Search results for ""nine arches press""

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 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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Popular Song makes us tap our feet to the rhythms of nostalgia, life on Mars, science fiction, lyric odyssey, humour and a fondness for the spirit-catching cassette tape in this highly inventive debut from Harry Man.

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Jenny Pagdin's powerful, sensitive and stark debut poetry collection details a first-hand experience of postpartum psychosis. Threaded through this book are extraordinary and courageous poems that illuminate, that settle and unsettle in equal measure that move through illness and recovery, through snow flurry and sunshine, towards love.

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White Ghosts, the debut collection by poet and novelist Katie Hale, traces maternal lines, and the legacies of slavery and whiteness interwoven into the fabric of America, through revealing, unflinching poems. Travelling deep into an intimate history that spans both sides of the Atlantic, Hale unravels the language haunting those narratives we choose to tell in official versions,,through museum labels and civic statues, and in handed-down stories. Transformational and challenging, these sharply-detailed poems interrogate the bare bones of silence, complicity, difficult inheritances and racial constructs. Via wagon routes or interstates, on desert highways or in the landscapes of northern England, through nature and through human culture, questions of ownership and power are writ into the journey. Through four hundred years of female migration, the poems in White Ghosts use art, music, and lyrical reworking of the curated space, to address white guilt: what is lost through generations, and what is passed on? “From immigrants and settlers to slave owners and abolitionists, Katie Hale's candid poems of portraiture constitute a necessary work of decoloniality and witness. By tracing the histories of women in her family, she offers a radical exploration of whiteness and its impact across the centuries that, 'Let the body learn to witness its own skeletons.'”- Malika Booker “How do we understand our maternal legacies, and how is that understanding inflected by race? Katie Hale’s White Ghosts explores the author’s own maternal legacy and its entanglement with America’s history of immigration, white privilege, and slavery; what that means for the contemporary moment and the woman standing at the end of this maternal line. Here is tenderness and rigour, beauty and truth-telling, in an engaging and ambitious debut.” – Carrie Etter "A reckoning with self, and with familial history: where often there might be shame, or avoidance, these poems look into the white spaces of history in search of truth" – Andrew McMillan “This haunted, haunting book is unflinching in its confrontation of history, and what it means to own or be owned. Poems about whiteness are gradually erased and in this erasure reveal new, painful stories that examine the intersection between responsibility and guilt, between truth and omission. Throughout, Katie Hale’s work displays that rare quality –vivid moments of lyric stillness that hold their own whilst carrying the weight of a wider personal, social and political narrative.” - Kim Moore

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Wild Life by James McDermott explores the nature of queerness, the queerness of nature, and the queerness of ‘natural’ masculinity. In bold poems that root themselves firmly in the coastal landscapes of North Norfolk, a vivid and radical dialogue between nature, sexuality and self-discovery emerges. McDermott brings a lyrical physicality to poetry which focuses on the body, desire, shame, and tenderness, creation and re-creation, and where there is ‘everything always opening / everything always coming out’. These poems skilfully graft and touch, draw parallels between moments of transformation in the many kinds of ecosystems we exist in – whether outside and between woodland, shoreline and skyline, where the wildlife will ‘see me as just another animal’, or in human interactions in schools, gyms, and pubs where ideas of manhood, self, and society’s expectations collide. Like the coastal spaces where McDermott finds an innate connection, Wild Life identifies that which is fluid and constantly changing – and that nature itself isn’t afraid of being colourful, excessive, too much.

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What do you do when you are a god – but powerless and unable to prevent one of your favourite species from their insatiable, accelerating death wish? Do you try to shout louder and more insistently, or instead reinvent yourself as a troubadour of romantic ruin? Such are the dilemmas posed by Rishi Dastidar in his third poetry collection Neptune’s Projects, a reshaping of mythology for the climate crisis era which gives bold consideration to the stark choices we face.A post-apocalyptic jig and reel, these poems are compelling, deadpan yarns of the sea, full of both fury and fun. In Neptune’s Projects the end of humanity is made wry, thrilling – and alive.

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One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets by Jacqueline Saphra is a poetic journal that chronicles the personal and political upheavals and tragedies of the Coronavirus pandemic. This sequence of sonnets charts the dislocated, frightening and at times uplifting experience of one hundred days of lockdown. Written as a daily sonnet throughout the first lockdown, from 23rd March 2020, Saphra's candid and revealing sequence is a unique record of strange and unparalleled days. Cover art work by Sophie Herxheimer.

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Katie Griffiths’ debut poetry collection, The Attitudes is a search for trust and faith – in the body, in the mind, in all those things we seek to hold on to but cannot. Here, we intimately encounter mortality and tread the balance between visceral wisdom and the intellect, between fragile, fallible bodies, and the mind’s hold over them, between the bright spaces and the haunted ones.In poems that are bold, effervescent, frequently playful, Griffiths approaches serious subjects - eating disorders, ageing, grieving - with a precise and inventive lyricism. The Attitudes compiles multitudes, with layer upon layer of counterpoints, juxtaposing and exploring the unresolvable, all the while seeking to move towards a place of deeper reflection and stillness away from the noise and distraction of the daily business of being alive. An astute and accomplished book which transforms

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This remarkable debut collection from Geraldine Clarkson contains the uncontainable; wondrous, spellbound and daring poems, happy to roam from South American monasteries to the shorelines of memory. These bold, often witty and always hawk-eyed poems survey matters of faith, tragedy and womanhood.Elaborate, skilful and formally audacious, Clarkson is a poet of extraordinary and kaleidoscopic vision; her writing always richly riotous with detail, her poems possessing the singular ability to move from the maelstrom of feeling to the stilled moment with an assured, quick elegance. "The speaker of these poems is endlessly morphable and endlessly verbal; she can say anything and beguile us into listening: put our screens down and really listen and come to life again in the garden of her diction, her memory, her weird unassailable vision." – Kathleen Ossip"... one of the finest contemporary practitioners of the prose poem. A mind-rattling, heart-shaking debut." – A.B. Jackson

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This deeply moving new collection from Abegail Morley explores the altitudes of trauma, mapping the stark new territory that loss leaves behind, where the landmarks of absence overfill with memories, where the missing loom large, casting their unshifting shadow. “In The Unmapped Woman Morley writes with astonishing technical virtuosity as she searches for recovery through art...Morley speaks in a voice that is eloquent and precise as she seeks to understand what happens to the vanished." - Nancy Gaffield“Abegail Morley is a natural poet. Each poem seems exhaled in a single necessary breath as she unflinchingly addresses traumatic events. Her language is fresh, fluent and unadorned, with strikingly accurate images, and endings that make the reader re-consider the whole poem... This is a highly talented, original voice well worth listening to.” – Patricia McCarthy “These are poems to live with - tight as the skin of a drum.” – Robert Peake

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Jacqueline Saphra will follow her critically acclaimed, T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted All My Mad Mothers (2017) with Dad, Remember You Are Dead, a sister volume to her previous collection, taking on the canon in an examination of fatherhood and daughterhood within a wider context.

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Jessica Mookherjee, highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes, presents her second collection of poems, Tigress. Mixing myth, magic and migration, these poems explore the impact of choice upon our lives and concentrate their magnificent, kaleidoscopic imagination on the intricate and often fraught nature of childhood and family, selfhood and womanhood. Fierce, often funny, always charged and revealing, Mookerjee’s acute attention to detail tracks lives lived between Bengal, Wales and London. In exploring the intense displacement and loss that marks the experience of migration, the poems move into territories of danger and safety, illness and heartbreak, and ultimately into self-discovery; a rich and sensual moonlit menagerie of bears, big cats, wolves, and ‘forest mothers’. At every step, Tigress is wildly inventive, elegant and utterly distinctive.

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Khairani Barokka’s first full poetry collection, Rope, is a spellbinding and impressive debut, kaleidoscopic in detail and richly compelling. With a meticulous artist’s instinct, these finely-tuned poems ask urgent questions about our impact upon the environment, and examine carefully the fragile ties that bind our lives and our fate to our planet, our ecosystems and to our fellow humans. Sensual and ecologically attentive, Rope draws on issues of climate change, sexuality, violence, nature, desire and the body. Lush with detail, alert to its own distinct sounds, this is poetry in urgent and vivacious action - intent on finding vivid joy and hope amidst the destruction and dangers of the Anthropocene era.

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Angela France’s The Hill is a remarkable sequence of poems that leads us up the winding footpaths of Leckhampton Hill near Cheltenham. Under our feet are fossils and flora, bones and the relics of quarrying. France is masterful in capturing the sense of place and weaving the entrancing voices of the hill, its walkers and inhabitants, into the fabric of these formally adventurous poems that range from prose to ‘anglish’, richly worded and delighting in their shapes and sounds.Here, we encounter ghosts, foxes and ancient kings. We meet the protestors who, years before the Kinder Scout Trespassers, were standing up for their rambling rights and took the law into their own hands in 1902 when a landowner tried to enclose the hill they had walked for generations. And though history is never far from the surface, The Hill raises questions that are just as important today; who has the right to roam, whose land is it,

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Jacqueline Saphra’s All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamourous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp.With an emphasis on the cultures of the different times, we tread a tantalising tightrope between the confessional and the invented. These astute poems step assuredly from childhood’s first exposures to the scratched records and unsuitable lovers of young womanhood, the slammed doors of daughters and sons, the tears and salted soups of friendships, and the charms of late love. All the time, incandescent and luminous as an everlasting lightbulb, at the heart of each of Saphra’s poems is a delicate filament kicking out a heavy-duty wattage.

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Sarah James' precise and astonishing poetry invites us to taste and touch the flavours, shapes, memory and experiences for ourselves, the tang of sea-salt tempering the irresistible physicality of these adventurous poems.

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In A Midlands Odyssey ten writers take the stories of Homer's Odyssey and transplant them to the English Midlands. With a range of settings – from smart canal-side apartments to late-night launderettes – these stories are wonderfully inventive and offer a down-to-earth take on one of the world's greatest pieces of storytelling.'The Odyssey theme, so rich with its tales of wandering Odysseus, the lure of the Sirens, the loss felt by Penelope and those gruesome reports across time from the underworld, energizes the ten writers here, providing a pretext for a fine array of inventive and imaginative stories, attuned to the legend, aslant to the Ancient World, adventurous in their address. If the topology is contemporary and centrally oriented, and the themes entertainingly current, this anthology is certainly not Midlands miscellaneous; it's the opposite of drab urban realism: a mere seagull's cry, only the odd whisper and rumour away from Ancient Greece itself.' Alan Mahar'An inventive and intriguing project, distinguished not only by the power of its Homeric reimaginings but by the superb quality of the writing throughout.' Jo BalmerStories edited by Polly Stoker, Elisabeth Charis and Jonathan Davidson.Includes stories by: Yasmin Ali, Lindsey Davis, Elisabeth Charis, Kit De Waal, Charlie Hill, Paul McDonald, Richard House, Dragan Todorovic, Natalie Haynes, David Calcutt.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

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Richie McCaffery's debut collection of poems, Cairn, begins in a dedication and ends with ghosts - in between lies hoards of artefacts and long-forgotten antiquities; a police whistle, a tarnished silver spoon, the bookmark lodged in a boring book decades before that sings of a lost age. These poems find their stories in the overlooked places of everyday, and take utter delight in the unexpected image and turn of phrase. Soaring, often short and bitter-sweet, the poems form markers in the landscape of love, lore and family, making mementoes to the buried and the living.Richie McCaffery (b. 1986) lives in Stirling and studies and works as a teaching assistant at The University of Glasgow. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Spinning Plates (HappenStance Press, 2012) and Ballast Flint (Cromarty Arts Trust, 2013). His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Dark Horse, Stand, The Rialto and The Best British Poetry 2012.

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Read a sample poem for free - just click the Extracts tab above.Shortlisted for the 2013 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.In her debut collection, Melanchrini, Maria Taylor's distinctive poetry slips fluently amidst the worlds and underworlds of classical mythology and modernity; between her own Greek Cypriot heritage and British urban upbringing; among betting shops, schools, bar-rooms and hospitals. Lively and ebullient, from moments of quirky humour to poignancy, these poems demonstrate a poet who isn't afraid to leap into the heart of circumstance and treasure what she finds there. Melanchrini finds personal histories at the kitchen table, tears in the soapsuds, and a moment's sensuality in the midst of a city market. Maria Taylor's poems are deceptively plucky; as entertaining as they are inventive and quietly determined. "Enjoyable, engaging, serious but unpretentious, confident and well-crafted, this is a debut collection that should attract attention – and ought to win Maria Taylor a lot of readers. Above all the book is full of life, of real lives. It has variety and surprise but is very clearly by one voice – a voice that it is good to listen to because it sees so much."Peter Sansom"Maria Taylor's poems sing with the extraordinary in the everyday, full of those moments where something or someone is briefly transformed: a woman takes a merman home; a dead Aunt's house becomes a museum where the main object is missing; the memory of morning coffee is full of birds' wings. The power of these poems is that they constantly invoke the unexpected, and the colours and textures of both times past and yet to come."Deborah Tyler-Bennett "This is a distinctive and assured collection of poems. The writing is at once clear-sighted and fully realised. In its mystery, precision and surprise, Melanchrini shows the truth of a powerful new writer."David MorleyMaria Taylor is a Leicestershire-based poet. Her writing has been published in The North, The Guardian, the TLS, Staple and others.

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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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"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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Elizabeth Bishop's hawkweed, John Berryman's hummingbirds, Ted Hughes's burnt fox - the birds, beasts and flowers of Isobel Dixon's new collection are at times kin to D.H. Lawrence, whose essay 'Whistling of Birds' lends this book its name, though each poem here is its own vivid testament to the natural world, and our often troubled and troubling place in it. Lyrical, vigorous, inventive, A Whistling of Birds is at times in conversation with Lawrence's iconic collection, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, but also ranges widely through the worlds of other writers and makers - from the Venerable Bede to Emily Dickinson, Georgia O'Keeffe to Glenn Gould, and a wealth of other connections closely examined and delicately drawn. An abundance of apricots in Santa Fe; bats, bees, tortoises, snakes, the generous body of a whale. Threaded throughout is the beautiful complexity and vulnerability of the planet, and the joy and difficulty of making art. Douglas Robertson's finely detailed images also speak of a close connection to the green world, ocean and sky, and a thoughtful dialogue between artist and poet. With its resonant elegies and notes of celebration, this is a collection that flexes, hums and brims with energy, yet surely draws you in to its quiet, reflective heart. "Isobel Dixon's writing is lit by a fierce sense of landscape. She is newly touched by the tiniest northern flowers, haunted still by powerful spirits of the south. Her work is visually exuberant; its sounds, delicious, especially when bound by rhyme. Dixon's lines flash with humour and tenderness. Her poems marry exactitude to emotion. In both, they are memorable." -Alison Brackenbury 'As Lawrence says, "The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention." Isobel Dixon's A Whistling of Birds does just that. Doing so, she gets, and shares with her readers, new slants on life on earth. I felt alerted again to things, fellow creatures, deeds, I hadn't paid due attention to, or had once and had become accustomed and needed to be shown afresh. This book gives shocks of pleasure and gratitude in equal measure.' - David Constantine

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You live and then you die. That’s the only certainty there is, right? Using love as its guide, Proof of Life on Earth, the debut poetry collection by Degna Stone, looks at all the stops between our arrival and our departure. These poems examine matters of the heart (both the metaphorical and medical kind), of race and discrimination, of the body, mind and self – each in forensic detail, attentive and curious of what moves, shapes, and makes us alive.In between are the landmarks which populate the rich terrain of this collection; not only of our lives through youth to adulthood, but of history, of the long shadows of empire, and of landscapes themselves - especially those of the northeast of England, evocative, rugged and monumental. Stone’s deft and scalpel-sharp poetry explores human existence shaped by mortality and experience, and asks what it means to do more than survive – to live in defiance, openness and awareness.

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There is (still) love here, the compelling new collection of poetry by Dean Atta, is a personal and powerful exploration of relationships, love and loss, encompassing LGBTQ+ and Black history, Greek Cypriot heritage, pride and identity, dislocation and belonging.Atta’s tender, precisely-crafted and generous poems seek consolation and affirmation. These are poems as an antidote for challenging times, whether facing prejudice or the challenges of the pandemic, experiencing grief or recovering from heartbreak. Here, we encounter blue feelings and homesickness, things lost in translation and the pressures of the many roles we play in life. We also find the recipes of home, gifts and giving, the togetherness of community and connection to help us to heal. There is still love here - and journeys towards forgiveness, acceptance, queer joy and the power to unapologetically be yourself and fully embrace who you are.

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Tania Hershman's Still Life With Octopus is an exquisitely-attuned second collection, a philosophical and poetic interrogation of the boundaries of animal and human worlds and the intimate nature of time, being and joy. Exploring the slippage between the life of the mind and the life of the body - in particular, those belonging to women – Hershman wonders what might happen if we let go of our preconceptions of both reality and language, taking nothing for granted and starting again from first principles, with fresh eyes. While trying to fathom our physical and metaphysical existence, Hershman doesn’t ignore the other forms of intelligent life we share our planet with; her octopus is envisioned both as a creature within and alongside us and as a way to consider our place as humans within a greater chain of co-existence. Still Life With Octopus is a precisely observed and open-hearted gift of a book.

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Space Baby asks difficult questions about the Earth, its beings, and what lies ahead for them; how do we look to the future on a planet that’s burning? How do we come to terms with our grief, and what can we believe in? If the human race destroys what we have, where will we go?In this dystopian, searching book, Evans mixes absurdity and wit with speculative, serious themes. Here, artificial intelligence and robots will ‘cuddle you to sleep’, the melting permafrost will reveal its surprises, and we encoutner the very first human baby born in space. Ultimately, Evans writes to acknowledge our responsibilities and interconnectedness with earth and all its lifeforms, as well as to our future generations. These are vivid, prescient poems of existence, and survival, which ask how we can still find joy on a ruined planet.

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In You have no normal country to return to, Tom Sastry explores questions of national identity and ‘the end of history'. A blistering, bleakly funny and timely second poetry collection, following his Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize shortlisted, A Man's House Catches Fire. By turns crisply satirical and questioning, You have no normal country to return to ranges across the legacies of Empire, postwar migration and the current crisis in English identity. Sastry’s precise, brilliantly attuned poetry asks how the times we live in and the tales we tell about them affect us; how our emotional landscapes are shaped by national myths and the more personal stories we tell about ourselves. It is a book about illusion, and discovering, again and again, that what was once taken for granted was never really there; a guidebook for an age of “enchantments collapsing on themselves”.

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Jane Burn’s new poetry collection Be Feared is a captivating reclamation of self, sisterhood, and love, encountering everything from the Snow Queen to monsters, plagues and infernos. Acknowledging fear, this book embraces discovery, a process of translation and transformation, of finding a voice radiant with both curses and psalms.Rebellious, bloody, and encroached upon by violence, Burn’s poetry examines survival, abuse and healing. Intensely imaginative, these incantatory poems rework fairy-tale and folklore and hold up enchanted mirrors to the everyday truths of being a working-class autistic woman, daring to become, claiming her own magnificent, unstoppable fluency and spell-making power.

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Cynthia Miller’s debut poetry collection, Honorifics, is an astonishing, adventurous, and innovative exploration of family, Malaysian-Chinese cultural identity, and immigration. From jellyfish blooms to glitch art and distant stars, taking in Greek gods, space shuttles and wedding china along the way, Miller’s mesmerizing approach is experimental, luscious, and expansive with longing - “My skin hunger could fill a galaxy”.Here, the poetry is interwoven with the words for all the things we honour – our loved ones and our ancestors, home and homecomings, and all that is precious and makes us feel that we belong and are beloved. It is also a book that examines contemporary issues of migration in sharp and enquiring relief. Language itself becomes a radical power for reimaging, challenging, and making change, and Miller’s distinctive and multifaceted poetry creates an extraordinary space for multiplicity and celebration.'This is language and detail, honed and luxurious. This is space and memory and migratory patterns and fable. An array of formal play and innovation. And everything finely weighted like a gift-box of intricate, interlocking mechanisms.' – Jacob Sam-La Rose'Honorifics is a dazzlingly inventive collection that circles around themes of love and yearning, family history and migration, with a sophisticated touch. Formally playful, these poems are alive with imagery and a restless intelligence'– Jane Yeh

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Dressing for the Afterlife is a diamond-tough and tender second collection of poems from British Cypriot poet Maria Taylor, which explores love, life, and how we adapt to the passage of time. From the steely glamour of silent film-star goddesses to moonlit seasons and the ghosts of other possible, parallel lives, these poems shimmy and glimmer bittersweet with humour and brio, as Taylor conjures afresh a world where Joan Crawford feistily simmers and James Bond’s modern incarnation is mistaken for an illicit lover. Consistently crisp and vivid, these poems examine motherhood, heritage and inheritance, finding stories woven in girlhood’s faltering dance-steps, the thrum of the sewing-machine at the end-days of the rag trade, or the fizz and bubble of a chip-shop fryer. And throughout, breaking through, is the sense of women finding their wings and taking flight - “and her wings, what wings she has” - as Taylor’s own poems soar and defiantly choose their own adventures.

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An outcast, an outsider, an oddball. With too much ambition and not enough talent, Saffron Jack has never fitted. Now, with the feeling that his time is running out, he needs to do something drastic to change his life. So what better idea than to run away to the nearest war zone and do the thing he’s always wanted to do: start his own country and declare himself king..."A bravura meditation on crown and country, borders, and what it means to belong." - Niven Govinden“It’s exciting to see what a poet already celebrated for their high-concept execution within individual poems can achieve when they have the courage to. The wide canvas of Saffron Jack allows Dastidar to untether his imagination and uses its permutational form to gather momentum and force as it zooms in and out on the titular antihero and his doomed and self-justified quest. Urgent, caustically funny and provocative – compulsory and deeply enjoyable reading.” – Luke Kennard

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"Examining regional accents and our attitudes to them are a way of peering into Britain's soul. I can't wait for this book" – Sathnam SangheraSpake: Dialect and Voices from the West Midlands with contributions from Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), Julie Walters, Liz Berry and many of the regions best known writers.Spake is a love letter to the West Midlands voice and a challenge to the preconceptions and prejudices that abound about dialect and non-standard English. Much maligned, frequently overlooked or simply left out altogether: the English West Midlands has for decades been diminished in the national conversation - and with it, the rich dialects and voices of the region are often misunderstood, ignored or worse – ridiculed and mocked. But who’s to say that the way we ‘spake’ isn’t every bit as vital and precious a part of the landscape as other accents and dialects? This anthology features contemporary writing that draws upon dialect in ways that explore the potential of the narrative and poetic voice, bringing to life the silent histories and harsh realities of a vanishing working-class way of life in what was once Britain’s industrial heartland. From contemporary re-imaginings of the interwar decades in Steven Knight’s TV series Peaky Blinders to Liz Berry’s prize-winning poetry and up and coming new talent, this book celebrates and gives voice to experiences rooted in the region that have largely lain at the margins.

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What to do when everything goes up in flames? Summon up A Man’s House Catches Fire, Tom Sastry’s debut collection of poetry, with all its elegant, satirical and hurt-quenching power: here are nightmares and fairytales, museums full of regret, mis-enchantments and magic for dark times.Whilst the accelerants of complicity and violence seep from these exacting poems, Sastry’s wit and stoicism slake the bonfire of modern troubles. They defiantly ask us: why do “the great marquees of England” stand empty? How old is your heart? Why aren’t we listening to the sea, and what it has to say? Funny, marvellously frank and often courageous, A Man’s House Catches Fire urges us to take a long hard look into the flames and avert the disasters of the heart, home and nations that threaten to befall us all.“Tom Sastry is a magician of deadpan. He’s kind of like if the Atlantic Ocean had a laugh track. Terrifying and hypnotic, but also desperately funny. This collection is generous in both its clarity and mystery." — Hera Lindsay Bird“Tom Sastry’s poems stare down the ridiculousness of the world we live in, and offer us ways to carry on in spite of it. These are poems of bright wit and astonishing vulnerability, with one eye always on the future. A Man’s House Catches Fire gives us the simultaneous pain and joy of being a human being; reminds us it is marvellous / that it still hurts.” – Suzannah Evans

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Zebra is the debut collection from Hebden Bridge-based Ian Humphreys. These acutely-observed and joyful poems explore mixed identities, otherness, and coming-of-age as a gay man in 1980s Manchester. Humphreys is a fellow of The Complete Works programme (which aims to promote diversity and quality in British poetry) and was highly commended for his work at this year’s Forward Prizes.

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The poems in Threat, Julia Webb’s second collection, train their eagle-eyes on life at the margins, and on family, love, loss, belonging and not belonging. They are not afraid to visit the uncomfortable places where true humanity resides. Threat is an examination of self from multiple perspectives. Its narratives of both past and present tread a fine line between fantasy and reality – these are the lives we have led, the lives we could have led, or the lives we are leading still. Forensically detailed and disturbing, the dark and sometimes brutal undertow of small-town existence seeps to the surface of these unsettling poems.

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Roy McFarlane’s second poetry collection, The Healing Next Time, is a timely and unparalleled book of interwoven sequences on institutional racism, deaths in custody and of a life story set against the ever-changing backdrop of Birmingham at the turn of the millennium. Here forms a potent and resolute narrative in lyrical and multidimensional poems which refuse to look the other way or accept the whitewashed version of events. Courageous, rageful and mournful, these are poems of Black history and Black presence, poems of witness and poems of activism. McFarlane’s intricate lines make record of injustice and mark the names of those who have lost their lives and dignity to prejudice and hatred. The Healing Next Time also asks vital questions of the future, and of the reader – and reminds us where the power to change things lies. It is also a poetry of personal discovery, of revelation and resilience – where the influence of Jazz and of James Baldwin infuse and shape this unique, remarkable book.

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Abegail Morley’s The Skin Diary confronts loss in its many forms with unwavering and astonishing clarity, an incandescent thread running through every line that makes each alive with fierce and steely energy.Here are alert and lyrical poems that hunt out imperfect hiding places, conjure up imaginary sisters and try to contain near-impossible sorrows that spill out of carrier bags and fill up archives. New skins and old disguises are stitched together, the fabric of life tries to hold fast whilst all else unravels and comes apart at the seams. The Skin Diary documents the sometimes fragile and strange windfalls of our days and months; through hard times and thin ice, this journal is bleakly wry, brilliantly focused and brimming with uncanny and discomforting turns of event.'...ghostly, visceral, and unflinching poems.’ – Penelope Shuttle'The Skin Diary somehow finds words for the ineffable in its search for hope and understanding.’ – Martin Figura'...here is a poet who can hold her nerve and her entire psychological landscape within each multifariously conceived and consciously humane line.’ – Melissa Lee-Houghton

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In her fourth collection Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places in poems that are vivid forays of discovery and resistance, arrival and loss. Bearings sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets – the voices of John Berryman, Michael Donaghy, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. And there is respite for the weary traveller – jazz in the shadows, an exuberant play of words between the fire and tremors.As Dixon explores form and subject, conflict and the self, she keeps a weather eye out for telling detail, with a sharp sense of the threat that these journeys, our wars and stories, and our very existence pose to the planet.

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The 52 project started with a simple idea: Write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. It became a phenomenon. Hundreds of poets took up the challenge and their poems swept the board of poetry prizes, publications and personal successes.This book brings together the 52 prompts written by poet Jo Bell and by guest poets ranging from David Morley to Rachael Boast, so that you can pick up the challenge yourself. With contemporary poems to illustrate each prompt, it s a fine anthology as well as a book of lively and engaging exercises for poets, whether beginner or well established.

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Alistair Noon’s new collection of poems, The Kerosene Singing, roams the borders and places on the edge of many things, whether that’s on the edge of nations and continents, of history or of the realms of possibility. A dynamic lyric energy enlivens everything it comes into contact with in these poems; where history, landscape and language loom large, Noon’s attentive rhythms and wit bring out the most subtle detail. These quicksilver poems invite the reader out and beyond, into new uncertain territories, subject to change without further notice.

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Robert Peake's incredible eye for detail illuminates a collection of stirring and delicately attuned poems that not only roam but actively seek – travelling far and wide to all manner of places but also moving through time, taking leaps of faith or journeys into memory and sensation.From postcards to portraits, from ancient and modern wars to cosmopolitan cities, wildlife, and even a tiny ornamental skeleton, Robert Peake finds a sharp focus for the bigger picture both far and wide and closer to home. These carefully-controlled and eloquent poems know the subtle and deep consequences from each small gesture; the ripple-effect across each story, the altering of lives and history; the still, quiet centre from which it all begins.Robert Peake is a British-American poet living near London. His newest short collection is The Silence Teacher (Poetry Salzburg, 2013). His previous short collection was Human Shade (Lost Horse Press, 2011).

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The Midlands by is the second collection by Tony Williams, following his much-acclaimed debut The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street in inimitable and lyrical style. Beginning in the Midlands themselves, with the 'unfound grave of a Mercian king under wurzels, new housing and out-of-town Asdas', his poems compose a tragi-comic paean to vanishing hinterlands and fine-tuned weirdness, to domestic relics, to dog walks, dust and phantoms.Williams' absolute delight in word play and tomfoolery belies a darker, stranger undertow between rhyme and reasoning. Strange forces are at work in the heartlands, where we find ourselves travellers in perpetual motion, stopping only to gather our disappointment at the OK Café on the A1 and wonder if our 'boots might rise from the earth and pursue' us.Tony Williams is a poet and short-story writer based in North-East England. His first full collection, The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street, was published by Salt in 2009 and was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Portico Prize for Literature. He teaches creative writing at Northumbria University

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The thirty-nine poems of anima bring a distinctive, archetypal potency to the closing stages of Mario Petrucci's larger i tulips project, the 1111-strong sequence in which this sub-sequence crucially sits.Arising organically from prior modernist experiment, Petrucci's style nevertheless remains utterly contemporary. His mastery of the shape and sound of each poem makes for an intense and all-consuming experience, refocusing an array of influences through an acute lyrical sensibility. By yielding so completely to the power of linguistic transformation, these searing, necessary poems capture both the crisis and the beauty of the heart's innermost voyage."Mario Petrucci's anima is a revelation of the underside of a human heart submitting to the contradictions of love, doubt and mortality. This remarkable work reconfigures the soul as well as the mind, through language that shapes the ineffable into a visceral, triumphant poetry." Alexandra Burack, American poet and educator"The tensile delicacy of Petrucci's lines springs back with a very English baroque, Miltonic surprise: sense-ambush occurs in the next line, skewering what's gone before. Between these line-breaks rests a declamatory silence tested to snapping. This is major work to cast shadows." Álvaro de Campos [tr. Simon Jenner]"With a brio and tenderness all of their own, these new lyric poems are modernist marvels, word sculptures pared to their very essence… Petrucci's tulips promise to grow into a truly ambitious landmark body of work."Poetry Book Society Bulletin"Reminiscent of ee cummings at his best... vivid, generous and life-affirming." EnvoiMario Petrucci aspires to "Poetry on a geological scale" (Verse), whether exploring the tragedies of Chernobyl (Heavy Water, 2004) or immersing himself in heart-rending invention (i tulips, 2010).

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Read three sample poems for free - just click the Extracts tab above.In Improvising Memory, Milorad Krystanovich releases the characters trapped in the tableaux of negatives, and breathes into them a remarkable life of their own. Portraits step down from their frames and exist amongst us; before our eyes they age and alter, ponder their own flaws, confines and mysteries. Krystanovich's beautifully-detailed series of poems explore the spaces between images and populate them with a patient and delicately-balanced language that moves in circles and echoes, creating a lyrical resonance in the act of both observing and being observed. Freeze-frame fragments become striking and graceful poem-scenes, alive with moments tangible and fleeting, just out of reach or coming into focus at the edge of sight."You don't need to imagine me – a man with his photo camera hanging from its strap on his shoulder. For you, I would describe myself as a photographer whose hobby was not a simple black and white technique of evidencing the elements of everyday life… Later on, instead of developing films in a dark-room, I used my notebook and pen and exposed my hands to the lamplight."Milorad KrystanovichMilorad Krystanovich was born in Croatia and has lived in Birmingham since 1992. He has studied Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham and is a member of Writers Without Borders, Cannon Poets and the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators. Milorad works as a language teacher at the Brasshouse Centre in Birmingham. Improvising Memory is his sixth poetry collection, and follows on from The Yasen Tree (Heaventree Press, 2007).

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A Fold in the Map charts two very different voyages: a tracing of the dislocations of leaving one’s native country, and a searching exploration of grief at a father’s final painful journey. In the first part of the collection, Plenty — “before the fold” — the poems deal with family, and longing for home from a new country, with all the ambiguity and doubleness this perspective entails. In the book’s second half, Meet My Father, the poems recount events more life-changing than merely moving abroad — a father’s illness and death, the loss of some of the plenty of the earlier poems.

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