Search results for ""The Emma Press""

Relationships are tricky. Sometimes you just have to take off. Maybe on a medieval pilgrimage, or to a ballroom in eighteenth-century London, or perhaps a hotel in Eastbourne where the sheets are made of plastic. But you can never really escape. Via nightingales, betting shops, horny marriage counsellors and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this pamphlet looks at different kinds of intimacy – with lovers, grandmothers, patriarchy, the not-yet- born – and what they can reveal about sex, power and care.

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It’s time to let your imagination fly…If you look up on a cloudy day, you'll see a whole new surprising world above you - the world of clouds! The Book of Clouds is an introduction to this world - and the guide you'll want by your side to help you understand it.A mix of dreamy fantasy and scientific fact, this is the perfect gift for any child with their head stuck in the clouds - and for anyone who has ever wondered what's up there in the skies above. This book is ideal for children to use as a starting point for their own imaginative creative play. It is full of playful poems, inspiring, anarchic illustrations, and guides to all of the different aspects of clouds that you could want to know about.With 25 poems and many full-page illustrations that use watercolour and collage, you won’t be able to pick The Book of Clouds up without wanting to immediately start making your own cloud diary. So The Book of Clouds comes with 9 pages for your own notes and sketches at the end - let it truly become YOUR book of clouds!

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In this sequel to The Adventures of Na Willa (2019), our heroine Na Willa's days are still filled with simple joys-and now Pak, her father, is back from sea! Willa delights in a new series of escapades in the alley, until, one day, Pak brings some news that will change her life forever... Acclaimed poets Kate Wakeling and Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul bring Reda Gaudiamo's bright, curious and charismatic character to life for English-language readers. Adventurous yet accessible, this lyrical chapter book acknowledges that exciting new beginnings also mean sad goodbyes. Illustrated by Cecillia Hidayat.

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Can you imagine a world without bees? Did you know that dung beetles are awesome recyclers? Insects pollinate, recycle and are an important food source for many animals – they’re tiny but mighty superheroes of the animal kingdom. This is an anthology of children’s poems which will educate and excite youngsters about the fascinating world of insects. With factual notes alongside the poems, and black line illustrations.

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In 2015, suffering from a dreadful case of writer’s block, novelist and short story writer Jan Carson set herself the challenge of spending an entire year writing short pieces of microfiction on postcards and mailing these to friends around the world. When 2016 ended, she found it impossible to stop writing postcard stories. The stories in this collection represent the best of some five hundred postcard stories Jan has written since.

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Falling Out Of The Sky is a treasury of poems which retell classic myths, legends and fairytales from across the world. Hansel and Gretel’s witch takes us behind the scenes of the construction of her gingerbread cottage, and Medusa explains how the snakes on her head rule out a lot of options in everyday life – wearing a hat, for example. Full of alternate viewpoints and spirited new versions of old stories, Falling Out The Sky is a friendly introduction to poetry as well as the joy of literature. In tales about the beginning of time to the end of the world, poets and characters speak directly to the readers, revelling in the possibilities of storytelling. These are poems which parents can read aloud to younger children, and which older children can read to themselves, delighting in the mischief and invention of the poets.

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An innovative memoir debut from Maddie Ballard on living a life shaped by patterns and crafting, stitched through with threads of love, family and heritage.

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In Milk Snake, Toby Buckley invites us to look at the world from a slightly different angle, where small things become unsettling if you look closely enough. The poet explores queerness, displacement and trauma through clear-voiced, deceptively gentle poems about fishermen, maggots and bees. bleary from sleep and warmwater and no glassesi spot an uncertain commaslidinghe drags his tail up myshower wall cumbersomeand not unmaggotesque and ican seehis gutsor maybe it’shis dinner- from 'companion'

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Playful, formal, satirical and tender, the poems in The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising are wildly wide-ranging. Jack Houston whisks the reader through meditations on family life, the teachings of Lucretius, the sexual potential of Captain Barnacles, and dreams of a socialist utopia, managing to be both deeply weird and touching. In his debut pamphlet, Houston draws out and scrutinises the mundanities of life, showing how they can form part of something much bigger. His poems aim to awaken the capacity for revolution within us all, even if it only gets us as far as the roundabout in the local playpark."In the year 2121, we’re all now too aware that a sofa is simply a bench constructed from the hewn corpse of a tree, covered in a mesh made from the amniotic fibres of oppressedly mono-cropped cotton plants & filled with the plumage from many a murdered full-grown duck [...]"- from 'Utopia'

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Rebecca Hurst's debut pamphlet is woven through with fairy tales, folklore and landscape. She uses the natural world, family mythology and the theory of fairy tales to unpack, embroider, and explode traditional tales and tropes, exploring themes of voice, concealment, and transformation. Prickling with magic and spells, the poems in The Fox's Wedding lead us down a twisty path to find – what? A prince made of needles? A cursed box? A golden key? Take care and keep your wits about you; if you're lucky you might just find your way home.*** Describe the box. It is square, carved from elm with a brass hinge and lock. I see you hold it in your hands. I hold it against my body, so. It is a burden. It is the size of a tea-caddy. It is an object of beauty. You could call it beautiful. The grain, the glow. The box is very old. The box would prefer we not discuss its age.- from 'Her Unbreakable Box'

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We Are A Circus is the charming tale of a rainbow family, riding around Thessaloniki on a bike. They are poor and living precariously, but they are happy together and have fun in the sun and in the rain (though sometimes they get a bit cold). As the book progresses, we follow them through the seasons, playing and cycling and fending off the weather. When their landlord turfs them out of their house, things get more serious as they have to find a new home, fast. Nasta has created an exuberant, compassionate story, which is beautifully complemented by Rosie Fencott’s energetic artwork.

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With others in your absence tells the story of a return to the living, travelling out of the acuteness of grief into new ways of being towards others. Moving forwards and occasionally backwards in time, it celebrates the platonic relationships through which the speaker learns to readjust to a world made strange following the loss of a parent. Many of the poems are very loosely based on seasons 11–14 of the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who, each drawing its title and imagery from a different serial.Excerpt from '2017'Joe and I are drinking too much Spanish lager in a bar in West Bridgford. It’s been eleven months: right now, I can no more elegise my dad than I could have called him ‘father’, and anyway, ‘dad’ sounds flat, like it belongs in that blunt universe in which the dead can’t be addressed as lyric people.Joe reminds me that an elegy is something that you write when you’ve resolved your grief. I feel like an apple that’s fallen from a tree into a bed of roses in winter, skewered like a severed head upon a thorny stem, which is to say I am far from resolution.

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Rehema Njambi unpacks identity, faith, womanhood and – above all – agency, in poems partly inspired by conversations with the Black, mostly African, women around her. Imbued with quiet resistance to patriarchal societies, Njambi's debut collection is an ode to the women who have raised her, and their strength and their ability to hold, sustain, and be rooted in their faith. The poems resound with their idea of home, and belonging they wish to pass on to their daughters.GHOSTS IN THIS HOUSEThere were footsteps in the dark all night,almost every night, and we were scared — but we didn’t say a thing.She called us to prayer in the morning, every morning.With our small hands and smaller faithwe asked the Lord for protection —but He didn’t say a thing.

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This man wants a dog and will stop at nothing to get it! Beautifully illustrated with embroidery.Part of the second batch of Bicki-Books, a collectible series of postcard-sized picture books which each feature a classic Latvian poem. Suitable for children aged 3+.

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A little boy wants to tell his mother a secret, but first she has to swear to tell NO-ONE ELSE! There is also a secret hidden in the illustrations. Part of the second batch of Bicki-Books, a collectible series of postcard-sized picture books which each feature a classic Latvian poem. Suitable for children aged 3+.

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Menagerie is a collection of poems about animals, divided into three sections: water, earth and air. Some poems examine a creature from close-up, almost allowing the reader to see the world through the animal's eyes, while the poet is more present in other poems, looking on. The collection invites the reader to reflect on loneliness, love, mortality, and hope. Each poem is typeset with plenty of space around it, allowing it to breathe. With stylised illustrations by Amy Evans.from "Octopus Tank, Torbay Aquarium"I saw a ribbon of starlings once – they rose and fell in that same way, tied and re-tied Rome in a bow, and I thought the knot at their centre must be God. Here is God again in this stranger, the colour coursing her billow and flop like a weather map crawling with storms.

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In a sequence of poems set in the mountainous Deep South of America, Dawn Watson vividly evokes an ominous landscape of gas stations, jackrabbits and drifting hawks, where copperhead snakes fall out of branches and ‘magnolia cones / thum[p] the roofs’ of wooden outhouses. These poems, based on the writer’s time spent in Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, are interwoven with pieces set in the poet’s native Belfast which speak urgently to the raw realities of sexuality, juvenile detention, and the Irish border. Many poems feature speakers driving from place to place, capturing the in-between states in which so much of experience is actually lived. Precise and strange images coalesce into physical and interior landscapes. Alternately surreal and direct, and always joyously inventive, Watson offers a clear and unsettling vision of what is and isn’t there in these anxious, contemporary times.

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The Whimsy of Dank Ju-Ju is a collection of colourful, energetic poems which revel in language. Using experimental forms and punctuation, with snippets of lines exploded across the page, Akhtar drags the reader into a world of magic, heat, life and... whimsy.

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"Now's not the time to think. Now's the time to feel." A taxi ride, a train trip, a family photo: in About Us, seemingly unremarkable journeys and mundane objects ripple with the repercussions of past decisions. All is not what it seems at a family wedding, a regretful father risks estranging his daughter, and a young woman is tormented by the cries of a baby that her partner cannot hear. Reda Gaudiamo's characters charm, chafe and confound in a series of intimate snapshots of domestic relationships. With twists shifting from the comically mischievous to the abruptly chilling, this collection is a bold slice of contemporary Indonesian literature.

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Calm Beasts is a modern nursery rhyme. It's part of a collectible series of six new classics by Latvian authors, translated into English for the first time. Herberts Dobre paints a curious world where wolves fall silent and lions lie down to be stroked. The warm, muted palette of Gita Treice's painterly illustrations bring these beasts to life. Together, they tell a beguiling story about the power of the reader's imagination. Where in the world can a child roam free with big cats and fierce predators? In a picture book, of course!

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Rakhshan Rizwan's debut collection simmers with a poised, driving anger. Drawing on the rich visual and material culture of her home region, Rizwan unpacks and offers critical comment on the vexed issues of class, linguistic and cultural identity – particularly for women – in the context of Pakistan and South Asia. She writes about the hypocrisy of the men who claim to worship women, the nuances of using Urdu or Hindi, and the many contradictions of the city of her birth, Lahore. As well as startling free verse, Rizwan's many accomplished ghazals both explore and demonstrate her fascination with multilingualism, code-switching, displacement and belonging. The poems in Paisley are an unflinchingly feminist assault on received ideas about womanhood which present the reader with often-uncomfortable truths.

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In an island kingdom, Don Armando dreams of a dragon-slaying adventure like heroes used to perform. And in a laboratory in a gleaming city, scientist Haplo Nous tinkers towards an atom bomb. Past, present and future collide in Andrew Wynn Owen’s rip-roaring tale, full of rhythmical fireworks and joyous anachronism. This is a clash between chivalric heroics and modern scientific enquiry, and a shaggy-dog story taking in farmers, fisherpeople, flying machines and general derring-do.

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Urban Myths and Legends is a lively collection of poems by modern poets who have taken inspiration from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The poems all tell stories which include a transformation – some inspired directly by the Metamorphoses and some completely new and of our time. Wings sprout, leaves fall and no state is certain, as the poets channel Ovid’s mischief and whisper tales of just and unjust deserts.

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In her heady, debut pamphlet Myrtle, Ruth Wiggins celebrates the primal forces of nature and the human heart. Interweaving the ancient with the modern world, she explores fertility and death, in poems that are imbued with a subtle eroticism. There is a serious playfulness at work here too: a carnival stallholder battles with a spider, and a bored vegetarian contemplates life as a fox, while lovers fear death and separation as the gods look on in amusement. This free-wheeling and assured collection is full of dry humour and wisdom, and is by turns poignant, dark and full of zest.

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An anthology of instructional poems by modern poets dispensing advice on love, seduction, relationships and heartbreak. Produced to look like an old-fashioned schoolbook, complete with diagrams, the Poetic Guide professes to help while offering a combination of stone-cold wisdom and highly dubious romantic advice.With poems from Jo Brandon, John Canfield, Jade Cuttle, Mel Denham, Amy Key, Anja Konig, Cheryl Moskowitz, Abigail Parry, Rachel Piercey, Richard O'Brien, Christopher Reid, Jacqueline Saphra and Liane Strauss.Christopher Reid's most recent book is Six Bad Poets (Faber). Among his earlier publications, A Scattering was declared Costa Book of the Year 2009, while The Song of Lunch became a BBC2 film starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. Andrew Wynn Owen won The Times Stephen Spender Prize in 2011 and a Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2008. Liane Strauss teaches literature and creative writing at Birkbeck College and The Poetry School. She is the author of Leaving Eden (Salt Publishing, 2010) and Frankie, Alfredo (Donut Press, 2009). Abigail Parry was recently appointed Assistant editor at The Rialto magazine.

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A mind-blowing collection of poems about love, life, and a long-overdue introduction to the unique worldview of Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi. Ikhda captures the intensity and wildness of love, sex, motherhood and family ties through her heady and sensual poems and character sketches. She flexes and chivvies the English language into hitherto undreamt-of places, dipping occasionally into French and Italian, and presents it all back to the reader in compelling, undeniably truthful nuggets, with exquisite tenderness and humanity.Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi has worked in television, advertising and as a scriptwriter on a sitcom in Indonesia. She performed her poetry for the first time in 2011, at Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. She now lives in Naples, where she is enjoying her new role as mother to her little boy Corentin.

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Clare Pollard's first book for children revisits Arthurian legends in a thrilling tale of adventure and mystery. *The Untameables* turns traditional folklore on its head and forces us to think about how legends are written and whose stories get told.

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Tiny Moons is a collection of essays about food and belonging. Nina Mingya Powles journeys between Wellington, Kota Kinabalu and Shanghai, tracing the constants in her life: eating and cooking, and the dishes that have come to define her. Through childhood snacks, family feasts, Shanghai street food and student dinners, she attempts to find a way back towards her Chinese-Malaysian heritage.

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Bake a weird cake, pay a visit to the Deep, and get some inspiration for your very own word hoard! Anything is possible in the world of Cloud Soup, Kate Wakeling's collection of poems for children. Quieter poems sit alongside riotously funny ones in this sequel to Moon Juice. Readers are encouraged to look more closely at clouds, water, dust and trees, and to reflect on the knottier areas of life.

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A boy selkie who takes girlness off like a sealskin, an untameable kelpie, the warrior-wife of a princess, and a Loch Ness monster who is too busy having fun to worry about words like “girl” or “boy”. This is the way the world is - with just a bit of Scottish myth and magic thrown in. Wain is a fully-illustrated collection of LGBT themed poetry aimed at teens (but suitable for all ages) based on retellings of Scottish folk tales. These poems immerse readers in an enriching, diverse and enchanting vision of contemporary life.

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Meet Skig, who’s meant to be a warrior (but is really more of a worrier). Meet a giddy comet, skidding across the sky with her tail on fire. Put a marvellous new machine in your pocket and maybe you’ll be able to fix all your life’s problems. Kate Wakeling’s first book of poems for children is full of curious characters and strange situations. The poems she writes are always musical, sometimes magical, and full of wonder at the weirdness of the world.Moon Juice contains 25 poems and features bonus materials, including interviews with the author and the illustrator, and ideas for writing your own poems.

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Valerie Bence’s latest poetry pamphlet is a testament to ordinary lives, and a meditation on grandmothers. Part memoir, part family history, Overlap is a series of vivid vignettes from the poet’s childhood, courtship, motherhood and grandmotherhood, spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. Bence’s grandmothers Winifred and Harriet are at the heart of this book. She reflects on their hardy, steadfast lives as she too becomes a grandmother, in very different times. Stranded from her family in the Covid-19 pandemic, the poet conjures up their ghosts, walks in their footsteps and – sometimes – feels herself become them.

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You never know how things really are in other people’s families, in other people’s homes. There’s the public face and the private truths – the personal griefs and tragedies, whether festering or resting in peace. In her wry, engagingly strange poems, Anne Bailey takes the door off the latch and lets us inside. She shows us loss and disappointment, as well as hardness and resilience, particularly through the eyes of a daughter, wife and mother. We see the domestic sphere in such close-up detail that it becomes bizarre, an uncanny dimension that nonetheless rings horribly, weirdly true. "So you’ve put a picture on the lovely blank wallthat used to go pink in the sun and feel like an ice cream. A wall on which I used to rest my eyes in pleasant contemplation."- from 'Domestic'

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Step into Pearl’s world and take a tour around her faded seaside town, past the graffiti walls, bus stops and the old mattress factory. Except – with Pearl as our guide – the colours suddenly pop and every tiny detail becomes rich with interest. From the lido to the hair salon, to the Christmas shop in June, the ordinary becomes magical and every bit of wildness, weirdness and tattiness is whisked into the foreground. "Pearl" is an alter ego of the poet: she's a character who observes the minutiae around her and whose thoughts are a pleasure to follow. This pamphlet follows Pearl as she rollicks around, making her way through a townscape similar but not identical to the too-small-to-be-cities of poet Julia Bird's 70s & 80s childhood. from 'Clementine Pearl'The first time was a fluke. Subsequently, Pearl made plans to visit the Christmas shop at the edge of town every twenty-fifth of June; a day when even if it isn’t hot, it’s light, the day most likely the shop’s most empty of people wanting winter or its antimatter to take into their homes.

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Rachael Matthews is a working-class poet who paints poetic miniatures of domestic and psychological interiors. Her debut pamphlet, do not be lulled by the dainty starlike blossom, is a playful, dark meditation on the queer body as site of pleasure, connection, fertility, loss and trauma.Matthews finished writing these poems during lockdown, while she was heavily pregnant with her daughter. It was an unwitnessed pregnancy, experienced in isolation from friends and family, and invisible to the psychotherapy patients she was treating virtually when New York City became the global epicentre of the pandemic. Resilience and hope are woven into its DNA.

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Village of dunes. Valley of slumber-dust.Sandsnarl is a settlement steeped in sand – though where it came from and how long ago is a matter of tall tales and steely whispers. The sand itself makes accurate record-keeping impossible. It is drug, ore, plague and delicacy. The inhabitants of this region (or is it a fallen kingdom?) talk and think through its haze. Some alter their shape, as if shaved by it. Others seethe, resisting its rattle and buzz.These poems eavesdrop, extract, sift. Together, they make up a brief impression of time and place, a Buñuelian musical without the music.

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What’s your favourite food? Who’s your best friend? Have you tried to grow a rock? Aren’t beards weird? Did you ever move house and miss where you used to live? Didn’t a lot change when the pandemic started?My Sneezes Are Perfect is a collection of poems in the voice of a small boy who wants to tell you about all the things he’s learning, all the time. During the book, he moves from the Netherlands to America and has to adjust to his new life there. Then Covid-19 hits and his world changes all over again...

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A child waits for the tooth fairy; a mother spends a night watching a recording of the previous night; two women face the ghosts that haunted their grandmothers. The nights in these ten stories are thick and substantial, ambiguous and alluring. Eerie, magical, hushed and surprisingly alive, this anthology shows the night as a place where connections are made and daylit lives can be changed. With stories from Valentine Carter, John Kitchen, Winifred Mok, Leanne Radojkovich, Angela Readman, Jane Roberts, Rebecca Rouillard, Miyuki Tatsuma, Zoë Wells and Sofija Ana Zovko.

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Who would imagine that a family of moles has built a metro system right under our feet – and that the little mounds you see in the fields are actually their subway train stations?Part of the second batch of Bicki-Books, a collectible series of postcard-sized picture books which each feature a classic Latvian poem. Suitable for children aged 3+.

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After Summer is an anthology of new writing for young people, produced as part of the Creative Europe-funded READ ON! project. Featuring short stories commissioned, selected and written by young people from Portugal, Norway, Italy and the UK, this is an extraordinarily varied collection of stories spanning the continent.

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Naughty Gnat is a modern nursery rhyme. It's part of a collectible series of six new classics by Latvian authors, translated into English for the first time. Valdis Grenkovs tells the familiar story of what happens when a drawing session doesn't go to plan, taking the reader from the conception to the meltdown. Zane Zlemeša illustrates the text with a vivid collage of scribbles and platters as our check-shirted hero becomes overwhelmed by a fly in the ointment.

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Topsy-Turvy Tasks is a modern nursery rhyme. It's part of a collectible series of six new classics by Latvian authors, translated into English for the first time. Maija Laukmane presents us with a world where everything is out of place. Once one thing changes, daily routines and chores get all mixed up for a child and her pets: soon, Annie is being chased by mice and her dog has taken her place at school. But some things never change. As soon as Morris the cat gets at a bowl of milk, no amount of havoc can prise him away... Sabine Moore's bold illustrations are a mix of cartoon and cut-out styles, bringing their own bright and manic energy to this topsy-turvy world.

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In Carol Rumens's Bezdelki, small things like the English meaning of her Russian title help to shore up the memory of a life. These elegies for a late partner, written in memory of Yuri Drobyshev, explore the principle that death, even for atheists, isn’t purely loss. Instead, a kind of conversation between two people can be continued through willed acts of memory, whether by rooting through incidental artefacts found in a toolbox ('defiant old metals, coupled/irrefutably and awkwardly for life') or by revisiting works of Russian literature that both members of the couple admired. In Rumens's pamphlet, translations and imitations of Osip Mandelstam share space with fragments of Egyptian mythology and 'a wardrobe of old sweat-shirts' to convey the powerful, and moving, impulse to 'live with your death unburied at my core'.

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Have you ever had a pet? Or have you ever stopped to look at all of the small things in your home that make up your life? From wet socks to being tucked into bed at night, and strongly featuring one inspiring guppy fish with real staying power - Super Guppy stays close to home, but it's a home full of fun, jokes, and surprising adventure.

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Na Willa is a bright, adventurous girl living in Surabaya's suburbs, her home in the middle of an alley surrounded by cypress trees. She spends her days running after trains, going down to the market, and thinking about how people can sing through radios. Indonesian author Reda Gaudiamo has created a collection of stories of curious adventures and musings of a multicultural girl growing up in Indonesia with an East Indonesian mother and a Chinese-Indonesian father. Set in a time when children spent the day outside, listening to Lilis Suryani's songs on the radio, and when race and gender would still go undiscussed, this is Na Willa's story as she grows up unafraid to ask the big questions.

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In rural Wales, wandering the dunes west of Pwllheli, John Fuller has composed a letter on the subject of travel: warning against it, wondering about people’s presences and absences, and serenely admiring ‘the Wales of sheep and song’. His correspondent, young Andrew Wynn Owen, replies with friendly enthusiasm, matching John’s poetic form while flouting his advice and hopping from gallery to garret via Luxembourg and Venice. Between them, they consider: is it better to risk seeming ‘stay-at-home, | A stick in mud’ or ‘to pass life scared | Of stillnesses’ AWOL is an infinitely charming collaboration between the eminent poet John Fuller, with a career spanning over 50 years, and bright young poet Andrew Wynn Owen, whose first pamphlet was published in 2014. Beautifully produced in a large square format, this book is illustrated throughout in full-colour with watercolours and line drawings by Emma Wright. The epistolary poems are composed in terza rima in tetrameter lines, reflecting both poets’ love of metre and formal challenges.

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