Poetry / Poems
Straw Hat Poetry for Life and Other Chronic Conditions
Book SynopsisUplifting debut poetry collection about the realities and small joys of unexpectedly finding yourself living with a life-changing condition.
£9.49
Vagabond Voices night exposures
Book SynopsisCombining pressing geopolitical urgency with a subtle and gentle lyricism, as we have come to expect from Gerry Loose, his new book ranges wide, broad and deep, to settle back home in the Scotland re-inhabited by Sweeney the king, deranged and fleeing humanity, and a lilting nine day walk from coast to coast across Scotland’s heartland. With narratives from Nuremberg, which contrast city and individual citizens with its long and terrible past, and then stories of an island life – not as insular as might be imagined – in a Finland where anything or nothing may happen, with or without a Luger pistol, this book has a quiet insistence on personal experience. A unique take on the naming of endangered species here could be seen as a metaphor for what the ordinary people in these pages – and their would-be leaders – might in turn become. Expressive, formally inventive, Loose’s seventh full collection night exposures lives right into its title: shining light into murky and overlooked corners which some might wish to be kept in the dark.
£9.95
Muddy Pearl Amazing
Book SynopsisAfter 30 years of being a disciple, Simon Ponsonby began to reflect on whether he was amazed by Jesus, or whether he had lost his first love, having a relationship with Jesus that was predictable and dutiful. Did Jesus still amaze him or just employ him? ISBN 978-1-910012-18-5 As he reflected on this question, Jesus drew near to him, and Simon began to write a poem about Jesus, marvelling again at who he was and what he had done. Amazing is a touching and inspiring poem about just how amazing Jesus is - the perfect devotional for mediating and reflecting on Jesus, to help meet with him right where you are. Illustrated with the author's photographs, which position amazing truths in a stark and contemporary setting, and drive their message home all the more, this simple, honest and moving poem is a wonderful gift to help others to encounter the amazing person of Jesus too.
£9.99
Luath Press Ltd Like Leaves in Autumn: Responses to the war
Book SynopsisPublished to mark the first centenary of Italy’s entry into the Great War, Like Leaves in Autumn features 21 original Italian poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, with new English translations by Heather Scott. These are set alongside 21 new poems by contemporary Scottish poets writing in response to Ungaretti, and are illustrated with striking black-and-white artworks from the ARTIST ROOMS collection, owned by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. One of Europe’s greatest modernist poets, Ungaretti was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, to an Italian family from Tuscany. From 1915, he served in the Italian infantry in the campaign against Austria-Hungary. It was a ferocious conflict fought in the mountains of Northern Italy in trenches dug out of Alpine rock. Thousands died and Ungaretti’s poems, written during pauses in the fighting, channel these horrific experiences. In addition to his grief and loss, these verses are shaped both by Ungaretti’s sense of exile and by his intense life-affirming poetic sensibility. A century on, this anthology offers a creative interplay of recollection, translation and new inspiration. Italian, English, Scots and Gaelic voices mingle on these pages, and the artworks spark a dialogue between words and images, creating an alchemy of further meanings.Trade ReviewUngaretti’s war poetry expresses an intense feeling for life, that sense of the miraculous in which, as Cendrars puts it, ‘only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world. JOHN BURNSIDE Each of the poets was asked to respond to a poem by Ungaretti with one of their own, and to provide a commentary on the new work. Richard Price confesses to being "uneasy" about responding to Ungaretti's Levante, but comes up with a neat solution, creating a poem that celebrates the innovative structure of the original but is simultaneously in defiance of everything Ungaretti would come to stand for.- Roger Cox, Scotland on Sunday
£13.50
Luath Press Ltd Slate, Sea and Sky
Book SynopsisPresents a combination of poems and photography that creates a fresh soundscape and vision of Glasgow and of a land far beyond its crowded streets. From the screech of buses to the crash of waves on a windswept Hebridean shore, this work features poems that take us on a journey from the city to an island, between two very different worlds.Trade ReviewWhen I first read Norman Bissell's poems, one ordinarily harassed day in Glasgow, one of his meditations on city life made me laugh so much that I wrote it on a post-it note and stuck it to my wall. His poems are full of such lines: a calm voice that I want to carry away and keep in my mind's ear. I loved the place the poems took me to. Here is the voice of a poet who is grounded in place, at home in the world. - Gerrie Fellows, author of four poetry collections. There is lovely work here, limpid and light, a careful simplicity of line, open to the voices of the city and the calm, restorative spaces of nature. - Catherine Lockerbie, Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. On his journey Norman Bissell takes a clear-eyed look at the world around us; celebrating people - and elements, rocks and minerals, birds, hills and waters as living things - with integrity, passion and compassion. His life is laid open for us with honesty, shedding light on what it is to be human in the search for what is. - Gerry Loose, Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award winning poet.
£9.49
Dedalus Press To Star the Dark
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£10.45
Dedalus Press Of Ochre and Ash
Book SynopsisOf Ochre and Ash, Eleanor Hooker''s third collection of poems, lends to her familiar themes of family, place and memory a trademark uncanny, even otherworldly atmosphere, in which the glimpsed, the intuited and the half-known provide a great deal of the interest.The desire to "see my home from the other side" is a constant, but so too is immersion in the moment and, indeed, the ever-present nearby "darkening lake"."Eleanor Hooker''s voice guides her reader through large metaphoric visions and the consolations of ordinary life. This is a collection full of urgent, haunted poems with a subtle range of approach; they are many-faceted works, reflecting the fragmented strangeness of experience. We face wild gothic moments, whose counterweight is the familiar, calm or stormy, world of the lake she lives beside and the people whose life is shared with hers."- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin "Eleanor Hooker''s poetry has a way of resonating in the reader like secret histories passed down through the generations. It is a strange effect: the drift of these poems seems to have been with us even before we began reading and lingers long after the book is closed. They are both strangely familiar and incredibly new and run the gamut of human experience: poems of sickness and healing; journeys and journeying, poems of the dead and the unborn; of storm and calm. The world she describes for us is by turns unsettling, mythic and surreal, but ultimately so exquisite and affirming that it can only be our own. "- John Glenday
£10.45
University of Chester Press Humankind: Writing from the Cheshire Prize for
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£8.24
Vintage Publishing Interference Pattern
Book SynopsisAt first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and which the background. It is a book that acts out its own subjects – dualities, ambiguities, boundaries – through physical dislocation, through patterns of interference.This is a collage of many voices: eager or dispassionate, unreliable or matter-of-fact – depending, as with everything else, on your angle of entry. Some of the voices fear involvement; some are afraid of doing nothing; some, perhaps, have already gone too far. Like the image on the cover, these pieces shimmer and buzz in their own instability. Is this punishment or reward? What is the yellow smoke? Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover? Are we, like the hotel manager, seeing visions?Volatile, troubling, but endlessly interesting, these poems show J. O. Morgan working and compressing language into a precarious, frictional state. As a result, Interference Pattern is a unique reading experience: vivid, challenging and completely original.Trade ReviewEliot comes repeatedly to mind in reading Interference Pattern because, in its tragic grandeur and sophistication, it is a poem that could come to be for the twenty-first century what The Waste Land was to the twentieth. -- David Collard * Times Literary Supplement *This collection carries you, unnerves and stimulates. It absolutely meets TS Eliot’s requirement that poetry be “genuine”… It is vividly miscellaneous poetry…bracing, original. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer *Interference Pattern teases us at every turn, inviting us to try to unlock its secrets while keeping the keys just out of sight… The multifarious voices in the book mostly speak over each other but occasionally to each other, creating an intricate web of echoes and half-echoes. -- Roger Cox * Scotland on Sunday *
£9.50
Greenwich Exchange Ltd Green Tobacco
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£10.19
Nine Arches Press #Afterhours
Book SynopsisIn 2015, Inua Ellams was poet in residence at the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London. His #Afterhours project took him on a voyage of cultural translation and transposition through time and place, to the heart of the libraries' rare books collection, and through his own life’s story as he selected poems published during each year of his life, from birth to the age of 18.In return, Ellams opens up a captivating and potent dialogue between poems, writing a diary and intricately-crafted poems of his own in conversational response to the poems he selected from the Poetry Library collections. Here, for the first time together, are the collected #Afterhours poems alongside the re-discovered poems which inspired them and the diary entries which follow this journey. In Ellams’ meticulous hands, this becomes an entire narrative in its own right, compelling and magnetic, drawing parallels of displacement, language and reclamation, and showing poetry’s great capacity to be a powerful amplifier of human experience.
£9.49
Unicorn Publishing Group Tristan/Yseult
Book SynopsisA duel on an empty island sets the course for one of the greatest romances ever told. As the lovers of legend meet, something new is born, and something eternal is revealed. Their names will forever be spoken as one. This modern retelling of Tristan and Yseult sheds a stark light on the beauty of the Celtic tale.Trade Review‘Bonelle’s authentically original reimagining is vibrantly alive through his extraordinary use of language. I was entirely drawn in to his inventiveness and immersed in each moment of his vision. He takes you on a journey of sound, light and emotional punch. Truly a new voice to be celebrated!’ -- Armen Gregory‘In this reimagining of the Tristan and Yseult myth, Harry Bonelle uses taut and timeless language and strong imagery to craft an atmospheric and challenging poem, that melds the lyrical and the violent to powerful and memorable effect. Innovative and haunting by turns, it is full of surprise and originality.’ -- Angus Graham-CampbellA beautiful, jagged fragment from the legend in grainy, percussive verse, Tristan/Yseult is intensely romantic, yet grounded in the concrete particulars of its sea-washed world. It feels both ancient and brand new. A bewitching, exhilarating read.’ -- Simon Dormandy'Harry Bonelle’s new version taps into the dark and furious energy of the old saga, surging and juddering with life. Bonelle’s actor’s training has encouraged him to liberate the performance piece that its original author must have intended. Thrilling on the page, but even more so spoken loud.’ -- Simon Callow
£13.50
Cyhoeddiadau Barddas Cyfres Tonfedd Heddiw: Rhwng Gwlân a Gwe
Book SynopsisHer first volume of poems for adults by Anni Llŷn is the eighth title in the popular Tonfedd Heddiw series which provides a platform for new poets to publish their work for the first time.
£5.36
Smith|Doorstop Books A Commonplace
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£999.99
Graffeg Limited Cuddle and a Cwtch, A
Book SynopsisCwtch is a Welsh word used to describe a whole lot of love. This endearing illustrated poem introduces the term to the English language in order to share its healing, human warmth.
£8.21
Colenso Books The last twelve months or so Oct 2023 . . . Nov
Book SynopsisThe fourth volume of poetry by Anthony Hirst.
£10.23
Honno Welsh Women's Press The Hindu Bard: The Poetry Of Dorothy Bonarjee (
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£10.44
Galileo Publishers The Gloucester Notebook
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£21.25
Speculative Books Ltd #GIRLHOOD
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£999.99
Banipal Books From the River to the Sea
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£10.44
Eglantyne Books Sonnets to Orpheus
Book SynopsisBrand new English translations of this classic cycle of poems by Rilke dedicated to Orpheus
£9.49
Eglantyne Books The Swallow Book
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£9.49
MOIST YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL
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£11.40
Tippermuir Books Limited WILLIAM SOUTAR COLLECTED WORKS
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£51.00
Tangent Books Heartwood
£10.80
Smith|Doorstop Books This Is Not An Epiphany
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£6.00
University of Wales Press A Map of Love: Twelve Welsh poems of romance,
Book SynopsisA fascinating and exhilarating look at the many ways we love, and are loved. Following on from his bestselling The History of Wales in Twelve Poems, M. Wynn Thomas turns his attention in A Map of Love to poems from Wales and reflects on what they have to say on the age-old subject of love in its many and varied forms. Featuring twelve pieces dating from the fourteenth century to the present, this absorbing collection deliberately veers far from clichéd verses with its poems of regret and of mourning; straight love and gay love; bawdy verses of passion and desire, and gentle meditations on motherhood and marriage. It features anonymous and lesser-known writers as well as household names such as Gillian Clarke and R. S. Thomas, and it includes a previously unpublished poem by Emyr Humphreys. With original illustrations by Ruth Jên Evans throughout, this short but powerful collection will appeal to anyone interested in people and their complex relationships.
£9.49
Futa Fata Mainistir na Feola
£13.95
Fly on the Wall Press Secrets of the Dictator's Wife
Book Synopsis"There was a time when I was not the Dictator's Wife though I'm not supposed to talk about it." The Dictator's Wife confides this in you: her husband has blind spots. Any day now, he may be overthrown. And what of love? It is paling her, until she fears her own transparency. Who is this father of her children, this man who does not smile? Through the eyes of the dictator's wife, Aryamati Prize winner Katrina Dybzynska paints a world of mystery and intrigue, where the lines between loyalty and betrayal are blurred, and the true nature of power is constantly called into question.Trade Review"A stunning, lyrical work. Secrets of the Dictator's Wife goes through the looking glass of power and beautifully, unflinchingly, records what it finds there." - Freya Berry, Author of The Dictator's Wife;"In 'Secrets of A Dictator’s Wife,' Katrina Dybzynska charts the subversive inner life of the title character, who has ‘learnt to weaponize/ endurance’. The wry, subtle voice, revealed through this often compelling series of poems is alert to the peril of her situation as well as her own complicity: '…all the thin lines I balance on’." - Nell Regan, Poet
£6.99
Smokestack Books Vasili Tyorkin
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£10.44
Smokestack Books Russia is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic
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£13.99
Smokestack Books Mr Mensh
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£8.50
Offord Road Books Country Music
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£9.50
The Poetry Translation Centre Aulò! Aulò! Aulò!
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£8.66
The Poetry Translation Centre Sarah Maguire Prize Anthology 2020
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£10.80
Smokestack Books Accursed Poets: Dissident Poetry from Soviet
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£8.54
Backlash Press Backlash Journal: Isolation
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£5.65
Smokestack Books Nomad
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£7.59
Sunesis Ministries Ltd Silhouette of a Songbird
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£8.99
bog bodies press mnemotope 007
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£11.50
CavanKerry Press When Did We Stop Being Cute?
Book SynopsisA coming-of-age collection set to the music of the 1980s and 90s. This novel in poetic form tells the story of a young man dealing with the challenges of growing up mixed-race in 1980s suburbia. In this time of change, both for himself and the world around him, he seeks to “remember / just when I stopped being cute…” Narrating run-ins with the police (“The minute they see me, fear me”) and confrontations with himself, the speaker in this collection must learn to navigate a world that sees him as a threat. When Did We Stop Being Cute? reflects on the beauty and horrors of life in the United States, telling a personal story that shows Black lives and how they matter.Trade Review“Rhythmic, musical, and at times nostalgic for a past that never was, Martin Wiley’s poetry offers a piercing view into the life of a young mixed man as he processes his world, his grief, with nuance, biting humor, and brutal honesty, using the microcosms of a school, a deli, a neighborhood, to examine the fraught experiences of minorities in America.” * Jeni McFarland, author of ‘The House of Deep Water’ *“An artist tells us who they are through their work. At times this telling is subtle, and then there are times it is bold and brazen. In Martin Wiley’s When Did We Stop Being Cute?, the repetition of the theme of ‘coming of age’ is turned on its head. This transition from boyhood to adolescence for a young black male from a mixed racial background is fraught with peril, substance dependency, and difficult choices. There are juxtapositions between first kisses with pep rally backdrops and wanting ‘to drown in the miracle of my own survival.’ These poems reveal a truth that we should be honored to witness. The lies that America tells itself about the serenity and safety of the American suburb are laid bare for all to see. The false bravado of empty masculinity is examined and left wanting.” * DuiJi Mshinda, poet and author of 'Traces of Inifinity' *Table of ContentsPart One: The minute they see me, fear mePrologue: Early evening at the abandoned schoolWe can’t afford to be innocentThere ain’t no need for yaPeace is a dream (Kids in America pt. 1)All alone with you makes the butterflies in me ariseKind hearts don’t make a news story (KiA pt. 2)Something like a phenomenonForever’s gonna start tonight (KiA pt.3)Jimmy Got Nothing made himself a name (KiA pt. 4)If I could find a souvenir just to prove the world was here (KiA pt. 5)After: mathPart Two: Hey kid walk straight, master your highPrologue: Late night at the abandoned schoolLook right through me, look right through meGlory days, or The true story of two guys coming down a mountainAnd we mean to go on and on and onPast the days of yes y’allin’We’re all ice cream castles in the summer timeA self-made monsterYeah yeah they do it all the timeUnruly boys who will not grow upAfter: shockPart Three: But life is just a party & parties weren’t meant to lastPrologue: Early morning at the abandoned schoolThe world is collapsing around our earsSubtle innuendo follows(And so, by the way, I thank you)When they reminisce over youA white hot spotlightYou, you said you’d wait until the end of the worldWe still play our little gamesEpilogue: I thought we'd get to see forever...Excuse me for a moment, I’m in another worldYou don’t have to worry about meAfter: allAcknowledgements
£12.00
Ugly Duckling Presse Before Lyricism
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£13.50
Nightboat Books Drift
Book SynopsisCaroline Bergvall's Drift retraces the language and maritime imagination of early medieval North Atlantic travels from the sagas to quest poems to today's sea migrancies. Its centerpiece is the song cycle, "Drift," which takes the anonymous 10th century Anglo-Saxon quest poem The Seafarer as its inspiration. Both ancient and contemporary tales of travel and exile shadow the plight and losses of wanderers across the waters in this haunting new book. Drift is the second of Bergvall's explorations of historical English language.
£15.19
Nightboat Books Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets
Book SynopsisIn 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QTPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more.
£999.99
Nightboat Books Sun of Consciousness
Book SynopsisSoleil de la Conscience (Sun of Consciousness) was Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s first published work, and opened the Poétique (Poetics) strain of his oeuvre. This book-length essay, which is characterized by its exploratory, intimate character, announces Glissants concerns with créolisation (creolization), mondialité (worldliness, as against globalization), or opacité (opacity) and inscribes in this work a refusal of colonialism and of inverted exoticism. The sense of estrangement experienced by the author who arrives as a “foreigner” in a country to which he is bound by “the first page of his passport” is the author’s principal preoccupation. By positioning himself as both different and same, Glissant opens a space for the writing of a(nother) history: that of the Caribbean.Trade Review“As a writer of the African Diaspora, of the Carribean, and of the world, Glissant offers such braiding and breaking as a method that shows places of slippage, kinks that retrace the love, displacement, renewal, and violence inherent in the act of writing”—Rachel Ellis Neyra, Obsidian “Betsy Wing has made a fine job of rendering the specificities of Glissant's poetic vocabulary. For this poet's prose, and French poet's prose, written in an idiom which is felt as so foreign to English that it can evoke reactions of exasperation and impatience. . . . Glissant's influence on the next, third, generation of francophone writers, and not just Martinican writers, can hardly be overstated."—Times Literary Supplement "How rewarding to read a text in the last moments of this century that has absorbed quantum physics, jazz, modernist poetics, mathematics, and all for the sake of adding to the discourse of our planetary reality. "—Zoe Anglesey, Multicultural Review "Glissant’s assertions about poetry and language anticipate today’s most urgent and penetrating verse, such that Sun of Consciousness makes for a most timely text for study."—Ron Slate, On the Seawall
£10.44
Siglio Press Bernadette Mayer: Memory: 2020
Book SynopsisA revered classic of 1970s New York conceptualism, Bernadette Mayer’s Memory synthesizes writing and photography in this prescient “emotional science project” A New York Times Book Review 2020 holiday gift guide pick In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: for one month she shot a roll of 35mm film each day and kept a journal. The result was a conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory is both monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and a groundbreaking work by a poet who is widely regarded as one of the most innovative experimental writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer’s durational, constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary—and often unheralded—contribution to conceptual art. Mayer has called Memory “an emotional science project,” but it is far from confessional. This boldly experimental record follows the poet’s eye as she traverses early morning into night, as quotidian minutiae metamorphose into the lyrical, as her stream of consciousness becomes incantatory. In text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial consciousness of the present moment from which memory is—as she says—“always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show.” This publication brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible. Originally exhibited in 1972 by pioneering gallerist Holly Solomon, it was not shown again in its entirety until 2016 at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and then again in 2017 in New York City at the CANADA Gallery. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 by North Atlantic Books in an edition that has long been out of print. Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) is the author of over 30 books, including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994) and Work and Days (2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer has also been an influential teacher and editor. In the art world, she is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9.Trade ReviewWhat is illuminated in Mayer’s attempt to record what she experiences as she experiences it is the space where images, interiority, and action flow into each other and carry equal weight. -- Dennis Cooper * DC's *Mayer's artfully artless photographs — which collect streets, landscapes, clouds, weather, friends, family — are often very beautiful on their own. Arrayed in tight grids of small-scale reproductions they become something else: an expansive work of personal cinema, relayed in stills. And Mayer's mighty, long-breath journals provide a dynamic narration, making a work that is large and resonant while attentive to the smallest things. -- Luc Sante * Photo Eye *Mayer’s Memory [contains] more than 1,100 artfully artless photographs collecting rooms, skies, flowers, streetscapes and landscapes, friends and family in vibrant 1970s color. The photos are necessarily small (roughly 2½ inches by 1¾ inches), arrayed in grids of nine, along with intermittent full-page blowups, and as lovely as individual images are, their power is cumulative: a wide-ranging work of personal cinema, in stills. Her journal provides the narration in galloping long-breath prose poetry that feels as spontaneous and alive as the pictures. -- Luc Sante * New York Times *[Memory] has been more frequently exhibited in condensed forms, and the text was published without accompanying photographs in 1975. Now Siglio Press have published a complete edition, interspersing the photographs with her journal entries -- Janique Vigier * London Review Of Books *Elegy always has a way of creeping into art that documents the once teeming, now empty past: it is almost too painful to glimpse the innocence and the freedom of Mayer’s summer from the point of view of our current fearful season. It can seem a dubious advantage to have survived all those disconnected phones, defunct addresses, dead or forgotten friends. At our moment in history, ‘Memory' reads in part as an archive of suspended (in both senses of the word) pleasures. -- Dan Chiasson * New Yorker *It may bear reiterating that when Mayer made these notes on her life, self-conscious as she was, it wasn’t her writing that she meant to make known. Perhaps doing this kind of reading can help us, saturated as we are with sculpted life narratives, keep better diaries. The little uneven crevasses that form throughout the document to which her estate has granted us access are what make it especially satisfying to read, a different kind of historical documentation of how an artist comes to be. -- Thea Ballard * Nation *Seen in another light, the project seems to anticipate the way we think about representing life today, whether we’re sharing snippets of our days on Instagram or unpolished fragments of thought on Twitter. [...] In her thoughts and images, we find an immersion in quotidian minutiae, synecdoche for a lost era that feels almost eerily contemporary. * New York Times: T Magazine *An American poet – and synesthete – considers the ever-changing colours of the alphabet. * Frieze *In Memory, the poet shapes a new visual and textual language that explores the simmering possibilities of consciousness. -- Marcella Durand * Hyperallergic *Though Mayer’s writing has exemplified many of the stylistic traits of the New York School—detailing day-to-day life, chattiness, an emphasis on memory, an eschewal of lyric sanctimony—she explicitly rejected her then-contemporaries’ “addiction to style.” Her ambitions here are not stylistic, but relational: the goal was to, without writing a book, get the audience to become “a real reader,” by which she meant she would give them so much access that they might become her. I, sadly, did not become Bernadette Mayer reading Memory—which reassures me that the projects of both Memory and memory are ongoing, after all. -- Diana Hamilton * BOMB *Time travel into summery freedom on a 1971 road trip: this sumptuous book offers a portal into life off the leash. The result is an epic photo-poem: an incantatory work that investigates the nature of memory, monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and intimate in feel. -- Barbara Epler * TANK Magazine *Memory is not strictly a diary, but it pockets the day with similar devices; the entries read like consciousness spilled, even though, after the fact, she used both journal notes and the photos to refine and complete the text. Lines fall and trip over themselves to keep pace with her thought; objects are pilfered from their verbs; words and phrases repeat so many times they end up aural refrains cleaved from ordinary meaning. -- Phoebe Chen * Garage *Each of Mayer’s daily journal entries rolls and eddies as she allows herself to thoroughly investigate the elasticity of language and the contours of her mind. Arrayed in grids, the photographs—of grass, cats, friends, flags, skies, boats, herself, the moon—fix into place the minutiae of her days. * Paris Review *The American artist and poet spent one month in 1971 photographing her day-to-day life in minute detail, sharing both intimate and mundane moments, and delving into the slippery nature of memory. -- Emily Gosling * Elephant *This substantial volume will engage fans of Mayer and introduce new readers to a particular and remarkable voice. -- Editors * Publishers Weekly *A fabled work of installation art that plunged viewers headlong into the fizzing slipstream of [Mayer's] consciousness [...] Her epic's newest form: a treasure of a book -- Jennifer Krasinski * Bookforum *
£36.00
Black Ocean Grotesque Weather and Good People
Book SynopsisA debut English translation of contemporary free verse poetry by an award-winning South Korean poet and novelist.By turns humorous and dark, these poems explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul. Writing in a simple vernacular, Lim Solah’s lyric I struggles with the poet’s call to “wonder” in a world lurking with quiet dissonance and horror. Many of these poems incorporate elements of drama and fiction, including documentary, collapsing the boundaries between the imaginary and the real as they explore the writer's relationship with multitudinous versions of her many selves. While BTS light up the charts and Korean films gather international awards, Lim's poems paint a strange and disorienting map of the consciousness of the so-called "spec" generation that calls their country Hell Chosun. This is a voice on fire from a world on fire. Readers from Seoul to Seattle to Slovenia to Singapore will find it familiar. Since that world is also the one in which we all live. Curated by Jake Levine, the Moon Country Korean Poetry Series publishes new English translations of contemporary Korean poetry by both mid-career and up-and-coming poets who debuted after the IMF crisis. By introducing work that comes out of our shared milieu, this series not only aims to widen the field of contemporary Korean poetry available in English translation, but also to challenge orientalist, neo-colonial, and national literature discourses. Our hope is that readers will inhabit these books as bodies of experience rather than view them as objects of knowledge, that they will allow themselves to be altered by them, and emerge from the page with eyes that seem to see “a world that belongs to another star.” Trade Review“Lim Solah is a rare poet-seer who looks so closely at creatures great and small that she plunges in and inhabits them. In doing so, her introspections take us face to face with the city of Seoul, full of gusto and disgust, showing us the best way to see something is to become it. A post-human prayer book, urban survivor’s guide, and primer on the meteorology of awareness, this is a tome of ecstasy—open only to those courageous enough to venture outside themselves.”—Loren Goodman, author of Famous Americans“Lim Solah is a joyous, irreverent auteur whose remit remains unapologetically visionary: ‘I want to see a giraffe. I go to see a giraffe. // I fail to see a giraffe / so I make a giraffe.’ Quizzing the quiddities inside our everyday mundanities, here is a poet “peep[ing] into the rifts in the air” ... Lim's enchantments are incantatory responses, laboring playfully toward a powerfully estranging logic. Read these poems: see, sense, feel as if for a first time.”—Dan Disney, author of ither, Orpheus
£11.39
Black Ocean Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile
Book SynopsisSoliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile explores the role of silence in a time of war. The war Hussain Ahmed accounts here is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost. The experimental poems track grief as it extends from the personal “I” to a larger community that grapples to find connections with places that are no longer in existence. These are poems that must resist the danger of fear in order to ensure that the victims are not forgotten, resulting in a powerful result is a collection of survival stories that insist on being told.
£10.19
