Search results for ""Prototype Publishing Ltd.""

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which you' are the main character. Through text and image autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

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In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. The collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another. Out of these varied materials, Dutton builds a haunting landscape of strangeness and beauty.

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Virgula is an award-winning collection by acclaimed Dutch poet Sasja Janssen, and her second collection to be published in English. Taking as its title the latin word for ’comma’, the poems in Virgula reveal the stories hidden in the spaces in-between: the unending and the unresolved; memories that refuse to be contained. In Janssen’s poetry, the comma becomes much more than a punctuation mark, and is invoked as a muse and companion; she calls on her in every poem, as if she were a goddess, a friend or lover, someone who offers space when the emptiness becomes too heavy. In Janssen’s poetry, painful stories often unfold, events that never came to pass, but which leave traces and scars. Virgula strikes a balance between mystery and razor-sharp intent, through constant shifts and contrasts in perspective. The comma stops the stillness, and allows thoughts and language to move forward. Virgula was awarded the Awater Poetry Prize and was nominated for the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Prize and the Herman de Coninck Prize and De Grote Poëzieprijs (Grand Poetry Prize) for best poetry collection of the year.

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Seven Rooms brings together highlights from Hotel, a magazine for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction & poetry which, since its inception in 2016, provided a space for experimental reflection on literature's status as art & cultural mediator. Co-published by Tenement Press and Prototype, this anthology captures, refracts, and reflects a vital moment in independent publishing in the UK, and is built on the shared values of openness, collaboration, and total creative freedom.

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WINNER OF AN ENGLISH PEN TRANSLATES AWARDIsland mountain glacier by acclaimed poet Anne Vegter is tumultuous, humorous, erotic, enigmatic and vulgar in equal measure. Written in an elastic, playful style that levels the playing field of what kinds of images carry poetic weight, the poems inhabit an incongruous space between everyday distractions and intimate, at times uncomfortable or disturbing questions.Vegter became the first female Poet Laureate of the Netherlands in 2013. This collection, which also features drawings by the author, was awarded the prestigious Awater Poetry Prize in 2011; published with her long-term translator Astrid Alben, Island mountain glacier is Vegter’s first full collection in English.‘With her turbulent style and extraordinary themes, Anne Vegter is one of the most prominent poets in present-day Dutch literature.’– Dutch Foundation for Literature, Contemporary Dutch Poets series ‘Tumultuous work, in which the chaos can scarcely be tamed and much is possible that would not work in more concentrated poetry. Vegter’s later books make it evident that the poetic principle of free and idiosyncratic use of language forms the basis of everything she writes.’– T. van Deel in Trouw ‘Vegter does not write easy poetry. This does not mean that her work is inaccessible (on the contrary) but it lacks the tendency to hide anything whatsoever. Her most recent collection, Eiland berg gletsjer (Island Mountain Glacier; 2011), does not shield the reader. Friendship, marriage and sex, deterioration and loss – not in themselves exceptional subjects – are picked apart by Vegter in such a confrontational manner that the reader is left gasping for breath.’ – Piet Gerbrandy, Poetry International Rotterdam ‘[Vegter] shows herself to be a courageous and vulnerable poet: courageous because she chooses to write poems that are not merely neat, tidy and decorative, and vulnerable because the directness of her language can be dismissed as banal.’ – Jan Baeke, Poetry International Rotterdam ‘Vegter writes daring, personal poetry that sometimes teases language to the limit. One time her poems may consist of complex chess configurations, whereas at other times the poet can be trite, incoherent or even vulgar. It all contributes to the stimulating, grating feeling that someone is getting too close to you.’– Ron Rijghard in NRC Handelsblad

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Drinking to excess is living when you’re young. But what happens if living becomes rape… assault… death?!!Lisbon: that city at the mouth of the Tagus, that city that whispers, licks and seduces its visitors, that city that haunts those seeking refuge or its pleasures. Who would wish to escape?It is the start of the millennium and two ‘lads’ from South-East London are trapped in Lisbon among people and experiences set to push them to the limits. Attempting to lie low after a fateful night back home, the friends find themselves navigating an unfamiliar and unnerving new reality. A crime novel inspired by a real-life incident, and distinguished by its sensitivity to subtleties of language and dialogue, Along the River Run is a story of guilt and retribution played out amid the streets, sounds and sights of this bewitching city. Just as the undercurrents of Lisbon’s Tagus are ever present, so the literary undercurrents of the capital as written by Pessoa, Saramago or Sa-Carneiro are there to enrich and pervade the evolving narrative. The novel follows the author’s much-praised earlier book on Lisbon, a cultural exploration in a ‘Cities of the Imagination’ series, setting up authoritative background research for this haunting story of psychological destruction.

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Mensah’s work challenges dominant modes of masculinity, and disrupts the elitism of poetry through its accessible, honest, raw and intimate language and rhythms. Free from the constraints of convention, Mensah writes in his own, unique voice, layered with rhythm and surreal imagery, unified by its fearless commitment to emotional honesty and its openness about the power and cost of creativity.Safe Metamorphosis explores the transformations experienced in everyday life and the unspoken traumas caused by the uprooting of self as we are thrusted from one identity-building state to another. The trauma of leaving school, ‘growing up’, the demise of a romantic relationship, the loss of faith in a purpose: common, formative experiences too often dismissed. The poems in this striking and original collection explore metamorphoses at different points of our journey into adulthood, addressing the ways in which the associated upheaval of change and lost identity alters our sense of self and relationships with others.For Mensah, poetry and hip hop are a stimulus for philosophical reflection and introspection, and the poems in Safe Metamorphosis welcome us into the imaginative and highly observant mind of an artist committed to the healing and unifying power of communication.

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Plainspeak is the highly anticipated second collection by Astrid Alben, following her acclaimed debut Ai! Ai! Pianissimo. In these startling poems, readers will experience Alben’s unorthodox alter-ego-thinking-out-louder approach with the same exhilaration as they might engage with art or jazz. The poems in Plainspeak deal with place, ancestral ties, solitude, flight, insomnia and the embattled absurdities of daily life.Alben plays with formal boundaries, linguistic identity and the lyrical poetic voice, writing with rhythmic vitality and visual imagination. The poems tell multiple narratives whilst retaining the freedom of abstraction; they are supple and precise, each one an installation evoking different aspects of a particular theme. Plainspeak reinvents play and logic, is poignant and humorous, absurd and anguished: a book for and of the times we live in.

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alphabet poem: for kids! is a collaborative, experimental book of poems and collages. For children seeking their first book of poetry, or adults looking to rediscover a language they have lost, this playful reimagining of an ABC book is for youngsters of all ages.Written for and dedicated to the authors’ children, these poems are love letters to the English language, drawing on avant-garde poetic traditions to celebrate the sounds and imagery of letters and words as they emerge into meaning. Moving through the alphabet – each letter illustrated with a beautiful collage – this book is a journey through the foundations of our language. Surreal, imaginative, playful and unlike any picture book of poetry you’ve read or seen before, alphabet poem is absolutely for kids!, no matter how old they really are.

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Intertitles is an anthology of work situated at the intersection of writing and the visual arts. The anthology aims to explore their confluence and is conceived in response to a twofold observation: the increased presence of written, spoken and performed language in the work of visual artists and the simultaneous increase in visibility and circulation of the work and voices of writers in the visual arts arena.Bringing together a substantial and significant collection of work, the anthology recognises that both writers and artists are attracted to the possibilities of language as a material. Through essays, performance texts, scores, poetry and more, Intertitles plots a course through contemporary writing practices and lends perspective to the question of why this might be of particular interest at this moment in time.In art as in poetry, meaning is made in the very conditions of the encounter itself. The knowledge produced is not instructive or strictly informational but subjective and relational. Artists build the worlds that viewers may inhabit temporarily in the moment of their becoming. The physicality of these temporary utopias, however, is frequently realised in the contested spaces of our museums and galleries. This anthology asks if poetry, and the world it is capable of building outside of these normative structures, is poised to be the most constitutive form of all. Putting poetry into the social milieu, as a shared goal of artists and writers, might be understood as a gesture towards a truly radical reimagining.

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A novelist questions why she’s been shortlisted for the Prize of Prize’s Prize; an artist duo has a messy break up; a schoolgirl is saved from a predator by a flash flood and a gang of dead animals; a surgeon has an incurable identity crisis; a budding actor can’t see what’s so funny; a pregnant food writer gets a craving for luxury consumerism.These thirteen stories by writer and literary translator Jen Calleja pick apart the hidden motivations behind our desires, and the ways we seek out distraction from difficult truths. They investigate histories, power dynamics, rituals, institutions – the roles we adopt, as well as the ones we inherit. Known for her acclaimed poetry and translations, and as a performer in numerous bands, these facets manifest in an attention to the latent ambivalence of language, and the nature of storytelling itself. This writing is direct and considered – it asks to be read, read out loud, retold, refashioned into fables with a distinctive mouthfeel.I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For is a sharp, bold, inventive and prescient fictional debut from a versatile and brilliant writer.

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The Earth is Falling is a haunting and magical novel based around the existence of an abandoned village outside Naples. The deserted houses are peopled with ghosts who live in a perpetual present from which time has been abolished. The village appears to be semi-alive as it awaits the landslide that will eventually lead to its abandonment.

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A History is an elegiac 10-poem sequence, written about and in memory of Jill Robinson, a vital and continual presence in the poet’s life for almost seven decades, until her death from cancer in 2018. Burt’s eye is acute, unsentimental, and self-critical, unflinching in its depiction of illness, and unrequited love. His language has a Yeatsian severity, charged by vulnerability and an acute and expansive historical awareness.Published to coincide with his personal-political memoir Every Wrong Direction (Carcanet), A History is a major work from a writer whose life story and poetic sensibility takes us to places not often captured in poetry.

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Published here for the very first time, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction. Written in 1971, it is a surreal, fabular, lyrical work – a literary fairytale acid-trip road movie hybrid – the energies and details of which influenced much of his later work across media.The richly poetic story, a cinematic prose quest, tracks the journey of a blind young King and his valet, disguised as beggars, who set out in no particular direction and with no particular purpose. Departing from Fargo, across the frontier of Movietown, along the Superhighway and picnicking on the Lawns of Paradise, they encounter vivid characters like Pierrot, Borgia Ginz and Topaz, an Emperor who ‘smiles with the art of mirrors’, as well as a Sphinx with ‘Silence is Golden’ written in her eyes.The story serves as a foundational text, laying out many of the themes, images and styling of Jarman’s work in painting, film and design whilst also being haunted by the then emerging ecological crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the reckless consumption of modernity.This edition features facsimile images of the story’s handwritten drafts from Jarman’s archive, a link to an exclusive audio recording of Jarman himself reading the story in full, and is comprehensively informed by a vivid foreword from Philip Hoare, a deeply researched afterword by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, and a warm memoir by the artist Michael Ginsborg, a close friend of Jarman’s throughout the period of the story’s writing.

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Appearing for the first time in English, Deceit is the debut novel by Yuri Felsen, a leading modernist writer of the interwar Russian diaspora. Known by his contemporaries as ‘the Russian Proust’, Felsen died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, his life and legacy destroyed by the Nazis.Written in the form of diary, Deceit is a psychological self-portrait of an unnamed narrator, a neurasthenic and aspiring author, whose often-thwarted pursuits of his love interest and muse provide the grounds for his beautifully wrought extemporizations on love, art and human nature. Modulating between the paroxysms of his tormented romance and his quest for an aesthetic mode befitting of the novel he intends to write, Deceit is a remarkable work of introspective depth and psychoanalytic inquiry.Like voyeurs, party to his most intimate thoughts, we accompany the diarist as he goes about Paris, making enraptured preparations for the materialisation of his fantasy, observing not only his eagerness, dreaminess and poetic inclinations, but also his compulsive desire to analyse his surroundings and self. Yet amid these ravishing flights of scrutiny we discern hints of his monomaniacal tendencies, which blind him from the true nature of his circumstances. Thus begins an exquisite game arranged by the author, wherein it falls to the reader to second-guess the essence of what really lies behind his narrative.

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The 3rd issue of Prototype’s annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between.With contributions from Rachael Allen, Campbell Andersen, Edwina Attlee, Rowland Bagnall, Tom Betteridge, Sam Buchan-Watts, Pavel Büchler, Paul Buck, Theodoros Chiotis, Natalie Crick, Raluca de Soleil, Roisin Dunnett, Maia Elsner, Yuri Felsen trans. Bryan Karetnyk, SJ Fowler, Ella Frears, Sam Fuller, James Gaywood, Chris Gutkind, J L Hall, Ziddy Ibn Sharam, Daniel Kramb, Dal Kular, Eric Langley, Neha Maqsood, Helen Marten, Lila Matsumoto, Otis Mensah, Calliope Michail, Lauren de Sá Naylor, Astra Papachristodoulou, James Conor Patterson, Oliver Sedano-Jones, Marcus Slease, Maria Sledmere, Andrew Spragg, Nick Thurston, Olly Todd, Nadia de Vries, Stephen Watts, Karen Whiteson, Frances Whorrall-Campbell, Alice Willitts, Frannie Wise and Antosh Wojcik.

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Journeys Across Breath collects poems from the extraordinary career of one of the UK’s most significant poets, Stephen Watts. Gathering all of Watts’ published works between 1975 and 2005 – as well as a number of unpublished pieces appearing here for the very first time – this collection is an astonishing journey through the life and eyes of a remarkable writer of people and place.This long-awaited volume presents the breadth of Watts’ writing, from early prose poems, through long narrative sequences, fragmentary episodes, and later poetic meditations – all in Watts’ unmistakable voice. A writer of both the intensely personal and deeply-felt universal, Watts’ poetry charts familial histories, friendships, and encounters, set in both remote, rural landscapes across Europe and the changing, urban environs of East London.

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Doorways is an expansive, layered and self-reflexive anthology exploring the personal stories of one of society’s most marginalised groups – women experiencing street homelessness. Growing out of the extreme personal experience that informed the sound and photographic works of artist Bekki Perriman’s The Doorways Project, ​Doorways ​combines personal testimonies with new essays and commentary by renowned academics, activists, journalists, therapists and practitioners, exploring the cultural, social and political dimensions of homelessness, as well as the role of artists and institutions in challenging it.‘Doorways is an urgent book in this time of social crisis. The devastating stories of homeless women hit hard, while the essays show how this brutality is no accident – it’s the result of a deliberate policy against women and working class people. The book demonstrates the full scale of this tragedy: from housing policies designed to benefit developers to a collapsing mental health service, it is women who pay the highest price.’ – Kate Tempest

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Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West's saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16th June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses.Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened last night with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way.

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Sorcerer is a book in the form of a script/novel/manual about the pleasures of being with others and of being alone. Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and their aspirations, among other things. The characters find contentment in each other's company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sitcom in which conflict never arises. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart his face in front of a giant mirror.

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Lori and Joe have lived in the Lake District for many years, in a quiet valley where one day is much like another. Bringing Joe his regular cup of coffee one morning, Lori finds him dead. She could call an ambulance, but what difference would it make? Instead, she heads out for a walk over the fells. As she makes her way through the November fog, Lori’s thoughts slip between past and present, revealing a marriage marked by isolation, childlessness and a terrible secret she’s never disclosed. Arnold’s musical prose merges form and content to express what cannot be communicated through language alone. Taking place over the course of a single day, yet revealing the secrets of a marriage of many decades, Lori & Joe is a sparse, intimate and deeply moving story of entrapment and isolation, and of a life in which desire is continually overcome by inertia: nothing changes and nothing is ever (re)solved.

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Artifice is an exploration of the art of making. Its poems celebrate the artistry of craftsmanship: how works relate to beauty, and how they might inspire or ensnare. They consider issues of artificiality and authenticity, ‘the man-made’ and ‘the natural’. They warn of artfulness, in the sense of cunning or deception. And they wonder at the mystery of art and language, that which resolutely remains unknown or ineffable. For Artifice is as much riddle as revelation, stirring delight and discomfort as it delves into the nature of aesthetics and the creative process. How are works made and how do they make us, in turn? What worlds can be built from words? This book dwells in possibility, presenting an ambiguous space for contemplation, connection and, ideally, hope – for ‘to marvel is the beginning of knowledge’ (E. H. Gombrich).

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and I was writing myself out of a hole I thought that actually was writing myself into a hole I think and Other Poems came as I was writing to a joyful bigger and bigger andbigger inflating when a TN or Star is dying it gets bigger in bigger and that’s how you know it’s nearly expired it comes colossal how much writing was found to be on the right sizesize of what passes through me when my send my voice out what comes back what happens to other people’s voices inside me what kind of sieve I am from ‘explanatory notes with no fingers’Away From Me is the highly-anticipated second collection from poet and novelist Caleb Klaces.‘The world,’ wrote Georges Perec, ‘is big.’ The poems here rediscover the familiar intimacies of love, disgust, vulnerability, nurture and nostalgia in the vast spaces, technologies and voices that extend vertiginously beyond the individual self.In Klaces’s imagined landscapes, language is purposefully sieved, processed and contaminated by forces outside the writer's control, creating a work with its own glitchy music and sharp beauty: ‘a joyful bigger’.

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Home, the latest collection from writer Emily Critchley, is part experimental confession, part elegiac plea. It is an exploration of the damage done by, in and to many different manifestations of ‘home’, with poetry about child abuse, wrongful imprisonment, #MeToo, borders, Brexit, ‘our lost biophilia’ and global warming, among other issues. It is also an attempt to work through the pieces of a broken family, a broken society and a broken planet, with whatever limited tools the poet can summon. Whatever shards of hope may be picked out of the wreckage are in the understanding that we must be capable of doing more than we think – as individuals and collectively – to write a different future for ourselves and those with whom we share, indeed create, ‘home’. The collection dreams of a new ‘binding ground’ – something stabler beneath all our feet, and that a turning point, a ‘being otherwise’ may be under way.

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Lorem Ipsum, the debut novel from poet Oli Hazzard, consists of a single, 50,000-word sentence. An epistolary fiction addressed to an unidentified email recipient, the novel is modelled after the Japanese prose genre of the zuihitsu, which means ‘following the brush’.This playful, disruptive and digressive novel is written out of and towards a moment of crisis in the ordinary, in which the experience of attention has changed entirely.Lorem Ipsum is also an intimate, singular exploration of being a parent and a child, of dreams, work, fantasies, reading, happiness, secrets, memory, protest, repetition, intergenerational conflict, and the forms of community which appear or disappear based on how we conceive of 'shared time'. It is a book about the foundations upon which we build our lives, and what happens when they are shaken.

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The Boiled in Between is the debut novel by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten, a bold and daring work of fiction which transposes the poetic sensibility of Marten’s visual work to the page. It is a challenging, playful, enigmatic, tactile and deliberately ambiguous work of great inventiveness, which will establish Marten as an exceptional talent and unique voice in contemporary fiction.The novel began as an attempt to map the structure and stories of a house; within its tilted, sensuous, alchemical world, characters navigate strange, meticulously indexed landscapes – real and conceptual – to question language and definition and illuminate the associative movements of our minds. Spliced between three voices, the narrative is a project always in movement. The characters traverse these in-betweens: the hot-blooded living world; the curious disembodiment of the imagination; and the rampant snipping away at time in a progression morbidly (and comically) ever closer to death.

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The sea is spread and cleaved and furled is an interdisciplinary book and film-work by poet and visual artist Ahren Warner. It is a sequence of lyric poems, a narrative, voice-over and compendium of notes-to-the-self. Written and filmed across thirteen countries, from the Greek Islands to South East Asia to the Black Sea, the Balkans and the Baltic, it is at once a travelogue and an exploration of stagnating memory, of mental fracturing and its corollary: the exuberant performance of the self. It is both a love poem, an intermedia obsession with *cats*, and the personal and philosophical exploration of alienation, moving from Andrew Marvell to Cardi B, from Foucault and Back to the Future to the inane and repetitive close reading of Drake. The sea is spread and cleaved and furled is a poem and a film about the veneer of dialogue, narcissism and pleasure, about contemporary economies of capital, human movement and desire, and the resistance of the sensible or affective world to language itself.

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Try To Be Better is a multi-disciplinary engagement with the idiosyncratic creative practice of W. S. Graham, foregrounding experiment and process. Contemporary writers and artists respond to prompts Graham left in notebooks and letters to create original poetry, illustration, sculpture, painting, scholarship and more.Featuring: Astrid Alben, Nuar Alsadir, Marianne Røthe Arnesen, Edwina Attlee, Tom Betteridge, Rachael Boast, Nancy Campbell, Thomas A. Clark, Holly Corfield Carr, Lauren Doughty, Bobby Dowler, Aisha Farr, Natalie Ferris, Isabel Galleymore, Callie Gardner, Christopher P. Green, Oliver Griffin, Will Harris, Lesley Harrison, Daisy Lafarge, Zigmunds Lapsa, Maureen N. McLane, Lucy Mercer, Aimée Parrott, Natalie Pollard, Paloma Proudfoot, Denise Riley, Ben Sanderson, Denise Saul, Lucy Stein, Amy & Oliver Thomas-Irvine, Nick Thurston and Donya Todd.

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The Seers tells the story of an Eritrean refugee in London, moving between past and present to explore intergenerational histories and the UK asylum system. The novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone's story as land and nations.

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The fourth instalment of Prototype’s annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between.Including contributions by ajw, Sascha Akhtar, Chiara Ambrosio, Charlie Baylis, Jack Barker-Clark, Natalie Linh Bolderston, Jo Burns, Nancy Campbell, J. R. Carpenter, Joe Carrick-Varty, Robert Casselton Clark, Rory Cook, Emily Cooper, Kate Crowcroft, Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Alisha Dietzman, Edward Doegar, Nathan Dragon, Laura Elliott, Alan Fielden, Clare Fisher, Livia Franchini, Jay Gao, Honor Gareth Gavin, Emily Hasler, Grace Henes, Martha Kapos, Annie Katchinska, Victoria Manifold, Samra Mayanja, Jessa Mockridge, Helen Palmer, Yannis Ritsos (trans. Paul Merchant), Rochelle Roberts, Kimberly Reyes, fred spoliar, Scott Thurston, Hao Guang Tse, Ralf Webb, Sam Weselowski, Chrissy Williams and Xuela Zhang.

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Emblem is the debut collection from Lucy Mercer, winner of the inaugural White Review Poet's Prize. This is a book of ecological poetics, interested in exploring the changing symbols of the natural world in literature. Emblem revitalises this forgotten hybrid form in the present as a frame to contemplate the obscurities of motherhood, faith and the interior. In ghostly conversation with the sixteenth-century emblematist Andrea Alciato – a witness to a lonely time – the poems are carried forward by a non-linear dream logic of metaphor and similitude, speaking pictures who remain silent and a focus on an adjacent imaginal world. As well as reusing images from Alciato's emblem book, the poems fixate on alternating relations between text and image that blur into relations between mind and body, child and mother, red and green, past and present, public and private, the living and the dead.

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On a remote mountaintop somewhere in Europe, accessed by an ancient funicular, a small pharmacy sits on a square. As if attending confession, the townspeople carry their ailments and worries through its doors, in search of healing, reassurance, and a witness to their bodies and the stories of their lives.One day, a young woman arrives in the town to apprentice under its charismatic pharmacist, August Malone. An outsider, she is lulled by the stories and secrets shared by both customers and colleagues, and slowly loses herself in this strange, beguiling, isolated community. As her new boss rises to the position of mayor, exploiting his intimate knowledge of those whose trust he gained, she realises that something sinister is going on around her.Ambiguous, compelling and bewitching, The Weak Spot is a fable about our longing for cures, answers, and an audience, and the silent manipulations of those who hold power in our world.

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Sam Buchan-Watts’ debut collection considers the capacity contemporary lyric poetry has to reflect social change. The many ethical dilemmas these poems enact listen in to the noise which society makes to distract itself – from carceral space to questions of asylum, masculinity and the boundaries of aesthetic play.Described by the Guardian as a ‘sceptical, serious, versatile writer’, Buchan-Watts variously inhabits poetic form, exposing the interplay of sound, sense and desire. Returning repeatedly to the figure of a vulnerable boy approaching the thicket of adolescence, these are poems that are listening in when they’re not supposed to, distracted when they should be listening in, and finding secret listeners behind the arras. In this disquieting terrain we must hold ourselves to account for what we hear and what we make of what we hear.

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The 2nd issue of Prototype’s annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between.With contributions by Astrid Alben, Caroline Bergvall, Linda Black, Lochlan Bloom, Iain Britton, Sam Buchan-Watts, Hisham Bustani, Theodoros Chiotis, Cathleen Allyn Conway, Emily Critchley, Claire Crowther, Susannah Dickey, Tim Dooley, Olivia Douglass, Michael Egan, Gareth Evans, Aisha Farr, Miruna Fulgeanu, Mark Goodwin, Philip Hancock, Oli Hazzard, Hoagy Houghton, Dominic Jaeckle, Aaron Kent, Caleb Klaces, Lotte L.S., Ali Lewis, Jazmine Linklater, Rupert Loydell, Alex MacDonald, Helen Marten, Mira Mattar, Otis Mensah, Lucy Mercer, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Sinae Park, Molly Ellen Pearson, Meryl Pugh, Elizabeth Reeder, Leonie Rushforth, Lavinia Singer, Maria Sledmere, Maria Stadnicka, Maia Tabet, Amanda Thomson, Donya Todd, David & Lizzy Turner, Sarah Tweed, Anne Vegter, Ahren Warner and Oliver Zarandi.

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Songs for Ireland is the third publication from Irish experimental writer and audio-visual artist, Robert Herbert McClean, following his debut poetry collection, Pangs! (Test Centre, 2015) and his prose chapbook, Skrubolz Garbillkore (Book Works, 2018).Songs for Ireland is an experimental, interdisciplinary work, drawing on McClean's practices as writer and artist film-maker. It is a motley hybrid of voices and modes that satirically styles itself as a cartoonish call and response, a polyvocal tech startup melodrama, a Wi-Fi, Sci-Fi comic hallucination.Exploding the boundaries of the form and style of traditional poetry collections, Songs for Ireland is a radical rethinking of poetic practices, characterised by its energetic humour and McClean's unique, distinctive, idiosyncratic voice.

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Fatherhood is the debut novel from award-winning poet Caleb Klaces, combining prose and poetry in an experimental work of verse fiction. Following the birth of their first child, a couple move out of the capital to the northern countryside, where they believe the narrator’s great-grandfather, a Russian emigrant, was laid to rest. The father dedicates himself to parenting, writing and conversation with his dead ancestor, newly conscious of the ties that bind the present to the past. It is a time of startling intimacies, baby-group small talk, unexpected relationships and tender rhythms, when every clock seems to tell a different time, and the solidity of language is broken. As his daughter begins to speak, the father’s gentleness turns to unexplainable rage. He begins to question who he must protect his child from – the outside world or himself. Their new house, the family discover, is built on a floodplain.Moving between history, memory and autobiography, its shifting form captures a life and language split open by fatherhood. An experiment in rewriting masculinity, it asks how bodies can share both a house and a planet.

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A facsimile edition of Derek Jarman's sole, early, extremely rare poetry book A Finger in the Fishes Mouth, originally published in 1972. Heavily illustrated from Jarman's collection of postcards, the book combines text and visual imagery in a way which foreshadows his subsequent style as an artist and filmmaker. With the majority of the first edition having been destroyed by Jarman, this makes available a missing, significant piece of his oeuvre.

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REVISED & EXPANDED 2nd EDITIONRenowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels Book of Clouds, Asunder and Sea Monsters, the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis crosses borders in her work as much as she traverses them in life. Now, collected here for the first time, her stories, essays and pen portraits reveal an author as imaginatively at home in the short form as in her longer fiction. At once fabular and formally innovative, acquainted with reverie and rigorous report, sensitive to the needs of a wider ecology yet familiar with the landscapes of the unconscious, her texts are both dream dispatches and wayward word plays infused with the pleasure and possibilities of language. Conversations with the presences who dwell on the threshold of waking and reverie, flâneuses of the dusk and dawn, these pieces will stay with you long after the lamps have flickered out.

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The sixth instalment of Prototype's annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between. Including contributions by Galia Admoni, Louis Bailey, Eloise Bennett, Jen Carter, Imogen Cassels, Kat Chimonides, Helena Fornells Nadal, Miruna Fulgeanu, Zsuzsanna Gahse (trans. Katy Derbyshire), Eiffel Gao, Mica Georgis, Matthew Halliday, Jordan Hayward, Hasib Hourani, Aria Hughes-Liebling, Dominic J. Jaeckle, Rozie Kelly, Alex Mepham, Lucy Mercer, Duncan Montgomery, Angélica Pina Lèbre, c.f. prior, Oisín Roberts, Rochelle Roberts, James Rodker, Jacqueline Rose, Leonie Rushforth, Irina Sadovina, Agnieszka Szczotka, Maya Uppal, Jack Young and Kate Zambreno.

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The fifth instalment of Prototype's annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between. With contributions by Alex Aspden, Ed Atkins & Steven Zultanski, Mau Baiocco, Claire Carroll, Hal Coase, James M. Creed, Iulia David, Nia Davies, Fiona Glen, Olivia Heal, Emma Hellyer, Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou, Rowe Irvin, Sasja Janssen (trans. Michele Hutchison), Bhanu Kapil, Sharon Kivland, Jeff Ko, Prerana Kumar, Grace Connolly Linden, Dasha Loyko, Nasim Luczaj, Ian Macartney, So Mayer, Catrin Morgan, Ghazal Mosadeq, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Helen Quah, Dipanjali Roy, Leonie Rushforth, Stanley Schtinter, Lutz Seiler (trans. Stefan Tobler), Madeleine Stack, Malin Stahl, Corin Sworn, Olly Todd, Yasmin Vardi, Kate Wakeling, Nathan Walker, Ahren Warner, Stephen Watts & Rojbin Arjen Yigit

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In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets.One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers.Compiled from the Researchers’ disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

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Our Last Year is a book about change; through the internal narration of its two characters, the novel follows the disintegration and renewal of a marriage, in synthesis with a much wider natural reality. It tells a story of damage and destruction, both painful and restorative, and necessary. The trajectory of the novel – of becoming part of the evolutionary process, awake to it, enlivened by it, compassionate towards it – is dramatised through two minds, asking readers to reconsider their relationship with themselves, with others, and with the planet itself.‘A lucid and refreshingly uplifting masterpiece about a fraught period in the life of a married couple, Our Last Year surprised and moved and entranced me, calming and healing me with its wisdom and perspectives.’ – Tao Lin

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Leonie Rushforth’s first book reveals a poetics on high alert, where the ‘tireless human sonar’ scans a compromised world for calamity and grace. In her vision of precarity and connectedness, attention might prove the opposite of surveillance: a tender, sober act of keeping faith with the ethical force of exact expression. Her poems are provisional landscapes, like river deltas, where with language both sidelong and luminous she suggests a way of seeing and measuring distances – temporal, spatial, political – that opens a route not only to individual survival but to humane dialogue and the hope of community.

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microbursts is a collection of hybrid, lyric essays about the places between life and death; memoir and poetry; making and letting go. Originally written by Reeder as an intense text-based collection of lyric and experimental essays responding to the illnesses and deaths of her parents, it confronts the raw emotions of crisis, grief and creativity. Through collaboration with Thomson, the project expanded to consider how design and visual intervention might alter the nature and impact of the text.The outcome is a book which explores the subjects of illness, crisis, creativity, caring, death and grief, alongside the aesthetic and formal concerns of cross-genre writing, including how image, formatting and text work together to create tension, understanding and pace, expanding the possibilities of the essay and the artist’s book.Formally audacious, linguistically fluid, sensitive and intricate in its visual presentation, microbursts uses the potential and elasticity of the essay form to explore intensely personal, yet universal, experiences and considers the ways in which we can express and communicate these through spatial and linguistic form. Crucially, it achieves these things effortlessly, with its accessible, poetic language and engaging narrative of family, love, care, grief, dying, death and creativity.

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Returning to the island of Samos during the summer of 1979, where he had spent long periods of exile throughout his life, Greek poet Yannis Ritsos composed a remarkable collection of 336 single-line poems, written at a rate of about 10 a day: the Monochords, each line an essential observation of a moment; a personal archive of time past, present and future.In London in 2020, during a period of Covid confinement, artist and filmmaker Chiara Ambrosio began responding to Ritsos’ words through linocut images: an experiment in entering the space opened by each poem, rendering it in line and shape; a daily ritual that accompanied her along a strange year of exile from life.'Yannis Ritsos composed monochorda, single-line poems, as antidotes to the concocted complexities silencing truth. Chiara Ambrosio’s linocuts, beautifully intermingled with Ritsos' words, add their own ascetic harmony to his monochorda thus boosting their pertinence to our dissonant age.' – Yanis Varoufakis'This meditative book is an inspiring act of repair twice over, for ordeals of seclusion, threat, and tedium past and present.' – Marina Warner'A major poem by one of the greatest European poets of the past 100 years, in an exemplary translation & with a further superb expansion into a year's journey of linocuts make this book a vessel that holds urgently needed communal life-force.' - Stephen Watts

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