A haiku, an ode, a sonnet, a limerick, an elegy ... more poetry,please.
Poetry Books
Caitlin Press Love Will Burst Into a Thousand Shapes
Book SynopsisArt, children, marriage, breaking, rejoicing. Love is a many-branched tree and in Hamilton''s newest poetry collection, her third, it''s autumn or winter, the winds are kicking up and branches are flying everywhere - bursting into a thousand shapes. Or maybe it''s Hamilton''s heart that explodes into many dimensions. Tender, furious, grief-stricken, witty, urbane, elegiac, political, personal, erotic - these poems are all those things. Hamilton can''t stop loving big no matter how chancy itis. All these shapes lend raw material for a poem: Mothers lose their babies. A boy loses his leg to war. A girl hides from serial killer Richard Speck. A virgin gets pregnant. A partner mourns a death at Walkerton. Women tumble into love, celebratory and foolhardy. Frank and elemental, this collection reminds us that life is worth everything we can throw at it.
£10.44
Caitlin Press Born Out of This
Book SynopsisChristine Lowther''s first collection of essays, follows her journey from the unutterable loss of her mother to the discovery of her own poetic voice through deep reflection and her intimate connection to the coastal rainforest. Lowther looks back on her mother''s poetry and activism. She recalls the day the police arrested her father, and the indifferent beauty surrounding that life-changing moment. Tumbling through the years that follow, Lowther searches for her ownidentity-foster homes, punk rock concerts, activism and wanderings in Europe fill her hours but leave her searching. Ultimately she is drawn back to the forests and coast of her home. With remarkable poetic vision, Chris weaves her words and her mother''s poetry into the landscape, until language and land are inseparable. She describes the waning days of spawning salmon: barely submerged, the dark grey still-living move slowly among the dead, except for sudden splashes, bursts of energy, pinnacles of desperation. Nothing is simple in this dense, temperate jungle, and even this routine tragedy renews: This landscape of gore nourishes and fertilises the trees and berry bushes. With over twenty years of poetic devotion to Clayoquot Sound, Christine Lowther entrances readers through the stunning vividness of her writing, profound reflections on our place in the natural world and its ultimate indifference to us: We humans stand between forest and ocean like acupuncture needles, feeling the world pulsing with its endless cycles. Steeped in the immense beauty of the coastal rainforest, this indifference is strangely reassuring.
£13.29
Caitlin Press Average Height of Flight
Book SynopsisThese poems are founded in the landscape of coastal BC, built on the losses within the narrator''s life in counterpoint to her walks in the natural world. In forests with her dog, along watersheds and hill climbs, Beth Kope goes off trail to find inspiration and time for meditation. She observes as the landscapes change with storms blowing through, absorbs the names of plants, finds sustained comfort whatever the season: crisp, clear days, rain is fine, or thesnow that reveals the other creatures that share her routes. Kope invites the reader to join her on these walks and meditations on grief. The metre of feet and heartbeat creates a cadence of solace, but lovingly follows the nose of a dog.
£11.39
Caitlin Press He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car
Book SynopsisElegiac, lyrical, ironic; a series of reflections, recollections; a collection about relationships -- to family, clocks, water, trees, ungulates, endings -- recognising that not all relationships are straightforward: a mother''s secret false teeth, a teakettle riddled with bullet holes, pears and small knives. To leave a face in the funeral car is to fall out of time, to fall into history, to ponder the meanings of dust, the quiet records of suicide. This is poetry that covers a broad range, wide and changing, the strangeness of everyday life buoyed by the solace of language, the pleasure of song. Each word in its right place, each poem reflecting beyond surface meaning.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Rough Ground Revisited
Book SynopsisCovering Rough Ground, Kate Braid''s first book, was published in 1991 and awarded the Pat Lowther Award for Best Book of Poetry by a Canadian Woman. Since then Kate has written extensively in prose, poetry and on CBC Radio about her and other women''s experiences in the construction trades. Her work has been highly praised by women in almost every line of male-dominated work including lawyers, accountants and engineers, and she is in wide demand as a speaker and writer on the subject of women in non-traditional work. After publishing her memoir, Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man''s World, in 2012, it seemed appropriate to return to the first poems with the release of a second edition, Rough Ground Revisited. In this new edition, some of the original poems have been replaced with new ones that explore-in slightly more gritty fashion but still with humour, compassion and a wise eye-her experiences and the impact of that crucial time in her life.
£11.39
Accents Publishing Painted Daydreams: Collection of Ekphrastic Poems
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£15.20
Zephyr Press Aperture
Book SynopsisThe poet brings his fascination with formal poetry to 21st century subjects — internet culture, science, postmodern architecture — even as he also explores intimacy, gay love, and emotionally-charged objects in this bilingual (Polish/English) collection. Dehnel's range of style and diction includes poems based on the classic Polish thirteen-syllable line and intricate rhyming stanzas, to prose poems and freer lyrics. "My restlessness… is one of my strongest traits—that insatiability for places, books, paintings, people," he says.
£10.44
Samuel Wachtman's Sons, Inc. The Sun Will Rise Tomorrow: A Child's View of the
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£9.49
Laertes One Flew Over the Kosovo Theater: An Anthology of
Book SynopsisPerhaps the first full-throated response to the war in Kosovo to be published in English, this anthology in a Serbian translation crossed the border between the two countries in 2014 as one of the first works to break a literary silence of three decades. Every play included here even the two comedies proceeds from traumatic circumstances or the wake of them: Set in the thick of the NATO bombing and the forced expulsion from Pristina, The Basement is a family drama in which every inclination and every snap reaction can have an unbearable effect. The Finger draws its impetus from a vacuum, from a family bereft, and the implacable dynamics between two women. In it a disappearance calls for and exacts rituals in the gap between life and death. In the monodrama, Slaying the Mosquito, exile carries with it all the derangement of the war, enacted in the person of the poet-madman-shaman, a tormented spirit caught between diverse worlds. The eponymous One Flew over the Kosovo Theater is an uproarious lampoon. Set in the days approaching the independence of Kosovo, it takes aim at the new government and their yen for censorship and the appropriation of the arts. Recapitulating the occupation and conflict, The Crossroads Café is a sweeping farce with a full cast of characters, including Serbian Police and guerrilla fighters, together with an Everyman trapped in the machinations. One Flew over the Kosovo Theater is more than a collection of plays. It is something that verges on a saga.
£21.24
Laertes We Fall Like Children
Book SynopsisHow does a writer translate war? And when the war is over, how does the individual reconstruct his world from the ruins? Bajraj lives in Mexico, in exile since the war in Kosovo, and a lot of his poetry is equally attentive to both the desire and the loneliness inherent in that fate. -- Ani Gjika Bajrajs poems capture the troubled voice of the foreigner in a strange land; a place tethered, painfully and inextricably, to the past. Bajrajs Mexico City, populated by fallen angels and the ghosts of the poets war-torn past, is an uneasy place, one in which even the most mundane of activities is tinged with darkness. Visions of violence intermittently break the flow of words, rendered all the more forceful by their sparse simplicity. This selection of short poems, like small windows into a world in which neither the reader nor the poet is entirely at ease, allow us to contemplate the brutal melancholy of war, exile, and their lingering effects. -- Alice Whitmore
£10.44
Laertes Emergency Exit: Recent Poems by Xhevdet Bajraj
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£10.44
Laertes Memories Pretend to Sleep: The Poetry of Julia
Book SynopsisBorn in 1949, Julia Gjika grew up during the harshest years of Albanias Communist regime when literature from the West was strictly censored and her own poems were often not allowed in print. When compared to that of other countries in Europe, womens poetry in Albania is fairly recent, and Gjika belongs to the first generation of female poets, having published her first book, Birthday, in 1971, followed by Where I Find Poetry in 1978. In 1996, she immigrated with her family to the United States, where her poetry began to reflect the sacrifices of immigration. Gjikas work is characterized by an unflinching honesty, precision of thought and language, and the peculiar combination of wisdom with a childlike vulnerability. She is a poet who, like the child who puts her ear to the railroad track to hear her train coming, has felt everything deeply, and given herself permission in the face of it all to break into song.
£10.44
Laertes A Song by the Aegean Sea: A Book of Poetry
Book SynopsisA Song by the Aegean Sea is a song for the unsung heroes of the coast of Izmir, Turkey, or Smyrna, that cosmopolitan city through the different ages. The book celebrates the underbelly of the city; the gypsies selling flowers, the roving musicians, the mussel-sellers, and the protestors. The elements of the city’s coastline are also merged with the characters in an impressionistic, yet surreal canvas from a stranger’s point of view. The traveler, i.e., the poet, or the singer of the Aegean song yearns to become part of the scene. Trade ReviewMohamed Metwalli’s A Song by the Aegean Sea transports us to Turkey’s Aegean coast where a tourist described as an “Egyptian poet” observes scenes of city life from his “6th floor balcony / [i]n the Izmir Palace Hotel.” Told in three sections spanning a year (each poem is dated from three trips taken in June 2013, January 2014, and June 2014), a mostly omniscient narrator paints scenes based on the poet’s travels. A title like “Jump Cut” alludes to the collection’s cinematic framework with local characters reappearing and storylines carrying through across several poems, and we learn that the tourist had wished for “stronger lighting / For scenes unworthy of filming / In his life.” In the final poem, “Farewell,” the speaker observes “the carcass of a dove / Struck by lightning in front of my very eyes.” Gretchen McCullough’s collaborative translation with Metwalli is full of remarkable phrases, from winter’s “skittish sun” to […] ships seeping their lightFrom afarSilver and gold on the surface of dark waters In her introduction, McCullough notes that Metwalli composed his original text, first published in 2015, in “formal standard Arabic, not colloquial,” which made me wonder whether the translation is reaching for a slightly archaic register of English. Many poems land on an emphatic exclamation point reminiscent of older poetry, moves that feel akin to making a black-and-white film in homage to the classics. In “A Raven, a Moon,” the speaker enters into conversation with the city itself and considers what to do with “a drunken, orange half moon,” musing about whether to send it skipping “on the surface of the water … [o]r puncture it until it lands on the bed of the sea.” Metwalli delights in metaphor; in “Strange Language,” the speaker observes how a date “primped herself, / her mirror, the page of the sea,” before they board a “boat with no intention to depart.” REVIEWED BY LAYLA BENITEZ-JAMES -- LAYLA BENITEZ-JAMES * Poetry Foundation *
£10.44
Laertes A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20
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£21.24
Sagging Meniscus Press Moreover
Book SynopsisThese poems turns laconic and garrulous, hard-boiled and tender, magnify gaps and unreliabilities in the surface of things through which the depths of an underlying desolation, a nameless existential care, and the mystery of love may be glimpsed; they make a swaying bridge over the abyss of loss. Number among my umpteen flaws detached glibness, he writes; Who would disagree that little''s glitchless? What he calls his glibness, transmitted with a compressed but graceful musicality, often attains an unsentimental lyricism all the more touching for its reticence. His audacious imagination and relentless intelligence give rise to a richly ironic humor that is often valedictory, somber, even grim, but never without profound affection and attention.
£12.34
Sagging Meniscus Press Rituals of Mummification
Book SynopsisPoet Joseph Reich writes from a great inner pressure of experience and memory. His senses are open to an America frozen in a forever unconsummated act of rotting; with humor, empathy, and a vast, restless energy, his experience bursts out, capturing the fleeting world in a poetic bubble with an almost painterly repletion, so that for a moment it becomes whole and tangible, authentic both to the outer reality to which it is a touching tribute, and to his own nature.
£13.50
Sagging Meniscus Press Orchid Elegy
Book SynopsisMatthew Gasda''s gorgeously contrapuntal Orchid Elegy is a long poem that, like a fugue, moves at once backwards and forwards, joining an impulse towards restless exploration and budding divagation with an instinct for recapitulation. Its 179 brief numbered sections are held both together and apart by a semantic tensegrity achieved through graceful thematic stratification; each structural node experiences the quality of its own solitude in resonance with an elegiac melos unfolding around and through it. These parcels of finitude, petals like the characters of a play, constantly seek, both in form and in thought, the pattern of a lost Eurydice, even in the shifting, retreating presence of the Other, for the most important category of beauty is the beauty of that which is lost. The spiral of longing persists through love, hunger and death. Yet, something is accomplished, if not necessarily captured, through the turning of this gyre of lament and encomium. Tracing and dissecting through the alchemy of metaphor the form of the beloved, slowly the poem emerges from its secret and consciousness emerges; the poem, or the soul, becomes body, and vice versa, a shared node transparent -- shining, and with renewed purpose, the elegy of life begins again.
£9.49
Sagging Meniscus Press Magritte's Missing Murals: Insomniac Episodes
Book SynopsisThese insomniac episodes consist of 84 tantalizing descriptions of hallucinated Magritte murals, painted on the inside of poet Joseph Reich''s sleepless eyelids. Strongly visual but leaving much to the imagination, humourous, and deliciously paradoxical, they make a delightful introduction to Reich''s wryly obsessive way of shaking off the downpour of the world''s insanity.
£9.50
Sagging Meniscus Press Grief Songs
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£13.29
Sagging Meniscus Press Resisting Probability
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£10.44
Sagging Meniscus Press Wings
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£17.09
Sagging Meniscus Press Please State the Nature of Your Emergency
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£10.44
Sagging Meniscus Press Run Out of Prose
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£13.29
Sagging Meniscus Press Logography: A Poetry Omnibus
Book SynopsisThis book brings together three collections of extraordinarily vigorous and electric poetry from the quicksilver mind of Anis Shivani: Confessions II, Lyric/Resistance, and The Art of Love.
£22.09
Sagging Meniscus Press Sadness Corrected: New Poems and Dialogues
Book SynopsisIn this prodigious outpouring of short pieces, Marvin Cohen looks into every corner of human affairs, even the darkest, with a joyful spark that never goes out.
£19.79
Sagging Meniscus Press This Way to the Grand As-Is: New and Selected
Book SynopsisThis is a snapshot of Aaron Anstett''s career so far: the author''s own selections from six previous collections, from SUSTENANCE (1997) to PLEASE STATE THE NATURE OF YOUR EMERGENCY (2017), plus twenty-seven new poems. From the beginning, Anstett''s work has been driven by a restless attention and lyrical ear. He is a poet of surprise and wit and wonder.
£20.69
Sagging Meniscus Press When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs
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£20.69
Sagging Meniscus Press The Rudiments of Poetry: New Poems 2017-2018
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£20.69
Sagging Meniscus Press All the Useless Things are Mine: A Book of
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£14.39
Mage Publishers A Scholar for our Times: A Celebration of the
Book SynopsisShahrokh Meskoob was an Iranian writer and intellectual, who was born in Babol, on the Caspian coast, in 1924 and died in Paris in 2005. Imprisoned in the mid-1950s for leftist activities, he was forced to leave the country following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, after publishing two critical articles in the Ayandegan newspaper in Tehran. Meskoobs literary analysis of the Shahnameh and the poetry of Hafez, and his book Iranian National Identity and the Persian Language, all translated into English, demonstrate his view that national identity meant cultural identity and that modernity in Iran should be based upon an understanding of the best of Iranian culture. This book celebrates Meskoobs life and work in eight essays by prominent Iranian scholars and in a selection of facsimiles of his papers, now archived at Stanford University.
£39.09
Mage Publishers Milkvetch & Violets: Poems by Mohammad Reza
Book SynopsisMohammad Reza Shafii-Kadkani is a contemporary Iranian poet, literary critic, editor, author, and translator born in 1939. His nature poetry, which comprise most of the poems in this book, are harbingers of hope. His wildflowers and birds anticipate the arrival of spring. His milkvetch contemplates its predicament but finds a way to convey its message through the breeze. His wintersweet outsmarts the drought; his mountain osier, pine and petunia are the songs of life; his rain cleanses the earth and purifies the words; his poppy is reckless, his sea fearless; his jasmines and sweetbriars are miraculous. Kadkani is at once a modern poet and a classical one, well versed in both traditions. His themes, language, and style are unique, fusing the old with the new, the classic with the modern. Mojdeh Bahar was born in 1973 in Iran to a family of poets and writers. Her parents emigrated to the U.S. when she was 14. Although she is a patent lawyer by profession, she continued her deep interest in Persian poetry. This is her first book of translations from one of her favourite contemporary Persian poets.
£17.09
Mage Publishers Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women,
Book SynopsisIranian women have been writing Persian poetry for over a thousand years, and in the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged once again as an outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise.In this expanded bilingual anthology encompassing both the most progressive and the most regressive eras for women in Iran, Mojdeh Bahar introduces readers to the poems of 104 Iranian women during the past sixty years. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, this expanded edition of Song of the Ground Jay engages with a very diverse array of Iranian women''s voices that includes the full spectrum of aesthetic sensibilities-with varying styles, tones, and themes, painting a dynamic and cohesive portrait of modern Persian poetry by women.For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with contemporary Persian poetry by Iranian women but doesn''t know where to start, Song of the Ground Jay opens a door and invites you to walk in.
£65.44
Sagging Meniscus Press Rotalever Revelator
Book SynopsisThis is a book made from words that spell other words backwards: a giant palindrome that contains poems about geography, dams, swamps, celebrities, eponyms, and the news. There''s also a translation of the first part of Burnt Norton and a multi-lingual section, O Rue Euro, with German, French, Italian, and Spanish beating up on English, and vice-versa. Flip the book over, and you have Revelator Rotalever: the same sequence of letters, differently divided into words and punctuated. Doug Nufer''s stop-at-nothing inventiveness, an object lesson in transforming the merest opportunity into delight, is matched here by James Siena''s stylish illustrations.
£15.29
Sagging Meniscus Press Falling in the Direction of Up
Book SynopsisThis, the first full-length poetry collection by Kurt Luchs (author of Its Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye), contains enough references to the present moment to signal that it was written in this century, but otherwise it seems almost a book from a different era, specifically, that of the innovative American poetry of the sixties and seventies. The author has clearly been inspired by the free verse of Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, James Tate and Charles Simic, among others. However, his voice remains very much his own: lyrical, direct, mysterious, funny and awestruck by turns, often in the same poem. There is nothing trendy or up-to-date about these poems, which may be why so many of them feel both fresh and timeless. He divides the book into four sections forming a loose sort of arc. The opening section, Feral Grief, recounts a brutal and loveless childhood endured with his siblings, a dark tale he tells without self-pity and with flashes of savage humour and grace. One of these poems, Suzie, about a memorably awful family dog, won the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. The second part, Night and Morning, shifts the mood into the light with closely observed nature lyrics and meditations. Section three, The Sound of Water, appears to be a catch-all housing the surreal, the satirical and the spiritual, a kind of literary thrift store window where a comic swipe at the false promise of shampoo-conditioner sits comfortably next to a heartfelt tribute to J.S. Bach. He concludes with a powerful section that shares its crookedly optimistic title with the book itself, Falling in the Direction of Up. These are striking love poems that range from joyful to mournful to sensual to bemused -- again, sometimes all at once -- sharply written and revealing the redemptive power of the human spirit. Taken together, these accomplished verses read less like a first book than like the work of a poet writing at the height of his powers, what James Wright called the poetry of a grown man.
£15.29
Sagging Meniscus Press Shelf
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£13.49
Sagging Meniscus Press The Blank Page
Book SynopsisA new poetry collection from a great American visionary. Iván Argüelles fills his Blank Page with astounding poetry, bringing us through Homeric, Dantesque, and Vedic worlds as well as the Americana of his youth in beautifully constructed lines with imaginative juxtapositions that would be the envy of André Breton or Paul Éluard. -- Carl Landauer It is difficult, William Carlos Williams famously wrote, to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack of what is found there. In Iván Argüelles brilliant new book we follow a fecund mind through our plague year. Day by day, poem by poem, Argüelles unspools the internal news, speedy, profuse, enjambed and unwilling to cycle through the usual bromides and pronouncements. This is language on fire, midnight speech unraveled, crafted and raw, overflowing and yet aching toward a sublime silence where meaning diminishes/ in mulch and nothing comes back. The Blank Page is news that wont be forgotten. -- Philip Brady, author of The Elsewhere: Poems & Poetics
£17.99
Saved by Story Publishing The Alchemy of The Beast
Book SynopsisI wept as time stopped, and I wept as time refused to cease.Grieving her faith, her love, and her identity, twenty-one-year-old Scarlett V. Leonelli is devastated by an unexpected tragedyone threatening to unravel her to her very core. Following a series of inexplicable synchronicities, Scarlett journeys deep into the jungle of a hidden village in Costa Rica where, far beyond the only reality she has ever known, she is forced to trust the path as it appears beneath her feet.Led by the sacred invitations in riddles of mysterious guides, romantic rendezvous, and enticing adventures, Scarlett falls into the belly of the Beast itself.Will Scarlett give in or choose to alchemize one of humanity's inevitable tragedies?The Alchemy of The Beast is the first installation of The Lionheart Chronicles, a series inspired by author Alyssa Noelle Coelho's own truth-seeking journey. Drawing upon her training in sociocultural anthropology and her own experiences as a Traveler, wrestling with the meaning of existence, love, connection, and contribution, Alyssa shines a light on the raw truths of the human condition and showcases the beauty of cultures worldwide.
£21.59
Caitlin Press The Dirty Knees of Prayer
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£11.39
Caitlin Press Acquired Community
Book SynopsisJane Byers'' Acquired Community is both a collection of narrative poems about seminal moments in North American lesbian and gay history, mostly post-World War II, and a series of first person poems that act as a touchstone to compare the narrator''s coming out experience within the larger context of the gay liberation movement. The parade poems such as Celebration Was a Side Effect, 1992 explores the important role parades have played in the queer movement and how they have transformed from activism to celebration. St Patrick''s Day Parade, 2014 takes the Boston St. Patrick''s Day committee''s homophobia to task, reminding us that this is not ancient history, but an ever-transforming experience. In her long poem, Keen, Byers imagines a dialogue between a young queer university student and Michael Lynch, an AIDS activist, poet and scholar who helped found many gay community institutions. In this compelling poem we are reminded that the AIDS epidemic had a rippling effect, touching the lives of everyone within the gay community and well beyond. In this second book by Byers her poems go beyond the historical perspective of LGBT rights and are living examples of progress. Acquired Community examines and celebrates community resilience.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Flightpaths: The Lost Journals of Amelia Earhart
Book SynopsisOn the 120th anniversary of Amelia Earhart''s birth and the 80th anniversary of her disappearance, award-winning poet, Heidi Greco revitalizes what we know about the iconic aviator through uplifting and historically mesmerizing verse. If most people were asked what they know about Amelia Earhart, they''d probably respond with something like Wasn''t she that pilot who went missing when she tried to fly around the world? Although that much is true, Earhart was so much more. She was a feminist at a time when women were just beginning to make inroads towards equality. She was a best-selling author who made appearances and speeches that inspired many. In addition, she was a pacifist, a poet, a punster ? the list could go on. She was ahead of her time in so many ways, right down to the no-nonsense clothes she wore (many of them fashioned after her own designs). To this day, her disappearance is enshrouded in mystery, with many questions remaining. Was she on a secret mission, spying for her country? Was she captured by the Japanese and held in a prison camp? Or did she and her navigator simply crash and die? The poems in this collection, presented as if written by Earhart herself, consider some of the many theories that attempt to explain her disappearance. Through logbook entries, recollections and letters, the work explores some of the various flightpaths she may have taken.
£11.39
Caitlin Press The Small Way
Book SynopsisWhat strange gravity draws two people together? What pulls them apart? In The Small Way, a woman re-evaluates herself and her marriage as she comes to terms with a spouses transition. Intimate and powerful, the poems celebrate the courage of a partner coming out as a trans woman and records the confusion in facing a partners changing gender identity. Speaking to the tenderness that exists between two people, the book explores shifting bodies and changing emotional landscapes, and examines what it really means to love someone. The poems reside in the stillness of two bodies and in the intersection between time and grief. The Small Way is a passionate record of love and loss, and a naked exploration of vulnerability. The book is an elegy to love and memory, a chronicle of holding on and letting go.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Playing Into Silence
Book SynopsisGrowing up during the 50s and 60s in small town Alberta, Pam was keenly aware, by the age of nine, that she was a lesbian. And she also knew well to hide this about herself. Pam would search for books on the The Island of Lesbos, only to return from the library with a copy of Little Women. In between the vast spaces of dust and dugouts, she grows up and grows old, playing her saxophone in deep, blaring notes. Age is a constant marker throughout these poems for an otherwise long and lonely time of waiting for queer rights, for acceptance, for love. Poet Tina Biello unearths just about everything from beneath the Alberta ground: dinosaur bones, a familys firstborn, missing cows. A voice from within the Prairies, Playing Into Silence is a look back at a dry time in lesbian identity.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Elemental
Book SynopsisUsually, we take for granted or plain ignore the Earth we walk on, the Sky above, the Water we drink and bathe in or that falls as rain, the Fire we assume for heat, and the Wood that makes up our landscape and building materials. But over fifteen years as a construction carpenter, Kate Braid began to pay more attention to the materials she worked with and depended upon. Out of these she has crafted an intimate picture of what it is like to be wholly engaged with the elemental materials of earth, sky, water, fire and wood that we depend upon every day. Elemental is a poignant, intelligent collection that asks us to look more closely at ourselves and the details that construct our rich and delicate world.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Paradise, Later Years
Book SynopsisMarion Quednaus collection Paradise, Later Years plays with the language of juxtaposition, nothing is straight on; if theres quiet beauty by the sea, theres a passing warship. Quednaus lyricism, whether of river or lover, bears witness to relationships transformed by the tension -- and surprise -- of setting one thing against another. The verse is often irreverent, the humour touching on the pain of recognition, making us shift our boundaries. This book is a brave road trip where no one comes out with the same skin of escape, or want, but rather with new forms of redemption.
£11.39
Caitlin Press Chenille or Silk
Book SynopsisA startling first collection of confessional poetry examining the slippery relations of desire, class, embodiment and trauma. Emma McKennas writing traverses the bounds and the wounds of a family marked by poverty and intergenerational trauma. The collection asserts the primacy of intimacy and sexuality to subjectivity, as the poems move through the struggle to find identity, love and belonging in an urban queer communitys ever-shifting economy of desire. Striking, brave and at times uncomfortable, this collection captures the ambivalence -- and the hope -- of possibility.
£11.39
Caitlin Press The Brightest Thing
Book SynopsisIn her first full-length collection, award-winning poet Ruth Daniell offers work that is both earnest and hopeful, even in the face of trauma. In formally exquisite and lyrical poems, The Brightest Thing tells the story of a young woman who is raped by her first boyfriend and her struggle afterwards to navigate her fairy-tale expectations of romantic love. This contemporary story of hurt and healing is paired with poems that give voice to silenced princesses from fairy talesincluding Rapunzel, Donkeyskin, The Little Mermaids sister and the princess who feels the pea beneath two hundred mattresses. At turns heartbreaking and joyful, with an unabashed eye for beauty and an unapologetic hope for love, Daniell questions the pursuit of happily ever after, and probes deep into darkness while looking for the light.
£11.39
Caitlin Press How She Read
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£12.34
Metatron Press The Choice Is Real
Book SynopsisJayson Keery's world-building poems reimagine the coming-of-age narrative for queer and trans people. Winner of The Metatron Prize for Rising Authors (Poetry), The Choice is Real is a romp through millennial media landscapes and an interrogation of their power as systems of early childhood gender programming. Challenging the conventions of how queer and trans people are encouraged to tell their stories, The Choice is Real engages the concept of choice in queerness and trivializes the linear born-this-way narratives that queer people are sold. In response to a second puberty brought on by medical transition and an unravelling of family structures following the death of their stepmother, Keery regresses through a warped and foreboding childhood landscape saturated with pop culture iconography. Writing with and against Disney classics, Keery moves between formative memories and contemporary moments, weaving in accounts of current relations in their playful uprooting of assumptions of queer relationality. Opening with a cheeky epigraph from trans author and activist Lou Sullivan: I love being a girl. So delicate, The Choice is Real explodes with celebration and criticism of girlhood from a transmasculine perspective.
£12.00
