Search results for ""Nine Arches Press""

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Deborah Alma's debut poetry collection Dirty Laundry is raucous, daring and honest, drawing contemporary women’s lives and those of our foremothers into the spotlight. It voices bold, feminist songs of praise: of persistence, survival, adventures of sexual rediscovery, each reclaiming the space to speak its mind and be heard and seen. A perfect remedy for the heartsick and weary, Alma’s intimate and particular poems are resolute enchantments, a form of robust magic.The collection brims with poems which are unafraid of airing secrets, desires and untold stories. From growing up mixed-race and learning to survive as a woman in the world, to tales of the countryside and themes of escape and finding joy, this book of poems is as vivid as it is frank and fearless. There’ll be no need for any tears, it’ll all come out in the wash…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tom Chivers was born in South London in 1983. His publications include How To Build A City (Salt Publishing, 2009), The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009; shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets) and, as editor, the anthologies Generation Txt, City State: New London Poetry and Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry (Penned in the Margins, 2006, 2009 & 2010). A regular reviewer for Poetry London, he presented a documentary about the poet Barry MacSweeney for BBC Radio 4 in 2009. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011.

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Co-editor Tom Chivers was born in 1983 in South London. A poet, publisher and independent arts producer, his books include How to Build a City (Salt Publishing, 2009), The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009) and, as editor, City State: New London Poetry and Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2009 & 2012). In 2009 he presented a documentary for BBC Radio 4. His poem 'The Event' was animated by artist Julia Pott for Channel 4 television and has been viewed over 80,000 times online. Tom is currently writing a book of creative non-fiction entitled London Clay: Journeys into the Deep City. Co-editor Martin Kratz lives and writes in Manchester. He collaborates regularly with the composer Leo Geyer, and their piece Sedna won the 2011 Rosamund Prize. The opera The Mermaid of Zennor was described by the Times as an 'imaginative and beautifully shaped take on the Cornish legend'. 'The Dancing Bear' and 'The Bearded Lady' from the song cycle Sideshows, won the Philip Bates Prize for Composers and Songwriters. 2014 sees the premiere of three new collaborations: the complete performance of Sideshows, the opera Glasstown, and the ballet The Fox, to be performed at Sadler's Wells. Martin is currently writing a PhD on contemporary poetry and the sense of touch.

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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 and exclusive interviews with all the selected poets, insightful reviews by our Book Selectors Jo Clement, Roy Mcfarlane, Harry Josephine Giles, Arji Manuelpillai and Nina Mingya Powles. Plus micro reviews by the Ledbury Critics and extensive listings of every book and pamphlet published this quarter. The Autumn 2023 Bulletin magazine features poems, reviews and commentary from the PBS Autumn Choice Daljit Nagra whose playful mock epic Indiom (Faber) re-examines empire, language and class in India. The Translation Choice Lutz Seiler, translated by Stefan Tobler, crosses between industrial, rural and suburban landscapes of East Germany in Pitch & Glint (And Other Stories). Mary Jean Chan delves into queer identity, SARS and Hong Kong in her luminous second collection Bright Fear (Faber). Jacqueline Saphra considers her Jewish identity in Vevel's Violin (Nine Arches Press). US poet Terrance Hayes brings us formal innovation and powerful testimony in So to Speak (Penguin) and we celebrate the astonishing lifetime achievements of Mary Oliver in her new selected poems, Devotions (Corsair). You can find out more and join our poetry community today at www.poetrybooks.co.uk.

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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 and exclusive interviews with all the selected poets, insightful reviews by our Book Selectors Jo Clement, Roy Mcfarlane, Shivanee Ramlochan, Arji Manuelpillai and Nina Mingya Powles. Plus micro reviews by the Ledbury Critics and extensive listings of every book and pamphlet published this quarter. The Winter 2023 Bulletin magazine is full of crossings and re-connections. It features poems, reviews and commentary from the PBS Winter Choice Kwame Dawes whose new collection Sturge Town (Peepal Tree) journeys through memory and geography from Ghana to Jamaica and Nebraska. The Translation Choice, Sea in My Bones (the87press) by Juana Goergen, translated by Silvia Tandeciarz crosses between Spanish, Taino, and Yoruba in a multilingual celebration of indigenous Caribbean peoples. Marjorie Lotfi reveals her refugee experience fleeing Iran as a child in her debut The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe). Fahad Al-Amoudi uncovers the tale of an exiled Ethiopian prince in his astonishing debut pamphlet When The Flies Come (ignition press). Jasmine Cooray's Inheritance (Bad Betty Press) bequeaths us hopeful and resilient poems for when life and love are unexpectedly cut short. "America's favourite poet" Billy Collins brings some much needed humour to the table and celebrates the short poem in his new collection Musical Tables (Picador). David Wheatley sings of mushrooms, ancient forests and curious toddlers in Child Ballad (Carcanet) and Kostya Tsolakis re-examines Greekness and queer identity in his innovative debut Greekling (Nine Arches Press). You can find out more and join our poetry community today at www.poetrybooks.co.uk.

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City State showcases the work of twenty-seven London writers between the ages of 16 and 36. From hyperlinked walks of Battersea bombsites and guerilla gardening projects to jagged urban lyrics and dark hymns to the East End, City State presents a confident, entertaining and truly diverse snapshot of the best new poetry from London.Featuring poems by: Jay Bernard, Caroline Bird, Ben Borek, Siddhartha Bose, Tom Chivers, Swithun Cooper, Alex Davies, Inua Ellams, Laura Forman, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Christopher Horton, Kirsten Irving, Annie Katchinska, Amy Key, Chris McCabe, Marianne Munk, Holly Pester, Heather Phillipson, Nick Potamitis, Imogen Robertson, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Ashna Sarkar, Jon Stone, Barnaby Tidman, Ahren Warner, James Wilkes, Steve Willey"We are offered London as a test case for a new diversity of means and manner, from sassy performance scripts to the solid blocks of densely disjunctive language characterised as innovative or avant-garde. [City State proposes] a central space that is also the meeting place of many edges."Philip Gross, Poetry London"City State is [a] journey across the metropolis in rush hour: a journey that by turns bewilders, delights and throws up unpalatable truths. The anthology showcases a real range of styles, from Jacob Sam-La Rose's heartfelt verse, to Chris McCabe's complex, darkly witty observations. Though diverse, the poets featured here often seem to riff around several themes that are associated with London itself: dislocation, escapism, breathlessness."Helen Mort"Performance poets are wedged side by side with the new crop of post-langpo practitioners and sculptors of sound; formalism and new narrative jostle for position with cut-ups, found poems and the inheritors of a confessional poetics [...] What seems to unit the best of the poets here is a quality of looking outward: they are aware of, and play with, the possibilities of language and form; they draw on a recognisable tradition but refresh it, linguistically and subjectively [...] There is a great deal of vitality and versatility among the younger generation of emerging poets in the country's capital."Simon Turner"Here is a good, deep shaft drilled into the poetry of the capital. [...] What I like about this anthology is its range. There are poets here who, I guess, could fit into the latest Bloodaxe catalogue with relative ease. There are others, like Nick Potamitis or Steve Wiley and Alex Davies, who are much more experimental and are carrying on the work of poets such as Allen Fisher and Iain Sinclair. And there are poets coming out of a more performance-oriented stream such as Jacob Sam-La Rose, whose wonderfully ironic 'How to be Black' is one of the many highlights of this collection.[...] A true anthology of what's going on in poetry now."Steven WalingTom Chivers (editor) was born in 1983 in South London. A writer, editor and promoter of poetry, his publications include The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009) and How To Build A City (Salt Publishing, 2009). A winner of the inaugural Crashaw Prize, he is Associate Editor of Tears in the Fence, was Poet in Residence at The Bishopsgate Institute, London, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Tom is Director of Penned in the Margins and Co-Director of London Word Festival.

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