Search results for ""nine arches press""

"Here is a press that genuinely revels in publishing new and exciting poetry; when I read a Nine Arches Press book I know that my mind will be a bit bigger once I've finished it. And my smile will be wider. Let the revels begin!" - Ian McMillanPoems – maps designed to get you lost, to discover magic in the everyday. Maps & Legends is a new anthology celebrating the best of Nine Arches Press over the past five years.Plotting points from urban backwaters to wild imagined spaces, editor Jo Bell guides us through those shadow places poetry inhabits, places that fall well and truly off the map.Featuring poems from Claire Crowther, David Morley , Luke Kennard, Matt Merritt, Maria Taylor, Angela France, Daniel Sluman, Alistair Noon, Tony Williams, David Hart and more.Jo Bell is the former director of National Poetry Day, and is now the UK's Canal Laureate. She has been a Glastonbury Poet in Residence, and programmed the Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2011. She has also appeared on BBC Radio 2 and 4, and at the Hay and Cheltenham Festivals. Her own poems have been commended in the Wigtown Poetry Competition and the Hippocrates International Prize.

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In 2021, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a sixth time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Rishi Dastidar and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Kym Deyn, Estelle Price and Fathima Zahra.Primers: Volume Six now brings together a showcase from each of the three poets. Startling, original and packed with flair, Deyn, Price and Zahra explore everything from magic and mourning, cross-examinations of power and patriarchy, and the intimate secrets and ‘Parent cuts’ of growing up. These are poems of becoming and being, of difference and defiance, of other worlds, hard lessons and leaps of faith. Primers is proud to present these bold and dynamic poems from three of contemporary poetry’s most exciting new voices.Praise for Primers: Volume Six“There is of course nothing more exciting in reading poetry than finding a voice new to you, and feeling that feeling – where the brain says ‘oh hello, what have we here?’, as the skin responds with a tingle and your face starts smiling as you realise, there is something special in these words. That, roughly described, was our initial sensation on seeing the work of Kym Deyn, Estelle Price and Fathima Zahra. Each, in their unique ways, have that uncanny ability to recast what you thought you knew, as they make you look then look again at who we are, how we live, and what we might be.” – Rishi Dastidar

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Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka and Daniel Sluman co-edit Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, a ground-breaking anthology examining the poetics of disabled and D/deaf cultures. With contributions that span Vispo to Surrealism, and range from hard-hitting political commentary to intimate lyrical pieces – these poets refuse to perform or inspire according to tired old narratives. Five years after the seminal U.S. anthology, Beauty is a Verb, Nine Arches Press brings you its exciting UK progeny: Stairs and Whispers. The first of its kind and packed with fierce poetry, essays, photos and links to accessible online videos, this book showcases a diversity of styles, opinions, and survival strategies for a world that often works to shut us down.

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Khairani Barokka's second poetry collection is an intricate exploration of colonialism and environmental injustice: her acute, interlaced language draws clear connections between colonial exploitation of fellow humans, landscapes, animals, and ecosystems. Amidst the horrifying damage that has resulted for peoples as interlinked with places, there is firm resistance. Resonant and deeply attentive, the lyricism of these poems is juxtaposed with the traumatic circumstances from which they emerge. Through these defiant, potent verses, the body—particularly the disabled body—is centred as an ecosystem in its own right. Barokka's poems are every bit as alarming, urgent and luminous as is necessary in the age of climate catastrophe as outgrowth of colonial violence.

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The Tattoo Collector ranges between Hong Kong, Scotland, and London, exploring the intertwined relationship between the body, ecology and class where protests, gigs and the tattooed body form a vital line of connection.

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The Apothecary of Flight is a heady flight into the art of poetry itself: its vital importance as a tool for expression; for understanding and translating the self; for articulating the sheer force and joy of poetry and the way, for a person with autism, it can hold and celebrate both the smallest and weightiest of life's experiences.

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Velvel's Violin, a deeply moving and political fifth collection by TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Jacqueline Saphra places us on the shifting ground between past and present. Through its search for missing histories of the Jewish diaspora, the book is a call for empathy and a warning to a world where the legacy of the Holocaust echoes current narratives of prejudice, war, displacement, and migration. Saphra's precisely-tuned writing ranges through tones of dark humour, lyrical beauty and moments of transcendent joy to find assonance between the turbulence of now and a family history of fragmented stories, irreparable loss and miraculous escapes. Between each poem - forgotten songs, weeping forests, buried violins - sound and silence combine to speak of love, absence and survival.

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Out of the doll’s house and into the woods, Bunny Girls steps out of the shadows of girlhood and looks at the world with wide eyes. Surreal, spiky, wise and darkly funny, this new collection by Costa-winning author and poet Angela Readman expertly mixes shades of film noir, northern wit, and magic realism. Through the lens of childhood, these poems address autism, anxiety, and darker concerns buried by cultural ideals of femininity.Here in Readman’s skilful words are odes to severed heads, angels and Disney villains, Marilyn Monroe’s body double, squashed slugs, sexual awakenings, Wendy-houses and snow globes, nosebleeds and blackbirds. Women are both invisible and actively writing themselves into the visible. Where there is isolation and dislocation, its counterbalance is finding breathless, reckless joy in the acts of creation and imagination. At its heart, this enlivening, magnificent book is about darkness and light, the lovely and the frightening, the beautiful and the worrying.

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Living by Troubled Waters is the third poetry collection by Roy McFarlane – an extraordinary, uncompromising book exploring slavery, colonialism, and the continued tragedies visited upon Black bodies whilst these legacies remain unresolved. In his close examination of the horror of racialised violence, McFarlane examines how the strong currents of the past and present flow side by side. His poems ask us to think about the Black Mediterranean of today as much as we do about the Windrush scandal and the aftershocks of trans-Atlantic slavery, where Black people are still imprisoned, enslaved and drowned as they flee persecution and poverty.Living by Troubled Waters is innovative, formally experimental and far ranging in scope; erasure & inclusion (to make known) poems interweave and speak to the wider body of the collection. In his use of archival documents as a space for activism and linguistic intervention, McFarlane writes back into history, reclaiming voices and reshaping narratives. His poems also draw strength from themes of place and displacement, social justice, Black motherhood, family, art - and from the power of poetry itself as a witness to troubled times.

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Angela France’s Terminarchy eloquently considers the troubling terms of existence in an age of climate catastrophe and technological change. How do we negotiate a world where capitalism and greed threaten a fragile earth, where technology seems to promise us connection but might also fuel isolation? Where even finding solace in nature reminds us that the seasons can no longer be trusted? Reframing ecopoetics in her own instinctive, radical, lyrical form. France considers whether, rather than collison-course, there might be a better way to coexist. Where extinction threatens, these wry, alert poems and their earthy voices try to find a way through and look for hope."Angela France travels the living world of our fellow creatures with much empathy, considering the survivals, (for now) and the irrevocable losses. Though the theme is mortal and full of danger, the poems sing, they inhabit delight amid the sorrow. Observational, meditative, earthy, riverine, full of foundational energy; this is a key collection, an essential poetics of gravity and grace." - Penelope Shuttle

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Rosie Garland’s dauntless and enthralling new poetry collection, What Girls Do in the Dark, invites us to leap into deep space - across a universe where light, names, place and time become the “distance between things that stand like sisters”. We venture through strange night-time transformations, between northerly points and places of being and not-being. In a twilight alive with glimmering energy, we discover not just outer-space, but inner space – where the body and the self are made of infinite galaxies, illuminated for the briefest blink of a life.Garland’s poetry is rooted in the realm of gothic imagination, mythology and the uncanny. It contains magnitudes and magic, feminist fables starstruck with science and astronomy. Like comets, these dazzling poems explore containment, liberation, near-misses, extinction, and ultimately, they ask what it means to escape the pull of gravity and blaze your own bright, all-consuming and astonishing path.'Garland is a real literary talent: definitely an author to watch' - Sarah Waters

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Tania Hershman’s debut poetry collection, Terms and Conditions, urges us to consider all the possibilities, and to read life’s small print before signing on the dotted line. These measured poems bring their stoical approach to the uncertain business of our daily lives – and ask us to consider what could happen if we were to bend or break the rules, step beyond the boundaries and challenge the narrative. In feats of imagination and leaps of probability, falling simply becomes flying, a baby sagely collects data, and even the evidence often leads us astray. In between this, Hershman’s precise poetry elegantly balances the known, unknown and unknowable matter of existence, love and happiness, weighing the atoms of each, finding just the exact words that will draw up the perfect contract of ideas.

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David Clarke’s first full collection follows on from an acclaimed and award-winning pamphlet Gaud (winner of the 2013 Michael Marks Pamphlet Prize). Follow the trail of these fleet-footed poems, and you’ll be swept along from sonnets for Scott Walker to Orpheus as white van man, via ‘epic fails’ and sword-swallowing for beginners. It’s a memorable trip you’ll want to start afresh as soon as you finish reading. By turns subtle, bittersweet and wickedly sharp, this is a debut collection of poems to be savoured, which you will find yourself returning to revisit again and again.

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Dorothy Lehane's debut poetry collection is experimental and exploratory - part daybook, and part astronomical chart, this is a voyage into both the self, the body and the personal as well as into an ever-expanding cosmos of stars, planets and space.The poems of Ephemeris are fiercely bright and tuned in on a precise, musical wavelength of sound and form. Language, seen here through this particular telescope, is exuberant and numerous with possibilities, gracefully testing its own boundaries. In galaxies of sounds and shapes, Lehane brilliantly takes a giant lyric leap from poem to poem, making for something of a stellar debut.

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London in the dark end-times of the late noughties; escaped war criminals and their hired thugs scavenge like hyenas amid the city's smut and glitter, the system appears in nonchalant free-fall and words drop cheaply as grimy metropolitan rain. With this dystopian backdrop, where language is spun, redacted and renditioned, McCabe and Reed's gritty riposte performs an angry and elegant resistance. The result of this psychogeographic collaboration between two of modern poetry's most distinct voices is this - a poetry chain-letter that seeks to interrogate the city at one of the most peculiar and sinister points in contemporary history and to map the capital on foot, under their own light; poems as foundlings; the weight of language and place obsessively and voraciously explored. Beneath flagstones, in river silt and on the top decks of buses, the strange, dark energies of the city find their way into this electrifying exchange of poems."McCabe and Reed's wide-eyed, X-rayed Cubist vision of London is more than a cultural mapping. It is a significant addition to the poetry of London. Partly a response to Whitehall's warring, it uncovers deeper historical and pyschogeographical interplay within the city. Horizontal and vertical layers of story are contextualized and abstracted to reveal multifarious states of being, control and flux. These anchored, edgy scripts of multiverse unearth deposits in angular localised texts that make you smile, laugh, wonder and leave you wanting more. A tour de force in every way." David Caddy"This book is both a celebration and a dark critique, appropriate for the dark times we inhabit. Intense and uncompromising and I'm already looking forward to reading Part Two!"Steve Spence, Stride MagazineChris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry collections are The Hutton Inquiry, Zeppelins and The Restructure, all published by Salt. He has recorded a CD with The Poetry Archive and written a play Shad Thames, Broken Wharf, which was performed at the London Word Festival and subsequently published by Penned in the Margins in 2010. He works as Poetry Librarian at The Poetry Library, London, and teaches for The Poetry School.Jeremy Reed has been described by the Independent as "British poetry's glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie." He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, winning prestigious literary prizes like the Somerset Maugham Award.

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Tim Love's By All Means is a collection of short stories that find people in transit; between places, relationships, states of mind and different lives. Sometimes these are stories of moving on, leaving the past and the characters populating a point in personal history lingering in memory's rear-view mirror. At other times, these stories ruminate on lives only half-full and half-lived, where the characters are stuck forever in either first gear, or worse - in reverse, terminally pondering but never quite settling on a direction of travel.These are gently tragi-comic stories laden with subtle, beautifully-observed everyday miracles and mistakes. Tim Love has an exacting ear for the voice of characters; he captures their travails and their unwitting shedding of truths and half-truths in irresistible style and in concise detail. "Tim Love wields words with the precision of a surgeon, or a sculptor. These stories are clever, poignant and memorable - but above all they are hugely generous."Vanessa GebbieTim Love lives in Cambridge, England, having lived in Portsmouth, Norwich, Bristol, Oxford, Nottingham and Liverpool. He works as a computer programmer and teacher, and is married with two bilingual (Italian) children. His prose has appeared in Panurge, Dream Catcher, Journal of Microliterature, etc., and has won prizes run by short Fiction and Varsity. His poetry pamphlet Moving Parts was published by HappenStance in 2010.

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Dragan Todorovic's Little Red Transistor Radio from Trieste is the first collection of his uniquely dark, surreal and searing short stories. From a young boy discovering rock 'n' roll rebellion via his transistor radio in a small town in the former Yugoslavia, to a speculative supermarket where even the fake fruit and air fresheners can't hide pervasive shades of death, these stories encounter other 'possible selves', passengers, angels and voyeurs; things are lost and found and nowhere or no-one is quite as they appear to be. Combining blistering observations with an unnerving and precise articulation of our worst-kept secrets and fears, these stories come to vivid and spellbinding life at Dragan Todorovic's command; in compelling dreams and nightmares they redraw the boundaries between the real and the imagined. "Dragan Todorovic is a master storyteller, ushering us into familiar worlds and then disturbing the peace, charming us with his wit only to outwit us with his magic. His fictions are sharp, elegant, and shapely and deeply, deliciously consoling."Maureen Freely"These strange and beautiful stories ask us the very deepest questions about ourselves. I loved them."Scarlett ThomasDragan Todorovic is a writer and multimedia artist whose publications include eight books of nonfiction, poetry and fiction. He has worked extensively in print and electronic media, both in Serbia (where he was born) and in Canada (where he lived between 1995 and 2005). Some of his articles, books and artistic projects have won international awards. Little Red Transistor Radio from Trieste is his first collection of short stories to be published in the UK.

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Read three sample poems for free - just click the Extracts tab above.Andrew Frolish's debut collection, Retellings, finds its foundation in the stories we tell of love and loss, of the stories passed on to us and those narratives of life we write ourselves. Fathers and forbears loom large in poems that find them working long and unforgiving hours on the factory shop-floor, bringing wild animals in from the cold, and notable both by their presence and absence in Frolish's poignant and measured poetry.Moving between East Anglia's stretching seascapes, childhood's sometimes lonely landscapes and the wider world we venture into as we grow, each poem by Andrew Frolish unearths a story like a treasure find and brings it, clear-eyed and succinct, into a razor-sharp focus."This first collection brims with the hidden pressures of history. Poems range widely, from rural and industrial tradition, through a lovely sequence of stone-skimming, to that mysterious exchange of energy between what is said and unsaid. Boundaries are pushed back, levitation is underwater. And Andrew Frolish knows too, how to let simplicity fall, like a blessing."Pauline Stainer"Andrew Frolish s first book is in thrall to the physical world. There are factories where things and people are transformed; hospitals, crematoria, places in which the human creature is reduced and rendered. And there is the world of nature, rich, treacherous, full of surprises. Mechanical and organic metaphors wrestle with one another like Jacob and the Angel. And the imagination moves through this world aware of its incarnate being, its skin and sinew, in love, in awe, lamenting, celebrating. Time passing is registered in the extended rhythms of Frolish's resourceful and evocative language."Michael SchmidtAndrew Frolish was born in Sheffield in 1975. After studying politics at Lancaster University, he trained to be a teacher in the Lake District. His poems have been published in a variety of magazines, including PN Review, Acumen, Envoi, Tears in the Fence, The Interpreter's House, Pulsar, Iota, Orbis and The Agenda Broadsheet. He has received prizes in several competitions and won the Suffolk Poetry Society Crabbe Memorial competition in 2006.His poems for children have been published by Hopscotch. He now lives with his family in Suffolk, where he is a headteacher.

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Kate Fox's new collection The Oscillations explores distance and isolation in the age of the pandemic, refracted through the lenses of neurodiversity and trauma in poems that are bold, often frank and funny. Dazzling and open-hearted poems of self-discovery. Responding to a world that has been broken by the pandemic into a 'before' and 'after'. A strong voice sings of what it means to be many things at once - autistic, creative, northern, a woman. Fox measures not only distances, social or otherwise, but how we breach them, and what the view might be from beyond them.‘It’s both comforting and challenging to have Kate Fox as our guide through these turbulent and fractured times; comforting because Kate’s language is always inclusive and accessible and challenging because the ideas her superb poems brim with ask us to look deeply inside ourselves." - Ian McMillan, poet and broadcaster

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Suzannah Evans’ debut collection Near Future is doom-pop-poetry with an apocalyptic edge, a darkly humorous journey through sci-fi lullabies and northern mysteries. This is a future simulation stripped of the space-age gloss of progression - one where the robots have gone rogue and the hopes of a new millennium are malfunctioning; this is a skewed yet oddly familiar world gone uncannily wrong. These playful, sharp, poems are also about more than dystopias and five types of possible apocalypse - in looking at the worst-case scenarios, Evans comes closer to the bigger narrative; universal truths of change, whether man-made or natural, preventable of inevitable, and the uncertain business of human existence where 'there are disasters that you cannot prepare yourself for'. Evans brings a distinctive, skilful and wonderfully peculiar roving eye to our restless and unpredictable times.

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The Craft is an indispensable guide to both the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of poetic craft in the 21st century, and essential writing-desk companion for poets at all stages. The book covers practical techniques – the nuts of bolts of putting poems together, mastering poetic forms such as sonnets, sestinas, prose poems and golden shovels, how to choose titles for your poems and the art of long sequences. It also explores the idea of ‘craft’ itself - knowing how pentameters dance is important, but by no way is it the only dimension of ‘craft’ that the poet starting out today has to consider. What about sound and the skills involved in performing your work? What about truth and fabrication, and the ethics of using real life in your work? What about the politics of the word ‘craft’ itself? With essays on poetry from Moniza Alvi, Dean Atta, Liz Berry, Caroline Bird, Malika Booker, Debjani Chatterjee, Jane Commane, Rishi Dastidar, Carrie Etter, Will Harris, Tania Hershman, Peter Kahn, Gregory Leadbetter, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Roy McFarlane, Harry Man, Claire Pollard, Peter Raynard, Roger Robinson, Jacqueline Saphra, Joelle Taylor, Marvin Thompson, Julia Webb, and Antosh Wojcik.

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In 2018, the Poetry School and Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a fourth time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Kim Moore and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Lewis Buxton, Amelia Loulli and Victoria Richards. Primers: Volume Four now collects together a showcase from each of the three new poets It is an irresistible invitation to step out of ourselves and our bodies and drop your expectations on the dancefloor, to take the plunge on the rollercoaster-ride of grief, motherhood and new life, and to meet desire in all its outrageous, dazzling and joyous forms. Secrets, disclosures, changed names and brilliant disguises make for a vivid, adventurous and often deeply moving selection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices.Praise for Primers: Volume Four“All three poets are rooted in the territory of the body and the expectations placed on it by society though their concerns range widely – from an examination of toxic masculinity to female desire and motherhood. Their approach to language and form is varied, but what is consistent is their ability as poets to invite the reader to see the world in a different way.” – Kim Moore

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The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press are delighted to announce the arrival of Primers Volume Three, the third year of an annual scheme which creates a unique opportunity for talented poets to find publication and receive a programme of supportive feedback, mentoring and promotion. The scheme will select three poets whose work will feature together in Primers Volume Three, a book showcasing short debut collections of work.The Primers scheme provides an important platform for emerging poets who are seeking to develop their writing and build towards a full collection of poems. With the involvement of Jane Commane (Nine Arches’ poetry editor), Hannah Lowe (poet) and the Poetry School, Primers Three will nurture and support new talent that may otherwise not find an outlet. It also aims to provide an important opportunity for poets to develop their skills, work on their poetry practice, and find audiences for their work. Following editing and mentoring with Hannah and Jane, the Primers Volume Three collection will be published by Nine Arches Press, and a further series of live events will showcase the three chosen poets at festivals and shows around the country.

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In 2019, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a fifth time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Jacqueline Saphra and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Krystelle Bamford, Claire Cox and Hannah Jane Walker.Primers Volume Five brings together a showcase from each of the three poets. At the core of these poems are the milestones and critical moments of our lives and, vitally, the ties that bind us to those we love. From the tides of grief to surfing the wave of birth, these often courageous and candid poems are distinctive in their engagement with fear, loss and self-discovery, and how they emerge afresh, bold and illuminating. An insightful collection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices.“Each of these poets moved us from a very first read with courage, openness and authenticity and each walks an exhilarating edge, daring to take risks with both language and content.” – Jacqueline Saphra

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In Angela France's third poetry collection, Hide, what is invisible is just as important as what lies within plain sight. Layers of personal history are lifted into the light and old skins are shed for new; things thought lost and vanished long ago are just on the edge of perception, yet certainties before our eyes vanish in the blink of an eye.These poems possess their own rich heritage of stories and experiences; themes of magic, wisdom, age and absence are woven into the fabric of this skilful and succinct collection. Readers should also keep their wits about them, for these poems are cunning and quick; they hide nothing, but delight in camouflage, disguise and secrets, patiently awaiting someone who will seek."France's writing engages sensitively with the world as she searches for meaning in the ordinary and movingly explores the borders between shared and private experience. These are poems that make an honest deal with discomfort, following the trails and 'ghostly outlines of existence' with integrity, thoughtfulness and care." Deryn Rees-Jones"'Invisibility must be achieved for success', writes Angela France, revealing one of the truths of why the best poets serve language and are annihilated in the process. Hide is a book of wisdom, dignity and first witness. It offers poems of scrutiny and strength of character. And the poet's language possesses and is possessed by a gloriously sheared weight and shared music." David Morley"Angela France's new collection is a deft and resonant exploration of the half-hidden, taking us 'over there' and 'in there' under the hide of the 'other' and the liminal spaces they inhabit, all evoked with an uncanny command of language and image." Nigel McLoughlin"There are fifty-two complex, thought-provoking poems in this, Angela France's fascinating third collection, all of them engaged with what are clearly deep, lastingly cental preoccupations and, despite her view in "Anagnorisis" that "My only surety is carbon and water, ashes; / language as sensation, / no words", more than justifying the fulsome back-cover endorsements of Nigel McLoughlin, Deryn Rees-Jones and David Morley, who speak of the "integrity, thoughtfulness and care of her work", its "uncanny command of language and image", the sensitivity with which she perceives the world "as she searches for meaning in the ordinary" and its "gloriously sheared weight and shared music"."Ken Head"Angela France's collection not only brings immediate rewards - its depth satisfies more and more on rereading. I enjoyed it immensely."Matthew Stewart, Rogue StrandsAngela France has had poems published in many of the leading journals, in the UK and abroad and has been anthologised a number of times. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Gloucestershire and is studying for a PhD. Publications include Occupation (Ragged Raven Press) and Lessons in Mallemaroking (Nine Arches Press). Angela is features editor of Iota and runs a monthly poetry cafe, Buzzwords.

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Exploring place and displacement, boundaries and borders, Passport is the second collection by Richie McCaffery, and follows his acclaimed debut Cairn (Nine Arches Press, 2014). In moving to the Belgian city of Ghent, McCaffery finds “What I see and what happens / are two different countries.” In a place of dualities and unrealities, the poems find the usual definitions themselves becoming unstable; the old currency that is no longer valid, the postcards home unsent and the present tense ill at ease.Written in crisp detail, these fluent poems weigh up whether leaving is a form of running from or coming back to home, wherever that may be. At the heart of this tender and compelling collection, McCaffery writes directly of anxiety, loss and dislocation, asking us to consider what belonging is, and how we find our place in life, in love, and in language.

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In 2015, The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press launched a nationwide scheme to find exciting new voices in poetry with Kathryn Maris and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, a final four poets emerged as clear choices: Geraldine Clarkson, Lucy Ingrams, Maureen Cullen and Katie Griffiths.Primers: Volume One now collects together a taster of poems from each of the four new poets. The brilliant chemistry of their poems proves to be a heady mix and a memorable journey – from post-war correspondents to foster families, breath-taking natural landscapes to strange, unsettling dream-like narratives and so much more in between. There’s plenty here to delight and dazzle, and ample evidence of a bright future ahead for contemporary poetry, as these striking and bold new voices demonstrate.

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Read three sample poems for free - just click the Extracts tab above.Daniel Sluman's Absence Has a Weight of Its Own is an unflinching study of serious illness, sex, death and decadence. In sometimes brutal and spare cadences, Sluman explores the extremities of human experience in poems that are skilfully, icily primed. This debut collection is at times provocative and by turns tender and wry. Frailties and vices are held up for inspection in a ruined landscape of disappointing highs, hung-over regrets and head-on collisions, haunted by figures such as Roman, an unrepentant and debauched womaniser. In the aftermath, real love and hope remain stubbornly, emerging into the sunlight of an unexpected new day. "Dan Sluman is a poet accomplished beyond his years. His work demonstrates a maturity and control of image and form which gives his use of the poetic line all the tension of a band-saw. These poems have teeth. They are as brave and uncompromising as their imagery is startling. Not only that but he reads his work with extraordinary confidence and power. He is definitely a young poet to be watched."Nigel McLoughlin"Daniel Sluman is a name to watch for. His poems are sharp and crafted with not a word out of place and he has a talent for the unexpected metaphor and simile which jolts with its fittingness. These are not comfortable poems, they can't be read – or heard – casually but this is a poet who clearly loves language and has the skill to work it. The one thing I demand from poems I read is that they change me in some way – and these do."Angela France"This is a strong and sometimes violently beautiful debut that wears your heart in its mouth as much as it wears its heart on its sleeve. It is also a distinct pleasure to read aloud, its delicate musics blooming sharp as lime on the tongue. Here's to Sluman's next book!"Adam Horovitz"Daniel Sluman's debut collection crackles with energy; his language is physical, fast-paced, passionate, fearless. A real discovery by Nine Arches Press.'Penelope ShuttleDaniel Sluman is a poet based in Gloucestershire. His poems have appeared widely in journals such as Cadaverine, Popshot, Shit Creek Review and Orbis. He is the poetry editor of Dead Ink, and is on the editorial board for Iota.

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Poetry Projects to Make and Do, edited by Deborah Alma, The Emergency Poet, is a ‘how to’ handbook of essays, prompts, advice, and ideas designed to help both aspiring and established poets find new ways not only to create new poetry, but to share and take it out into the world through collaboration, projects, performances – and more. With an array of real-life examples from experienced poets, Poetry Projects to Make and Do provides imaginative case-studies and inspiration for readers to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. Each essay encourages experimentation alongside plenty of practical tips and guidance. From projects which poets can try out at home, to ones which take poetry out into the streets; from having a go at making poetry films or podcasts, to hand-crafting a poetry residency; from how to apply for funding, to working in collaboration and involving music, art or photography in your poetry. This indispensable book covers a broad range of topics to empower and encourage poetry as part of everyday creativity. Poetry Projects to Make and Do follows previous popular creative writing handbook titles for Nine Arches Press – including The Craft, Why I Write Poetry and How to be a Poet – and is edited by Deborah Alma, aka The Emergency Poet and founder of the world’s first walk-in Poetry Pharmacy, based in Bishops Castle, Shropshire. Includes 20+ essays by: Deborah Alma; Jean Atkin; Casey Bailey; Roshni Beeharry; Julia Bird; Jo Bell; Jane Burn; Lewis Buxton; Jane Commane; Jonathan Davidson; Helen Dewbery; Pat Edwards; Jasmine Gardosi; Roz Goddard; Daisy Henwood; Sophie Herxheimer; Helen Ivory; Gregory Leadbetter; Arji Manuelpillai; Caleb Parkin; Nina Mingya Powles; Jacqueline Saphra; Clare Shaw; Degna Stone and Tamar Yoseloff.

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‘I can’t face the big stuff so I comb the moors for a tiny yellow flower’ – so begins Tormentil, the second poetry collection by Ian Humphreys. Set largely in the starkly beautiful West Yorkshire moorlands, these poems creep and bloom across geographies and time. Isolated by grief in the first months of the pandemic, Humphreys goes in search of hope and blessings among the burnt heather, tumbledown mills and canal locks near his home in the Calder Valley. He unearths a landscape of wildflowers and wildlife, a soundscape of rain and birdsong, at once healing, threatening and under threat. These are richly textured poems of living and resisting, anchored by connections to family, food, community – and an acknowledgement of the precarious root-holds of hard-won freedoms. A soaring, defiant hymn to recovery, this vital book contemplates migration, otherness, and all the internal and external elements that bind us, make us unique.

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Small Moon Curve is an intimate poetry memoir exploring what it means to ease open to the restorative powers of love, faith and beauty following diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. In this compelling testimony, the narrator discovers a surprising, powerful affinity with Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

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The poems in Tamar Yoseloff's Belief Systems act as a call to make something worthwhile from the wreckage of our world, in the spirit of the radical artists she evokes, such as John Latham, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg visionaries who located power and beauty in what is forgotten.

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Greekling,the much-anticipated debut poetry collection by Kostya Tsolakis, celebrates and commemorates damaged and rejected Greek bodies, be they of flesh and blood, made of marble, or natural bodies. In intertwining Greek culture, history and poetic influences with the contemporary queer experience, this collection is perceptive, lyrical, and deeply evocative of time and place. From an Athenian childhood to a closeted adolescence in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, towards sexual self-discovery, maturity and freedom – Tsolakis charts the pursuit of unconditional happiness.These poems explore queer joy on dance floors, darkrooms and bedsits, but also the risks of crossing strangers’ thresholds or in encountering the violent machismo and hypermasculine expectations of the society you grow up in. And ever-present through the collection is Athens – the city the poet once turned his back on at eighteen but has come to love again. Moving between lament and celebration, Greekling reflects on a changing and often misrepresented country, the nature of motherlands and mother tongues; it is a voyage out – and a return.

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The Field in Winter, the third collection of poetry by David Clarke, winner of the Michael Marks Award, elegantly reflects on memory, time, and the very particular landscape of loss, in a calendar of poems, a 'charm of words' that track and loop through seasons of nature and living. The relationship between the environment, the human body and the self takes centre stage here in poetry that is concerned with being in the world - senses alive to the detail of things, the trunk of a linden tree , the shock of cold water, the frenzy of bees and blossom. But these remarkable poems also write towards the intangible in the late summer's dusk - an empty cage, a bird flown; history's slow grind and echo. Clarke's elegies reach out to touch what passes us fleetingly in a moment of time - 'before the tongue can catch them' - held for that second, precious, in his poised and finely weighted poetry.

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Ramona Herdman’s Glut is a lush, entertaining, and bittersweet collection of poems about how we live together and find meaning through rules and rituals around food, family, alcohol, work, nature, sex and love. These vividly-realised, nimble poems probe at the delicate balancing acts we – our bodies and our minds – perform in life: between power and trust, between convention and rebellion, and between what is enough and what is too much. All the time, Herdman’s spry poetry keeps a gimlet eye on our impulse to make sense of it all – of how we live and work together, and what strategies will help us to navigate our way through the tangled undergrowth of negotiation and misunderstanding. Glut is a lustrous, darkly funny, open-hearted book on the distance between people, on satisfying appetites, and on seeking both pleasure and consolation.

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In Gregory Leadbetter’s second poetry collection, Maskwork, mystery, theatre and ritual combine to reveal rather than to disguise. The mask, in these resonant poems, acts as a way of becoming, seeing, and knowing – granting access to altered states and otherworlds hidden within and beyond ourselves. Here, language itself becomes an animating magic, connecting humans to our ecological roots.The spirit of revival, renaissance, new birth and rebirth haunts this book: and at its core, the idea of poetry itself as a form of learning – an art and a mystery – runs like a quicksilver thread throughout, between the elusive and the certain. Leadbetter’s meticulously attuned lyrical poetry tells of the transformative experience of knowing, a dynamic state of being that forever alters both the knower and the known.

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"why don’t you write about yourself ever people used to ask / and I didn’t know why / either in Chinese one word can lead you out of the dark / then back into it / in a single breath" Magnolia is the debut poetry collection by poet, essayist and non-fiction writer Nina Mingya Powles, one of contemporary poetry's most exciting new international voices and the winner of the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. These vivid, luscious poems move between journal and biography, place and belonging, all the time exploring the multitudinous facets of language and culture that make up our identity, from the sense of longing that a delicious bowl of food conjures up to the inviting glow of paper lanterns that illuminate memory and travel. Formally rich, these unique poems skilfully broaden the perspective of all a poem can hold can contain through their daring, joyful and expansive approach.

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Letters Home, Jennifer Wong’s remarkable and vivid third collection of poems, unravels the complexities of being between nations, languages and cultures. Travelling across multiple borders of history and place, these poems examine what it means to be returning home, and whether it is a return to a location, a country or to a shared dream or language.“There are poems of homesickness, nostalgia, but also humour, hope and optimism - all depicted in Wong's distinctive, intelligent style... This is a remarkable collection, which makes a new and bold contribution to the genre of diaspora literature.” – Hannah Lowe"Jennifer Wong’s voice is captivating, compassionate, her poems full of insight, as she questions the complex relationship between culture and identity and what it means to leave a place to become defined by another." - Rebecca Goss

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David Clarke, winner of the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2013, returns with his second collection, The Europeans. Simultaneously close to home and looking outward beyond these shores, these wry and perceptive poems revel with form and encompass journeys, ideas of nationhood and national identity, and the optimism of a time when Europe and the UK enjoyed a quite different entente cordiale. They are a warning against nostalgia, a lucid and prescient exploration of how we see ourselves and how we are seen."A document for our times. A protest against bigotry and smuggery. A thesis for open borders and equality. In its cumulative effect, The Europeans is a comparative cultural analysis, a social satire and political commentary, a portrait of us and them, here and there, home and away." Paul Stephenson "Clarke’s authoritative new collection offers profound pleasures, and deepening regrets, in a poetic continent where every reader must confront ‘your own untruth’. The Europeans is certainly a book for the present. It is also a book for our uncertain future." - Alison Brackenbury"It includes the best gathering of found Brexit similes I expect to see in my lifetime, and a poem on stately homes that needs to be broadcast before every re-run of Downton Abbey. With targeted humour, an eye for the mobile and the sedentary, repurposing the mundane, David Clarke takes us to estates of all kinds, to both Leeds Central and Milano Centrale."– Alistair Noon

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Theresa Lola’s debut poetry collection In Search of Equilibrium is an extraordinary and exacting study of death and grieving. Where the algorithms of the body and the memory fail, Lola finds the words that will piece together the binary code of family and restart the recovery program. In doing so, these unflinching poems work towards the hard-wired truths of life itself - finding hope in survival, lines of rescue in faith, a stubborn equilibrium in the equations of loss and renewal. “Theresa Lola’s poems never fail to surprise with her breath-taking ability to create unexpected imagery; they never fail to move as she laments the last years of a loved one; and they never fail to delight with the transformative and healing power of poetry to create beauty.” - Bernardine Evaristo

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From politics to pop, from the UK to California, wherever digital heartbeats flutter and stutter, Ticker-tape is a maximalist take on 21st century living. Rishi Dastidar’s first full collection showcases one of contemporary poetry’s most distinctive voices, delivering effervescence with equal servings of panache and whiplash-quick wit.Here is sheer madcap ingenuity and also impressive breadth; ranging from odes of love to deconstructed diversity campaigns and detonations of banter’s worst excesses, plus appearances from ex-SugaBabes, a shark who comes to tea, to the matters of matchstick empires and national identity. Ticker-tape is bold, adventuresome and wry – an unmissable and irrepressible debut.

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How to be a Poet is the brainchild of poet Jo Bell and editor Jane Commane. As a natural follow-on to the 52 Project of 2014, this book aims to help poets taking the next step in developing, working and participating in the wider creative community as a writer.How to be a Poet combines practical advice and topical mini-essays that examine both the technical and creative dimensions of being a poet. It’s a no-nonsense manual where we’ve replaced the spanners with lots of ink, elbow grease and edits. At each step, we ask plenty of questions: what makes a poem tick over perfectly, how do we get it started when it stalls, and which warning lights should you never ignore?

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This debut collection of poems by former Birmingham Poet Laureate Roy McFarlane explores love, loss, adoption and identity in powerful, precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers and parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love and learning to say goodbye that come along the way.Themes of place, identity, history, and race interweave personal narratives, with and poems that touch on everything from the ‘Tebbitt Test’ and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that 'place just off the M6'. Distinct and memorable, McFarlane’s poems are beautifully focused, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love.

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‘Bird Sisters exerts a powerful hold, as if to read it is to be haunted by things one half-remembers.’ – Moniza Alvi‘All is strange or estranged in fact, but it is articulated in poems of supple inventive concentration. In that sense Bird Sisters is a book that casts deep shadows.’ – George SzirtesJulia Webb’s Bird Sisters is a surreal journey through sisterhood and the world of the family via the natural world. Fascinated by the ‘otherness’ of things, her poems expose places and relationships that are not always entirely comfortable places to exist. Many of them feature transformations of some kind – both real and metaphorical: a woman wears a dress of live bees or becomes a bird and family members turn into owls and sparrows.In exploring the ways in which both adults and children are casually cruel to one another, often within a mythological framework, Julia Webb blurs the boundaries between fairy tale and reality. These families are terrifying in their complexity and dysfunction, yet utterly compelling and convincing and with dark undercurrents of humour that ensure the poems are never bleak.

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David Hart's Library Inspector is a requiem to libraries and to the power of books, with imaginative origins in the new Library of Birmingham, and its realisation here in the windswept landscape of coastal Mid Wales. As the figure of the Library Inspector struggles to keep up with disappearing librarians, tiny libraries with perplexing opening hours and a prized stock of just a few books, the landscape is altering and memories and books alike are carried off on the breeze and swallowed by the sea. Dreamlike and darkly-humoured, the Library Inspector's journey reveals a vanishing world with long shadows on the horizon. The narrator might be decidedly unreliable, and the fables fabulous, but at this poem's heart is a solemn melancholy in the face of a reality of library closures and fleeting time, for memory, for love and for the sake of words.

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Love, sex, boats and friendship. And yet Jo Bell's second poetry collection, Kith, is about so much more, as these bold and generous poems interweave bigger questions of place, identity and community and what these mean to us, here and now.Delighting in the belting, beautiful turn-of-phrase, Jo Bell's poems are lyrical and joyous, but always precise and clear as birdsong. They take us the long way home, plot histories along the route of backwaters, and are occasionally diverted for a roll in the hay; hearts are broken and boats are dry-docked. There will be tears, but there will also be love, safe harbours, and the company of wise and faithful kith.Jo Bell - archaeologist, boat dweller and erstwhile director of National Poetry Day - is a poetry pundit and deviser of online poetry community 52. Winner in 2014 of the Charles Causley prize and Manchester Cathedral prize, and placed in the Bridport, Wigtown, and Ballymaloe international competitions, she has had a fortunate year. She is currently building new projects with the writer Tania Hershman and poet Michael Symmons Roberts. Kith is her second collection of poems.

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In 2023, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a seventh time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Katie Hale as selecting editor. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Jade Cuttle, Antonia Taylor and Laura Varnam. Primers Volume Seven now brings together a showcase from three distinctive poets, exploring everything from mudlarking and making a mossary', to the borderlands of conflicts and a bold retelling of an Old English epic. Through lively engagement with language, deep connection to place and time, and the unearthing the stories of myth, history and peoples, these revealing poems offer an insightful collection of new work from some of poetry's most talented emerging voices.

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