Search results for ""cinnamon press""

A unique, illustrated collection of poetry exploring themes of loss and togetherness.

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A young girl discovers that riding a bike is more than simply learning balance… A village is commandeered by the army for target practice… A drive south for the summer becomes a journey through language to an inner place… An unassuming young man is driven to murder… Weaving together compassion and acute observation with a fine ear for the nuance of identity and nationality, Isabelle Llasera’s debut short story collection is serious, humorous, tragic and inspiring by turns. Sometimes intimate, sometimes cast against broader backdrops, these stories show that the private and personal are always present. Smog demonstrates, time and again, that the big things in our lives are always less important than our fundamental humanity.

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A recipient of an Eric Gregory Award as a young poet, Ian Gregson’s debut collection, Call Centre Love Song went on to be shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Described by Carol Rumens as ‘combining a postmodernist’s sense of ‘things being various’ with a traditionalist’s concern for shape and completeness’, Gregson’s work is formally diverse, eminently accessible and packed with wit, but this is never glib or throw-away. There is deep commentary going on in these poems, on how we make and break connections, on the possibilities and limits of language and perception. Brilliant, often funny, frequently poignant and always timely, The Slasher and the Vampire as Role Models, is a new and collected that shows Gregson at the height of his linguistic dexterity as poet with something real to say.

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How do we hold on to what is constant within us when circumstances challenge our sense of who we are? At the heart of the story is the mystery of Isabel Grey, a successful opera singer who disappeared in the late 1970s and has not been heard of since. Two musicians, facing life-changing crises of their own, decide to look for her. Stephen Bennett's career as an orchestral bassoonist has been ended by a violent mugging; singer Alice Wade is suffering serious vocal problems and trying to move on from the latest in a long line of failed relationships. Stephen takes a job as Archivist for Hope Street Theatre and becomes intrigued by a young woman who appeared there in the 1960s. Nearby, Alice is taking refuge in the house she's inherited from her godmother, Imogen, and while trawling through paraphernalia Imogen left behind, she learns of a sister, Isabel, about whom Imogen never spoke and who vanished forty years earlier. Their discoveries are woven into Isabel's gradually unfolding story, the silent language of keepsakes becoming signposts to the past, revealing the truth of what really happened. As Isabel emerges from the shadows, Alice faces the loss of all she values most. Not wanting her life to become a sad echo of Isabel's, she must face the future with courage and acceptance.

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In darkness, she walks the labyrinth. Confused. Lost. But not alone. In the Paris of 1970, the hippie revolution has yet to crash land and Minnette searches hungrily for a way to enlightenment. She finds it. Or she finds something and the path of her life is set. But, by the beginning of the 21st Century, Minnette is haunted by the shades of recurring dreams and recurring memories, unsure whether the city around her is as solid as it appears. She looks back on her life’s search — and on that a winter’s evening in Toledo when, for a moment, the gates to another world may have opened — and feels the defeat of a life thrown away. But something moves in the shadows, something that comes closer each evening. Combining a mind-spinning vision of another reality just a step away from our own with searing character study and sensual, impressionist prose, In Dreams the Minotaur Appears Last is the latest novel from the author of the ground-breaking anti-novel Vitus Dreams and the acclaimed short story collection, High City Walk.

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Kay Syrad's perceptive, surprising imagery and ability to see to the heart of things is never more acute than in this outstanding new collection, Inland. A novelist of psychological acuity, wit and intelligence; a collaborator with artists and musicians and a gifted editor, Kay Syrad’s formidable skill and deeply humane insights come together in her poetry to astonish, startle and delight. There is darkness here, but also light; there is sorrow and celebration; there are huge questions and the smallest moments exquisitely observed. Written with a graciousness of thought and an elegant control of language that makes these pieces sing, Inland marks Kay Syrad as an extraordinary poet.

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Tracing life from a childhood in an Italian-English family on Tyneside to becoming a Welsh-speaking freelance writer in Cardiff, Eisteddfod-winning author Tony Bianchi leads the reader through a series of increasingly bizarre vignettes. Each section is a free-standing short story but read together they form a ludic, untrustworthy autobiography where the rug of humdrum normality is constantly pulled from under our feet. Lured into trusting belief by the narrator’s direct, confiding tone, by the sometimes overwhelming weight of circumstantial geographical and historical detail, and by the photos and documents that seem to guarantee authenticity, again and again the reader is suddenly left rudderless, unsure of the boundaries between truth and fiction. Did Bianchi ever play football in a Cardiff park with notorious Serbian war-lord Arkan? Is the floor of his local pub a concrete realisation of an M.C. Escher painting?In England, Wales, and beyond, Bianchi introduces a series of extraordinary characters, from the devout, indulgence-collecting, organ-playing grandfather, to the plumber and Cumbrian nationalist Caedmon, or the piano-playing pharmacist with carpal tunnel syndrome. And whether at the centre of the narrative or reporting from the sidelines, there, constantly leading us on from one potentially disastrous situation to another, is the author as anti-hero, always earnestly self-deprecating, always reinventing himself, always challenging our assumptions about identity, time and memory.

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Poetry pamphlet on the theme of Parkinson's Disease

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Paul travels to work on a day like any other: filled with reflection and questions. But the chill is more than the wind slicing in off the North Sea and Paul's soul searching runs deeper, with no end in sight. Part autobiography, part humanist study, Rotterdam is a unique, moving text. -- Welsh Books Council

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Set in Serbia during the First World War, the lives of a brave soldier and a patriotic medical orderly interweave.

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In this prequel to The Standing Ground, we travel back two generations to the origins of the oppressive E-Government state that infiltrates every aspect of people’s lives in the decade following Brexit and a global pandemic. But, as the darkness overtakes Britain and other areas of Europe, the light of resistance wakes in a community that spans the Celtic outposts of Brittany and North Wales. And in a strange child, Myrddin Emrys, also known as Merlin.Weaving together Arthurian legend and exploratory fiction of the near future, The Roots of the Ground explores the human cost of a monoculture that tramples freedom and privacy and asserts with Carl Jung that:'As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.'

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A Quixotic coming of age novel exploring the ways we enter the fantasy lives of those we love, This is the End of the Story is the first in a trilogy of new novels from Cinnamon Press founding editor, Jan Fortune.

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In the dream she is not herself. Belief is Catherine’s gift, or it was once, growing up in the shadow of an extraordinary friendship amongst a cacophony of voices trying to tell her who to be. Now, in her thirties, Catherine knows what she has lost and what she has survived. Her professional life is on course and she has a new relationship with Simon, a writer who shares her imaginative and creative worlds. But when Catherine arrives in Budapest in winter 1993 to begin researching a novel based on the poet, Attila József, she starts dreaming the life of a young woman imprisoned after the 1956 Uprising. More disconcertingly, by day this woman, Selene Virág, is with her, dreaming Catherine’s life just as she dreams Selene’s. Obsessed with uncovering the facts, Catherine discovers that Selene was a real person who lived through the persecution of Jews in Hungary during WW2, but what is most disorienting is that Selene believed Attila József to be the father of her daughter, Miriam, despite the fact that József committed suicide in December 1937, eighteen years before Miriam was born. How do the three lives of Catherine, Selene and Attila fit together? Densely layered, constantly challenging the boundaries between fact and fiction, A Remedy for All Things is a disquieting and compelling exploration of what we mean by identity and of how the personal and the political collide. Spare, subtle prose and an innovative, original narrative combine with an accessible, moving story; an extraordinary follow-up to This is the End of the Story, the first book in the Casilda Trilogy. The final part For Hope is Always Born, is also published by Cinnamon Press.

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A new annual from Cinnamon Press, the Review of Short Fiction looks at world of short-form fiction in the round, including prize winning stories, commentary and reviews.

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Edward Ragg won the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and his debut collection was A Force That Takes (2013). His second volume, Holding Unfailing (2017), charted the rise of modern China, whilst Exploring Rights (2020) confronted ‘post-truth’ culture and the prospects of humankind’s survival. And Then the Rain Came turns to love, physical and mental geographies, well-being and the vitality of the present. Set against the backdrops of the global pandemic and climate crisis, each poem embraces present perception in the awakening motif of rain.

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A young woman walks, walks, walks... always in search of the wondrous hidden in the everyday. When she at last enters a place of marvels just a step away from the mundane world, she discovers that the urge to keep searching is carrying her towards a climactic and extraordinary transmutation. Part Alchemical fable, part celebration of the transformative power of the Imagination, 'Marietta Merz' weaves a spell that lingers long after the story ends. Originally appearing as a key story in the highly acclaimed collection, High City Walk, 'Marietta Merz' is a limited edition pamphlet illustrated with original drawings.

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1900s London: For Patrick Bowley, fresh from rural Galway, a place of mind-expanding encounters with mystics, suffragettes, theosophists and free-thinkers. Drawn into the world of such luminaries as Jiddu Krishnamurti, Annie Besant and W B Yeats, it seems that Patrick is on a quest for meaning that will bear fruit. But a bruising failure in romance leaves him disillusioned with London and its class divisions and, in spiritual crisis, he flees to the familiarity of rural Ireland. But Patrick finds no peace and as Europe slides towards war and Ireland towards rebellion, his longing to shut out the world is challenged by a vocation to preach peace in Ireland that will not be quieted. And so he begins an epic pilgrimage to Dublin, arriving days before the 1916 Easter Rising. It is here that Patrick’s journey reaches a gripping climax – one that finally reveals the true nature of the ‘pathless country’. Winner of the J G Farrell Award and an Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair Award, James Harpur’s debut novel deftly weaves a story of spiritual awakening with fin de siècle alternative thought, love and political history, exploring how conscience and spiritual quest survive in an atmosphere of war, sectarianism and class hierarchy.

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In a landscape scarred by conflict, two women begin a quest for a lost child and a lost world of peace. Bound together by love and acceptance, their story and path interweave with fellow outcasts - people like the ever-suave Dame Blanche, Sister Asunta, martial artist and magician, Master Wu Wu, and the lost soul, Tulip - but whether peace is simply the end of war or something deeper is something they must discover for themselves. A haunting tale, told in a series of visionary prose poems, The True Story of Cowboy Hat & Ingenue interweaves memory and yearning to ask questions that reflect on our past and, disturbingly, on our futures.

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Inspired by letters from family members who served on the Western Front and written home to Bangor, News From Nowhere describes the impact of war on a family, including Bronwyn, the sister coming of age as her brothers and father endure the torments of the trenches and the battlefield.Sometimes we get fed up in these shallow, narrow windings and run around on top, which isn't too bad as this part of the line is comparatively free of corpses. I've learned to control my stomach, but will never overcome my horror of the stench. Dodging bombs is surprisingly easy, when you can see them coming. One of the sentries shouts, coming over Right, or Left, and we clear into dugouts. At first you see a heavy puff of smoke, then the bomb, which looks like a champagne bottle, turning over and over as it flies.

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A group of ramblers are taken to an idyllic other world. But things are not so simple and they find themselves at the centre of a battle between opposing spirits.

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Rich, powerful and authentic, Some Boys I Knew is the stunning follow-up to Clea Myers' first book of memoirs, Tweaking the Dream.

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Cursed with love by his step-mother, Culhwch (Pig Boy) is condemned to love and marry Olwen, the daughter of the Hawthorn Giant—pitiless, violent and huge. So begins the quest—first to the court of King Arthur to wins support for the quest. In this earliest and earthiest of Arthurian tales, we are in the grip of the Otherworld, where landscape, nature and doing what we can to make a better future, no matter how impossible that might seem, are everything. Making a future despite the odds and despite the terrible and debilitating pain that afflicts Pig Boy as part of his love of Olwen will see him tested him again and again as he faces each task along the quest, the last to hunt the Great Wild Boar and seize the golden comb and scissors from between its ears so that the Hawthorn Giant can have his beard trimmed and hair combed for his daughter’s wedding. Will the marriage finally be celebrated? And what help will Pig Boy need to summon—not only from the court of Arthur and its warrior class but from everyone in the kingdom and from the non-human realm with it deep magic? An epic tale of ancient myth, the story of Pig Boy continues to resonate today with how we go on making a future, calling on the land and whatever and whoever might help, human and beyond. An ambitious, compelling and powerful debut from master storyteller, Michael Harvey.

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In the far future, after a nuclear war, the world is separated into two realms, each under the protection of the all-powerful Commission. In Ecologia mammoths, wolves and sabre cats roam the world of Stone Age people, while Economica is populated by modern people enjoying technological convenience, complete with robots that serve every need. In Ecologia the Commission is worshiped as a deity, but in Economica it is resented as an obstructive and unaccountable bureaucracy. When Peter finds a portal between these realms, he illicitly sets up a life for himself in both worlds, knowing that he is in danger. But like everyone else he has no idea what the Commission really is, and when Peter’s friend, Simon, figures it out and is silenced by sinister forces, Peter’s questions about his future only become more complicated. His quandary exacerbated by the imminent closure of the portal, Peter has to make a choice about where he belongs; a choice that will be the most important he’s ever made. Raising questions about what we mean by ‘nature’, ‘humanity’ and life itself, Destiny of a Free Spirit is a compelling debut that will keep you guessing till the end.

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Whatever the indifference or brutality of the world, love still thrives. September 1942: Following the collapse of the Allied resistance in Burma, the full might of the Imperial Japanese Airforce has been unleashed on the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing, in an attempt to force the Chinese government to sue for peace. The brave actions of a squadron of Chinese pilots in their battered planes offer a glimmer of hope in these darkest of hours. May 2019: 29 year-old Torin Cameron from London meets 26 year-old Lu Chen Xi (Sunny) at a business conference in Chengdu. Reluctant at first, she becomes his guide on a journey of discovery, that takes them deep into the Sichuan countryside and opens Torin’s eyes to China’s heroic role in the second world war—and a family secret that has remained concealed for seventy-five years. Unravelling the threads between wartime China and Europe and modern-day Chengdu and London, Degrees of Separation explores the yin and yang of tangled human experience, the twists of fate and tendrils of connection that wind through generations and across cultures. An uplifting and inspirational story of love and reconciliation.

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THE PUB IS THE HUB – And the hub of this pub is Pilot Ken, the affable crossword solver of the Bat and Ball, first to arrive and last to leave every drinking day. So the stories of Ken and his companions unwind with pub-talk and laughter, some genuine, some hollow; peppered with Ken’s eccentric theories: Does space actually curve towards pubs? Abounding in arguments over politics and trivia, rich in personal tales and tragedies, large and small. As the town slips further into terminal decline, Ken’s story weaves with the characters he drinks with. Meet Jim, the fully-qualified giant; landlady Evil Mand and her running battle with the pubco; Frank Speke, who crusades for his right to say whatever he pleases, no matter how offensive; Emily, the theatre director and Pomo, the Clown, both, trying to fend off the burgeoning cultural desert; Wayne, freed from the ties of convention by his decision to drink himself to death; FMC, the lonely class warrior; and Nev, who wants white people to stop behaving like idiots around him. When Ken’s posse is exiled from the Bat and Ball by a hostile temporary landlord who ousts the regulars in an attempt to ‘revive’ the pub; we travel with them on their fruitless tour in search of a new home and triumphant return, mapping the troubled, dying town where the pub is the last redoubt of decency, friendship and bar-room philosophy. Yet always there hovers the shadow of death-in-a-glass, from which nobody is exempt. Crosswords, love, life, death. Love, life, death, crosswords. Praise for Andrew Dutton’s debut novel: Nocturne: Wayman’s Sky Intriguing, very original. — The Stoke Sentinel

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The art of people-watching is one we all engage in, and in Streetwise these observations, suffused with the many ways we imagine the lives of others, take on depth and focus as poet and passers-by interact without a word needing to be said. In nuanced and lyrical pieces, the poet draws on years of experience as an employment lawyer, aware of those turned out onto the street; reflects on personal experience of the paths that lead to medical diagnoses, aware of those whose news was less fortunate, and above all, simply watches with a humane and intelligent perspective. From city streets to the streets of history, from country paths to places of memory, David Burridge follows in the footsteps of the philosopher Rousseau, revealing how much can be discovered by simply walking through a forest or up a hill. A finely layered and compelling reflection on the many routes we take through life, Streetwise is a collection to which readers will return.

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What’s written about us by non-Roma is a stereotypical image that’s both romantic and vilified. In writing our own Parramisha-story we are obligated to deconstruct those prevailing narratives readily available in popular culture and that have unjustly treated us.
 Parramisha challenges the reader to reconstruct a new image as a life affirming narrative of our wholeness as a Romani identity.

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In Stranger we journey from people to places, visiting creatures, objects and conditions, all of which are odd, slightly off-kilter, seen from a unusual perspective… Linguistically deft and formally inventive, the poems challenge us to reflect on the stranger in our midst, conceptions of social and personal estrangement, the strangeness of everyday life and what we might take as apparitions. With sections introduced by translations of Chinese Sung Dynasty poetry, the poems move between brief aperçus to longer meditations. Original, haunting, alive to our current global situation, even at their most oneiric, these are inventive poems brimming with integrity from a distinctive voice.

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Offering an affectionate and often humorous peek into a child’s world as she matures, Crossing the Bloodline touches on universal human experiences from sibling rivalry to love; from loss to the wisdom that comes too late, taking us on a journey to the crossing point where childhood and maturity meet face to face. Lucid and tightly honed, this is gracious poetry that will leave images resonating long after reading.This is a magnificent collection, unhurriedly recreating people and exploring relationships that have made the poet who she is.Ann DrysdaleIn the powerful, often joyous poems of Crossing the Bloodline, Angela Platt writes movingly of subjects like family and memories … It’s a magic thing, the way that words can conjure the past and people to stand here right before us, and so wonderful to find a poet who can make this happen. Jonathan Edwards

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For Mark Charlton, blogging is ‘a road of chance and discovery’, one which has shaped the person he’s become; a journey that is ‘happenstance on acid.’ In Views from the Bike Shed he not only shares a selection of engaging, articulate and deeply-felt posts from the eponymous blog, but also charts his praxis as a writer. Advocating for blogging as a process and form that deserves serious attention, Charlton shows how it changes our writing and opens up unexpected opportunities along the way. Interspersed between blog posts on life and landscape, objects and artistic process there are also ‘Interludes’. And together these interludes not only give insight into how to blog, but dive into the depths of why blogging is such a rich resource in our writerly and human toolbox. Exploring how writing from our experience can become an inclusive and authentic means of connecting with readers, allowing them to make their own discoveries, Views from the Bike Shed is at once eminently practical as well as giving a vital meditation on the ways writers can push their own boundaries through this medium. Mark Charlton’s Views from the Bike Shed blog has been an addiction of mine for years. Mark's views are wise, finely expressed, broad-ranging, acutely observed and scintillatingly intelligent. A published collection is cause for widespread rejoicing. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did the originals. — Jim Perrin

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Writing Down Deep; an Alchemy of the Writing Life, has been a huge labour of love over the last three years. Many of the ideas have been trialed in blog articles and in online courses, and have been honed and rewritten for the book. There's also a huge amount of new material, reflections and writing prompts to help you become the writer you want to be with your own story and values. Writing Down Deep; an Alchemy of the Writing Life is a book for writers who want to dive deeply into their creative flow and into the extraordinary power of writing to affect individuals and the world. Whether you are a blogger writing articles, a memoirist, poet or novelist, writing is magical, it offers perspective shifts, leaps of imagination and connections that are vital to how we live at every level. The world is storied and those who tell stories of every kind, have a unique role and responsibility. The premise is that story (including poetry, fiction and nonfiction) is vital to human survival. It is so important that storytellers do well to become congruent with their tales. This book is for the wild idealists and alchemists of the imagination who believe that writing is so powerful that it should change us as we push the boundaries of our craft. This book is for those who see writing as an act of radical spirituality, in the broadest sense of 'spiritual' as the antonym of egotistical hubris, rather than as the opposite of 'material'. The book is a companion on the quest and, as such, you can read it straight through or slowly; make the rhythm suit you. It has five main sections that are interspersed around shorter, seasonal sections. The book is packed with prompts, inspiration and writing exercises. These are not mechanical or 'how to' exercises but aimed at challenging us to dig deeply into our writing processes and writing lives. Woven throughout are seasonal pauses to help you design your own writing retreats.

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How do we come home in a strange land? Moving to a remote forest hamlet in a new country in the midst of a pandemic, the only way to connect is to take the time to linger, listen and observe—to be with the land that is becoming home. From this observations a series of haiku arise, following the Japanese system of 24 seasons divided into 72 micro-seasons and interspersed with eight lyric poems that travel around the Celtic wheel of the year. And so a forest garden and its surrounding Finistère woodland slowly reveals itself, weaving together the lunar and solar, melding the Celtic shape of the year with the increments of the Japanese solar terms, each one unveiling a new aspect of change. Charting a life unmoored from the familiar, but permeable to the new the poems find their place at ‘the end of the world’, as the Romans called Finistère, but also in Penn-ar-Bed, the Breton name which is both the end and start of the world. Most endings are also beginnings and here in these precise, exquisitely observed poems, we find ourselves both unsettled and settling, exploring what it means to hold together being adrift and belonging; cycles and transformation and how we find a beginning at the end of the world.

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The sense of awe. not only at the grandeur of the universe but also the insignificance of our species is centre-stage in A Report to Alpha Centauri. And John Barnie sets out his stall early, warning, in the poem ‘To the Reader’, that you may want to walk away since, ‘...these poems are out there with the chilly wind / and the absence of yellowhammers, with drills and wrecking balls,...’ But anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear should surely stay, not to be comforted but to face the challenging questions, the unflinching honesty and the blazing anger at the hubris that is destroying so much life; life that even in what Conrad calls ‘a soulless universe’ still matters. Barnie calls us to ‘just look’, knowing that like all prophets he is ’... the stranger, the one / walking in the wrong direction.’ ('Lock-step') Serious and sometimes tinged with despair at humanity’s perverse race into self-destruction, captured in striking imagery that lingers, there is also a large and intelligent wit at play here that pours out in wry comments and melancholic humour. Like Kierkegaard’s father shaking a fist at the universe, Barnie raises his voice against the insanities that we all too easily take for granted, refusing to bow to the gods of consumerism. At heart, A Report to Alpha Centauri is a eulogy, written in the heart-rending voice of a visitor from Alpha Centauri, 10 million years after the last humans have left, ‘a world of shadows, a world— though I know this sounds strange, even as I write it down—of ghosts.’ ('A Report to Alpha Centauri') Sharp, urgent and ultimately humane, this is not poetry that any of us should turn away from.

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Full of wry intelligence, and a sideways perspective that digs beneath the surface of things, Robin Thomas's second collection is creative, witty and warm. Never predictable, leaning on images from art, the cadences of jazz and remarkable moments, whether from history or life, there is an unswerving pressure on language and a sense of mischief that can turn out to be unnervingly serious. This is accomplished, confident work.

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"For me, to be a citizen of nowhere is to be uncertainly poised between those challenges [we face today] and a defiant hope that, five hundred years on from More’s great contribution to literature, can rightly call itself utopian." from Rowan B. Fortune’s Forward Thomas Moore's no-place that might be anywhere, anywhen, Utopia, has haunted our imaginations for over 500 years. Dismissed as a lost realm in this Age of Despair, Citizens of Nowhere offers route maps to this place where our ideals and our lives can coincide. Now more than ever, we need the hope of utopia. Citizens of Nowhere reminds us that it is never far away. Finding utopias within sci-fi, horror, romanti fantasy and modernist fiction, Citizens of Nowhere brings together stories from: Nina Anana, Fiona Ashley, Sonya Blanck, Rowan B. Fortune, Ben Jacob, George Lea, Greg Michaelson, Jez Noond, James Perrin, Diana Powell, Omar Sabbagh and Robin Lindsay Wilson.

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Each careful word in these layered, honed and elegant poems counts. Writing about her debut collection, From the Dark Room, Gillian Clarke described the work as ‘truthful, brave and tender.’ In this third collection, Rose takes this compassionate yet unflinching sensibility to look at ancestry and legacy. Can you see the ghost of my mother’s hook nose in the subtle snub of my face? Rose asks in the title poem, before going on to investigate the many ways in which the ‘godless’ and ‘faithless’ both carry an ineluctable inheritance whilst ‘not being Jewish enough’. But this is no theoretical musing. Legacy here also looks at the pain of so many human losses, from the absence of a child to bereavement, from the deep injuries of history to those of our own bodies. Framed by the dark, there is always the light of a life’s pulse that insists: ‘Let us sing and be glad.’

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Combining poetry with the long essay, 'Thirty Ways of Looking at the Sea', which charts her involvement with the Marine Conservation Society as resident poet as they launched an appeal to tackle the threats facing thirty marine species, Words the Turtle Taught Me sees Susan Richardson writing at the height of her powers as a poet, an ecological campaigner and as a writer about the process of composing inventive, compelling poems.

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The latest collection from this well-respected Irish poet finds bitter-sweet joys in even the darkest times.

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What Rain Taught Us follows a mind fracturing into a subjective landscape of association, reflection and invention, where words, images and conflicting voices tumble and echo almost to the point of destruction. But, gradually, islands of stability form.

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Drawing on subjects as varied as Roman legionaries and a worn-out shirt, modern air travel and the imagined life of a lugworm, A Sense of North searches for purpose and order in the human condition. A sense of wonder finds itself kindled in the small and familiar as much as the large and emotive. Whether pondering the fickleness of memory or the meaning of love and loss, this is poetry that asks what it means to be alive.

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In this collection brimming, with pared down imagery and crystal sharp language, we are invited to become the hollow bone, the small vessel with space for insight and reflection. Steeped in the natural world and sensitive to how each body interfaces with the world, Ian Marriott''s debut moves us from the quotidian to the mysterious found in the everyday and in the world''s wilderenesses. The poetry is alive with experiences of the forest, the mountains, the vastness of Antartica; the language meditative, spare and precise and the form follows breath - short lines that carry contemplative thought forward with fluid ease. Winner of the Cinnamon Press Debut Poetry Collection Award, adjudicated by outstanding eco-poet, Susan Richardson, The Hollow Bone is suffused with shamanic sensibilty that is communicated with elegance, from the title poem with it''s thoughfully hone sketches of birds alive and dead to the longer sequence of koan-like fragments in Terra Infirma, it takes the

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Ambitious and prophetic, this new edition of John Barnie's verse novel, Ice, is increasingly urgent as scientist's debate the possible catastrophe that global warming and human intransigence threaten to unleash. Ice asks what it means to be human and how or whether we can retain humanity in the most extreme of circumstances.

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Post-pandemic, a tiny forest community gathers, bringing their ghosts and fears, hopes and secrets. And theirs are not the only voices. The forest also has stories of grief and resurrection, asking us what we mean by a life well-lived, human or non-human.

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A glittering retelling of Welsh myth that asks questions of society as it is today.

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An explorer dreams of a sea and a land beyond that can be found on no map … A naval officer becomes lost inside maps of his own making, his wife lost inside her pleas that someone search for her husband … And, as a singer struggles to make sense of the ordinary things around her, a hitman is trapped in an endless bid to escape … Meanwhile, two complete strangers plod through their day-to-day lives as they pour their hearts into writing a novel — but which one is the fictional character and which the author? An ever-shifting kaleidoscope, by turns moving and funny, intense and tender, Vitus Dreams draws you into a place where our basic assumptions about the real and the concrete are shattered to leave us with no choice but to rely on instinct and the people around us, if they exist.

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