Search results for ""Penned in the Margins""

None of this is the city. All of it is you.In his follow-up to Kalagora, Siddhartha Bose imagines the poet as a 21st-century beatnik, a ravenous language-machine eating up the margins of the city. Dreams trigger extraordinary visions of an apocalyptic London; beat-boxers and graffiti writers as urban oracles; the ghosts of a multicultural city moving through banks and brothels, kebab shops and squat parties. Dispatches from the post-industrial landscapes of the North, and from the poet's hometowns of Mumbai and Kolkata, complete this raw and uncompromisingly modern collection.Siddhartha Bose is a poet, playwright and performer based in Hackney. His poetry has appeared in Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009; ISBN 9781852248383), Dear World and Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013; ISBN 9781852249496) and the HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (HarperCollins India, 2012; ISBN 9789350290415). His first book, Kalagora, appeared in 2010 from Penned in the Margins (ISBN 9780956546746). Siddhartha has been featured on BBC 4 TV, BBC Radio 3 and was dubbed one of the 'ten rising stars of British poetry' by the Times. He is a Leverhulme Fellow in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.

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Urbane yet uncompromising, Trammel is the powerful debut collection from a voice that demands to be heard. Voracious in her critique of modernity, Charlotte Newman ranges across the spectra of social and sexual politics – from Brexit to the Bechdel Test via Renaissance art and vintage computer games.These poems are stylish, muscular and linguistically agile. Always driven by a musical engine, Newman weaves the hard language of politics, technology, finance, science and the law into a new lyric texture. Trammel is a radical book of poetry for an uncertain future.

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Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain.Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton's poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision.Includes 'i am very precious' - Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2016.

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Formally inventive and intricately composed, Astéronymes is a book of redactions - and an elegy for places and people that have been ruined by time, erosion or neglect. Astéronyme, n. (French). A sequence of asterisks used to hide a name or password.In this follow-up to her acclaimed debut, The Shipwrecked House (Guardian First Book Award longlisted), Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien takes us to a place where ancient stone circles collide with the language of the internet.Trévien becomes curator of imaginary museums, indexing objects and histories with a quixotic energy. The stunning central sequence recounts a journey across the Scottish island of Arran, where myths are carved into remote caves and a mountain hides behind a ‘froufrou of gas’.

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Opened in 1837 and inspired by the Pere Lachaise in Paris, West Norwood became known as the Millionaire's Cemetery. But within its opulent grounds there are twelve buried names whose currency is language: these are the dead poets of West Norwood. In the first instalment of a project to map the Magnificent Seven, Chris McCabe takes us off the main track of London writing and asks why the works of Hopkins, Tennyson and Browning are still read above those buried in this suburban enclave of South London. Join McCabe on the hunt for a great lost poet, as he walks the winding Gothic paths of the Cemetery and makes an unexpected discovery underground in the catacombs. The stories of those loved and dismissed by Charles Dickens are carefully uncovered; those who influenced Lewis Carroll and Winston Churchill; and those whose burial in the common ground has not been enough to silence them. A startling and original work of literary detection, In the Catacombs is written across a range of forms - prose, Gothic fiction, criticism and poetry - and places West Norwood Cemetery and its dead poets back into the foreground of the London psyche.

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A young woman spends a month taking the waters at a thermal water-based rehabilitation facility in Budapest. On her return to London, she attempts to continue her recovery using an 80 pound inflatable blue bathtub. The tub becomes a metaphor for the intrusion of disability; a trip hazard in the middle of an unsuitable room, slowly deflating and in constant danger of falling apart. Sanatorium moves through contrasting spaces - bathtub to thermal pool, land to water, day to night - interlacing memoir, poetry and meditations on the body to create a mesmerising, mercurial debut. 'There is a dreamlike quality to Abi Palmer's exquisite Sanatorium. In lucid, gorgeous prose, she tells the story of a body, of illness and of navigating the complicated wellness industry, but ultimately this is a book about what it means to be alive. A striking, experimental debut that will stay with me.' Sinéad Gleeson Shortlisted for The Barbellion Prize 2020

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*Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019* Winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019 * Winner of the Ted Hughes Award 2018 * Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award * Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize * The Perseverance is the multi-award-winning debut by British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus. Ranging across history and continents, these poems operate in the spaces in between, their haunting lyrics creating new, hybrid territories. The Perseverance is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet's father sit alongside meditations on the d/Deaf experience. Audiobook now available from Audible, Amazon and iTunes.

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Tom Chivers (editor) was born in south London in 1983. His publications include How to Build a City (Salt, 2009), The Terrors (Nine Arches, 2009), Flood Drain (Annexe, 2014) and, as editor, the anthologies City State: New London Poetry and Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2009 & 2012). He has made site-specific, perambulatory and audio work for Southbank Centre, Bishopsgate Institute, the Eden Project and LIFT. An award-winning independent arts producer, he is former co-Director of London Word Festival and currently runs Penned in the Margins from a small office in East London.

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Tom Chivers was born in South London in 1983. His publications include How To Build A City (Salt Publishing, 2009), The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009; shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets) and, as editor, the anthologies Generation Txt, City State: New London Poetry and Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry (Penned in the Margins, 2006, 2009 & 2010). A regular reviewer for Poetry London, he presented a documentary about the poet Barry MacSweeney for BBC Radio 4 in 2009. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011.

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Forms of Protest collects together for the first time the work of Hannah Silva, a poet known for her fearless and wholly original vocal performances. These poems and experimental texts oscillate between sense and nonsense, meaning and music, deconstructing traditional discourse and always testing the limits of language to represent the lived world.Ranging in form from sound poems to collaged spam email, from monologues to lists of insults, and embracing subjects as diverse as war, sexuality and giant squid, Silva's poetry is like nothing else you've read.Hannah Silva is a poet and playwright. She has performed internationally and throughout the UK, including at Latitude Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe and on Radio 3. Her solo show Opposition toured in 2011-12 and was described in a five-star review by What's on Stage as "radical, political, courageous". Her writing has been published in the anthologies Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2012; ISBN 9781908058010) and Dear World & Everyone In It (Bloodaxe Books, 2013; ISBN 9781852249496). She lives in Plymouth.

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Co-editor Tom Chivers was born in 1983 in South London. A poet, publisher and independent arts producer, his books include How to Build a City (Salt Publishing, 2009), The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009) and, as editor, City State: New London Poetry and Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2009 & 2012). In 2009 he presented a documentary for BBC Radio 4. His poem 'The Event' was animated by artist Julia Pott for Channel 4 television and has been viewed over 80,000 times online. Tom is currently writing a book of creative non-fiction entitled London Clay: Journeys into the Deep City. Co-editor Martin Kratz lives and writes in Manchester. He collaborates regularly with the composer Leo Geyer, and their piece Sedna won the 2011 Rosamund Prize. The opera The Mermaid of Zennor was described by the Times as an 'imaginative and beautifully shaped take on the Cornish legend'. 'The Dancing Bear' and 'The Bearded Lady' from the song cycle Sideshows, won the Philip Bates Prize for Composers and Songwriters. 2014 sees the premiere of three new collaborations: the complete performance of Sideshows, the opera Glasstown, and the ballet The Fox, to be performed at Sadler's Wells. Martin is currently writing a PhD on contemporary poetry and the sense of touch.

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Plastiglomerate finds our world in the midst of environmental disaster: from plastic pollution and wrecked shipping to fires in the Amazon rainforest. Geographer-poet Tim Cresswell writes with the forensic eye of a professional, bending the hard vocabulary of science into a jagged but compelling lyric that telescopes from the vast to the cellular in the space of a line. Plastiglomerate completes a trilogy of poetry books that examines mankind's impact on the earth; its central poem recycles the British folk ballad 'The Twa Magicians' to make an ecological protest song fit for the Anthropocene age. But among powerful depictions of the natural world under threat - from beached whales to lost birds - it is the humanity of Cresswell's imagery that wins through: leaf-blowers in surgical masks, blue nail polish, the biro 'leaking in the heat of my pocket'. 'Engaging and unsettling poems that tell it like it is, looking unflinchingly at environmental beauty and disaster. There is redemption here too, in the warmth of human relationships - while this is indeed a world of 'ruin and plunder', it is also a place 'full of love and sap'. A powerful and memorable collection.' - Jean Sprackland

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"Out on the estuary a slab of land had separated itself from the horizon and was moving closer" Shortlisted for the New Angle Prize 2019 In 2016 Tom Bolton set out on a mission to walk the long, winding coastline of Essex — from Purfleet on the Thames Estuary to the Suffolk border. Low Country records his probing, hallucinatory journeys along crumbling sea-walls and through retail parks, past abandoned military forts and plotlands. He uncovers an ancient battlefield upstream from a decommissioned nuclear power station, visits England’s most deprived community and treks the remote and beautiful Dengie peninsula in search of forgotten stories. In the treacherous mudflats and coastal resorts of England’s eastern edge, an alternative vision begins to emerge, shaken by Brexit and the rise of new, populist politics in Britain and America. In this low country of vast horizons, where land and sea are in constant flux, Bolton discovers a hidden history of invasion, resistance and radical thinking. A timely new book from the celebrated author of London’s Lost Rivers and Vanished City, Low Country repositions the edgelands of Essex at the political and imaginative heart of England.

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"The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk captures the precariousness and fragility of life" LUKE KENNARD; Kate Davis writes magical realist poems born of the hills, marshes and coastal edgelands of south Cumbria. In this remarkable first collection, tarns, limekilns and abandoned pits become portals into a dark, interior world. A woman levitates above a building site; earth slips and fault-lines open up beneath the town; the sea hides ‘a gob of virus’. The moving title sequence tells the story of a young girl with polio who struggles to find her feet — and her voice — in an unforgiving landscape where ‘the ground cannot be trusted’. Alive to geology, memory and myth, The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk is a brave, uncompromising and unmissable debut.

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The Sun is our neighbourhood star, igniting the imagination and setting the template for divinity. But in reality, it is crawling with sunspots of differing shapes, sizes, and power. Simon Barraclough (Poet in Residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory) is your guide to the Sun in this ambitious and energetic new collection of poems, fusing science and literature, and channelling Shakespeare, Byron, Nabokov and more. Is the Sun a god, a man, a woman, or simply a giant ball of hydrogen? Why does it tell fibs about its favourite painters? Is the Sun afraid of dying? Does it get depressed? And what does it really think about us, and the solar system it is bound to care for? In Sunspots fact, fiction, horror, humour and joy are condensed into a powerful meditation on the star that gives us life.

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In The Story of No Emma Hammond delivers an experimental lyric that is wild, weird and full of the errata of modern life. Her poems reappropriate the language of brands, pornography and instant messaging, and argue for Carry On films and Wotsits as the true subjects of poetry. The shifts of register and voice alone range from the breathtaking to the disconcerting in this stunning and complex second collection.

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The Sun is our neighbourhood star, igniting the imagination and setting the template for divinity. But in reality, it is crawling with sunspots of differing shapes, sizes, and power. Simon Barraclough (Poet in Residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory) is your guide to the Sun in this ambitious and energetic new collection of poems, fusing science and literature, and channelling Shakespeare, Byron, Nabokov and more. Is the Sun a god, a man, a woman, or simply a giant ball of hydrogen? Why does it tell fibs about its favourite painters? Is the Sun afraid of dying? Does it get depressed? And what does it really think about us, and the solar system it is bound to care for? In Sunspots fact, fiction, horror, humour and joy are condensed into a powerful meditation on the star that gives us life.

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A piano is thrown from the top of an East London tower block. A Goth is sick on the bus.Crises, curses and kisses punctuate this new book of poetry by Tim Wells. Written from the edges of the city, Wells' tightly honed poems satirise the slide towards a world of frustration, gentrification and heavy manners. Sometimes hilarious, often angry and always decisive, Everything Crash is a fierce examination of love, loss and the politics of modern living. This is poetry that challenges austerity and pretension with a cutting wit."Sharp, witty and ultimately unforgiving in all the right places"PHILL JUPITUS

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Oliver Dixon was born in Sussex and, excepting periods travelling in Europe and Asia, has lived most of his adult life in London. He is a specialist teacher for students with learning disabilities. His poems and reviews have appeared in PN Review, The London Magazine, The Wolf, Frogmore Papers, Long Poem Magazine, Blackbox Manifold, Gists & Piths and New Welsh Review. He blogs at Ictus (oliverdixon1.blogspot.com). Human Form is his first book.

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Reader's nomination for Guardian First Book Award 2013Anchors, shipwrecks, whales and islands abound in this first collection by young Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien. Trévien's is a surreal vision, steeped in myth and music, in which everything is alive and – like the sea itself – constantly shifting form. Fishermen become owls; a woman turns into a snake, while another gives birth to a tree; a glow-worm might become a wasp or 'a toy on standby'.Struck through with brilliant, sometimes sinister imagery reminiscent of Pan's Labyrinth or an Angela Carter novel, The Shipwrecked House is a lyrical and hallucinatory debut from a poet featured in Salt's Best British Poetry 2012.Claire Trévien was born in Brittany. Her pamphlet Low-Tide Lottery was published by Salt in 2011. Her work also appears in the recent anthologies Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt, 2012) and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon, 2012). She is the editor of Sabotage Reviews and the co-organiser of Penning Perfumes, a creative collaboration between poets and perfumers, featured in the Guardian (June 2012) and the Financial Times (August 2012). She is currently in the fourth year of a PhD at Warwick University.

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Love / All That /& OK, an anti-confessional by experimental British poet Emily Critchley, brings together a diverse range of work previously published in chapbooks since 2004, and includes new material from the sequences 'Poems for Luke', 'The Sonnets' and 'Poems for Other People'.

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From urban sketches of London and warped love poems to a paean to the Boston Tea Party and a letter to an American in Afghanistan, Metrophobia establishes a poetry that is inventive, quirky and packed with humour.Metrophobia, n.Fear or hatred of poetryStephanie Leal's satirical verses, visual poems and prose chunks gnaw at the edges of pop culture and the everyday. Her language twists and turns in unexpected ways, revealing a bold new writer ready to 'french kiss life square in the mouth'."A searching and resourceful imagination is at work here, seeking new perspectives with vitality and insight."Penelope Shuttle"Leal [is] playful, experimental, questioning of 'poetry' as a specialised, rarefied state enjoyed only by sensitive types, her poems with a touch of theatre and bravura."George Szirtes"These poems are an alternative news broadcast from a young American correspondent abroad in the world. Contained within them are many of the domestic and emotional snippets which CNN will never give you."Martin Newell"The poems turn familiar tropes and warp them into new, peculiar shapes; the one-night stand becomes a defiant one, stories of her grandfather take a hallucinatory turn. Stephanie Leal's world is one where preconceived ideas unravel suddenly, leaving a strange and unfamiliar territory behind them. [...] She is neither militant nor fawning – a struck bell that demonstrates a romantic but pragmatic spirit."Andrew SpraggStephanie Leal is originally from New Jersey, USA. She received her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2007 and is studying for her PhD in Philosophy. She currently lives in Norwich.

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Winner of the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize Winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Moving between child and adult voices, past and present, this startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life. 'Each page of The Sun Is Open is rich with exquisite and surprising language, pain, and wisdom.' - Maggie Nelson 'The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant, from Wendy Houses, to the very hairs of your head, to the poetry of First Aid instructions, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking - sometimes pain-making work - making the words fit the columns, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses. A series of ethical considerations and transactions, credits and debits that sometimes demand to be accounted for, or judged, or at least spoken of in the light of whatever the forensics might or might never unfold.' - Ciaran Carson Poetry book of the month - the Observer A TLS book of the year

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An escaped lion roams the streets of Essex; a lonely pensioner holds a tower block fete; and a young woman dreams of leaving home. Travel the unfashionable A-roads and commuter lines of England -'where industry meets marsh'- with poet Luke Wright. In his stunning new collection, discover a country riven by inequality and corruption but sustained by a surreal, gallow's humour. The Toll combines the elegaic with the anarchic, placing uproarious satire cheek-by-jowl with wild experiments in form and touching poems of parenthood. In this mature follow-up to his best-selling debut, Mondeo Man, Wright captures the strain of austerity Britain, speaking truth to power and registering the toll it takes on us all.

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A woman stands at the edge of a cliff, looking out to sea and the horizon. Dancers welcome the sun in a circle of stones. A dowsing road turns without warning. A church bell. Footsteps.Old Weird Albion is America writer Justin Hopper's dark love song to the English South; a poetic essay interrogating the high, haunted landscape of the South Downs Way; the memories, myths and forgotten histories from Winchester to Beachy Head.When someone disappears, when someone leaps from a cliff and is all-but-erased from memory, what traces might we find in the crumbling chalk of the cliff face; in the wind that buffets the edge of this Albion?A skewed alternative to Bill Bryson, Hopper casts himself as the outsider as he wanders the English countryside in pursuit of mystical encounters. His journey sees him joining New Age eccentrics and accidental visionaries on the hunt for crop circles and druidic stones, discussing the power of nature with ecotherapists and pagans, tracing the ruins of abandoned settlements and walking the streets of eerie suburbs.Through a startling revelation of his own family history, Hopper turns part detective, part memoirist, tracking the footsteps of his grandfather's first wife, Doris; piecing together her forgotten history.

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Bodypopping Belgians and bicycle couriers populate a world of public fountains and archaeological debris in this original and eclectic collection by James Wilkes.Weather A System includes poems, found text, scripts, ephemera and imaginary reviews; subversive broadcasts that cut through the 'civil drizzle' of contemporary life. Wilkes' work excavates the present, looting and salvaging to craft an innovative, playful and multi-dimensional poetics. Weather A System captures shifts of weather, power and fashion: an energetic and darkly witty intervention in an eroded culture. "James Wilkes views the city 24/7 from a podium of his own. When he talks he talks quickly, capturing the details that pedestrians miss: the shuffle of clothes, the background tracks. His ambition is to move with the flaneurial swagger that knows the city is always subject to the ever-shifting weather. Through the commuter and traffic crush, as the crowds run for cover, the poet exposes himself under 'a cavernous pigeon sky'. Because the forecasts for gloom were long since predicted by himself his energy never flags and his wit doesn't err. It's Apollinaire's rain that runs through his ink though he opts instead to leave the Little Car behind and send by courier. Where others find congestion and grime Wilkes cuts between the parnassian dead freights, weaving the forms that function for now: reviews, questionnaries, plays. 'Who would not want to glamorize these fast people?'."Chris McCabe"The eagerly anticipated new collection by James Wilkes does not disappoint. It has genuine range and depth, is ambitious in scope and artfully enjoys the possibilities and playfulness of discourse. 'The Review Pages' section in particular reverberates beyond its beguiling humour and the 'Collected Civil Ephemera' gleans a sure psycho-geographical harvest. There is much to savour in this stimulating and inspiring collection. I thoroughly recommend a poem a day."David Caddy"Wilkes keeps his 'ethereal cannonade' going right through to the end, gathering up the debris of weather reports and fashion shows alike and reassembling them into tottering word-sculptures, ransacking everything from books to pub chatter for pieces which he can fit together into some out-of-control jigsaw. [...] this is a book where the pleasure is in the technicolour range of the language and the urgent sense of not quite being there."Jon StoneJames Wilkes was born in Poole in 1980. A graduate of Oxford University and UEA, he has taught English in Japan and writes art criticism. Interior Traces, a radio drama about brain imaging technologies, was broadcast in 2009. His previous publications include Ex Chaos, A DeTour (both Renscombe Press, 2006) and Reviews (Burner Veer, 2009). A selection of his work was included in the anthology Generation Txt (Penned in the Margins, 2006). In 2008 he started a PhD on the construction of landscape in the Isle of Purbeck.

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In his ambitious second full collection, Ross Sutherland is an uneasy observer of our age of inauthenticity, hacked computers and digital avatars. Emergency Window features new poems alongside excerpts from two recent sequences, including a hilarious and strangely prescient version of 'Little Red Riding Hood', a poem written using Google Streetview, sonnets inspired by the Street Fighter 2 video game, and a sequence of computer-generated translations of classic literature.Surreal, funny, intelligent and experimental, these poems chart a search for meaning in a disintegrating world."If he were a piece of furniture, he would be an elegant high stool that felt uncomfortable and stylish at the same time."Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3"Sparky, surprising, joyous poetry" Roddy LumsdenRoss Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. His first collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2009, followed by the limited-edition mini-book Twelve Nudes in 2010 and the free National Poetry Day e-book Hyakuretsu Kyaku in 2011. Ross regularly appears at the Aldeburgh, Manchester, Glastonbury and Latitude Festivals; he is taking his latest show, Comedian Dies in the Middle of Joke, to the Edinburgh Fringe 2012. He lives in Cambridge.

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One of The Times' "ten rising stars of British poetry".'Kalagora' is a Hindi neologism meaning 'black man / white man'. This book tells his story: from a wild Millennium eve party in Manhattan to homecoming amid the grime and glory of London's East End. In this dazzling debut collection by Siddhartha Bose, the global wanderer pays witness to traffic accidents and street surrealism in Mumbai – the irresistible 'city of motion' – observing the uncanny and the unexpected at the start of the 21st century. Across continents and time-zones, a story emerges of love, chaos and addiction, a tale that evokes the colour and raw energy of these hybrid, multi-cultural cities. "Bose's métier is a kind of breathless urban Romanticism… daring the reader to keep up."Simon TurnerSiddhartha Bose is a poet and performer based in London. He grew up in Mumbai and Calcutta, followed by a seven year itch in the USA. Selections of his work have appeared in the anthologies City State: New London Poetry(Penned in the Margins, 2009) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Bose has recently completed a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, where he also teaches poetry and Shakespeare. He is playwright-in-residence with WhynotTheatre, Toronto.

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Set in the urban pastoral of an East London postcode, Feral Borough asks what it means to call a place home, and how best to share that home with its non-human inhabitants. Meryl Pugh reimagines the wild as 'feral', recording the fauna and flora of Leytonstone in prose as incisive as it is lyrical. Here, on the edge of the city, red kite and parakeets thrive alongside bluebell and yarrow, a muntjac deer is glimpsed in the undergrowth, and an escaped boa constrictor appears on the High Road. In this subtle, captivating book - part herbarium, part bestiary and part memoir - Pugh explores the effects of loss, and lockdown, on human well-being, conjuring the local urban environment as a site for healing and connection. 'A subtle, heartfelt and affecting book about home, the city and the self -- Pugh reminds us that nowhere, however urban, is without nature; that wherever we go, the intricate web of life continues to shape and change us.' Rebecca Tamas

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A remarkable new book in praise of marine fauna. Of Sea takes the form of a poetic bestiary of creatures living beneath, beside and above the water: in wetlands, salt marshes and the intertidal zone. In a sequence of 46 poems, Burnett captures the world of cockles and clams, rare moths and the humble earwig (to name a few) with a precise and dynamic lyric that seems always on the verge of music. 'Burnett is one of the UK's most original poets of the nonhuman world, and of our environmental moment. Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance.' - Rebecca Tamas

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Fiery, feminist and funny, Darling, It’s Me is the first collection by Norwich-based writer and academic Alison Winch. Winch combines refreshing explorations of marriage and motherhood with re-imaginings of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and rebuttals to the 'great' (male) philosophers of the Enlightenment. Fusing philosophical interrogation with humour and pop cultural resonances, Darling, It’s Me plots new ground for confessional poetry.; "One of the cleverest, filthiest, most incendiary debuts I’ve ever read." CLARE POLLARD

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Step through the iron gates of one of London's most spectacular Victorian cemeteries on the hunt for the lost poets of Nunhead.Literary investigator Chris McCabe pushes back the tangled ivy and hacks his way through the poetic history of south-east London, revealing a map of intense artistic activity with Nunhead at its heart: from Barry MacSweeney in Dulwich to Robert Browning and William Blake in Peckham.Join McCabe on a journey back in time along underground rivers, through Elizabethan villages and urban woodland. Discover the surprising lives and lines of writers neglected amongst the moss-covered monuments of Nunhead Cemetery: from the 'Laureate of the Babies' and a New Zealander soldier-poet to those who chronicled London at the height of her industrial powers.But this is also a personal journey that highlights poetry's force in overcoming trauma; McCabe's exploration of Nunhead Cemetery is interwoven with diary entries that document his mother's illness.In this latest instalment in an ambitious project to plot the dead poets of the Magnificent Seven - London's great Victorian cemeteries - McCabe drills deep into the psyche of the city, and into his own past.Encounters with the dead and forgotten are charted in sinuous prose and with a wry humour that belies his meticulous research. Cenotaph South offers a powerful meditation on art, writing, memory and community, confirming McCabe as contemporary poetry's most innovative thinker. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered what lies behind the canon, or beyond the cemetery gates.

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"Splendidly various" TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT Typewriters, plagiarism and the poetic line are just three of the subjects under the spotlight in this book of essays by much-loved literary blogger Katy Evans-Bush. Studies of Ted Hughes, Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas sit alongside a new look at Keats, a search for forgotten war poet Eloise Robinson, and practical guides on poetic technique. Katy Evans-Bush combines the intellectual rigour of the literary critic with the dynamism of a seasoned traveller in the blogosphere. These essays place poetry at the heart of contemporary culture, meeting at the borders it shares with music, politics and sculpture. She writes about art and life in a way that is generous, witty and incisive.

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"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.Ryan Van Winkle was born in New Haven, Connecticut. His debut collection, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here, was published by Salt in 2010. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Guardian and Scotland on Sunday. 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.

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An industrial accident in a wire factory and the chance discovery of a birth certificate. Church services held in a ruined swimming pool. An unidentified elephant skull.Midland tells the stories of three young women as they fight to find their feet amidst the accumulated rubble of the twentieth century. From the bombsites of the 1940s to the construction sites of the 1960s and the school halls and decaying tower blocks of the 1980s, Honor Gavin has created an ingenious narrative of one Midlands family that is also a startling, anarchic history of a city.Composed in electric prose that soars and dives, blending keenly observed dialect with urban theory, cinema, farcical digressions and surrealist timekeeping, Midland is a novel out of time but in the middle of everything.

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Where Rockets Burn Through: Contemporary Science Fiction Poems from the UKWhere Rockets Burn Through is a ground-breaking anthology of sci-fi poetry, featuring poems from over thirty writers currently living and working in the United Kingdom, including Joe Dunthorne, W.N. Herbert, Ross Sutherland, Ron Butlin, Ken MacLeod, Jane Yolen, Aiko Harman, Jon Stone, Kirsten Irving, Lorraine Mariner, Chrissy Williams, plus work by the late Edwin Morgan, a pioneer of sci-fi poetics.From alternate worlds and dystopian futures to alien landings and photon guns, this collection of interstellar poems will delight and excite Trekkie and poetry fan alike.Russell Jones is an Edinburgh-based writer, editor and researcher. His chapbook of science fiction poems, The Last Refuge, was published in 2009 by Forest Press. He is guest editor for the Interdisciplinary Science Review and is currently completing his PhD in Creative Writing and tutoring in Scottish Literature at Edinburgh University.

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I believed that Fukayama line: the end of history. But History didn't end, did it? Logan Dankworth, columnist and Twitter warrior, grew up romanticising the political turmoil of the 1980s. Now, as the EU Referendum looms he is determined to be in the fray of the biggest political battle for years. Meanwhile, Logan's wife Megan wants to leave London to better raise their daughter. As tensions rise at home and across the nation, something is set to be lost forever. The third of Luke Wright's trilogy of political verse plays looks at trust and privilege in the age of Brexit. "Poet Luke Wright doesn't mince his words. His performances rumble with rage, passion and humour. They are also peppered with brilliantly smart observations. You will leave his show brimming with energy, heart pounding and brain whirring." The Guardian

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We all want something to believe in. It's 1987 and Frankie Vah gorges on love, radical politics, and skuzzy indie stardom. But can he keep it all down? Following the multi award-winning What I Learned From Johnny Bevan, Luke Wright's second verse play deals with love, loss and belief, against a backdrop of grubby indie venues and 80s politics. Expect frenetic guitars, visceral verse, and a Morrissey-sized measure of heartache. Written and performed in deft verse by Fringe First and Stage Award for Acting Excellence winner Luke Wright. 'Pulsating, poetic story-telling' **** (Lyn Gardner, Guardian).

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Out for Air is the exhilarating first collection by former professional skateboarder Olly Todd. Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Each poem is its own event: expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place. From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things. 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARD

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In Heavy Time psychogeographer Sonia Overall takes to the old pilgrim roads, navigating a route from Canterbury to Walsingham via London and her home town of Ely. Vivid in her evocation of a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall's secular pilgrimage elevates the ordinary, collecting roadside objects - feathers, a bingo card, a worn penny - as relics. Facing injury and interruption, she takes the path of the lone woman walker, seeking out 'thin places' where past and present collide, and where new ways of living might begin. 'It is a talisman of a book. Heavy Time doesn't just describe a pilgrimage, it becomes one, for both writer and reader. It is an invitation to resist 'busyness', to think of ourselves as explorers, to seek out 'the everyday divine'. It has sent me out looking for 'thin places: pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through.' Beautiful and essential.' - Helen Mort

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A knife is pulled. An Uber driver is racially abused on the day of the Brexit referendum. A father bathes his son in ice water. A schoolboy drives a drawing pin into a map of the world. The threat of violence is never far away in Anthony Anaxagorou's breakthrough collection After the Formalities. Technically achieved, emotionally transformative and razor-sharp, these are poems that confront and contradict; poems in which the scholarly synthesises with the streetwise, and global histories are told through the lens of one family. Anaxagorou 'speaks against the darkness', tracking the male body under pressure from political and historical forces, and celebrates the precarious joy of parenthood. The title poem is a meditation on racism and race science that draws on the poet's Cypriot heritage and is as uncomfortable as it is virtuosic. Elsewhere, in a sequence of prose poems that shimmer with lyric grace, he writes, 'I'm your father & the only person keeping you alive.' Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize A Poetry Society Recommendation A Guardian Poetry Book of the Year One of The Telegraphs Best Poetry Books of 2019

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Shortlisted for the Costa 2019 Poetry Award. . Winner of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize. Surreal, joyful, political and queer, Reckless Paper Birds is a collection to treasure by Polari Prize-winning poet John McCullough. These exuberant poems welcome you into a psychedelic, parallel world of 'vomit and blossom' where Kate Bush mingles with a weeping Lady Gaga, a 'fractal coast' full of see-through things: water, mirrors, glass pebbles. With a magpie's eye for hidden charms, McCullough ranges across birdlife, Grindr and My Little Pony while also addressing social issues from homelessness to homophobia.

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A Poetry Book Society recommendation; A book of the year - the Poetry School; The Triumph of Cancer blurs the borders of science and poetry, working with forensic attention to capture the `inscape' of the living world. In this powerful new collection, presented as a museum of artefacts, Chris McCabe returns to the site of personal trauma to confront disease head-on. Elegies for his father, poets and celebrities mingle with still-life portraits of organic and synthetic subjects. These poems move with lyric grace and surgical precision against a backdrop of terror and cancerous global politics, showing McCabe at the height of his powers: dextrous, darklycomic and a true original.

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Longlisted for the 2020 Laurel PrizePlunge into mountain lakes and drift along meandering rivers in Swims, the debut poetry collection by Elizabeth-Jane BurnettA long poem taking many forms, Swims begins and ends in Devon, moving across the waterways of England and Wales: from urban pond to open sea. The poet swims among fishermen on Grasmere, reimagines the body as bottle cap in the Channel, and clambers down the bank of the river Ouse with words scrawled on her swimsuit.As political as they are personal, these meditations are conceived as environmental acts that probe the relationship between landscape, memory and the self. A sinuous, innovative debut, Swims reminds us of the power of swimming to transform the human spirit, registering what the water gives to us and what it takes away.

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Margins, edges and coastlines abound in John McCullough’s tender, humorous explorations of contemporary life and love. Encompassing everything from lichen to lava lamps, and from the etymology of words to Brighton’s gay scene,& Spacecraft is a humane and spellbinding collection from the winner of the 2012 Polari First Book Prize. Spacecraft & navigates the white space of the page and the distance between people.

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Highly Commended by The Forward Prize 2010At once erudite, humourous and stylishly contemporary, Sarah Hesketh's debut collection invokes a world of frozen lakes, 'snow-spun streets' and people who have stayed too long.With formal control and precise, crafted language, these poems examine the 'small relics of lives': china horses in an old people's home, a caged bird, the thighbone of a Saxon saint. Drawing from myth, history and a close reading of the present, Napoleon's Travelling Bookshelf is an impressive and engaging journey into love, identity and what it is to be alone – 'lost from sight / behind the ice-mapped waves'."What Sarah Hesketh's poems do so remarkably is to string a row of images together in such a way that each keeps its distinct hardness while at the same time contributing to a crystalline whole. They are original and utterly convincing."Bernard O'Donoghue"Sarah Hesketh writes superbly crafted poems with a very firm hand. Her poems are overflowing with intelligence and scorn for the easy and the clichéd, but her ear is as keen as her passion for the right word, the properly perceived state of affairs. When she writes lines like: 'I am content to form / the small oh of glory, / to add a little polish / to your morning epaulettes' (in 'Faking') you know that the irony you are dealing with is as intricate as lace but as sharp as daggers. Her terrain is not, to extend our analogies, exactly Jane Austen's 'two inches of ivory' because Hesketh's imagination ranges far and wide into some fairly exotic real and literary spaces, but the sense of ivory is there, as is the fierce, delicate carving. It is a melancholy but rigorously beautiful world her poems describe. We also know that every tiny part of every line has been fiercely fought for and that that is the source of the authority."George Szirtes"Hesketh's first collection is a striking debut, abounding in verve and rigour. In stark, lucid language, pared to the bone, summoning images that are sometimes cryptic yet always singing, Hesketh whirls us through a breathless breadth of forms, subjects and perspectives, from an old woman "forever remembering the waltz" in 'The Ballroom at West Riding Asylum' to 'The Boy Who read Homer to His Cat', juggling a giddying array of themes and allusions, often in the same poem, such as in 'Chaconne for Ice', where Roald Amundsen and Neil Diamond meet cheek by jowl for the first and probably only time. There is a real musicality to Hesketh's writing, imbuing her whittled words with a rhythmic vitality that is utterly compelling. A fine first collection from an exciting new poet."Poetry Book Society BulletinSarah Hesketh was born in 1983 and grew up in Pendle, East Lancashire. She attended Merton College, Oxford and holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA. In 2007 her collaboration with composer Alastair Caplin was performed at the Leeds Lieder Festival. She currently works as Assistant Director at the writers' charity English PEN.

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Stranger in the Mask of a Deer conjures an elemental, dreamlike narrative ranging from the present to the Late-Upper Palaeolithic, when the British peninsula was gradually reoccupied by humans and animals returning from the greater continent after the Ice Age. Richard Skelton began this book-length poem many years ago with the intention of exploring the history of Britain's landscape, only for the text to transform into a kind of literary seance, involving both human and other-than-human voices. Its transforming power lies in the accumulative magic of the word as ritual. Skelton's is a mesmeric lyric, probing the edges of consciousness towards a place where 'there are always presences / always inherences / things beyond sight.' 'An incredibly moving, essential meditation on where we have come from, where we are, and where we are headed.' -Kerri ni Dochartaigh

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