Search results for ""Burning Eye Books""

World Poetry Slam Champion Harry Baker's latest collection is his most ambitious yet. Following on from the success of Unashamed (Burning Eye, 2022), Harry Baker combines the insight of a mathematician and the vulnerability of the poet to find wonder in the little things that make life so precious. From a poem about wellies becoming an exploration of masculinity, a poem planning his own funeral inspiring thousands around the world to do the same, or a poem about his favourite German wheat-beer literally just being a poem about his favourite German wheat-beer, The combination of grief and joy in recent poems has led to Harry being described as the Barbenheimer of the poetry world (by himself, but he is hoping it catches on).

Read more less

Angry Yellow Woman is Vera Chok's debut collection. Is Vera a woman, though? And how yellow are they? The anger is real. These playful, searching, and violently sexy pieces expose Vera's immigrant-hobo journey through the landscapes, beds, and bodies of the UK and beyond.

Read more less

Adapted from a spoken word solo show, Chosen Family by ibizo Iami is a raw but gentle story of recovery and strength. Set in the waiting room of Dr Unicorn's office, Ibizo reflects on the instances that have knocked her down and built them back up again. Through emotionally charged poems and monologues, we start to unpick the importance of boundaries, love and expression in the quest to recover the body from trauma. We meet friends and concepts along the way that shape Ibizo's journey to finding their chosen family.

Read more less

On the radio they said that Hans Christian Andersen wrote the Little Mermaid whilst he was avoiding the wedding of the person he loved. I thought 'that doesn't sound like a story that involves singing lobsters'. So I picked a book from my shelf, I sat down at the table, and I began to read. And as I read the stories, I remembered where I first heard them. You know how that is? You open one memory and a thousand more pour out.

Read more less

Some Things is a collection of poems shaped by a diverse range of influences, including politics,gender, race, class and the many layers in-between. An adversary of oppression and discrimination worldwide and a critic of the current political landscape, Banjoko's poems speak candidly about the world we live in, highlighting the many different roles of those who hold power and how they use it,including personal and global relationships.

Read more less

The first collection by poet Jess Green is taken from her spoken word show set in an inner city secondary school suffering the cuts and blows of the Coalition government. Burning Books champions the underdogs; the unnoticed and unheard stories bearing the gritty reality of the UK’s education system.

Read more less

How often is it that a poet with the name recognition factor and critical standing of Salena Godden publishes their first collection 20 years into their career? Perhaps it is simply that no publisher has had the courage to commit themselves to the task of reflecting the force of nature that is Salena Godden to the page… until Burning Eye came along!Be clear, Fishing in the Aftermath is more that a sweeping up exercise, more than a greatest hits retrospective, more than a gathering up of old work. Salena takes us on a hair-raising ride through the process of a writer, the highs, the lows, the drinks, the lovers, the fights, the sex (especially the sex) that she has embraced like a method actor in search of a character, and shared with audiences over twenty years. Like a 21st Century female Bukowski Godden delivers her message straight and full strength. Not for the weak-kneed or faint-hearted, Salena is a hurricane of personality and energy, and the full force of the considerable talent that has made her a hit at literary festivals the world over is delivered here in all its frank glory.Salena Godden is one of Britain’s foremost spoken word artists. A regular performer at literary festivals in the UK and around the world in a career than is now entering its third decade. Salena tops the bill at literary events and festivals nationally and internationally. She can be heard on the BBC as a guest on Woman’s Hour, Click, From Fact To Fiction, The Verb and as a resident poet on R4’s Saturday Live. She currently works alongside award-winning radio producer Rebecca Maxted with their most recent production Try A Little Tenderness – The Lost Legacy of Little Miss Cornshucks aired on BBC R4 in May 2014. This follows the success of their last collaboration Stir it Up! –50 Years of Writing Jamaica also for BBC R4.Fishing In The Aftermath – Poems 1994-2014 marks twenty years of poetry and performance and the majority of the work included here is previously unpublished in book form.

Read more less

The Genesis of this Revolutionary has involved an up-bringing of scientific exactness, complemented by experimental cross-dressing, existential fist-fights and being possessed by the spirit of a relentlessly swearing 17th Century Ranter. Nourished by fermented mysticism and the Devil's Music, Jonny takes us along for the coffee fuelled bicycle ride as he searches for the best poem in the world; beset by complex towel hierarchies, the guilt of a trout sacrificed on the altar of innocence, and numerous erotic encounters.

Read more less

This is debut collection from Scottish poet and play write Liam McCormick and is therefore fraught with love and growing up.

Read more less

`Notes on Loneliness' is a collection of commissioned, unpublished and new writing from poet Daniel Cockrill written between 2008 - 2018.

Read more less

When Harry Baker first started writing rap infused poetry he was advised to “write about what you know” so instead of writing about killing people, or driving fast cars (over people), he wrote about mathematics.It is not all complex maths and algebra however but throughout Harry applies his mathematician’s mind to conjuring complex rhythms that have to be read out loud to be believed.

Read more less

Power walks in dressed like your best friend, offers to pay the bills and buy the drinks. Tells you to get some sleep because they’ve got this, they’ll keep watch, stop anyone getting in. Then Power leaves in the night and clears out your house. This is where this book begins. When Power’s taken everything. How do you get it back?"I finished Dressed As Love with tears rolling down my cheeks. There is such tenderness and fury in this extraordinary collection, that spans decades and topics- from the power of art to the love of place, from the outrage of Partygate to the joy of Eurovision. And throughout, Jess Green's clear, precise voice doing what good poetry does best- giving voice to our heartaches and yearnings and thwarted dreams, against a backdrop of what we all know, but often struggle to voice so articulately: what it is to be a girl and a woman in a world made by and for men. A beautifully expressed call to arms that will stay with me for a very long time." Julie Hesmondhalgh"This is Jess Green’s best work to date. Tough, tender and insightful; I found myself in these pages, along with so much more." Molly Naylor

Read more less

My Achilles looks at the man behind the myth and explores both the strength and vulnerability in embracing all the sides of oneself: the complex and the ugly, the bold and the brilliant. With themes of love, hope and yearning, My Achilles aims to be not just a myth but a legend. So much about queer love and identity has been hidden between parentheses and what is not said. This pamphlet attempts to fill in those gaps, so that they are not destined to be repeated over and over.

Read more less

Walk around any stately home, museum or National Trust property and you are likely to see the words please do not touch more than a few times. The irony is in most cases the sign is telling you not to touch something that was stolen from another land, something that should have never been touched in the first place. Please Do Not Touch asks important questions about these things, about the world and the lives that they have shaped. How have the ill gotten gains of colonialism shaped our society today? How does the noise of the crimes of the past reverberate into our present day soundscape?

Read more less

Dating & Other Hobbies is a collection of female-centred poetry and short stories from spoken word artist Cat Hepburn (#GIRLHOOD), offering up a uniquely humorous and poignant exploration of modern relationships and dating culture. Screaming with authenticity and using toe-curlingly relatable observations on millennial life, Cat's unashamed writing treats the reader with the honesty of a wine guzzling bestie on a night out, making it both gut-wrenching and spit-your-tea-out funny. Confessional, uncomfortable and hilarious all at once, from regrettable one night stands, to 'ghosting' to extramarital affairs- no stone is left unturned. Shining a light on the nuances of human connection and interaction in a world of digital dating and sexual exploration, Dating & Other Hobbies provides a truly unique celebration of early adulthood, and all the beautiful mess that comes with it.

Read more less

Tina Sederholm is a pathfinder, scouting out the best ways to thrive in our confusing and overwrought world. Fuelled by a passionate belief in the healing power of art, and the contention that no person or day is exempt from an interesting story, she uses her finely honed wit to confront complex questions such as, ‘How do you live a meaningful life?’, ‘What sort of God is worth believing in?’ and ‘How do you best fold your socks?’ The result is an infectious rebel shout-out to finding joy even in difficult circumstances, hope and solace for those traversing any transition in their life.

Read more less

In her third collection, acclaimed performance poet Sophia Blackwell explores connections, relationships and journeys, and celebrates their importance in a divided world. From Brighton, Paris and the Edinburgh Fringe to Amsterdam, Australia and outer space, The Other Woman maps women’s journeys through time and geography, exploring identities, bloodlines, buried pasts and alternative futures, ending up somewhere new and different – the country of marriage.

Read more less

Hafsah Aneela Bashir's debut poetry collection is by turns tender, poignant and fierce. With searingly sharp detail, this is an exploration of the private and the public, teasing out the relationship between the two; compelling readers to stop and look again and again at what they had imagined was the familiar. Between the uncertainty and doubt of relationships under strain, to the tragedy of war and its fundamental injustices, this is a collection that unapologetically examines the human condition and the conflicts that arise within us. What does it take to be who we are? What are we prepared to ignore or accept? Her work asks uncomfortable questions, searching after uncomfortable truths. Never complacent, always conscious of many journeys each of us must make, this is a collection that travels with us.

Read more less

Letters I Never Sent to You is a collection of impressions and encounters; of people briefly met and of places passed through and lived in. It explores the sometimes slippery nature of the word "home", and how love and heartbreak can be felt just as strongly for a place as for a person. It explores connection and disconnection with places, people and the spaces in which we encounter them. From Washington D.C. to London, from Accra to Paris and onwards to Berlin, Letters I Never Sent to You tells stories of a life split between places, identities, languages, nationalities, sexualities and of running away and running into yourself, of love lost and found again. Having created work for stage, film, page and performance Paula Varjack has been writing to you for nearly a decade with no expectations of ever hearing your reactions. Can you write yourself into existence? Paula did, and she wants to open up to you, even though (and perhaps especially because) you might not have ever met. What would you share with someone you would never see again?

Read more less

Sophia Blackwell's new collection, The Fire-Eater's Lover, is about performance of all kinds. Whether it's the rituals of seduction, the trials and triumphs of squeezing into a red vintage dress or the adrenalin of putting a microphone to your lips, these poems are filled with the joy of performing. The Fire-Eater's Lover conjures together scraps of everything from classic blues songs to job rejection letters, marriage proposals and medical questionnaires, and whips them into a circus of illicit sex, love lost and found, bittersweet goodbyes and moments of illumination.

Read more less

Jonny Fluffypunk's second collection, Man Up, Jonny Fluffypunk contains poetry, flash fiction and the transcript of the eponymous solo show Man Up, Jonny Fluffypunk: One Man's Struggle With Late-Onset Responsibility.

Read more less

Three decades of work captured in one multimedia extravaganza of a book. Want a bit of Steve Larkin? You can have it all, and in any order you want!

Read more less

Leyla Josephine dances between her private and public lives, her inner thoughts and outer performance, dipping into each side of herself with humour and reverence. In Public/In Private ends up in a stranger's flat on a one night stand, an awkward lunch with a politician, raves in dark sweaty clubs and midnight mass in Ireland. Some poems read like public proclamations but in others we are invited to listen through the crack of a bedroom door. There is a sense that everything firmly belongs here, the opposing sides of herself do not discount each other. Leyla Josephine's first collection of poetry unmasks secrets, faith, shame, lust,and death unapologetically. She fearlessly reaches through every page and asks 'Have you felt this too?'.

Read more less

In Late Shift at the Pickle Factory Mary Dickins presents the reader with an intensely crafted patchwork of stories, reminiscences, observations and whimsy. These poems are tender, sad, joyful, surreal and ridiculous and always characterised by Mary's distinctive blend of wordplay, humour, poignancy and politics. Mary believes that there is nothing stranger, more intriguing and revealing than the everyday life, people and places that we take for granted. She invites you to explore and enjoy this book as part of her poetic legacy drawn from an exuberant and challenging life well lived.

Read more less

Take your little feelings-junkie-self on a dash through the house of fun. Here is hedonism and anhedonia a.k.a 'the inability to feel anything' nothing? explored through lyric poetry and dystopian prose poetry. Here are the Romantic Poets. Here are some bands from the 1980's. Here is a bathroom. Here is a place where the super-rich get to use your organs instead of their own. Obvs. Think escapism, mothers guilt and drink- some of it set in an alternate dimension of distorted mirrors and super-fun balloons. Dilettantes and the discerning brain are welcome here.

Read more less

A poem cycle about giving birth. A creative response to the seemingly improbable and yet utterly commonplace act of somehow producing a human from your body. A rollercoaster ride of viscera and vulnerability, exploring the agony and the ecstasy of an everyday accouchement.

Read more less

My Body Is A Resource I Am Willing To Expend is a story of becoming: of learning what it means to care and be cared for, to love and be loved. In 2016, Katie (Tom) Walters caught fresher's flu and never quite recovered and developed a severely disabling, incurable disease. This debut collection exposes the process of acceptance, reconfiguring their relationships and finding their place in an increasingly inaccessible world. From their bed, they rebel in a world of sprawling plants and transcendental tenderness, where righteous crip pride collides with rage, grief, and mourning.

Read more less

Moving through moods and atmospheres (Passion, Anger, Joy, Nature/ The Sea, Melancholy, Philosophical/ Mystical, and finally Whimsy), Spectral is a book intended to be read in a number of different ways: 1. From beginning to end, moving through the blended spectrum of moods laid out in order; 2. As a mood-picker – either finding something to match your feelings from one of the seven main sections, or using something to change your mood to where you would like it to be; or 3. As a pic’n’mix menu of topics, emotions, and poetry forms. The pieces come from a number of places across the years – some of them from NaPoWriMo prompts, some from commissions, some from workshops, others inspired by random book pages, musical sequences, or just turning up without warning. A couple come, inevitably, from this past age of isolation and confinement, and still others are inspired by the wisdom and grace of chosen family. Not so much a pick-your-own-adventure book as a means to either follow an artistic journey laid out or choosing your own path, Spectral is an experience Fay is looking forward to sharing with you.

Read more less

Madeleine Ekezie has done everything right: good job, a step on the housing ladder, successful friends. But she's lost, miserable and deeply lonely. When she discovers the story of The Body - a maybe mythical, definitely magical being who feeds the hungry and soothes the hurt - Maddy blows her life up to find it. She quits her job to hunt through old zines, ignores her parents to pick through abandoned blogs, finding in each entry some truth about The Body. The Body in Its Seasons is a journal of Maddy's obsession, compiled in footnotes, conversations and diary entries. Maz Hedgehog unpicks the fabric of the poetry collection and reweaves them into a new tapestry of the experiential and lyrical.

Read more less

Political, funny, heart-breaking, I Find My Strength In Simple Things is an exploration of growth, chaos and relationships. In homage to Desree’s spoken word performances, a majority of the poems are paired with QR codes, which link to fi lms of the performances that made her. Desree invites us to care, explore and to find our strength with her, using thought-provoking one-liners and her incredible stage presence. I Find My Strength In Simple Things, will have you laughing and crying, as you are reminded the human experience is a messy one.

Read more less

Neon softly lights the shadows of LGBT issues, mental health, school, grief and longing. Delve into a mind of swimming pools and hospitals, planets and supernovas, classrooms and therapy offices, playgrounds and the sky - all bound together in tight prose spliced with light. This is a book for all ages, for the very radical act of just being alive.

Read more less

Award-winning poet, TED speaker and activist Agnes Toeroek writes with hope and hilarity, exhaustion and empathy about the need to get out of bed and pay the bills and fall in love and over-water the pot plans - all while the revolution needs you. Poetry about all the things we do all those days we aren't campaigning, marching or petitioning. About how we love, how we care, how we create. And how these things give us the resilience to keep resisting. How all that care gives us the strength to keep making the world a better place.

Read more less

“Little You is Rachel Nwokoro’s debut poetry collection. With poignance, precision and passion, Rachel takes us on a five-part journey through difficult topics with a unique humour that shows the resilience of her spirit and the strength of this young woman’s heart. Rachel completed her first poem How Much? after being harassed by a pizza delivery man near her family home in London and since then, poetry has been a safe place to explore the inexpressible; those aspects of being human that tend to stick in your throat. A magical mix of writing and touching illustrations by loved ones. ”

Read more less

German poet Nora Gomringer is here translated into English for the first time by Scottish poet and editor Annie Rutherford. There is no simple equivalent to Nora Gomringer in the UK but Kate Tempest is perhaps the closest in terms of the way she is experimental yet remaining accessible and in her ability to stride seamlessly from stage to page to film to literature festival. These are poems which defy categorisation - interweaving the best of page and spoken word poetry to create something entirely of her own. These are poems which laugh, howl, stamp their lines. They are candid, wry, compassionate. There are poems about the darker times of Germany's modern history, reworkings of myths and fairy tales, and a 3-page-long ode to sex against a wall. All brought perfectly into English by Annie Rutherford.

Read more less

The Book of Hours is a contemporary reimagining of a medieval book of hours. These were collections of exquisitely hand-illustrated religious readings. They were created in a handy size so they could be carried by the owner and read on a daily basis. This book of hours is secular, but the general mood is contemplative and reflective. The poems can be read individually or as a story of growth and change throughout a year. These are the poems from the poetry film project http://thebookofhours.org, which has been made in collaboration with an international community of filmmakers.

Read more less

We Need To Talk is a poetry collection on sexual violence, survivorship and solidarity. We Need To Talk instead looks at gender-based violence structurally, taking Agnes's own experiences as a starting point to discuss the normalization of sexual violence in contemporary society. Agnes pulls no punches in this frank and honest collection, and she is right. We do need to talk about this.

Read more less

In her debut poetry collection 'Requite', Malaika Kegode's lens is on people, the ones that speak to us through music and books, those both real and imagined, as she shines a light on loneliness and the sometimes unbearable burden of love and being loved. It is a love letter to the testament of humanity and the patchwork of people that make up our lives. Her gently crafted style is tender, astute and unfalteringly humane as she blends the mundane, everyday rituals of brewing tea and watching TV with the vast subjects of love, loss, growth and rebirth.

Read more less

Cherry Pie is 2015 collection from Ted Hughes Award and Arts Foundation Award winner Hollie McNish, inspired by her grandparents' advice on newspapers, war, sex and tinned cherries. The poems collected in Cherry Pie hold personal meaning for Hollie and are also those which have been frequently requested by audiences in theatres, pubs, festival tents, schools and youth clubs up and down the UK. The book is illustrated by some of Hollie's favourite artists and illustrators.Cherry Pie includes Hollie's poem Mathematics (1.9 million hits on YouTube) as well as Bungalows and Biscuits which was shortlisted for Best Factual New Media Content About Older People's Issues in the Older People in Media Awards. Her poetry has received over 3.5 million YouTube views; more than most political speeches, less than a cat dancing to 80's pop music.

Read more less

In this debut collection Caroline Teague addresses ideas of melancholy linked to striving for a sense of belonging and home.

Read more less

In his second poetry collection Solastalgia, Irish poet Ciarán Hodgers explores the intersection of environment and mental health. Considering the effects of climate change on the wellbeing of our world and ourselves, this exploration of ecopsychology asks what it means, how it feels and how to be in relation to the more-than-human world. Punctuated throughout by counselling ‘sessions’, this book holds up to the light a processes of healing, both ourselves and the planet, through exercises in reciprocity. It asks what a tree can teach us about grief; how evolutionary biology might support the counselling process; what the water cycle can teach us about time; how autumn can make us reconsider lost friendship and how a mountain might help us overcome trauma. Moving out from the individual, it considers geopolitical history and cultural perspectives on climate change, and seeks to move beyond present restrictions and creatively engage in the notion of the symbiocene. Celebrating the resilience, tenderness and connection between the human and more-than-human worlds, this collection holds space for the deep emotional response to the climate crisis, helps us find more commonality with the world, challenges us to think of a way through the immediate and galvanises us toward action against the most pressing issue that has ever faced the planet.

Read more less

You know how it is when the summer comes, and you have an album which you play over and over, which seems to sum up a very particular time and place? In which each song seems to sing of life and the very joy of living it? Yay! Is a collection of upbeat poems for uncertain times, poems of imagination and escape, whimsy and warmth, humanity and honesty. From a man trapped in a toilet in a motorbike museum with a cistern which refuses to flush, to a small town in West Virginia in which absolutely everything has a suddenly erotic undertone, via Scratch'n'Sniff hieroglyphs and the world's most mediocre circus, these poems are a veritable celebration of life from the Professor of Whimsy.

Read more less

Not Dancing with Ingrid Pit is an honest and personal collection capturing missed opportunities, those unstructured moments and nostalgic, half recalled memories which skulk at the periphery of an increasingly confusing current world state. Andrew Graves circumnavigates his modern worries and presents his own uniquely crafted narratives which utelise estranged family members, eccentric strangers and forgotten Hollywood cast offs in his fascinating line up of unconventional protagonists. This is a dark, funny and bewitching paean to the cult, disregarded and devalued, a chaotic and comforting monochrome tome inscribed with both hope, fear and a thinly veiled longing for something better.

Read more less

In this earnest debut Taher Adel draws from his own life, heritage, religion and culture to map a remarkable journey. The poems in I don't know what language I dream in operate in the lost spaces between language and identity where the poet wrestles with himself in order to understand who he really is and where he stands in the confusing world around him.

Read more less

The King of pop culture poetry returns with his second collection! As the great Dominic Toretto once said, ‘I don’t have friends, I have family’. 2Black2Furious largely looks at both what family can be: linked by blood, heritage, found and chosen. Tyrone Lewis intersects his exploration on race, and continues to ask the question – what does it truly mean to be Black in a world weighted with perception. There’s also some Avril thrown in too, because you can’t go wrong with some Avril.

Read more less

Priestess of the Powder Puff Experiment has taken four years to create and compile; a distillation of deep self enquiry, bold uncensored rants, hilarious absurdism reflecting modern life’s insanity, and tender moments of beauty inspired by the natural world. Jackie also tackles subjects such as environmental destruction, mental health issues and social injustice. In turns passionate and confessional, sensitive and poignant, and peppered with her inimitable bold humour, this collection is something to be savoured again and again.

Read more less

Life Goals of the Millennials: or The Commune Manifesto is about growing up queer and not growing out of it. In The Commune we champion platonic love and commitment. We tell stories, find good in those around us, holdfast our beliefs and each other, and we face down the practicalities of a world not made for us. The Commune Manifesto has taken shape over 10 years of late-night conversations in Glasgow tenements. It is dedicated to every beautiful soul who feels lost on their own, or terrified of losing their community as they grow older and feel the pressure to settle down. Finally, it is a personal statement of intent, an affirmation, a life goal, to retain the joy that comes from our hardfought and close-knit bonds. These poems visualise the hope we have in a future together. Come join us in the Commune!

Read more less

'Adekola's voice refuses to settle in a simple picture of identity that is palatable or transferable. The multiplicity of selves that speak in his poems reflect but also create a myriad of ways to be Muslim, to be Black, to just be. There is a powerful undercurrent of hope throughout this that leaves you with the sense that despite it all, people have always and will continue to persevere' Suhaiymah Manzoor-KhanNigrescence is the breakthrough debut collection of poems by northern poet Abdullah Adekola. The word 'nigrescence' means to develop a racial identity which Adekola unpicks through language that tugs and pulls through his own blackness, searching for ways to heal in a increasingly fractured world.

Read more less