Search results for ""Penned in the Margins""

Improvised Explosive Device is a startlingly innovative exploration of extremism, hate crime and violence by poet Arji Manuelpillai. In this powerful and unsettling first collection, Manuelpillai presents a vision of the contemporary haunted by Melville's image of the whale - the terror beneath the surface of the sea. His uncompromising focus on violence is laced with gallows humour and the surreal, framed against the mundane detritus of modern life: two boys playing Mortal Kombat; a field of old trainers; the lonely glare of laptop light; a suspicious looking package in the back seat of a van. The poems in Improvised Explosive Device emerged through research and interviews with academics, sociologists, and former members of extremist groups and their families - from the English Defence League and the National Front to ISIS and the Tamil Tigers. These complex, unnerving texts ask a series of important questions. What drives a person to commit a radical act of violence? How is that violence mediated through screens and social media? And how does the British government police marginalised groups? Improvised Explosive Device is a brave, surprising and risk-taking book; it will change the way you look at the world. "Refusing glib analysis and easy answers, Improvised Explosive Device is a work of radical empathy, fuelled by honesty and compassion, both for those stirred to violence against minorities, and those who suffer from it." Rishi Dastidar "The project of Arji Manuelpillai's Improvised Explosive Device leans into the mighty disciplines of poetry, sociology, and reportage to formulate an arresting debut which contests the ways we're conditioned to internalise notions of terrorism, nationalism and belonging...a bold and startling new work." Anthony Anaxagorou

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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST SINGLE POEM* From the mercurial mind of award-winning poet John McCullough comes his darkest and most experimental book to date. Panic Response puts personal and cultural anxiety under the microscope. It is full of things that shimmer, quiver and fizz: plankton glowing at low tide; brain tissue turning to glass; a basketball emerging from the waves, covered in barnacles. These are poems of uncertainty but also of hope, which move beyond the breathlessness of panic towards luminescence and solidarity.

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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION* *A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation* Seaweed and sunburn. The death of a fridge. A 'pie-faced' St George upstaged by the horse. The English Summer confronts the illusions and paradoxes of history in poems that reimagine medieval anchorites and 18th-century follies, zombies and the Megabus. This is a landscape populated by overcrowded urban bedsits and burnt-out country piles, where ghosts of the past are sensed beneath dual carriageways and old gods emerge from rotting bindweed. Visceral and analytic at turns, Hopkins' startling collection probes at the undergrowth of English culture; a white-hot debut by a poet of singular vision.

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An Archive of Happiness is set in the Scottish Highlands over the course of one day during the Avens family's annual get-together. It's the summer solstice and theirs is a fractured family, broken by arguments, by things said and not said, by a mother who has left and a father who was left behind. What happens on this day will force them to cleave together to survive and redraw the traditional bonds of family. * Longlisted for the 2020 Highland Book Prize* "This is such a big-hearted, intricate and compelling novel: it is as robust and delicate as the landscapes it inhabits. Reeder tells a story of loss, fracture and repair, every sentence infused with both clear-sightedness and love." -Jenn Ashworth "An Archive of Happiness is a poignant, multi-layered exploration of family relationships brilliantly revealed. A haunting story told in exquisite prose." - Ruth Hogan

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Headstones are sliding earthwards. An urban fox forages for slugs. A jogger disappears into a forest of sycamores as high-rise blocks glister with the last of the sun. Follow Chris McCabe into the nocturnal world of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in search of the lost and forgotten poets of the East End. In The East Edge, McCabe leaves the safety of streetlights behind and walks in the footsteps of William Morris and W.G. Sebald through one of London's most enigmatic Victorian cemeteries. Stealing through the shadows, McCabe discovers stories of maritime disasters and the war dead, veers off the path with contemporary poet Stephen Watts, and trawls the archives to uncover one of London's overlooked mavericks, the career criminal-turned-poet William 'Spring' Onions. McCabe's lyrical prose and trademark dark wit are interrupted by a 'disembodied essay', spoken by a poltergeist who has returned to haunt his master's house. In this, the third instalment of McCabe's journey through London's Magnificent Seven, the stakes are raised as he places himself into the foreground of the cemetery as a performer. Can the burial grounds become a space for live theatre? Will the voices of the dead rise to meet the living? What ghosts emerge when darkness falls?

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The Book of Naseeb tells the story of an idealistic heroin dealer who dreams of fitting the victims of war in Afghanistan with artificial limbs. In this breathtaking first novel, Khaled Nurul Hakim chronicles the hero's struggle for redemption through the backstreets and motorway service stations of modern Britain to the desert and mountains of a fictional borderland. Written in an exhilarating, incantatory blend of street argot and Quranic-inspired language, The Book of Naseeb charts an epic journey like no other. 'A completely absorbing, singular book. Night journey, border odyssey, angel's-eye view of human striving.' YASMINE SEALE 'What a book - visionary, terrifying, remarkable use of language. London, Birmingham, Afghan borderland. Khaled Nurul Hakim is a writer you won't forget, and this deserves to be read.' TOM BOLTON 'The Book of Naseeb sits at the pinnacle of the contemporary, addressing itself to the particular challenges, and the people, of today. It is a profound contemplation of human struggle, and remarkably impressive.' Daniel Baksi, The Arts Desk

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From the late 15th century onwards, a flurry of voyages were made into the North Atlantic in search of fish, the fabled Northwest Passage, and beyond into the territories purely imaginary. Today, this vast expanse is crisscrossed with ocean and wind currents, submarine cables and wireless signals, seabirds and passengers, static and cargo ships. In her long-awaited poetry debut, award-winning digital writer and artist J.R. Carpenter transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into an astonishing sea of fresh new text. Cartographic and maritime vernaculars inflected with the syntax and grammar of ships logs and code languages splinter and pulse across the page. Haunting, politically charged and formally innovative, An Ocean of Static presents an ever-shifting array of variables. Amid global currents of melting sea ice and changing ocean currents, Carpenter charts the elusive passages of women and animals, of indigenous people and migrants, of strange noises and phantom islands.

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Fence is an epic of fragments that is at once beautiful and beautifully strange. In his exploration of the vast, frozen Svalbard islands, poet and geographer Tim Cresswell has created a kind of travel poetry whose taut, minimalist lyric synthesises subjects as diverse as history, politics and Arctic ecology. Echoing the mournful atmospherics of the great Anglo-Saxon elegies, this book-length poem is a powerful meditation on places that are slipping away, where 'compass gone haywire / so north'.

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In his most daring collection to date, Chris McCabe delves into the shadowy recesses of London history, bringing forth unsettling anachronisms and revealing the city as a perilous place to exist.Taking its name from the term for a female spy, Speculatrix is at once the voyeur and the observed. Fame and death are McCabe's subjects, sifted and strained through his poems' urgent rhythms. At the heart of the book, a sequence of wild, neurotic sonnets tears at the corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to conjure a visceral landscape of decay and financial collapse. Extending the collection beyond his trademark urban locale are startling poems for the loved and departed: from the artist Francis Bacon to the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Barry MacSweeney. In Speculatrix, McCabe has pulled out all the stops, showing why he is considered one of British poetry's most arresting and pioneering spirits.

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In 2013 poet Sarah Hesketh spent 20 weeks visiting a residential care home for people with dementia. The result is The Hard Word Box, a book of poems and verbatim interviews that takes the reader on a surprising and enriching journey through memory and imagination. The agility of Hesketh's poetic voice channels moments of tenderness, suffering and humour, revealing dementia as a negotiation with language and silence. The Hard Word Box is an inventive and compassionate meditation on the things that will be lost.

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A Hornchurch Commuter / The Drunk Train / Thaxted / Get Parochial! / Loughborough / Stansted / Jean-Claude Gendarme / The Ballad of Mr & Mrs P. Cartwright / The Billionaire Princess / The Royal Wedding, 1947 / For Radio / Jeremy, Who Drew Penises on Everything / SCANDAL! / Bloody Hell, It's Barbara! / The Rise and Fall of Dudley Livingstone / Luke's Got a Joke / At 4.48am Sentinel_poet wrote: / Mondeo Man / Another Grotty Holiday / Clean Slate / Weekday Dad / A143 / The Ballad of Raoul Moat / The Meek / About a Minute / The Ballad of Chris & Ann's Fish Bar / It's Splendid Being the Infidel / Houses that Used to Be Boozers / A Shed of One's Own

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George Ttoouli is an Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme. He co-founded the Heaventree Press in 2002 and has worked in the education team at the Poetry Society. He's now mostly skint, in Coventry. He co-edits poetry blogzine Gists & Piths. In 2004 he received a Jerwood-Arvon Young Writing Apprenticeship to work on a novel, which he still hasn't abandoned. Static Exile is his debut collection of poetry.

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Featured on BBC Newsnight Review Mono-browed cousins, clandestine paperboys, murderous action heroes and Swiss euthanasia clinics jostle for position in Ross Sutherland's intelligent and wildly entertaining debut collection of poetry. Sutherland charts the never-ending urban excursions of Pac-Man; constructs mash-ups of celebrity obits; and dons a surgical mask to conduct an 'Experiment to Determine the Existence of Love'. Things To Do Before You Leave Town is a sharp, ambitious and blackly comic exploration of the end of things, where 'all the roads that lead out are really leading back in'.

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'My poor old heart, I've left its drawbridge down' Divorced, and perhaps a little bruised, Luke Wright journeys off the sunken roads of southern England and into himself, pursued by murderous swans, empty car seats, and his father's skeleton clocks. Both brazen and elegiac, these poems pull on the 'tidy hem' of responsible existence, unravelling the banal frustrations of online outrage and ageing friends, and grasping at something 'beyond our squeaky comprehension'. Wright files through the shackles of cynicism to ask how can we let go without giving up. 'Luke Wright is one of the greats. A poetic pugilist. Beguiling, hypnotic and master of the emotional sucker-punch. The Feel-Good Movie of the Year is his best yet.' - Carl Barat

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Winner of The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021 Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party. A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar. Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard's affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse. 'Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "aren't knives fascinating... and hearts, my god!" whilst everything slowly goes black.' - Caroline Bird A Poetry Book Society Recommendation

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What I Learned From Johnny Bevan is a politically charged modern epic by celebrated poet Luke Wright. Written in electrifying verse, this is a story of friendship, class ceilings and the battle for the soul of the Left.At university the mercurial Johnny Bevan saves Nick, smashing his comfortable middle class bubble and firing him up about politics, music and books. Twenty years later, as their youthful dreams disintegrate alongside the social justice they hoped for, can Nick, now a jaded music journalist, save Johnny from himself?Winner of a prestigious Fringe First Award, What I Learned from Johnny strikes at the heart of a divided Britain with wit, compassion and laser precision.

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Futures features some of the most daring new voices in Greek poetry, together with international poets with Greek connections. These bold, impassioned and critically aware texts stake new poetic and political ground: they articulate what it means to live in a time when capitalism is buckling under its own weight.

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The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot in 1953 to "propagate the art of poetry". The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2019 Bulletin features a wide range of exciting new poetry publications, reviewed by expert poet selectors Sandeep Parmar, Vidyan Ravinthiran, George Szirtes, AB Jackson, Degna Stone and Anthony Anaxagorou. AUTUMN SELECTIONSJuly, Aug, Sept 2019Choice: Jericho Brown, The Tradition (Picador)Recommendations: Mary Jean Chan, Flèche (Faber)Peter Sirr, The Gravity Wave (Gallery)Seni Seneviratne, Unknown Soldier (Peepal Tree)Anthony Anaxagorou, After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins)Commendation: Carmen Bugan, Lilies from America – New & Selected (Shearsman)Wild Card: Dunya Mikhail, In Her Feminine Sign (Carcanet Press)Translation: Manuel Forcano, Maps of Desire (Arc)

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Heather Phillipson is an internationally exhibiting artist and award-winning poet. Instant-flex 718 is her much anticipated first book-length collection. She is already a widely published and anthologised poet. Her Faber New Poets pamphlet appeared in 2009, and her text Not an Essay from Penned in the Margins in 2012. She received substantial publicity as one of the first four writers featured in the Faber New Poets launch, taking part in a national tour supported by extensive TV, radio and newspaper coverage. Heather Phillipson’s poems are a protest against well-stitched seams, an off-loading of intellectual baggage, a shout from the deepish channels of fear. With its cover designed by the artist-poet herself, Instant-flex 718 is an operatics of reactivation. Phillipson has an impertinence and dynamism incomparably her own. Her poems observe the ordinary world stagger.

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The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot to share the joy of poetry. It's a unique poetry book club and every quarter our expert selectors choose the very best new books to deliver to our members across the globe. Our lively quarterly magazine is packed full of sneak preview poems from all the selected poets, alongside exclusive interviews, insightful reviews by the Ledbury Critics and extensive listings of every book and pamphlet published this quarter. The Winter 2022 Bulletin magazine is as thought-provoking as ever with poems and commentaries from emerging and established poets. The PBS Winter Choice Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa re-examines the slave trade and interprets the voice of her Barbadian ancestors through innovative dance notation and movement across the page. Nina Mingya Powles reviews the "gorgeously sticky" Pamphlet Choice Mother of Flip Flops by Mukahang Limbu who takes us from Cowley Road, Oxford, to Nepal. The Translation Choice Laura Doyle Pean delves into mental health in Yo-Yo Heart (87 Press) translated by Stuart Bell. A E Stallings takes us back to ancient Greece via modern motherhood. Arji Manuelpillai confronts Sri Lanka's traumatic past in Improvised Explosive Device (Penned in the Margins) and Selina Nwulu examines Black British experience, migration and grief in her formidable debut A Little Resurrection (Bloomsbury). Fran Lock channels "queer working class rage" in her astonishing White/Other (87 Press) and Philip Gross takes us to a celestial plane with The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe). You can find out more and join our poetry community today at www.poetrybooks.co.uk.

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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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