great wealth. Vain, extravagant and with a penchant for the seedy, he is not only wicked, but crafty as well. Yet, as he acquires money so he loses it and when his debts threaten to overwhelm him, he concocts one last plan. But will the woman he trusts provide him with an alibi?
Holland House PB £9.99 9781909374843 300pp Crime Fiction (FF)
Two Novels: The Proof, The Third Lie Agota Kristof Following on from The Notebook, which recounted the survival of twin brothers during war and occupation, The Proof and The Third Lie trace the lives of Lucas and Claus during their years of separation. As the brothers, isolated in different countries, yearn for the seemingly impossible restoration of their lost connection, perspectives shift, memories diverge, identity becomes unstable. Written in Kristof’s spare, direct style, the novels are an exploration both of the aftereffects of trauma and of the nature of story-telling. Praise for The Notebook: “A stunning, brutal and beautifully written (and translated) book.” – George Szirtes “The Notebook is a transfixing house of horrors.” – James Tennant, New Statesman “In its odd, memorable, unique way, The Notebook is a masterpiece.” – John Self, Asylum
CB Editions PB £8.99 9781909585041 248pp Fiction (FA)
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The Last Ship Jan Shinebourne For Joan Wong, growing up in a Chinese family in the political turmoil of 1960s Guyana, family history is never straightforward. There are the examples of her grandmothers – Clarice Chung, iron-willed matriarch who has ensured the family’s survival through unremitting toil, with her pride in maintaining racial and cultural identity, and Susan Leo, whose failures have shamed the family, who found comfort from harsh poverty in relationships with two Indian men and adopting an Indian life-style. Later, when Joan Wong makes her own pilgrimage to ancestral China at the turn of the twentyfirst century, there are surprises in store.
Peepal Tree Press PB £8.99 9781845232467 164pp Fiction (FA)
Her name was Clarice Chung but in Canefield, Berbice, everyone called her The Old Lady, even her own children. The Old Lady could have meant any old lady, for there were many old ladies in Canefield, but there were no other Chinese old ladies. When they called her The Old Lady, they emphasised old, though when she came to live in Canefields in 1923 she was only fifty, and when she died there in 1946 she was seventy-three, not so very old at all. It was her Chineseness that made her seem old, to the point of being ancient, like China, and this is why the title stuck to her. She knew this and the awe it excited in people, so it pleased her to be called The Old Lady. For twenty-three years, she sat in her shop in Canefield in the same spot, behind the counter, where she guarded the money drawer. She hardly moved except to open and close the drawer. She rarely spoke to customers, only to her three children, Norma, Frederick and Harold, who worked in the shop and bakery daily, obeying her commands and serving the customers. She did not speak to the customers other than when she had to, but she observed them closely; she spoke to them to let them know that her shop was not there to dispense charity, and they must pay the price she demanded for her goods. No one ever disputed the prices, or asked for discounts. They learned not to go to her shop for any other reason but to make a purchase – not for companionship or
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conversation or to shelter from the sun or rain. If a small group of men or women or children gathered in the shop to gossip, she ordered them to leave: ‘Gwan! Go way! Get out me shop!’ It was a shock when she broke her silence, as if a statue had suddenly come to life; they were so used to seeing her sitting very still, white as chalk and dressed in her black Chinese silk pyjamas, with one hand resting on the money drawer. Children rarely came across any actual dumb people in Canefield, so they came to think of The Old Lady as a dumb person. When she suddenly shrieked at them, waving her arms to shoo them away, it was terrifying, as if a corpse had risen from one of the graves in the churchyard to pursue them, a popular nightmare of theirs. Children did not like her and grew up to think of The Old Lady as a witch or devil. Many many years later, near the end of the twentieth century, Clarice Chung’s granddaughter, Joan Wong, returned to Canefield to research Clarice’s history. These same children, those who were still in Guyana, now themselves nearing old age, were reluctant to speak to Joan because they had nothing good to say about her grandmother who had come to British Guiana in 1879, on the last ship to bring Chinese people to the colony.
Seren New Welsh Short Stories ed. Francesca Rhydderch & Penny Thomas A stellar line-up of writing talent includes Stevie Davies, Trezza Azzopardi, Joe Dunthorne, Owen Sheers, Cynan Jones, Deborah Kay Davies and Rachel Trezise. Stories range from the personal to the universal; from the streets of south Wales to the wilder reaches of small town and countryside, from film sets to the limits of time and space. The anthology is the first in a series. It is co-edited by Seren fiction editor Penny Thomas and Francesca Rhydderch, a previous editor of New Welsh Review, whose debut novel The Rice Paper Diaries won the Fiction Prize, Wales Book of the Year 2014.
Seren PB £8.99 9781781722343 Short Stories (FYB)
The Apprentice Journals II: Gemini J. Michael Shell In this futuristic setting of magic and science, Spaul and Pearl’s twins have arrived: one human, one half-human and half fire elemental. These starcrossed parents must tame the terrible power—and volatile emotions—of their amazingly beautiful, half-Fierae child. But when Pearl and Spaul are taken by the Masons, it falls on the twins to save them. They must overcome the singularity of their intense sibling love and embark on a journey. They must break out their lodestone gauntlets and call to the Zephrae. They must ride the lines from Smith’s Crossing to the crocinfested Florida. In Gemini, humans and elementals must come together again to face new challenges in a story of lightning, fire and love.
Dog Horn Publishing PB £10.99 9781907133923 240pp Science Fiction (FL)
Exile Çiler Ílhan Exile is a collection of short stories with the taste of a novel. The overriding theme is the sense of melancholy of those who have been alienated from their homeland, from their families or from society. By offering the reader short, vivid glimpses into other worlds, be they of real or fictional characters, Ílhan builds a patchwork of stories which highlight the lives of the dispossessed. As a woman writing in modern day Turkey, she is not afraid to take on the themes of honour killings or the American occupation of Iraq. All stories are open to her empathy and understanding.
Istros Books PB £8.99 9781908236258 130pp Short Stories (FYB)
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Total Shambles George F. After slipping through the cracks of modern life and into the amoral underground beyond work-a-day society, George F. finds himself at the heart of London’s political frontline, where anarchy, alcohol and addiction stalk the streets of a different city to the one you know. From life on the street to behind the barricades, from the occupation of derelict buildings to inevitable evictions and confrontation with law and order, from euphoria to despair, Total Shambles follows the journey of an idealistic writer as he tries to thrive and survive in the contentious world of squatting in London. George F. is a pseudonym used for the protection of the author.
Influx Press PB £9.99 9781910312049 160pp Memoir (BM)
Finding Myself: Essays in Race, Politics and Culture Clem Seecharan Clem Seecharan, Caribbean Studies professor at the University of North London, brings together two visions of Caribbean history, one public, the other personal, in his discussions of race, culture and politics in Guyana and the Caribbean. In bringing together “conventional” but always insightful studies of Indo-Caribbean history (and essays on Walter Rodney and CLR James) with autobiographical explorations of the construction of his point of view, he brings rare honesty to the discussion of a historiography that is adequate to the region’s diversity.
Peepal Tree Press PB £19.99 9781845232474 336pp Literary Essays (DNF)
Ware at War 1939-1945 Derek Armes This is a revised edition of the book (first published in 2002) describing the profound changes that took place in a small Hertfordshire town during the six years of World War II. While many of its citizens were called up in the armed forces (or as ‘Bevin Boys’), everyone who remained had a role to play – as air raid wardens, fire-fighters, first aid and rescue workers, Local Defence Volunteers and members of the Home Guard, fundraisers for the ‘war effort’, hosts for evacuees, providers of comforts for the troops and many other roles. The town suffered from enemy action in a number of raids and suffered in other ways from rationing and regulations – but a strong community spirit prevailed. The book is illustrated with more than a hundred contemporary photographs.
Rockingham Press PB £12.95 9781904851608 208pp History (HBTS)
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The Knowledge Robert Peake Robert Peake’s incredible eye for detail illuminates a collection of stirring and delicately attuned poems that not only roam but actively seek – travelling far and wide to all manner of places but also moving through time, taking leaps of faith or journeys into memory and sensation. From postcards to portraits, from ancient and modern wars to cosmopolitan cities, wildlife, and even a tiny ornamental skeleton, Robert Peake finds a sharp focus for the bigger picture both far and wide and closer to home. These carefully-controlled and eloquent poems know the subtle and deep consequences from each small gesture; the ripple-effect across each story, the altering of lives and history; the still, quiet centre from which it all begins.
Nine Arches Press PB £8.99 9780993120114 72pp Poetry (DCF)
Campaign in Poetry ed. Rachel Piercey & Emma Wright Campaign in Poetry is a powerful collection of poems about political and social issues in the UK. The poems have been written by contemporary poets in the months leading up to the UK General Election, reflecting current concerns and developing events in this country as well as more global trends. Some of the sharpest minds writing today offer up shrewd, provocative thoughts on nationalism, climate change, immigration, political apathy amongst voters, arts funding and feminism in the digital age. This anthology is a statement against disaffection, providing an alternative perspective on the political landscape of the UK.
The Emma Press Pamphlet £7.50 9781910139172 40pp Poetry Anthology (DCQ)
Analogue / Digital Paul Munden Analogue/Digital brings together poems first published in Faber’s Poetry Introduction 7, and other anthologies and magazines mainly from the 1990s, with recent poems relating to travels – particularly in Australia. In between, there has been a switch from analogue to digital technologies, and this informs the selection, in which themes of loss, survival and changing horizons are reflected in the radical shift. Old and new worlds speak to each other, with their various means of recording the world – past and present – vying for attention.
Smith Doorstop PB £9.95 9781910367377 95pp Poetry (DCF)
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Cherry Pie Hollie McNish “I can’t take my ears off her.” – Benjamin Zephaniah Cherry Pie is the new collection from poet Hollie McNish, inspired by her grandparents’ advice on newspapers, war, sex and tinned cherries. The poems collected in Cherry Pie hold personal meaning for Hollie and are also those which have been most requested by audiences in theatres, pubs, festival tents, schools and youth clubs up and down the UK. The book is illustrated by Hollie’s favourite artists and illustrators inspired by the cult literary ‘zine Popshot. Cherry Pie includes Hollie’s viral poem Mathematics (1.9 million hits on YouTube) as well as ‘Bungalows and Biscuits’ which was shortlisted for Best Factual New Media Content About Older People’s Issues in the Older People in Media Awards. Her poetry has received over 3.5 million YouTube views; more than David Cameron’s speeches, less than a cat dancing to 80s pop music.
Burning Eye Books PB £9.99 9781909136557 Poetry (DCF))
Cherry Pie When my mum sliced the cherry pie on the table my grandad ran off and threw up. ‘I’m so sorry dad’, said my mum, ‘I’m so sorry I forgot that the tanks all blew up’. I was nine years old then no idea what had happened but when my papa came back he explained. Two weeks of waiting on the shore of a war beach as rowing boats came to collect them and the only thing there for the soldiers to eat were pre-packaged sweet syrup cherry tins. His mates were shot dead, The cherries were blood red, Stench of rotting and sweet fruit, He was gagging with each breath. He said, ‘War is a sham.’ We had ice cream instead He said, ‘Be kind not revengeful Hollie, Don’t believe all you read, And don’t eat cherries in syrup, Cos that stuff rots your dreams.’
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Requiem Razmik Davoyan First published in 1969, a classic Armenian text by Armenia’s most loved living writer, Requiem tells of the struggle to survive and come to terms with a terrible human catastrophe. After the Ottoman empire’s entry into the First World War on 29 October 1914, the Armenians were accused – in a few cases justly – of conspiring with the advancing Russian forces to ensure Turkish defeats. The legend of ‘Armenian treachery’ gave the Ottoman government the pretext to sanction measures designed to remove all traces of the Armenian population from the empire. For someone whose family suffered immeasurably, Requiem is an amazingly measured and considered narrative of loss and survival. In an attempt to answer the moral questions brought about by the event and its aftermath, Razmik Davoyan remembers and commemorates without bitterness.
Arc Publications PB £9.99 9781908376787 96pp Poetry (DCF)
Life Class Jo Reed Jo Reed’s second collection offers readers more of her trademark mix of memory, myth and magic; a window to a unique world where the unvarnished reality of OAP shopping trips (‘Finding the deepest trolleys, we fill our day’) sits alongside breath-taking flights of imagination (‘a turtle sings, fathoms deep, a boy held safe upon her back.’) The magic of Life Class is found in the single consciousness that connects the poems; be they set in the world of 1960s Soho, on the edge of an estuary, on a Greek island, or in the hearts and minds of Jo’s inimitable female protagonists (and the men they love – or more frequently, tolerate). An invaluable chance to read new work from this muchloved poet.
Valley Press PB £7.99 9781908853493 72pp Poetry (DCF)
Self Portrait With A Swarm of Bees Jan Wagner Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, to be published in Arc’s flagship translation series ‘Visible Poets’ combines the poet’s unerring instinct for the surprising perspective on commonplace objects or events – plants, animals, landscapes – with a mischievous delight in the detail of the absurd, the precarious balance. Wagner is a vigilant, yet playful, chronicler of the quotidian, his meticulous handling of image and sound forging a worldly, almost luminous palpability. Intensely curious, constantly attentive to novel or unanticipated possibilities afforded by traditional forms, Wagner’s poems celebrate what he has called, ‘our steaming, glowing, odorous, noisy world’.
Arc Publications PB £10.99 9781908376824 144pp Poetry (DCF)
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Kith Jo Bell Love, sex, boats and friendship. And yet Jo Bell’s second poetry collection, Kith, is about so much more, as these bold and generous poems interweave bigger questions of place, identity and community and what these mean to us, here and now. Delighting in the belting, beautiful turn-of-phrase, Jo Bell’s poems are lyrical and joyous, but always precise and clear as birdsong. They take us the long way home, plot histories along the route of backwaters, and are occasionally diverted for a roll in the hay; hearts are broken and boats are dry-docked. There will be tears, but there will also be love, safe harbours, and the company of wise and faithful kith.
Nine Arches Press PB £8.99 9780993120107 90pp Poetry (DCF)
The Oranges of Revolution Clare Saponia There is a spectre haunting the world, and Western governments do not know how to respond. From the Arab Spring and the UK riots of 2011 to civil wars in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya and the Ukraine, our rulers pick and choose their favourites, colourcoding the good revolutions and demonising those whom they cannot control as ‘terrorists’. Clare Saponia rigorously explores these confused and violent struggles, as if dissecting a blood orange – skin, pith, flesh, pips, juice – from cause to consequence, aspiration to betrayal, defeat to renewed hopes for social justice. The Oranges of Revolution is a book about democracy and power, despotism and resistance, imperialism and revolution.
Smokestack Books PB £7.95 9780992958138 64pp Poetry (DCF)
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Humfrey Coningsby Jonathan Davidson For Humfrey Coningsby – lord of the manor of Neen Sollars in South Shropshire – the world was a place of wonders and despair, of love found and then forsaken. He was a cantankerous, sentimental, petulant traveler; a gentleman soldier; a sly linguist; a confidant of Princes and Emperors; a receiver of such delights, and a doomed versifier. He walked out of this world on 10th October, 1610 – and now he walks back in, with barely a word of explanation. This series of poems, complaints, explanations and demands for satisfaction forms the narrative of a life still being lived over four hundred years later. The Siege of Strigonium in 1594 was wretched; life in Aleppo in 2014 is worse. Humfrey Coningsby’s story is also the subject of a BBC Radio Four Afternoon Drama by Jonathan Davidson, to be broadcast in Spring 2015.
Valley Press PB £7.99 9781908853486 56pp Poetry (DCF)
The Art of Falling Kim Moore The Art of Falling is Kim Moore’s keenly anticipated debut poetry collection. A young poet from Cumbria, she writes with a compelling directness and power about her life and the lives of others. Vigorously alive and often full of humour, there are poems about ordinary people: the scaffolders and plasterers, shoemakers and carers amongst us. Already a winner of multiple prizes, including the Northern Promise Award (2014), Moore writes poems that are both moving and memorable.
Penned in the Margins PB £9.99 9781781722374 Poetry (DCF)
Sunspots Simon Barraclough The sun is our local star; the most important object in our lives. But what really powers it? And who are the sun’s favourite painters? Is it a god, man, woman, or a dumb ball of matter? Simon Barraclough (Poet in Residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory) is your guide in this tour-de-force book of poetry. Sunspots condenses fact, fiction, myth, humour and emotion into a luminous meditation on the star that gives us life. Is the sun afraid of dying? It is anything we want it to be?
Penned in the Margins HB £12.99 9781908058263 80pp Poetry (DCF)
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Englaland Steve Ely After the battle of Brunanburh, when Æthelstan’s army defeated an invading alliance of Scots, Irish, Britons and Norse, the Viking mercenary Egil Skallagrimsson extemporised a panegyric for the English and their king. Englaland is a stunning re-imagining of Skallagrimsson’s song, an unapologetic and paradoxical affirmation of a bloody, bloody-minded and bloody brilliant people. Danish huscarls, Falklands war heroes, pit-village bird-nesters, aging prize-fighters, flying pickets, jihadi suicide-bombers and singing yellowhammers parade through the book in an incendiary combination, rising to the challenge of the skald’s affirmation: you are the people in the land; know you are the people; know it is your land.
Smokestack Books PB £8.95 9780992958145 164pp Poetry (DCF)
Granny’s Interpreter Ian Watson Granny’s Interpreter includes ‘new and used’, published and unpublished poems which wheel around home, belonging and memory on a sliding scale between tenderness and satire and between bereavement and celebration. Many of them have been coloured by the decades in which Ian Watson has lived an emotional tug-of-war in Germany: between mother- and motherin-law tongue, between Irish parents and their German grandchildren. They are the chronicle of a commuting heart, from the ‘big flat heavy flakes’ of his daughter’s snowman in Bremen to the drizzly final departure from his father across the Lagan in Belfast, from hedge schools in County Clare to pizza on the Somme.
Salmon Poetry PB £10.00 9781910669037 90pp Poetry (DCF)
The House of Small absences Anne Marie Fyfe The poems in Anne-Marie Fyfe’s new poetry collection, House of Small Absences, invite us to a number of beautifully rendered yet unsettling places, often inspired by her travels abroad. She carefully captures a setting with all of its colour and detail, but also evokes the spirits of a place, the past or future inhabitants, their various losses and their movements through time.
Penned in the Margin PB £9.99 9781781722404 Poetry (DCF)
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The Sound LaDDer David Attwooll “The excitement of reading David Attwooll’s poems lies in the poet’s intense relationship to language and the verbal and textual musicianship with which he treats his subject matter. From the Goths, Transylvanians and teenage samurai, escaped from the pages of books, to email spam or jazz, to memories about childhood and place, these poems capture Attwooll’s delight in the world around him.” Jenny Lewis “I like David Attwooll’s lack of pretension and preciousness. He is playful and experimental…” Hilary Menos, Sphinx Review
Two Rivers Press PB £8.95 9781909747098 72pp Poetry (DCF)
Nightwalking After Philip Sidney & Charles Mingus
The ghost of a riff on moonlit ground
The moon in jive-ass slippers dances close
- Boogie Stop Shuffle and a walking bass –
to offer back neglected things we lost:
the furthest supernova ever found,
a partner’s kiss, a porkpie hat, a face
a faint signature at the edge of space
that brightens as she coolly circles past.
ten billion years ago. We stray in Mingus landscapes here, places to play.
Two weeks of heatwave and the hottest day for seven years unpacked by warm fat rain: the scents of earth and river, dung and hay, sweet and rotten, beneath a perigee moon.
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Terrace Richard Skinner The Argentinean writer Borges once observed that the ‘imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.’ Terrace is a book of short-stories and short-films in verse, told through oblique glances, hints and understatements, landscapes and lists, ekphrasis and myth, cutups and haiku, It is a book about the meanings of perfume, light and colour, exploring the world in a series of striking images, and juxtaposing them in unexpected ways to reveal at the end the ‘bigger picture’ that was always there, only hidden. Richard Skinner is the author of three novels published by Faber – The Red Dancer (translated into seven languages), The Velvet Gentleman (shortlisted for the Prix Livres & Musiques) and The Mirror.
Smokestack Books PB £4.99 9780992958152 40pp Poetry (DCF)
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The Strange Years of My Life Nicholas Laughlin This anticipated work from a young Trinidadian author chronicles personal and political observations in a hugely engaging way.
Peepal Tree Press PB £8.99 9781845232924 84pp Poetry (DCF)
Those April Fevers
In Search of Home
Mary O’Donnell
Chris Considine
Intergalactic, these poems travel from outer space via the moon to coffee tables at a luxuriously considered pace. In doing so they crackle with precision, dance between love and horror, curiosity and wonder.
A new collection from the poet shortlisted for Forward Prize for best first collection, In Search of Home moves around a single theme with extraordinary range. Accomplished and intelligent, this is poetry that always satisfies: witty, literate, compassionate and beautifully measured, Chris Considine explores what it means to belong, what might constitute identity, what we might mean by ‘home’ when:
The narrators are as diverse as their subjects, their tones ranging through wry, wistful, lusty and political. There is surrealism here, a world turned upside down by climate change, newly-charged mythologies that shake what we thought we understood about the order of things, and our relationships.
Arc Publications PB £9.99 9781908376572 96pp Poetry (DCF))
“I’m little more than shreds snagged on nails of this and that loved and abandoned place” (Far to Go)
Cinnamon Press PB £8.99 9781909077539 80pp Poetry (DCF)
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Time Travel Hotel Clive Birnie Black McCarthy is despatched to INTERFOLD – The Time Travel Hotel Republic to track down “Eugenides”. His client, the Wolf, is constantly on his back demanding progress as INTERFOLD keeps shifting time and place and throwing up residency and immigration anomalies. Help of a kind is on hand via the Dwarf with the Horse, the Man Who Fell Through Floors, the Girl With Nine Lives, the Nurse With The Curse, and Joylin – the INTERFOLD receptionist. But who is Eugenides? The Man Who Lived in a Vacuum Cleaner? The Man Who Dreamt He Was Dreaming? One of the other oddball residents of the wayward republic? Is winding up naked in a sauna elevator in the Car Park at Infinity really going to help? Unfortunately for Black, his client is not the only one who wants Eugenides found, Black is possibly the worst detective money can buy and time is not only against him but ignoring all the usual rules. Beneath the black humour, Time Travel Hotel is an exploration of identity and whether we are defined by a place of origin, residence, citizenship or by the decisions that propel us through life. It is a book about regret and missed opportunities. A book about going back – if only you could.
Burning Eye Books PB £9.99 9781909136526 176pp Science Fiction (FL)
Stranger, Visitor, Foreigner, Guest Elizabeth Porter Stranger, Visitor, Foreigner, Guest is the story of a collision of worlds and the ways in which westerners interact and impact on an extraordinary social and political arena told in first person narratives by Sasha, a young American, and in the 19th century by Lucy, a would-be missionary. At the heart of the novel are the true events of the Bushiri war. Lucy’s involvement in this war has huge repercussions for Sasha a hundred years later when he tries to make a new life for himself in Tanzania as a water engineer, where he meets and falls in love with Grace. A powerful and beautifully observed debut novel, Stranger, Visitor, Foreigner, Guest explores identity, belonging and the fragility of personal happiness against the backdrop larger events.
Cinnamon Press PB £9.99 9781909077645 320pp Fiction (FA)
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Prismns Garth St. Omer A new novel from a classic St. Lucian author, Prismns re-affirms St. Omerís leading status.
Peepal Tree Press PB £9.99 9781845232429 196pp Fiction (FA)
A Shadowed Livery Charlie Garratt Two people have been found dead in the grounds of a Warwickshire house: it seems clear that Lady Isabel Barleigh has shot her disabled son on the eve of his wedding then turned the weapon on herself. An hour later his fiancée, distraught with grief, committed suicide. The case is all but closed but Inspector James Given doesn’t believe this version of events and, with the local policeman, Constable Sawyer, begins to dig further into the past of the Barleigh family. Meanwhile, Given’s own past – his very nature, hidden from all – begins to catch up with him. A complex mystery about identity, deceit, and past crimes, inspired by a true story.
Holland House PB £8.99 9781909374904 Crime Fiction (FF)
Terroir Graham Mort From England to Europe, Africa to South America, these stories from prizewinning short-story writer Graham Mort explore relationships: father and child; man and wife; man and his environment. A rising star of winemaking understands his terroir, but oversteps the boundaries; a father taking his son on a day out finds himself in unexpectedly terrifying circumstances; an aid worker in Uganda finds himself treading in his father’s footsteps… All these stories are sensitively told and beautifully written, bringing fresh perspectives to our place in the world around us.
Seren PB £8.99 9781781722305 Short Stories (FYB)
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The Mark J.L. Fontaine Liam O’Connell is a man haunted by his past, who lives by stealing, scavenging and tricking those he meets. He takes shelter in a derelict cottage belonging to the recently widowed Laura West, and the unlikely pair begin a relationship. After a visit from Liam’s estranged wife, Peggy, they are left with Danny, the child she claims is Liam’s, currently living in care. The pressure on all sides leads to a complete breakdown between Liam and Laura and he leaves. On his return a year later Liam discovers that Danny is living at Laura’s house and has sworn to kill him. Now Liam has to find a way to survive Danny without losing Laura. A story of guilt, loss and redemptive love.
Holland House PB £8.99 9781909374379 Fiction (FA)
The Whale House and Other Stories SHARON MILLAR Millar’s 2013 Commonwealth Prize collection examines everyday localities and human complexities in beautifully subtle snapshots.
Peepal Tree Press PB £8.99 9781845232498 196pp Fiction (FA)
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Quartet Jennifer Bailey, Helen Holmes, Jane McLaughlin & Jez Noond A short story anthology from talented quartet of emerging writers. Jennifer Bailey has had a number of stories published in Slow Dancer, The New Writer, Fish Anthology, Staple, and by Cinnamon Press. A novella, Pictures of Margaret, was runnerup in this year’s Manchester Metropolitan University Novella Competition. One of Helen Holmes’ short stories won a New Writing North competition; others have been shortlisted for Cinnamon Press, Mslexia, The Fine Line and Lightship competitions. Jane McLaughlin writes poetry and fiction and her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2012 and shortlisted in the Bridport Prize 2013. Jez Noond’s short fiction has been long-listed for the Bristol Short Story Prize and found publication with Cinnamon Press.
Cinnamon Press PB £9.99 9781909077652 280pp Short Stories (FYB)
J – Black Bam and the Masqueraders Garth St Omer St. Omer’s last published novel reappears as part of the Caribbean Modern Classics collection
Peepal Tress Press PB £9.99 9781845232436 196pp Fiction (FA)
The Ten Day’s Executive and Other Stories Rhoda BharAth This debut collection promises to be a series of politically-charged snapshots of Trinidadian life.
Peepal Tree Press PB £8.99 9781845232931 196pp Fiction (FA)
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My Father’s Dreams Evald Flisar My Father’s Dreams: A Tale of Innocence Abused, is a controversial and shocking novel by Slovenia’s bestselling author Evald Flisar, and is regarded by many critics as his best. The book tells the story of fourteen-year-old Adam, the only son of a village doctor and his quiet wife, living in apparent rural harmony. But this is a topsy-turvy world of illusions and hopes, in which the author plays with the function of dreaming and story-telling to present the reader with an eccentric ‘bildungsroman’ in reverse. Spiced with unusual and original overtones of the grotesque, the history of an insidious deception is revealed, in which the unsuspecting son and his mother will be the apparent victims; and yet who can tell whether the gruesome end is reality or just another dream…
Istros Books PB £9.99 9781908236227 200pp Fiction (FA)
Murder at the Star Steve Adams In 1921 God-fearing, bible-quoting, partially deaf Thomas Thomas was brutally murdered at the branch of Star Stores he managed in South Wales. His body was discovered the next morning, his head smashed, his throat cut and with a stab wound to the stomach. The store safe was bare: over £126 was missing, but was this more than a horribly botched robbery? Out of their depth, the local police called Scotland Yard and DI George Nicholls duly arrived from London to identify a number of suspects in the town. Some had a potential motive, some the opportunity to commit the crime, but extensive investigations proved inconclusive and Nicholls returned to London with the case unsolved. So the identity of the killer died with him and the case consigned to history, until now.
Seren PB £9.99 9781781722558 200pp True Crime (BTC)
Holy Wells: Scotland Phil Cope As in so many areas of Britain sacred wells persist in Scotland in the face of modernity. Holy Wells: Scotland is an exploration of just some of the many hundreds of wells in the country, carefully researched and beautifully photographed by experienced well-hunter Phil Cope. The book is a sweeping journey from the northwards from the Borders through mainland Scotland to the Orkneys before sweeping through the Hebrides to end on the sacred isle of Iona and is both a record of some of the country’s many wells and a celebration of their continuing relevance to the identity of Scotland today. Holy Wells: Scotland is the fourth title in the Holy Wells series, which includes books on Wales, Cornwall and Borderlands.
Seren HB £25.00 9781781722589 272pp Heritage (GM)
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Wages Paid James Carnegie This classic reappears in an updated revision of the original short story set on a slave plantation.
Peepal Tree Press PB £8.99 9781845232153 128pp Fiction (FA)
Patria and Other Stories ed. Jan Fortune A short story anthology from ten talented emerging writers, the winning and runner-up entrants of the 2014 Cinnamon Press Short Story Prize. Adnan Mahmutovic’s story ‘Your Camp: Survivor’s Guilt’ deals with the aftermath of conflict: “The voice here is taut, urgent. The story the echoes that will not leave even those who escape.” Zoe Gilbert’s ‘Mawkin’ is a haunting and beautiful piece of prose: “carefully judged, lucid, the gentle unfolding of events at once intimate, poignant and almost mythical.” The winning and title piece, ‘Patria’ by Kerry Hood, is a “poignant, acutely observed story is a small northern community that happens to have an airfield nearby, and is the place where bodies of dead servicemen are brought back home from conflicts abroad. The prose is excellent – the story very memorable.”
Cinnamon Press PB £9.99 9781909077688 180pp Short Stories (FYB)
Vitus Dreams Adam Craig Taking the explorer, Vitus Bering, as its point of departure, this innovative and extraordinary novel explores dreams and waking, reality and loss. Why do we give primacy to waking rather than dream experience? What is the nature of symbol? What might the concept of authorship mean? Linguistically playful, lyrical and poignant, Vitus Dreams explores these questions through surprising and convincing characters: from Ulysses to John Franklin, from the wives left behind to Vitus Bering himself. Weaving mythology with visually inventive passages, the text ranges from Russia to Bruges, from sea to land, from meta-fiction to concrete poetry. Vitus Dreams is a literary tour de force; tightly constructed and brimming with wit and humanity.
Cinnamon Press HB £11.99 9781909077676 260pp Fiction (FA)
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Homunculus
Limestone Man
Aleksandar Prokopiev
Robert Minhinnick
Homunculus is billed as a collection of sixteen ‘fairy tales for adults’ with something for every reader. The author has largely retained the classical fairy-tale structure with its elements of surprise and the constant intertwining of the real and unreal, but he transcends the sugar-sweet endings we are familiar with.
A meditation on age and opportunity by prizewinning author Robert Minhinnick. Limestone Man is the follow up to the 2007 Ondaatje shortlisted Sea Holly.
Along with typical fairy-tale features like the interplay of humans and animals, he presents us with a wide range of more mature themes – the erotic, the tragic, the absurd – set amidst dichotomies on an adult wavelength: mythical vs. urban, banality vs. wisdom, as well as issues of guilt and longing. Some of the stories are related to existing internationally known fairy tales such as ‘Tom Thumb’, where the main character struggles with an oedipal bond with his mother, or ‘The Huntsman’, told from the perspective of the hunter sent out to kill Snow White. Others go back to Macedonian folk roots or have been freely composed by Prokopiev himself, but all of them are rendered with humour, skill and a noticeable love of life!
Istros Books PB £9.99 9781908236234 175pp Short Stories (FYB)
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Richard Parry is a painter who cannot paint, a writer who doesn’t write. His obsession is Lulu, that ‘orphan off the street’, his aboriginal ‘green child’. But on returning from Australia to his hometown he finds it has become notorious for the suicides of young people. As Parry tries to connect past and present he is haunted by dreams of Australia and of his youth. Yet is Parry all he seems? How trustworthy is memory? And what has become of orphan Lulu?
Seren PB £9.99 9781781722497 220pp Fiction (FA)
Babbicam Rod Madoks In a backyard junk sale a young American poet finds some vintage recordings of John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee telling his story; he was known as ‘the man they could not hang’ throughout England, having survived execution. He claimed he was saved from death because he was innocent of the bloody crime. As the poet goes in search of the truth about Lee he must escape his own ghosts, and before the past can yield up all of its secrets, he must first go back to the original scene of the crime — that mysterious Devonshire beach the locals called Babbicam. A novel about guilt, meaning, and the ghosts all around us.
Holland House PB £9.99 9781909374829 400pp Fiction (FA)
Brian Wilson in Swansea Bus Station Graham Fulton We give names to everything. Our species, our children, our cities, our streets, our emotions. All the spaces in between. Labels of logic. We use language and reason to try and keep a grip on the ungrippable, maintain the belief that we’re comfortably in control of the world and ourselves. Hold the uncaring chaos that’s scratching beneath the surface at bay. Packed with Fulton’s trademark energy, intense driving rhythms, hard humour and baffled humanity, Brian Wilson in Swansea Bus Station carries us on a wild febrile trip, encountering many people and places, ‘normality’ and ‘order’ in all its guises. At the end of the day mortality is the great leveller, and fame and success are a misty illusion, whether it’s an icon, a pop star, a comedian, a scientist, or a Nobel prize winning writer. We have to keep on trying, even though we know we’re all random particles happily travelling to dust on a bus.
Red Squirrel Press PB £8.99 9781910437094 68pp Poetry (DCF)
PaperCuts Bernadette Cremin Papercuts includes poems from four previous collections (Perfect Mess, Speechless, Miming Silence and Loose Ends) alongside new work, spanning over twenty years. The collection is a testament to the human condition in all its moods, particularly melancholia; a precious state of mind. It shamelessly flirts with the absurdities of life familiar to us all, paying particular attention to the seeming trivial and incidental details that can speak so aptly. Papercuts gives a glimpse of life; messy because it is honest. Untidy because life is. There’s a lot of love lurking in this collection ... and every single word is meant intensely.
Salmon Poetry PB £10.00 9781910669051 Poetry (DCF)
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Rogue Teacher Mark Grist Rogue Teacher is the debut poetry collection from hugely popular Spoken Word artist Mark Grist. It contains his most popular performance pieces including work from his live shows – Dead Poetry and Rogue Teacher, as well as material from his new Spoken Word shows Dead Poets’ Deathmatch, and Grave Invaders (both set to tour in 2015 and 2016). The collection contains his hugely popular poem ‘Girls Who Read’, a piece which has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube. Seen in every country in the world, the film was honoured with two Webby awards for ‘best solo performance’ and ‘best viral video.’
Burning Eye Books PB £9.99 9781909136533 80pp Poetry (DCF)
THE GOOD DARK Ryan Van Winkle “intimate and haunting” – the Guardian The Good Dark is the place we go to remember. The Good Dark is the place we go to take account. In his powerful second collection, Ryan Van Winkle charts loves won and loves lost. A lyric voice that is both familiar and strangely different leads us through the forests of memory and towards a grim acknowledgement of the obligation to get up, to be careful, to move. The Good Dark includes poems from Van Winkle’s acclaimed one-on-one poetry performance Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel (Edinburgh Fringe 2012) and cements his reputation as one of the most evocative poets writing today. He has performed the poetry/theatre show Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel at Battersea Arts Centre, London Literature Festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it was the 6th highest rated show of 2012. He was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2012. He lives in Edinburgh, where he is Poet in Residence at Edinburgh City Libraries.
Penned in the Margins PB £9.99 9781908058287 Poetry (DCF)
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A Beginner’s Guide to Cheating Andy Jackson
Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal Charles Baudelaire The poems of The Flowers of Evil were written in Paris at a time of revolution and accelerating change – the beginning of mass culture, the rise of consumerism and the middle-class, the radical redevelopment of the city by Haussmann – and they provide many parallels with the malaise and uncertainties of contemporary capitalist societies. Here we find poems about love (and love-hate), birds and beasts, Paris scenes and street people; about spiritual revolt, wine, death, travel and far-away places. The poet’s voice is by turns ironical, angry and compassionate, his words charged with anguish, desire and rapture.
Andy Jackson takes his poetic inspiration from the most unlikely sources; the inner secrets of dentistry, legends of music hall, conspiracy theories, dance crazes, cult movies and public conveniences. Quirky and engaging, his poetry is accessible but rooted in strong image and narrative. His first collection The Assassination Museum was published by Red Squirrel Press in 2010, and was described by Ian McMillan as “alive with possibility and excitement”. A Beginner’s Guide To Cheating contains a host of unusual people and situations portrayed with pathos and surreal comedy. Each page turn introduces the reader to strange new characters; fingerprinters, TV wrestlers, Royal couples, dentists, code-breakers, police suspects, all of whom are brought to life through vivid and accessible narrative poetry.
Red Squirrel Press PB £8.99 9781910437117 68pp Poetry (DCF)
Arc Publications PB £11.99 9781908376404 192pp Poetry (DCF)
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Whereupon What absence we sought in the loose weave of light and shadow, eluded. We could only wait out the long burn of winter, each feeling the weight of weather, folding each into himself denying the sly making of small miracles. Cocooned, we did not know whose grief we held or who would listen to our plaint. Mute, we only knew brute omission left absence harder to bear than scourge of stone: the fig-and-nettle broth of lies that followed loss, hollowed grief to a reed. (Previously appeared in Agenda)
An Unfinished Sufficiency Ruth O’Callaghan Philosophical, exuberant incantatory sensual and meditative these poems embrace the complexities of death loss and love. Although observed with a detached eye their unflinching truth is simultaneously intimate and compassionate. The poems, written in both formal and free verse, constantly explore the boundaries within the human situation. The poet’s fascination with words and language lend both a lyricism and restraint while her rhythms echo those of time, love, loss and grief.
Salmon Poetry PB £10.00 9781910669044 80pp Poetry (DCF)
The Weight of Light Chris Powici Chris Powici’s poems range from the shed door to the back of beyond, from a rain swept railway station to a graveyard on Skye. Along the way he writes about otters, cave paintings, moorland rivers, bird cries and abandoned boats, in search of those moments when the human and the wild rub up against one another and we find ourselves suddenly, mysteriously at home on this ‘good, wet earth’. His poetry has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including New Writing Scotland, Other Poetry, The Interpreter’s House, The Gutter and BBC Wildlife.
Red Squirrel Press PB £8.99 9781910437100 68pp Poetry (DCF)
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The Emma Press Anthology of Dance ed. by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright The Emma Press Anthology of Dance is a celebration of dance and the role it plays in people’s lives. This lively collection considers the formal occasions where dancing is expected – weddings, school discos and office parties – as well as the impromptu moments where dancing is drawn from us on a more primal level. Flirting in the kitchen that becomes a shuffle choreographed by intimacy; a weary couple who find solace in a drunken half-stumble half-jig. What makes us start dancing? Why do we ever stop? This anthology examines the defiance and drama of dancing both on stage and off, capturing the passion and exhilaration of rhythmic motion to music.
The Emma Press PB £10.00 9781910139158 96pp Poetry (DCF)
The Green Gate Fiona Owen The Green Gate sees Fiona Owen working at the peak of her talent. Deftly exploring landscapes, both interior and with a finely tuned sense of place, this is eloquent, lyrical and courageous poetry in which the threads of encounter continually weave. There is a degree of openness in Owen’s poetry that constantly surprises and satisfies. Experiences that might vanish are noted with lucid precision. The language is inventive and the images are not only original, but seem to be part of the order of things. Another remarkable collection from an accomplished poet.
Cinnamon Press PB £8.99 9781909077683 80pp Poetry (DCF)
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Low Maintenance: Selected and New Poems John Forth John Forth was born in Bethnal Green and recently retired from teaching English after thirty-odd years. He has published three collections – Malcontents (1994), A Ladder & Some Glasses (1998) and The Demon’s Phenomenal Filmshow (2012). Low Maintenance usually refers to a kind of quiet rootedness and John’s new poems search for it in a range of unusual places and people – from rural Somerset to the beaches of British Columbia, superheroes to stonemasons. Several cast a sympathetic eye on apocalyptic events both real and imagined, but mostly they are hymns to the unsung, each celebrating the immediacy of its moment.
Rockingham Press PB £5.00 9781904851615 208pp Poetry (DCF)
Endless Running Games Gareth Durastow Poet Gareth Durasow debuts his first full-length collection. Endless Running Games is many things. It is poetry for the people who collected insects when they were kids and dreamt of becoming spies. It is poetry for those who want the thrill of a whale hunt without getting sea in their boots. It is sublimely awkward poetry and gangly upstart poetry. It is poetry that can show you how to spot a replicant, how to stand toe-to-toe with Bruce Lee, how to find the sonnet in computer code and phishing spam. It is poetry that will grip you in its force field until you learn to roll with it.
Dog Horn Publishing PB £8.99 9781907133909 64pp Poetry (DCF)
The Road to Zagora Richard Collins Diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease novelist Richard Collins resolves to travel the world, searching out its remote places, physically and culturally, while his condition allows and India, Nepal, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Peru and Equador are his destinations. The Road to Zagora explores both the world and his illness. As inveterate walkers Collins and his partner Flic decided to leave the tourist trails and visit places of extremes: the Himalayas, rainforests, deserts. The difficulties of rough terrain, altitude, extremes of climate for a person with Collins’ condition are an ongoing strand of his narrative; occasionally they cannot be overcome and Collins is forced to consider the frailties of the human body in passages of moving contemplation. The Road to Zagora is a memorable journey around the world, and the self.
Seren PB £9.99 9781781722596 220pp Memoir (BM)
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Falling Out of the Sky ed. by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright Falling out of the Sky is a treasury of poems which retell classic myths, legends and fairytales from across the world in fun, often tongue-in-cheek ways. Hansel and Gretel’s witch takes us behind the scenes of the construction of her gingerbread cottage, and Medusa explains how the snakes on her head rule out a lot of options in everyday life – wearing a hat, for example. Full of alternate viewpoints and spirited new versions of old stories, Falling out the Sky is a friendly introduction to poetry as well as the joy of literature. These are poems which parents can read aloud to younger children, and which older children can read to themselves, delighting in the mischief and invention of the poets.
The Emma Press PB £8.50 9781910139189 56pp Children’s Poetry (YDP)
Barearse Boy John Tait Jon Tait’s family have lived in the hills of the AngloScottish borders for at least six hundred years. He is a direct descendent of a notorious seventeenth-century reiver family who lived in Barearse near Yetholm in Scotland, rustling cattle, burning farms and putting their neighbours to the sword. In this modern take on Scott’s Border Minstrelsy, Tait follows the reiver people as they are forced from their rural heartlands into the industrial and post-industrial North East of England in search of work. If Kinmont Willie Armstrong were around today, he would recognise himself and his people in a book that celebrates the working class culture of the North. Written with the lawless spirit as well as the dourness and defiance of the original Border Ballads, Barearse Boy is as rooted in the purple heather moorlands of the borders as the writer himself.
Smokestack Books PB £7.95 9780992958190 96pp Poetry (DCF)
Scumbled Lesley J. Ingram “Lesley Ingram’s wild, direct poems enfold furies and flowers. They throb with colours, ‘anger-red’, ‘as green as the kelp shawl’. Compellingly strange, Ingram’s lines re-create both the menace of the ‘Butterfly Whisperer’, and the ‘Fire-starter’s’ memories of ‘the cold of flight’. This is a vivid, vital first collection.”Alison Brackenbury “A haunting collection whose returns to sea, salt and bone explore the brackishness of human relations, the kinship we crave with the non-human, and our desire to trade flesh for something less encumbering.” Damian Walford Davies
Cinnamon Press PB £8.99 9781909077720 80pp Poetry (DCF)
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The Sistine Gaze Seamus Cashman In Seamus Cashman’s poem ‘The Sistine Gaze: I too begin with scaffolding’ the poet’s gaze is mirrored in responses of the Ceiling and Last Judgement Wall frescoes — received via ‘voices’ of the muse and of the painter, Michelangelo. The conversation is a meditation which confronts and contemplates thought and idea in a spiral of image and metaphor. The poem’s ‘gaze’ focuses melodically through the creative process, mythologies, the god, the ungodly, and corporealities, through its thirty-one ‘Movements’. It rides high – indeed luxuriates – on the riches of Michelangelo’s great masterpieces. It faces personal doubt as issues of human certainty and the artist at work become its central strands. Death, transcendence and subjection to social realities inform the work’s wave-like spiralling as it unwinds through the magnificence of the human body to encounters with destiny.
Salmon Poetry PB £10.00 9781910669068 90pp Poetry (DCF)
Blood Work Matthew Siegal “This unexpected book – a genuine contribution to the literature of illness – centers on containment: how we contain our blood, how blood is contained in tubes and vials, how sometimes we do not seem contained by our bodies, and sometimes the body seems to contain nothing, and even how in the face of control or self-reliance leaking away, we might manage to contain ourselves, to feel held, to feel held in place. The deceptive directness of Matthew Siegel’s debut is remarkable; in his capable hands, illness reveals how barely contained any human being is, and how we reach, alone and together, for whatever will hold us.” Mark Doty “Matthew Siegel’s poems see the world with an immediacy and compassion that could only come from the decision to be vulnerable. It’s such a simple-seeming principle of poetry – yet it is as rare as hen’s teeth. I honor this young poet for the freshness and skill in these poems, his allegiance to the most unpretentious areas of experience, and his courageteaching heart. Blood Work is a wonderful first book.” Tony Hoagland
CB Editions PB £8.99 9781909585058 80pp Poetry (DCF)
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insatiable carrot Judy Kendall insatiable carrot continues Judy Kendall’s constant exploration of form and image, both visual and linguistic in an innovative new collection that centres around the theme of gardening. Ambitious, sometimes challenging, often deftly humourous, these are vivid, honed pieces, like ‘My northern flowerbed’ of which Philip Gross said: ‘With a faithful, almost dogged particularity, this poem refuses itself even the comforting sweep of a whole sentence, keeping so close to the cold, clear details of its subject that the other just-possible, metaphorical, personal sense of what it might imply creeps up unnoticed in the reader. Yes, it grows.’
Cinnamon Press PB £8.99 9781909077713 80pp Poetry (DCF)
Paul Bunyan Larry Beckett The US poet Larry Beckett’s songs have been recorded by musicians all over the world; Song to the Siren alone has been covered by Tim Buckley, David Gray, This Mortal Coil, Robert Plant, Bryan Ferry, Half Man Half Biscuit, George Michael and Sinead O’Connor. Beckett is also known in the US as a widely respected poet who has been writing, for over forty years, a series of long poems exploring the intersections of North American history, myth and song. Paul Bunyan re-tells the legend of the giant lumberjack for the twenty-first century. Drawing on logger folklore, James Stevens’ stories and the Davy Crockett almanacs, Larry Beckett’s poem is a modern epic in ‘long-winded’ blank verse. It is a celebration of the everyday poetry of colloquial North American English, loose and rough, bragging and unbelievable. Like its eponymous hero, the poem has no purpose but plenty of pioneer spirit, drifting westward like the loggers from Maine to Oregon.
Smokestack Books PB £9.95 9780992958176 136pp Poetry (DCF)
The Man at the Corner Table Rosie Shepperd Rosie Shepperd’s debut poetry collection, The Man at the Corner Table, crackles with the unexpected. The voice is one of urban sophistication; a merciless charm that teases and tempts us with sensual evocations of food and place. The reader is surprised with tastes, scents, colours and textures. There is a winning insistence on detail offered with an irony that blends into satire. Formally, these are poems of skill and erudition in the way they voice themselves as objects of both desire and satire. We are interrupted in our reading as we realize that we are staring at themes that are both vital and lethal: love, desire, grief and death. Like a secret recipe, the author’s technique is invisible, leaving us with poems whose flavours linger and become something that surprises and changes us.
Seren PB £9.99 9781781722466 Poetry (DCF)
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Infragreen Kate Bingham “Kate Bingham’s Quicksand Beach, shortlisted for the Forward Prize, offers an urgent interrogation of the ways in which we love – as parents and children, husbands and wives. Her command of form is enviable and her grasp of subject-matter complete.” the Guardian “Bingham has the unusual ability to write convincingly and infectiously about happiness – the happiness of family and parenthood.” Sunday Times The two short poems that open the book establish a sense of tone. They illuminate a state of transition, where perception becomes thought, where imagination begins ‘like photosynthesis’. The poems in the opening section are mostly set in the city and to describe their subject matter: the rain, a bus trip, listening to the radio, unwrapping flowers, taking the car to be cleaned, does not reveal the way they subtly accumulate detail and by implication, narratives of daily life. Perceptive, persuasive and carefully crafted, the poems of Kate Bingham’s third collection, Infragreen, are a joy to read. Although she writes mostly about the quotidian, her sympathetic wit and keen eye can transform the everyday, allowing us to see things as if for the first time, with a shimmering freshness.
Seren PB £9.99 9781781722435 Poetry (DCF)
Show Me Life Liv Torc “I wanted you to change me, so I chose you…” It doesn’t matter how successful you are, or how many times you have dyed your hair purple and walked out onto the stage of a local folk festival holding a notebook and a banjolele. It makes no odds how many pairs of boots you own, or sex you have had with strangers. It doesn’t even matter how many times you have scooped up the smashed up porridge of your heart and poured it back into the jelly mould of your ribs. What matters is that we keep moving forward, despite ourselves, despite everyone else… that we remember that life is not a hamster wheel but an ocean, a road, a dirt track, an adventure that takes you on, on, on. Show Me Life peers into dark corners of sexuality and strolls along Italian city streets. It free-falls into love and then tests that love over and over. It gets sad and thoughtful, pregnant and angry. It splinters into a billion pieces and becomes something quite different. Something with a lot more to lose.
Burning Eye Books PB £9.99 9781909136540 80pp Poetry (DCF)
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Mildew Paulette Jonguitud Twenty-four hours before her daughter’s wedding, Constanza discovers a green spot – ‘irregular in form and velvety to the touch’– at the top of her left leg. She has things to do: the wedding dress to finish, dealing with the fall-out from her husband’s affair with her niece. Meanwhile, the spot grows, threatening to take over her whole body. Mildew, translated from the Spanish by the author, blends horror with psychological realism. Narrated over the course of one day, it touches upon childhood memories, ageing and disappointment, and expands into the mystery of the relationship between body and mind.
CB Editions PB £8.99 9781909585034 96pp Fiction (FFA)
Imaginary Cities Darran Anderson Inspired by the surreal accounts of the explorer and ‘man of a million lies’ Marco Polo, Imaginary Cities charts the metropolis and the imagination, and the symbiosis therein. A work of creative non-fiction, the book roams through space, time and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks to move beyond the clichés of psychogeography and hauntology, to not simply revisit the urban past, or our relationship with it, but to invade and reinvent it. Following in the lineage of Borges, Calvino, Chris Marker and Kenneth White, the book examines the city from global macrocosm to the microcosm of its inhabitants’ perspectives. It rethinks the ideas of utopias and dystopias, urban exploration, alienation and resistance.
Influx Press PB £11.99 9780992765590 304pp Creative Non-fiction
Losing Israel Jasmine Donahaye In 2007, while researching her family history, Jasmine Donahaye stumbled upon the collusion of her grandparents’ in the displacement of Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s – an early ethnic cleansing in which villages were erased to prevent the return of Palestinians. She set out to uncover a piece of Israel’s hidden history, and a part of family’s story unknown to her. What she found challenged everything she thought she knew about the country and her family, and transformed her understanding of the place, and of herself. Losing Israel is a moving and honest account which spans travel writing, nature writing and memoir.
Seren PB £12.99 9781781722527 160pp Memoir (BM)
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The Lost art of sinking Naomi Booth “a mysterious and otherworldly piece of writing – one that contains both the lavishly gothic and the familiar and domestic.” – Jenn Ashworth Some call it The Fainting Game, others Indian Headrush – but it’s all the rage amongst the girls of Class 2B. “It makes you go all rushy. You feel like you’re falling into a dream.” This is the story of Esther, who lives in the Pennines with her father. Esther is obsessed with experimenting with different ways to pass out: from snorting Daz powder at school to attempted auto-asphyxiation in a serviced apartment in north London. But what happens when you take something too far? And what has Esther’s mother, a beautiful dancer wasting away in her bedroom, to do with it all? The Lost Art of Sinking is a dark comedy about losing yourself. Sensual, funny and exquisitely written, this bold novella introduces a fresh new literary voice in Naomi Booth.
Penned in the Margins HB £12.99 9781908058294 Fiction (FA)
On a Wandering Planet Jean Harrison As traffic rises and congestion soars society knows that something has to be done, but what if that something was not anti-congestion measures, but tearing down houses to create a mobile population, living in vans, available as needed? What if, to protect the environment, we cut ourselves off from the environment entirely? In a mechanised society ‘free’ from nature, Miranda, recently bereaved, struggling with loss of the natural world as well as loss of her partner, Elizabeth, and increasingly suspicious of the rhetoric of perpetual wandering, begins to piece together how society came to move so far and how there might, after all, be another key. This compelling debut novel combines the fast pacing of an intelligent exploratory novel with a character driven narrative; inventive and highly accessible, On A Wandering Planet asks important questions and dares to imagine.
Cinnamon Press PB £9.99 9781909077706 300pp Fiction (FA)
Nine Lives and the Darkest Part of the Night Zodwa Nyoni Nine Lives follows a gay Zimbabwean’s quest for asylum in the UK, and the extraordinary tale he has to tell. After fleeing from persecution, Ishmael finds himself alone in a flat in Armley, Leeds. He’s waiting for a Home Office letter that he hopes will free him from his past and allow him to start a new life. He fears being sent back and he struggles calling this new place home. In The Darkest Part of the Night, Shirley decides that her brother, Dwight, must go to a home after their mother dies. She doesn’t expect him to stage a protest in the middle of the church on the day of the funeral. Dwight wants to be heard. Shirley feels burdened and responsible for her disabled brother. And Donnelley, Shirley’s husband, feels ignored and overshadowed. Though not the ideal moment, it’s time for the family to talk properly.
Dog Horn Publishing PB £8.99 9781907133541 64pp Drama (DD)
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D is for Dinosaurs Ned Elliott & Charles C Somerville D is for Dinosaurs is a colourful A to Z book, which is full of amazing facts about the world of dinosaurs. Whether you are a young or old, it is easy to see why dinosaurs continue to fascinate us as we find out more about them and develop more theories about their lives and their eventual decline. We’ve recently learned that dinosaurs were brightly coloured with the discovery that some had ginger feathers. The largest dinosaur ever to be discovered was only unearthed last year and there’s evidence to show that some dinosaurs may have been venomous – if you didn’t think they were scary enough already! And if you think that seeing a single Magpie is unlucky, at least it doesn’t have teeth – unlike its dinosaur ancestors!
Hogs Back Books PB £6.99 9781907432200 32pp Children’s Picture Book (YBC)
Big Dog and Squiz Lloyd Sherratt & Lynne Hudson Perhaps you have a friend like Big Dog, someone who will lead you on an adventure, carry you across a stream, clear a path for you and help you on your way. But perhaps one day, your friend may need your help in return. This story explores the friendship between Big Dog and Squiz – a squirrel. Follow them as they set off to explore and see how Squiz’s quick thinking helps to save the day.
Hogs Back Books PB £6.99 9781907432217 32pp Children’s Picture Book (YBC)
The Granimal Alexander Christian & Tanya Fenton Deep in a forest lies Pug’s Hole – home to a group of peculiar and opinionated creatures, who like nothing better than to eat, sleep and ponder over the world around them. And what could provide something better to ponder on than the arrival of a mysterious, large, pink Egg? Who or what will hatch out of it and what adventures will result?
Hogs Back Books PB £6.99 9781907432224 Children’s Picture Book (YBC)
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P U B LI S HER S
Dead Ink Dead Ink is a small, ambitious and experimental literary publisher based in London and Manchester. They are completely independent: they have no funding, no sponsors and no agenda. The team work together as a collective and, despite having their own niches, are all involved in every part of the publishing programme. They are dedicated to bringing the most challenging and experimental new writing out from the underground and presenting it to audiences in the most beautiful and artisan way possible. Readers form an integral part of the Dead Ink team. You don’t simply buy a Dead Ink book, you invest in the authors and the books you love.
Wild Ink
Brick Mother
Controller
Richard Smyth
SJ Bradley
Sally Ashton
Wild Ink is a blackly comic story of friendship and envy, love and memory, booze and uproar, secrets and scandal.
Neriste and Donna both work at the notorious Cedar Hospital Heathley, a secure psychiatric unit that is understaffed and underfunded – a place where doors are kept locked, where the staff carry panic alarms, and where even a pen has to be treated as a weapon.
How far would you go to satisfy your desires? Sex and punishment, art and exploitation, Controller is the debut novella from one of the UK’s finest young writers.
Albert Chaliapin is dead – or at least, he feels like he ought to be. He lives in a world occupied only by the ghosts of his former life (and his nurse, who can’t even get his name right). Then, one day, his past – in the form of a drunk cartoonist, a suicidal hack and a corrupt City banker – pays a visit, and Chaliapin is resurrected, whether he likes it or not.
Dead Ink PB £12.00 9780957698529 325pp Fiction (FA)
As both women struggle with their lives inside and outside the hospital they are drawn to Nathan Rivers, a patient who committed a terrible crime a long time ago. They, and others, are beginning to wonder – does he still belong within the walls of the hospital?
Dead Ink PB £12.00 9780957698512 241pp Fiction (FA)
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A young traveller finds herself in Northern Spain, working as an artist’s model. As her relationship with the artist deepens and darkens, her experience of the city, those around her and the nature of art and desire change.
Dead Ink PB £8.00 9780957698581 72pp Fiction (FA)
Papillote Press Papillote Press is a tiny publishing house specialising in both fiction and non-fiction books from Dominica in the eastern Caribbean. They aim to produce books which reflect the rich culture and literary life of the island and we are proud to welcome them into the Inpress fold. They join our increasing list of publishers that support the best in Caribbean and Black British fiction, poetry, literary criticism, memoirs and historical studies. Here are some of our favourites from their formidable backlist...
Love for an Island
Look Back!
Black and White Sands
Phyllis Shand Allfrey
Trish Cooke & Caroline Binch
Elma Napier
Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Dominican author and politician, died in 1986 – her poetry neglected and little known.
A magical tale set in the Caribbean and a wonderful evocation of the oral story-telling traditions of the region, it celebrates the relationship between a grandmother and her grandson as she tells him about her childhood adventures in the rainforest and her encounters with the mysterious Ti Bolom.
In 1932 Elma Napier turned her back on London’s high society to build a home in Calibishie, a remote village on Dominica’s north coast. This remarkable memoir chronicles literary house parties, war and death, smugglers and servants and stories inspired by her political life as the only woman in a colonial parliament.
Papillote Press PB £6.99 9780957118720 32pp Children’s Picture Book (YBC)
Papillote Press PB £10.99 9780953222445 260pp Memoir (BM)
Now enjoying a contemporary resurgence her work is now being acclaimed and her place in Caribbean literary cannon assured. This is the first time her poetry has been put together in one volume, spanning five decades, from the 1930s, and reflects the two strands of Allfrey’s life – the tropical and the temperate.
Papillote Press PB £8.99 9780957118751 104pp Poetry (DCF)
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Holland House Holland House Books was founded in 2012, with the aim of publishing fine literary fiction from traditional to experimental and all stations between. Since then they have produced many quality publications and have grown to include two imprints: Grey Cells Press for crime and mystery fiction and Caerus Press for historical fiction.
The Absent Woman
The Most Distant Way
Greenwood Tree
Marlene Lee
Ewan Gault
B. Lloyd
Virginia Johnstone doesn’t need a rest, she needs a change; not comfort, but purpose.
Two young British distance runners, Kirsten and Mike, are training in Kenya’s Rift Valley, an area with the greatest density of elite endurance runners on earth.
1783 – Lichfield society is enthralled by the arrival of dashing ex-officer Orville; he charms his way into the salons, grand houses and even a great inheritance from extrovert Sir Morton.
With only a week remaining of their three month stay, they each have to face up to their fears about going home whilst trying to make sense of their lives. Meanwhile, the country around them is beginning to tear itself apart, as an election, which will plunge Kenya into weeks of bloodshed, approaches.
1927 – Detective writer Julia Warren returns to her home in Lichfield to work on her next novel. Detective fever takes over, and she moves from reality to legend as events from the past seem set to re-enact themselves in the present, and she finds herself unravelling more than just the one mystery.
Holland House PB £7.99 9781909374492 200pp Fiction (FA)
Holland House PB £7.99 9781909374577 449pp Fiction (FA)
Divorced, and a visitor in her children’s lives, she decides to leave Seattle and spend three months in the harbor town of Hilliard. There, on the edge of Puget Sound, she sublets rooms in an old hotel, rooms belonging to a woman who has vanished without explanation.
Holland House PB £7.99 9781909374416 254pp Fiction (FA)
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Istros Istros Books is a London-based independent publishing house at the forefront of discovering and promoting literature from South East Europe. Amongst their list are the works of the leading philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the Albanian writer and political activist Fatos Lubonja, and many other leading names in contemporary literature from the region. Istros Books are also proud to have five EU Prize for Literature winners on their list, representing authors from Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia and Turkey.
Seven Terrors Selvedin Avdi C´
After nine months of self-imposed isolation following his wife’s departure, the hero of Seven Terrors finally decides to face his loneliness and join the world once more. However, when the daughter of his old friend Alex appears in his flat one morning with the news that her father has disappeared, he realises that his life is again about to change. As the two search for clues in Alex’s war diary, unearthed in a library in Sweden, they come upon tales of unspeakable horror and mystery. Startling, unusual and intense, Seven Terrors may well be considered the perfect post-war nightmare.
Istros Books PB £8.99 9781908236098 152pp Fiction (FA)
Death in the Museum of Modern Art
What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents
Alma Lazarevska
´ Horvat Slavoj Žižek & SreCko
A tender and revealing set of stories by the uniquely delicate Bosnian writer, Alma Lazarevska. Avoiding the easy traps of politics and blame, Lazarevska reveals a world full of incidents and worries so similar to our own, and yet always under the shadow of the snipers and the bombs which we know are out there and who occasionally impinge on the story in shocking ways.
Paraphrasing Freud’s famous question ‘Was will das Weib?’ (‘What does a woman want?’), the leading Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the young Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat join forces to examine the burning question ‘What does Europe want?’
Istros Books PB £9.99 9781908236173 124pp Short Stories (FYB)
Instead of a peace-project, the European Union is increasingly turning into a warzone: whether it be the expulsion of immigrants or riots in Paris and London, or European interventions to bring “more democracy” to Libya or Syria. But instead of leaving Europe to the enemies, Žižek and Horvat reflect on the fight for a different Idea of Europe.
Istros Books PB £12.99 9781908236166 240pp Politics (JPA)
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P U B LI S HER S
Dog Horn Dog Horn Publishing is dedicated to publishing the best in cutting edge literature, valuing bold voices and writing that takes risks. They are less concerned by genre than by defying convention, taking readers someplace new, and challenging the limits of what writing is and does. From the outset, they have been dedicated to nurturing writers, while remaining both independent and brave. Dog Horn books are striking, both visually and in terms of content, and are filled with the daring, the absurd, the mischievous and the dangerous.
A History of Sarcasm
Crashin’
Kerotakis
Frank Burton
Deb Hoag
Janice Lee
The seventeen stories in this collection blur the boundaries between fact and fantasy through a series of obsessive characters and their skewed versions of reality. Among them are a man who insists on living every aspect of his life in alphabetical order, a girl who believes she is receiving secret messages through the TV, a paranoiac who is pursued by an army of giant lobsters, and an academic who turns into a cat. Funny, dark and relentlessly off the wall, this collection brings together the best of Frank Burton’s published work with some brand new stories.
When gonzo columnist Eve Petra is fired by her magazine’s new owner, she spends a couple of days (okay, a week or so) wallowing in self-pity and Jack Daniels. To her great dismay, no one wants to hire a middle-aged female version of Hunter Thompson. The market has changed. People have changed. The only thing that hasn’t changed is Eve.
Kerotakis is Janice Lee’s postmodern exploration of consciousness, form and narrative, as it follows the journey of G.I.L.L. A contemporary reimagining of Frankenstein that takes us forwards, backwards and sideways through time and space, this is a cutting-edge novel for the multimedia age.
Dog Horn PB £9.99 9781907133015 160pp Short Stories (FYB)
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Dog Horn PB £9.99 9781907133008 170pp Fiction (FA)
Dog Horn PB £9.99 9781907133138 390pp Fiction (FA)
P OE T RY B ACKLI S T
Opera di Cera Kelley Swain
Grown Up Scott Tyrrell
Standard Twin Fantasy Sam Riviere
Sister Invention Judith Kazantzis
Valley Press 9781908853363 | £8.99 PB | 88pp
Red Squirrel Press 9781906700768 | £7.99 PB | 68pp
Egg Box 9780956928986 | £7.99 PB | 24pp
Smokestack Books 9780957574786 | £8.95 PB | 152pp
Petrol Honey Rob Auton
War Reporter Dan O’Brien
Adventures in Form ed. Tom Chivers
Heimlich’s Manouvre Paula Cunningham
Burning Eye Books 9781909136311 | £10.00 PB | 96pp
CB Editions 9780957326675 | £8.99 PB | 130pp
Penned in the Margins 9781908058010 | £9.99 PB | 192pp
The Poetry Business 9781906613839 | £8.99 PB | 64pp
Ghost Pot John Wedgewood Clarke
Imagined Sons Carrie Etter
Marshland Gareth E Rees
Earthshine Mimi Khalvati
Valley Press 9781908853271 | £7.99 PB | 72pp
Seren 9781781721513 | £9.99 PB | 64pp
Influx Press 9780957169395 | £11.99 PB | 336pp
Smith Doorstop 9781906613877 | £5.00 PB | 34pp
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B ACKLI S T
P OE T RY B ACKLI S T Best Friends Forever ed. Amy Key
Liffey Swim Jessica Traynor
Outside Looking On Chimène Suleyman
Where the Wind Sleeps Noel Monahan
The Emma Press 9781910139073 | £10.00 PB | 64pp
Dedalus Press 9781906614973 | £10.50 PB | 76pp
Influx Press 9780992765552 | £9.99 PB | 160pp
Salmon Poetry 9781908836809 | £12.00 PB | 172pp
Poor Queen Mab Jones
Manifestations Stevie Ronnie
Skip Diving Celeste Augé
Fauverie Pascale Petit
Burning Eye Books 9781909136410 | £8.99 PB | 72pp
Red Squirrel Press 9781906700812 | £7.99 PB | 62pp
Salmon Poetry 9781908836885 | £10.00 PB | 88pp
Seren 9781781721681 | £9.99 PB | 72pp
Homesickness and Exile ed. Rachel Piercey & Emma Wright
Tilt Rosalind Hudis
The Other Side of Sleep: Narrative Poems ed. Cherry Potts
A Bloody Mess Richard O’Brien
The Emma Press 9781910139028 | £10.00 PB | 64pp
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Cinnamon Press 9781909077447 | £7.99 PB | 64pp
Arachne Press 9781909208186 | £9.99 PB | 160pp
Valley Press 9781908853387 | £5.99 PB | 46pp
F IC T IO N B ACKLI S T
American Sycamore Karen Fielding
Things to Make and Break May-Lan Tan
Above Sugar Hill Linda Mannheim
Mrs B Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw
Seren 9781781721179 | £8.99 PB | 200pp
CB Editions 9781909585010 | £8.99 PB | 216pp
Influx Press 9780992765521 | £9.99 PB | 180pp
Peepal Tree Press 9781845232313 | £9.99 PB | 236pp
Commentary Marcelle Sauvageot
Love & Fallout Kathryn Simmonds
Love and Eskimo Snow Sarah Holt
Double the Stars Kelley Swain
Ugly Duckling Presse 9781937027100 | £10.00 PB | 128pp
Seren 9781781721469 | £8.99 PB | 240pp
Valley Press 9781908853370 | £8.99 PB | 312pp
Cinnamon Press 9781909077362 | £9.99 PB | 160pp
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere Alice Furse
The Poet and the Private Eye Rob Gittins
Devilskein & Dearlove Alex Smith
The Notebook Agota Kristof
Y’Lolfa 9781847718990 | £8.95 PB | 304pp
Arachne Press 9781909208155 | £10.99 PB | 256pp
CB Editions 9780957326699 | £8.99 PB | 174pp
Burning Eye Books 9781909136441 | £8.99 PB | 224pp
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B ACKLI S T
Magazines BANIPAL
The London Magazine
March, June, November
Six issues every year
Acumen
Agenda
ENVOI
January, May, September
April & September
February, June, October
Modern Poetry in Translation
The Rialto
UNDER THE RADAR
March, August, December
March, August, December
Three issues a year
magazines
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Jonat h a n E dwa r ds h a s bee n awa r de d t h e Costa Poet ry Awa r d for h is de bu t col l ec t ion My Fa m ily a nd Ot her Su per heroe s.
Edward’s heroes are a motley crew: Sophia Loren, Marty Mcfly and Evel Knievel jostle for space on the pages alongside Valley’s mams and dads, the kebabby in Merthyr and the traditional Welsh costume, all described with great humour and warmth. The poetry category judges: Owen Sheers, Anna Dreda, and Charlotte Runcie, described Jonathan’s book as, “Joyful and dynamic – a collection that’ll make you laugh and make you think.”
In d e x
A
G
Adams, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Colley, Jo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Garratt, Charlie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Adès, Timothy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Collins, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Gault, Ewan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Anderson, Darran . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Considine, Chris . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Gittins, Rob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Apichella, Maria . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Cooke, Trish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Golden, Frank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Armes, Derek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Cope, Phil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Granier, Mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
Ashton, Sally . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Cox, Juanita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Grist, Mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Attwool, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Craig, Adam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Gross, Philip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Augé, Celeste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Cremin, Bernadette . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Auton, Rob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73
Crymble, Philip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Avdi, Selvedin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Cunningham, Paula . . . . . . . . . . . 73
H Harrison, Jean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Harrison, Joseph . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
B
D
Hayes, Martin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Bailey, Jennifer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Davidson, Jonathan . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Henry, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Barasch-Rubinstein, Emanuela . 22
Davies, Ellen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Hesketh, Sarah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Baratynsky, Yevgeny . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Davoyan, Razmik . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Hoag, Deb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Barnett, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Desnos, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Holmes, Helen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Barraclough, Simon . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Donahaye, Jasmine . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Holmström, Lakshmi . . . . . . . . . 30
Baudelaire, Charles . . . . . . . . . . . .57
Ducker, Christy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Holt, Sarah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Beagrie, Bob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Duggan, Dan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Hook, Andrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Beckett, Larry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Durasow, Gareth . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Horvat, Srecko . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Bell, Jo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Bergman, Mara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Bharath, Rhoda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Binch, Caroline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Bingham, Kate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Birnie, Clive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Booth, Naomi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Bradley, S J . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Burton, Frank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Byrne, James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 C Callaghan, Ruth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Callow, Margaret . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Carnegie, James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Cashman, Seamus . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Chassler, Nora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Chivers, Tom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Christian, Alexander . . . . . . . . . . 67 Coffin Price, Valerie . . . . . . . . . . . 28
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Hudis, Rosalind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 E
Hudson, Lynne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Ebeling, Sascha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Elliott, Ned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
I
Ely, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Ilhan, Ciler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Etter, Carrie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Ingram, Lesley J . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
F
J
F, George . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Jackson, Andy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Fenton, Tanya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Jones, Mab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Fielding, Karen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Jonguitud, Paulette . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Fletcher, Sarah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
Joy, Avril . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Flisar, Evald . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Fontaine, J. L. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Forth, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Fortune, Jan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Fuller, Cynthia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Fulton, Graham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Furse, Alice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Fyfe, Anne Marie . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
K Kazantzis, Judith . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Kemp, Will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Kendall, Judy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Key, Amy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Khalvati, Mimi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Kramer, Lotte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Kristof, Agota . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
P
Lamming, George . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Parks, Linda Rose . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Somerville, Charles . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Laughlin, Nicholas . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Pattullo, Polly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
St Omer, Garth . . . . . . . . . . . . 49, 51
Lazarevska, Alma . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Peake, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Stubbs, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Lee, Janice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Petit, Pascale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Suleyman, Chimène . . . . . . . . . . 74
Lee, Marlene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Piercey, Rachel . . . . . . . 39, 59, 61, 4
Swain, Kelley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73, 75
Levitin, Alexis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Porter, Elizabeth . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Lloyd, B. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Potts, Cherry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14, 74
Lowe Shinebourne, Jan . . . . . . . . 36
Powell, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Lowe, Adam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Powici, Chris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Prokopiev, Aleksandar . . . . . . . . 54
M
T Tait, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Tamrazian, Arminé . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Tan, Mary-Lan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Tantony, Rebecca . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Mack, Sheree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Q
Thomas, Penny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Madec, Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Quinlan, Kathleen M . . . . . . . . . 25
Torc, Liv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Madocks, Rod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Mannheim, Linda . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Mayer, Sophie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 McCabe, Chris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 McCarthy, Michael . . . . . . . . . . . 31 McLaughlin, Jane . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 McMillan, Ian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 McNish, Hollie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Millar, Sharon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Minhinnick, Robert . . . . . . . . . . 54 Monahan, Noel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Moore, Kim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Morris, Jenny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Mort, Graham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Munden, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 N Napier, Elma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Noond, Jez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Notaro, Domingo . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Nyoni, Zodwa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Traynor, Jessica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 R
Tyrrell, Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Reed, Jo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Rees, Gareth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
V
Rhydderch, Francesca . . . . . . . . . 37
Van Winkle, Ryan . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Richardson, Susan . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Vlavianos, Haris . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Riviere, Sam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Ronnie, Stevie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Ross, Jacob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Rowe, Violet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
W Wagner, Jan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth . . . 75 Walford Davies, Damian . . . . . . . 20
S
Watson, Ian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Salter, Mary Jo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Wedgewood Clarke, John . . . . . . 73
Saponia, Clare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Whiteley, Aliya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Sauvageot, Marcelle . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Willoughby, Andy . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Savicevic, Olja . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Wilson, Philip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Sawkins, Maggie . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Winters, Sandra Ann . . . . . . . . . 15
Scott, Lawrence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Wright, Emma . . . . . . . 39, 59, 61, 74
Seecharan, Clem . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Shand Allfrey, Phyllis . . . . . . . . . . 69 Shell, J. Michael . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Shepperd, Rosie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
O
Sherratt, Lloyd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
O’Brien, Dan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11, 73
Siegal, Matthew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
O’Brien, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Simic, Goran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
O’Callaghan, Ruth . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Simmonds, Kathryn . . . . . . . . . . 75
O’Donnell, Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Skinner, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Olsen, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Smith, Alex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Owen, Fiona . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Smyth, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Z Zarrop, Martin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Zenith, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Žižek, Slavoj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Zultanski, Steven . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
79 |
I N DEX
In d e x
L
Lullaby with Succotash maybe start talking say I like those dangly things on your ears they’re called earrings I know that and while you’re talking get out a bowl and start peeling oranges to your lady say can you do the succotash? and if yes do the succotash with her a couple laps around the kitchen with one hand on the small of her back and the other hand still peeling oranges add key lime custard
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and cherries and chocolate chips and syrup are we making a doozie? tell her yes to a doozie and smile why are you smiling? say just the way you do the succotash with your hips and your eyes going half the way through me pour in banana pudding and clear tequila you’ll make me dizzy I know that you’ll make me naked I know that turn on the radio shake a little music out of the speaker right into the bowl maybe stop talking maybe kiss her neck and stir let her taste a spoonful and if it needs a pinch of cinnamon that’s why we have spices take the dangly things off her ears they’re called earrings I know that put the earrings in the bowl say your skin baby say your lips say your sugar baby say taste it again and if she thinks it’s ready say let’s eat it in bed
Taken from The Emma Press Anthology of Dance by George David Clark.(pg. 59)
Catalogue cover illustration by Emma Wright. ISBN: 9781908853431 Catalogue Design: Jeremy Hopes
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