Search results for ""Flipped Eye Publishing Limited""

After over a decade working as a musician under the name Kae Sun, Kwaku Darko-Mensah Jnr. makes a full-blooded return to the bones of his craft – poetic exploration and wordplay. His début pamphlet, Flood Season, begins with seeds of perennial flooding, a phenomenon as familiar to residents of Accra as it is to residents of Assam, and blossoms into an exploration of diasporic belonging, the tensions between who we are and the clichés that surround our nation states. Ultimately, the poems hint that we might all be routinely, “caught in the delicate act of restraining/ Home in clasped hands/ Held to the ear, listening for a way back”. Flood Season carries the weight of its musings with an ease akin to water uprooting a misplaced house, and fizzes with the joy of a burst dam.

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Grammar of Passage details a German family’s quiet lives as they are pulled into the gathering maelstrom of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Monika Cassel’s attention to detail in this début, tempered with a deep empathy brings individual moments to vivid life, deftly demonstrates how poetry can excavate and reinvigorate history.

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As the opening poem of this début, Death of a Pie ‘n Mash Shop, attests: Chip Hamer is not your typical man of letters. A founding member of the Poets on the Picket Line squad, his poems have been bellowed against the din of rush hour traffic from picket lines throughout London, bringing solidarity and attention to workers across the capital. Chip’s first full collection is unflinching in its appraisal of the first fifteen years of the millenium, from New Labour’s descent into Middle Eastern conflicts to the ConDem government’s age of austerity. But while the outlook may seem grim, A Class Act is characterised by an attitude of stern determination and a tender, underlying empathy that never forgets the human story behind each headline and statistic. Revealing another passion, as a coach at the All Stars Boxing Gym, these poems jab, feint and move before catching you with a hard left hook.

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Peter Ebsworth is a poet in love with the stage. In Krapp's Last Tape, he treads the line between the audience and the performer, an act of voyeurism and ventriloquism that results in tense snippets of verse only relieved by a tongue in cheek humour that is evident throughout. In his persona poems, he embodies a pantheon of pop culture gods and goddesses such as Marlon Brando, Sticky Vicky, the veteran Benidorm erotic entertainer, and Tony Soprano; in other poems he turns the gaze around to observe them as audience. Selected from literary output ranging over 30 years the tone swings from bullish to reflective, aptly mirroring the gamut of emotions that performers embody on stage. Krapp's Last Tape remains, however, firmly rooted in side stage drama - Ebsworth's interest in Pythagoras is focused on his role as a soldier rather than mathematician, and his girl has a lobster tattoo in place of the dragon of myth.

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Agnes Meadows' reputation as an International performance poet has made her a firm favourite at festivals all over the world, including the Austin International Poetry Festival, Mediterranean Poetry Festival, and Palestinian PEN's International Poetry Festival. Woman is a selection of new poems fused with work from; her two previous books You and Me and Quantum Love; and her CDs Agnes Meadows and Blues Shakin' My Heels.

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If listening is a form of attention, and attention is a form of love, Bella Cox's Sikiliza presents itself as both an imperative and a promise for exploration of the bonds that tie the constituent elements of a self together. A self woven from voices rooted in different continents. A self both defined by and defying notions of what it means to be woman, sister, daughter, lover, loved, queer. A self versed in the languages of scalpels and flowers. A self that howls, soothes and sings off-key. A self that's unapologetically here, wherever here may be.

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Proudly staking a landmark for the UK's Latinx community, Katherine Lockton's début pamphlet, Paper Doll, strikes the poetry landscape as disruptively as a meteor scars earth with its impact. Documenting a shape-shifting existence between activist and survivor, immigrant and alien, lover and loner, this is a tract of the unseen made visible and given a striking, defiant vocabulary. Having fallen from a building as a child in Bolivia, Katherine seems to have retained an ability to stack images that zip along, only leaving an imprint of their meaning as the poem descends to its conclusion. This quality, combined with a contrasting directness makes reading Paper Doll a profoundly affecting experience. There is no smooth ride to be had here. As the poet puts it in the poem The Paper Doll Chain, “she will defy me; time after time/ teaching me how to live when she does.”

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Deluge by Charlotte Ansell, as with her previous work, displays an unerring emotional honesty. Confronting displacement, ageing, therapy, family, as well as social shifts like gentrification, Charlotte draws perspective from the community she lives in and distils it into the stunning exhortations and vignettes that make up this collection. Having moved from boat moorings in London to boat moorings in Sheffield, Deluge nods to the change with poems such as Queen of the North, which opens with “Oh my God Sheffield why/ do you always leave your coat at home?” and Dear Canal, a private note to the waters “still harbouring/ knives, forks and spoons.” In poems like Jennie, Deluge and the heartbreaking Emptied, both Charlotte's empathetic range and formal restraint are in evidence, confirming a unique ability to pick at the most complex of the heart's dilemmas with clear language and refreshing directness.

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A Suburb of Heaven is a collection built from observation and speculation. Based on artist Stanley Spencer's work in the first section and the part-imagined life of Anna O, patient zero of psychoanalysis, in the second, it is a feast for the senses. Spencer's predilection for using Biblical scenes in a rural context carries a narrative impetus that Pnina Shinebourne builds on to create revelatory poetic highs, "half-way between drunkenness and reverie". These moments of altered reality perhaps lead inevitably to the sequence on Anna O, which starts with the curiously apt line, "Transference, said Freud". From that opening, Pnina invents Anna O's history, complete with music notes and linguistic asides. The imagery here is soft against what was sold as hard science; a struggling patient's emotions set against the speculating notes of ambitious men.

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Miriam Nash's debut, 'Small Change', is a document of transition; taking in geographical shifts from farmland to metropolis, the changing shape of family, the seeping of global into personal, and a hunger for self-definition. In writing that is at once rural, urban, shocking and gentle, Miriam weaves a world that is instantly recognisable but refreshingly complex, evoking celebration, sorrow and redemption with the same clear voice. / Miriam Nash spent her early years living on an island off the west coast of Scotland. Her poetry has taken her to the USA, Singapore and across the UK, where she has been published in Magma, Brand and Generations Magazine and performed at Tate Britain, Singapore's Esplanade and Chicago's Green Mill. She has been an active part of the UK and Singapore poetry scenes, leading workshops in schools and producing large-scale poetry projects for young people. In 2012 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. 'Small Change' is her debut pamphlet.

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In 'Catching the Cascade', his long awaited debut collection, Paul Lyalls presents verse that documents his long career as a performing poet, exploring the motifs of childhood, love, consumerism, second hand cars and his native North. His punchy, breathlessly entertaining poetry stems not just from a razor sharp wit but from his genuine love of language. "A gifted poet...his work is witty, well constructed and well delivered." --The Stage "A talented poet, Lyalls' works, such as 'The Cult of Relationships' and 'Anatomy of a Bookshop' provide a clever take on modern attitudes and popular culture." --Three Weeks magazine "The quality that shines through this slim volume is a playful sense of fun...Lyalls has an unerring and endearing sense of fun." --Patrick Neate, London Magazine

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A largely allegorical exploration of the loneliness of an existence based on an alien world-view, Martin Egblewogbe's The Waiting is a collection rooted in metropolitan Ghana, but its primary territory is the human mind. Juxtaposing his training as a physicist against his curiosity about local myth, he creates a universe that's both entertaining and erudite. In A Photograph of K & S, Smiling, a completely self-obsessed man, returned home after his father's death, attempts to explain away his unremarkable life based on one perceived slight from his youth; in The Gonjon Pin (title story for the 2014 Caine Prize anthology) a genius working on a program to predict lottery numbers is stumped by the appearance of an intruder's disembodied genitals on the wall of his computer engine room; The Making, Rain and Back to the Halls explore futility in different ways, while Atta explores life after death - a theme that reoccurs in a much bleaker guise in The Crwoling Caterpillar. Often Kafkaesque in its isolation of characters and a pervading sense of powerlessness, The Waiting nevertheless maintains a constant hum of humour, nowhere more so than in The Going Down of Pastor Mintumi - in which a pastor who has discovered the pleasures of the flesh late in life overindulges with hilarious consequences. The title story, The Waiting, is judgement day in a twisted mind, filled with the kinds of questions that haunt a life on earth, which, ultimately, is the quest of all art.

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Call it love, lust or intimacy: behind every computer screen, behind every firewall is a heart, and in that heart sits the seed of something that needs nurturing. In Niki Aguirre's Terminal Romance that yearning manifests in 16 interlinked meta vignettes populated by incorrigible romantics, cyber stalkers, foot fetishists, love-struck professors and reality-impaired pessimists. Anchored by the story of Nina Parks, an ambitious writer and self-styled internet-dating guru, who has signed up to go on 365 dates to promote her new book The Ultimate Guide to Finding Love Online, these misfits collide to serve up haunting, hilarious dating dramas. Niki Aguirre's remarkable eye and unwavering prose imbue each character with compelling humanity, illustrating with poetic subtlety our innate need to reach out and connect at all costs.

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Aoife Mannix's latest full collection begins with a series of poems that chronicle her recovery from cancer and surgery. In the wake of physical and personal transformation, the seemingly reliable constant of the outside world is in turn transformed by the global pandemic

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“Sometimes, I shout at the face with which I must live, hoping to discipline it into behaving. I squash its nose and slap its cheeks.” Employing an inimitable combination of cutting wit, impressive feats of formal experimentation and bold illustration that pulls no pixels as it shades, Aislinn has created a moving début that defies categorisation. Lovingly produced as a collectible item, this is poetry you will want to carry with you as you leave.

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Eleanor Penny's Mercy celebrates and shuttles between the visceral and vulnerable, the cruel and and the kind. It attends to the assumptions we may make about the civilised self, assumptions all too often proven hollow or insubstantial in times of crisis. Mercy is a dizzying yet finely orchestrated menagerie of dark fairytale, biblical allusion and metamorphosis, anchored by a sense of something intimate in every bright detail. A highly anticipated debut.

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It’s 1970s Ireland: Jack O’Connell saves the life of an American sailor, Troy, who repays him by unwittingly stealing the love of his life, Kate O’Rourke. Jack fights to win Kate back, but his perfect life falls apart when she dies. In the fall out, he loses custody of their son, Cathal, to his embittered sister-in-law, but many questions remain unanswered. Twenty years later, Cathal goes missing in the US and Jack is drawn back – secrets and all – into the family that ostracised him after Kate’s death. Heritage of Secrets echoes Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd in more than just the name of the American sailor, Troy, but it is unmistakeably of a new age of sexual politics in a small town that frowns on any deviation from long-established norms.

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Irrational ambition, despair, suppressed desires and secrets are woven into the heft of each of Aguirre’s ten profound stories; whether it's a boy trapped at the age of fourteen after a botched attempt to capture time in a capsule, an organic seed distributor entrapping an errant lover with a replica pre-Columbian Aztec artifact bought in Chicago, or a woman attempting to drown herself in a water aerobics class in London, the tales in 29 Ways to Drown grip by their absolute logic and the sheer absurdity of the inevitable truths they unravel.

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Set in 1792, amongst the merchant princes and cut-throat backstreets of Liverpool, in the Palace of Westminster in London and aboard the Blackamoor Jenny - a guineaman making its sixth "African voyage" to stock its foetid hold with human beings - Gabriel Gbadamosi's play Abolition unfolds a dark, inglorious undercurrent of 'Enlightenment' Britain. Arresting and deeply troubling, Abolition gives us the voices of people caught up in the original sin of slavery and fighting to survive it, profit from it, ignore it, or end it. Underpinned by impeccable research and uncanny fidelity to the language of its time, the play depicts a society both conflicted and very comfortable with the trade in African bodies. In Parliament, there is debate over moral hygiene and economic turbulence in the ship of state, whilst at sea the Blackamoor Jenny struggles with storms and depraved acts, driven on by the ever-urgent imperatives of money.

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After close to a decade where he has focused on teaching, fatherhood and running London's longest running poetry open mic, Poetry Unplugged, Niall O'Sullivan returns with Werewolf of London, a selection of some of his best known older poems alongside new verse written during his print hiatus. His newer work is still inflected with humour evident in his work since his 2004 début, but he seems to have found in his later work a register that ekes the majesty out of his reflections. Nowhere is this more evident than in the soaring nine-part sequence Now is Not the Time for Politics, which starts out in the realm of fatherhood where 'the mundane becomes so magical'; gathers the whole world and its winters in its span, where the 'warbling beyond our curtain is/ some Pentecostals giving Satan the boot'; and ends where most human interaction begins, with the word 'hello' – except it is uttered from the grave. A gem of fluid, funny, fierce verse.

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The poems in Katie Hale's Breaking the Surface are populated with totems of our wild, essential truths- from the raven bearing witness to death, to the wolf's dark appetite. Hale interrogates desire in its different forms and unpicks the seams of myths, folktales and fairy stories, offering them up with new life. A self-assured debut.

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In Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads, aliens and time machines, Lambrusco and apocalyptic first kisses, broken relationships and breast-shaped mountains are perfect companions for a delicate dance through Hill Valley, Wagamama and potato fields in Nepal. The language, open-hearted and burlesque, is lifted from hypnotherapy podcasts, ad agency jargon, the fine distillate of the worst things we think about ourselves. These are poems alive with tingling histamines and humming generators. They slip between lines of conversation, sneak into your bedroom at night, haunt your dreams.

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'In Search of Fat' is a translation of some of Bewketu Seyoums's popular poems from Amharic. The poems in this bilingual edition mark his distinctive humorous but cutting style in predominantly short form. The translations, with input from the author, aim to replicate in English the energy and vitality of his voice. Bewketu Seyoum is a popular young Ethiopian poet and writer from Mankusa in Gojjam, north-west of Addis Ababa. His father is an English teacher and his mother comes from a family of Orthodox priests. He has published three collections of Amharic poetry, two novels and two CD's of humorous stories. His short punchy poems, full of warmth and humour, address all the important issues of modern life, including poverty, freedom, religion and love. In 2008, Bewketu was awarded the prize for Young Writer of the Year by the President of Ethiopia. In June 2012, he will represent Ethiopia at the Poetry Parnassus festival in London.

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Feeling a way through the electric, breathless experiences of young adulthood, 'Every Single One' is the debut pamphlet from Nina Bahadur. From New Year's Eve to the stretches of summer, dealing with prickly relationships and an exhaustive search for identity, these poems are an honest and unabashed exploration of youth, intimacy, and growth. Born in London in 1990, Nina Bahadur is a recent graduate of Princeton University, and an assistant editor at The Huffington Post. She has been writing poetry since childhood, and her work has been featured in Magma, Pomegranate Poetry, and Yes, Poetry. Her interests include photography, travel, singing, and summer nights

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Bold and experimental both in style and content, the poems of 'tunth-sk' have a life of their own - the images feel like they've been glimpsed through a gap in a fence line, the language like an eavesdropped conversation. In turns, funny, erotic, shocking and innocent, 'tunth-sk' establishes Emma Hammond as a distinct voice within the poetical landscape, unafraid of exploration, in turns playful and provocative.

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"29 Ways to Drown", is the debut short story collection of Niki Aguirre, a stunningly talented Ecuadorean-American writer whose work has previously been published in three acclaimed anthologies. Influenced by a Latin American literary tradition steeped in magic realism, but embracing a personal history that has included living in Chicago, Cadiz, Guayaquil and London, Niki's fiction conveys a gritty, often scientifically-sophisticated, world with a haze of surrealism. Shamans parade the pages side-by-side with lovesick film buffs, papers and humans fly at will, and intellectual and professional quests lead to self-destruction.Whether it's a boy trapped at age fourteen after a botched attempt to capture time in a capsule, an organic seed distributor entrapping an errant lover with a replica pre-Columbian Aztec artefact bought in Chicago, or a woman attempting to drown herself in a water aerobics class in London, Niki Aguirre's stories grip by their absolute logic and the sheer absurdity of the inevitable truths they unravel. Latin America has always had its literary fiction heroes, but not many have come from Ecuador; based on the quality of Niki Aguirre's assured debut, it has been worth the wait.

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When twins Afya and Aftab, along with their adopted brother Khaled, leave the shelter of a hidden valley, they are astonished by the bustle and noise of the outside world. But beneath this chaos is an order more threatening than bedlam. An army of shadows gathers, looking to break free from the navel of the world, where they have been subdued for hundreds of years. The Keepers of Truth are scattered; the once-powerful Empire is fragmented, its twelve territories now controlled by seven warlords, one of whom has taken control of the region once protected by the Keepers. Surrounded by bright, new discoveries, our innocents are lost in fascination, unprepared for the trials they will encounter, trials that will redefine who they are and what they believe. Blessing Musariri is a stunning new voice, and has created a rich universe, rooted in African landscapes, that recasts the realism of our world in an uncannily resonant new light.

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Drawn from Agnes Agboton's two Spanish collections in a single volume for the first time ever, Voice of the Two Shores was originally written in Gun, a language of Benin, the musicality of which is faithfully reproduced through the net of two translations. Many of the poems are rooted in Benin, while others confront the absence of the living testimonies of that world and its traditions. Yet the poems are redolent of love - of the poet's beloved, and of the land where she was born, which is (re)born in her. The result is a book charged with deep emotion, in which ancient tradition is deeply rooted, poems that thrum with intimacy, nostalgia for her natal landscapes following years in exile in Spain, and a thread of dismay in the face of unacceptable realities.

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Breathe explores the heart of Fidel Castro-era Cuba; an outsider’s look balanced by a heft of empathy to illuminate truths that lie couched between the island’s propaganda and the Western media’s skewed portrayals. The protagonists in Swimming, Taxi and Sabbatical seem to want to hold on to the indulgences that their countries offer them, while praising Cubans for the more abstemious lives they lead; in Siempre Luchando, I Never See Them Cry and The Party, romantic liaisons weather or buckle under the strain of mundane cultural assumptions; the seedy sexual aggression of Luca's Trip to Havana is undercut by the subtle yet intense lust of Breathe; while Leaving Cuba, with its haunting closing image of Havana’s night sky, is as eloquently balanced a tale of the lives of everyday Cubans as you will read - whichever path one takes, something is lost. As Cuban writer, Aida Bahr, puts it: “relying more on subtleties than on drama, [Segal] portrays the tensions and struggles, but also the joy and warmth, that fill Cubans' lives.”

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Portrait of Colossus is a searingly forthright début that navigates parenting, masculinity, racism and ambiguities of identity. It articulates, with skill and sly humour, the migrant experience from the perspective of the second generation, the ones who “know [England]/ more than everywhere else/ put together”. Brimming with vulnerability and pitched between the lilt of hooyo's admonitions and Ted Hughes' eye for the natural world, many of the poems reconcile disparate worlds, cultures and identities, firing them with the lyricism of Dawud's Psalms. Samatar seamlessly blends influences from Somali oral history, Ovidian tales and Homer’s Odyssey into a poetics that makes Portrait of Colossus cathartic, musical, emotionally satisfying as well as erudite.

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Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers is the first major anthology of UK-based writers of Latin American heritage, a vibrant, new vanguard in British literature. Representing a community that is the eighth biggest in London, one of the fastest growing and best educated, numbering over 200,000 nationally, the work featured here includes fiction, poetry and theatre that exhibits the stunning fluidity with which the writers inhabit their hybrid heritage. Of the ten writers assembled here, some were born in Latin America and came to the UK in their twenties, others are second generation and have a British parent, but their work shares a fierceness, a playfulness with language and a sly political edge. Playing with form, genre, silence and coding, the resulting work channels and celebrates the rich mythology and scope of Latin American literature, but carries a uniquely British gene - a bit of banter, a flash of restrained cheek. It is no accident that some of the contributors are published and have growing international reputations - for example, Brazilian-British novelist Luiza Sauma (Penguin/Viking) and prize-winning Argentinian-British poet Leo Boix (Chatto). The book also includes an interview with the writer-actress Gael Le Cornec, exploring issues of identity, multiple heritage and displacement.

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The Sideways for It is a tour de force of poetic invention - adventurous, gleeful and illuminating. Crafted to read as the eye leads, the poems are experienced both as commentary and personal engagement, whether the subject is the shifting arrangement of intimate clothing in department stores or builders at work. Ian's work draws us into 'the silence of space,' urges us to observe the bridge cupping its shadow 'like a lover,' the clustered Xs of girls somersaulting and the 'delicate proboscis of the moth'. All the while one wonders how poetry so technical can be so human, how the writer can be 'so natural in his practised tricks'.

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Winner of the inaugural Venture Award (2012)

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"After Rain" (June 2008) is Charlotte Ansell's long-awaited follow up to the fantastic debut, "You Were For The Poem", which opened the world of Charlotte's direct, emotive poetry to new audiences. After the release of "You Were For The Poem", Charlotte featured at major festivals including Spit-Lit, Redbridge Literature Festival, Refugee Sanctuary Festival, Cheltenham Literature Festival and LIFT Festival, but she also managed to become mother of two delightful children while chronicling the world from the Dutch barge on which she lives. "After Rain" reveals Charlotte's raw, perceptive eye tempered by age and experience, embracing misfortune, but recognising the need to celebrate after rain.

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For more than a decade, the Barbican Young Poets programme has served as a base for experimentation, creative development and an ever-extending community of poetic practice. Inaugurating a collaboration between Barbican Young Poets and flipped eye publishing, ARTICULATIONS FOR KEEPING THE LIGHT IN collects and celebrates work produced by poets of the 2022 cohort. In a dazzling array of poetics and forms, ranging from the mechanics of crossword puzzles, erasure and language to techno inflected sensuality, prayer and the personal dynamics of light, these poems continue to extend the legacy the programme has established and showcase the potency and integrity of contemporary poetry.

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BEFORE THEM, WE is an anthology that explores the lives of migrant grandparents and elders from Africa, unpacking the intimate details of their lives before the families they went on to establish: who they loved, where and why they migrated, why they had families. A collaborative act of sharing by poets of African descent, bringing their personal stories into conversation with each other, BEFORE THEM, WE is a multi-layered meditation on how we engage with the practice of memory. Featuring a mix of commissioned writers, and poets who responded to a call-out, ranging from Gen Z to mature voices, BEFORE THEM, WE's 24 contributors include: multi-disciplinary artist, poet and playwright Dzifa Benson; Nigerian-born, award-winning poet, playwright and performer Inua Ellams; Zimbabwean literary and sound artist Belinda Zhawi; queer non-binary Nigerian/Togolese writer and performer Michelle Tiwo; Ghanaian-British producer and writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes, who has won acclaim as a children's author, poet, broadcaster and novelist; Hodan Yusuf, a writer, actress, multimedia journalist and trainer in conflict resolution; Somali digital cultural archivist and independent researcher Ibrahim Hirsi; and Ola Elhassan, a Sudanese poet and electrical engineer.

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The Epic ofCader Idrisstraddles thecolloquial and the humorous, the philosophical andthe mundane in languageso lyrical that you could almost miss its politics in itsown music, humming with the quirks one who knowsthe immigrant experience of modern Britain asintimately as the cliffs and dales of his youth.

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In her striking debut, Laurie Ogden wrestles with what it means to define ourselves as human. From the seeming infinity of matryoshka dolls to Maud Wagner and Latrice Royale, Humaning moves through a storm of conflicting notions of womanhood, the body, and difference. Sometimes open and playful, sometimes dark and surreal, the poems offer up self-authorship and anthropomorphism as tools for transformation in the aftermath of trauma, to reset the roots of relationships, and search for the humanity each of us carries inside.

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In Say, Sarala Estruch explores the limits of language in the face of overwhelming loss and attempts to forge a language with which to probe subjects that still remain largely taboo: grief, childhood bereavement, the challenges and possibilities of cross-cultural and interracial relationships, mixed-race identity, colonialism and its aftermath. A pamphlet that exists in the spaces left vacant by the silences in the stories that parents and grandparents tell us; Say casts a slant light on the scars our ancestors carry, both those we inherit and those we choose to leave behind.

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Written originally in Me'phaa, First Rain is a selection of poems that emerged from the poet responding to the death of his grandmother who declared to him in 2005: I will die in the days when the first rains come. The work mourns both the loss of a grandmother, and the fading away (like her sight in later life) of a culture and language that hold so much history and pride. In this way, they address social, racial and gender inequalities, environmental abuses and injustices faced by native peoples in Latin America - issues that have resonance globally. As the poet recounts: In the face of the wind, grab the stones that are falling upon us, one of his grandmother's phrases, refers to people standing up to injustice. This collection, Hubert Matiuwaa's first ever in English, is a gathering of stones.

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Defiant, humorous, empathetic and insightful, 'Not Quite Right For Us' pierces through the hierarchical mechanics of class, race, gender. A celebration of outsiderness and an ode to otherness, 'Not Quite Right For Us' is a singular collection of stories, essays and poems by a dynamic mix of established and surging voices alike, edited by Sharmilla Beezmohun and including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Aminatta Forna, Xiaolu Guo, Johny Pitts, Rishi Dastidar, Tim Wells and Rafeef Ziadah. This remarkable anthology marks the tenth anniversary of the live-literature organisation co-founded by Sharmilla, Speaking Volumes. Part cri du coeur, part warning shot, part affirmation, this is the book we need now.

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'Batman's Hill, South Staffs' is non-linear sequence of poems set largely in Staffordshire, between 1961 and 1972. Quietly contemplative and playful with language, the poems derive their energy from the dialogue between memory and hindsight, the moments where the present - physically, or through lived experience - throws a clear unrelenting light on the past, 'coming for you in the dark'.

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