Search results for ""The 87 Press""

An exceptional debut poetry collection by Robert Kiely. Mixing the very best of levity with acerbic and wry political critique.

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Novelty Theory is the fiery debut collection of poetry by Caspar Heinemann. Described by Bhanu Kapil as follows: “Caspar Heinemann has written an anthem for alien beloveds everywhere, in the time before rising up and where the “pre-nothings” burn up as soon as you touch them. Reading this book burst adhesions in my outlook, which is what I want (always). A book without an afterwards or a before, Novelty Theory occupies an intense present that does not console its readers. Can poetry be a form of cultural revenge?”

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The twenty-seven untitled poems in Bird me turn upon four recurring symbols, timeless images akin to those found in a dream state: pebbles, a river, a chestnut tree, and a bird. This final image, the most central to the collection, is one which haunts and inspires the poetic voice. This voice may or may not be Azam herself, or else a hybrid, lyrical ‘I’, as unfixed as the haunting bird of the collection’s title. This bird, referred to as ‘Hannah’, is addressed in each poem. The eponymous palindrome takes on different rôles and guises: there are moments in which Hannah is celebrated as muse, love object, mediator between the poet body and the natural world; at other times, she is an all-consuming force, deadly and destructive to a point where the poetic voice is afraid even to say her name out loud.

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White/ Other is a strange hybrid beast – part poetry, part polemic, part sectarian graffiti – a long lyric essay that grapples with the complexities of writing and living from the position of the absent subject: that is the white working-class “other” within neo-liberal culture. White/ Other is memoir remixed, cut up and spliced with passages of cultural analysis and moments of feral lyric riff to ask what it means to be politically reviled, socially abjected, and economically disenfranchised, alive at the sharp end of everything, language included. 'One of the unique joys of being a “white, other” is that you present an opportunity for nice, white middle-class people to comfortably indulge both their racism and their classism without ever having to admit to the existence of either. They don't see your class because you do not present to them like a “typical” working-class person according to the tropes they themselves invented, or because they do not believe the class system exists. They filter class out of their world-view in ways that remove the experience of class-based oppression from black and minority ethnic people, while refusing to acknowledge the roll racism plays in the perception and treatment of white working-class others...'

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From ‘sweet sobs’ to ‘the reservoir of sadness’ a vivacious energy animates this debut collection of poems; young girls! circles back to those fleeting moments ofrebellious girlhood with verve and humour.–Mona Arshi, author of small hands and somebody loves youA debut from Panjabi-British poet and artist Karenjit Sandhu. A lyrical narrative which re-imagines the renowned modernist pioneer Amrita Sher-Gil as a 1990s West London native.For Fans of: Bhanu Kapil, Vahni Capildeo, Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya.

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"This major new work is thought, spirit and sense (in every sense) ‘fleshed out’ in ‘all the corners’ by being unmade – as poetry, as music, as (black and white) images, and as attention to the interconnected circuitries the One has with the social, historical and environmental ‘to / link us outside’." - Emily CritchleyFor fans of: Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, Will Alexander, D. S. Mariott This is a book of poems and an essay infused with the tempos of Grime music and black radical thought.

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A collection of 12 essays written by academics, writers and thinkers, Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience celebrates the artistic and cultural works which have inspired, and continue to inspire, this volume’s contributors as scholars, teachers, and writers. The chapters celebrate the ‘moving’ power - personal and political - of works which engage with questions of identity, race, self-and-other relations, and sexuality.These highly personal chapters span a multitude of artists, particularly writers of colour, through exploration of their applications to neurodiversity, POC and LBGTQ+ communities, and feminism. Works explored are diverse in origin and heritage, spanning personal and political culture from South Africa to Trinidad, India to France, Nepal to The United Kingdom. These include autobiography, novels, short stories, plays, painting, sculpture, and film.Essays by Rowland Abiodun, Stuart Bell, Amrita Dhar, Natalya Din-Karuiki, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Madhu Krishnan, Isabelle McNeill, Maryam Mirza, Adam Roberts, Laura Seymour, Kirsten Tambling, Emma Wilson.

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Call centre agents and migrant workers, soldiers and charity workers, fresh university graduates and street children — they all navigate the myriad of avenues in which their desires are entangled within the Philippines' harsh and unforgiving conditions of migration and labour in Rogelio Braga's collection of stories, Is There Rush Hour in A Third World Country? Now translated by Kristine Ong Muslim into English, the collection offers a glimpse of the lives of ordinary Filipinos, told amidst coup d’états, active conflict areas, late-night convenience stores rendezvous, and bumper-to-bumper Manila traffic, given a considered dignity and nuance by one of the Philippines’ celebrated playwrights.

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This collection of essays celebrates the work of international feminist filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, filmmakers, essayists and activists, On Feminist Films is the second volume in the South London Cultural Review series. Contributors include: Stuart Bell, Catherine Grant, So Mayer, Louisa Wei, Emma Wilson.

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Rimming the Event Horizon gyrates a mutinous poetics of revenge, purposing contingency as a major mechanism of racialisation but also as a source of resistance and refusal, of material and imaginative possibility. It is not really a punitive poetics but rather, 'a constant, experimental exercise of antagonism,' a brutally disruptive 'xenogenerosity' (Harney & Moten). This is a collection of many rotations, revolutions and revolts, from the lick of the cyclone to the whirl of a dervish; the flick of a dragon's tail to the ultra-slow swirl of galaxies or precarious life circling the drain. Traversing metastable topologies of gender and race as complicitly mattered but also 'out of control,' Rimming the Event Horizon intra-venes in a universe(s) that must simultaneously avenge, and take revenge on itself. Looping the line between life and death, it dangles us over the edge headfirst, tongues out... "Sabeen Chaudhry's Rimming the Event Horizon is an index of "oracular horrors," both "asymptomatic" and "vicious animal". This is a work of devastation in the present but also "one of many aftermaths." Chaudhry invites a reading of the poem as "bruised verticality." A livid ghost shares space with wrecked daughters at the rim of a well. Is this the portal? "LICK CYCLONE" is the instruction. In this way, a reader's opacity weakens. There's nowhere not to look." -- Bhanu Kapil For Fans Of: Momtaza Mehri, Jen Calleja, Lola Olufemi.

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A decal is a copy, a transfer of forms and knowledge, something that sticks and leaves a mark. Lessons of Decal meditates on these transfers, on writing and making art, and on the many voices and art works that teach us how to read and think and be. Using personal reflections, close readings, and poetic interventions, Lessons of Decal gathers a series of passionate and playful essays that treat Form as their side-kick, experimenting with the confusing, unpredictable and pleasurable side of language along the way. Together, they make an impassioned call for nuance, curiosity, messiness, attentiveness, and pleasure. Lessons of Decal is a defence of complexity and confusion, across art and life. For Fans Of: Maggie Nelson, Lisa Robertson, Nuar Alsadir

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Luke Roberts had this to say about Scammer: “Flaubert said with my burned hand I write about fire. In Scammer, Dom Hale plunges his whole head into the datastream, dictating his blips and theme songs through mouthfuls of toxic waste. He has his own venom: it’s about style and it’s about form. These poems don’t just sprinkle on a little diction or flip a filter on or off. They’re not accessories. They perform increasingly desperate attempts to find some texture in the frictionless glow of the screen. What’s the etymology of scam? What was your mother’s maiden name? How much surplus value did Silicon Valley extract since the start of this sentence? What year is this? What’s happening? What the actual fuck? Frack the Millenium Dome. Poison the Cabinet. Napalm Eton. Cancel the biopic of Northern Rock. Scammer is what we’ve been asking for in our sleep. A diagram of dead ends. A blueprint of cracks in the infrastructure. It reads just as good forwards as backwards, at any speed, straight to the head. You could cook an egg on it. You could cook two. It’s legit.”

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Two female lovers separate. Alone in her apartment, surrounded by books and memories, the narrator learns to heal her wounds as the days pass by. Written in the form of a personal diary, the collection Yo-Yo Heart is made up of five parts, each a rite of passage, as the voice moves through the main stages of grief.

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One day in April the body of Owen Beausoleil, a poet, is found drowned. As the investigation begins, three people find themselves haunted by him – Noah Lang, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy; his wife, Kitty Lang, a psychotherapist; and Lolita Hammershøi, a ballet dancer and Owen’s close friend. As the three of them become bound up in the mystery of what happened to Owen, their lives begin to interweave in both expected, and unexpected ways. Meanwhile, Owen intervenes from the after-life, desperate to find out his fate. Interiors is a about how loss and desire shape our lives, and about what waits beyond the borders of everyday life."Written with striking precision and clarity, this debut combines complexly rendered characters with an emotionally arresting and propulsive story. " – Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time and HelpmeetJessie Widner’s debut novel Interiors is poised and poetic, a moving account of what happens to the lost inner lives of the people who leave us, ‘the invisible things that expand within the self … that leave no record’. The mood of the novel, an air of trepidation, stayed with me long after I put it down like a ghostly presence, echoing the novel's own fictional haunting.– Sarah Bernstein, author of The Coming Bad DaysFor fans of: Isabel Waidner, Djuna Barnes, Helen Oyeyemi

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"Why so few women on the street at night is another brilliant offering from the87press." –Bhanu KapilA searing and multi-form debut from Palestinian human rights activist and theorist Sarona Abuaker. Complete with images from performance pieces, essays, fragments of theory and notebooks, these are poems that engage the reader in thinking about liberation.For Fans of: Anna Mendelssohn, Ghassan Kanafani, Mira Mattar, Adania Shibli.

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Three generations of women: Téta, the grandmother, Fadwa, the mother, and Emné, the daughter who captures the tenderness of her fore-bearers. The poems in this collection recall and restore a family lineage broken by war, death and exile.This translation of the 2021 Émile-Nelligan Prize-winning collection will attract readers interested in Middle Eastern literatures and those who value poetry written with the urgency of survival, memory, and longing. These short lyric poems weave a narrative that registers one of the primary concerns of the 21st century: migration.

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Debut collection of verse by Kat Sinclair

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Ed Luker’s hotly anticipated collection Heavy Waters and is a mixture of poetic and prosaic workings on the sea, borders, and border violence.This edition comes with a foreword from Verity Spott, in which she writes that the book is: “[a] collection of poetry that has resolved to speak of the terrifying crossings; the depth weighed up, the air weighed down – human lives pushed and pulled, fleeing and returning in the crisis who longs for our silence, in lyric refusal.”“The poems in Heavy Waters brilliantly register the smooth functioning of social force, the way it hangs on the literal incorporation of power as it is internalized, embodied, and contradictorily experienced. In a world in which ‘loss’ has become a hardened economic category, Luker returns ‘loss’ to the affective animation of the body, attuning our corpus to avert the local and global catastrophes that are crushing it.” – Rob Halpern.

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Minoli Salgado’s Broken Jaw is a beautifully orchestrated collection of eighteen stories set mainly in Sri Lanka from a writer who has gained international recognition for her evocative representation of the trauma of war. This brave and passionate book not only speaks against silences – official and unofficial – but also tests the limits of what can be said, reminding us that though it may be 10 years since the civil war in the country ended, its legacy remains.The book is divided into two parts, ‘Rumours’ and ‘Ventriloquy and Other Acts’, that take the reader on a journey from the public world of political conflict to the private space of home, from the dislocations of violence and migration to a personal quest for peace and renewal, charting the emergence of a speaking voice in the context of its suppression and denial. These intricately crafted stories are at once enchanting and harrowing, full of resilience and courage, suffering and hope.Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2020, Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020.

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Callie Gardner’s debut collection Naturally it is not: a poem in four letters is a remarkable work written between the Spring Equinox of 2016 and the Spring Equinox of 2017. It is a work that moves between form, part lyric, part manifesto, part essay. Gardner’s poetry here is a truly unique blend of avant-garde rhetoric, utopian politics, and elemental alchemy. A timely work that engages anew with ‘the natural’ and ‘the cultural’ in an era marked by the increasing irrelevance of the four-season cycle of the year under climate change.

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'Kerf' are the sawdust, particles or pieces irrevocably extracted from wood by the blades of cutting implements. Failure to calculate blade thickness when cutting wood can throw off project measurements exponentially. Thin-kerf blades are most accurate for fine woodworking, but they can warp and need careful maintenance. Thick-kerf blades are labour saving but are brute and lack finesse. The poems of Kerf write through themes of woodworking, craft and labour, but these poems also analogise 'kerf' as social and cultural remnants and as examples of disjecta membra. Embedded in and around these themes, the poems in Kerf also explore the author's own, as well as others', experiences of autism and neurodivergence, particularly as manifested in feelings of isolation and in experiences of violence and rejection, but also from the angles of positive and negative obsessions, focus and distraction.

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A new long poem for half a voice on the subject of despised knowledge and political invisibility, published alongside a selection of shorter poems and essays dealing variously with the merging and commingling of smartphones and human bodies, the role of elegy in the mid-2000s, the social basis of fascism in the 2010s, social class, and the symbolic dysmorphia of the British high street. All of the work collected here circles around two central relationships: between politics and knowledge, and between poetic language and speech.

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The Working Classic is a collection of poetry, interviews, and essays with Aaron Kent. These diverse texts attempt to showcase how a gentrified creative industry routinely ignores working class voices unless that voice is an act of appropriation by a middle or upper class individual. Through a history of struggling with his own accent and upbringing, Kent showcases a working class poetics that aims to present both a reality of experience and a subversion of expectations. The interviews, essays, and reviews of Kent's work are a hostile depiction of how establishment arts attempt to set out the guidelines under which working class voices are allowed to participate, while the poems prove that working class voices can offer more than schadenfreude. "A definite classic; Kent continues to find new words and new forms to peel back the layers of the self. Non-linear, unpredictable and always surprising, this is a book only Kent could conceive of , and certainly one that nobody else could write" - Andrew McMillan For Fans Of: J. H. Prynne, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anthony Anaxagorou

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This is 'a roots rave manifesto / to free literature'. The second installment in Oscar Guardiola-Rivera's Night of the World trilogy, Out of the World continues Hoodoo Girl's adventures, alongside the trickster Ix. This mythopoetic narrativetold in three episodesis inspired by the Mayan epic Popol Vuh, where plot is overrated' and musicality abounds. Lay your ear to the ground and follow these unearthly threads, the syncopated beats where the colonial encounter animates the Angel of History to reveal the masquerade that surrounds us all. In this second installment of Night of the World, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera elaborates in kaleidoscopic poetic form his ongoing, multi-scalar inquiry of how the open veins of the Americas are a burrow or cave from which emerge so many critical monsters, creative motions, moral ironies, and cosmos-shaking events. Intertwining touchstones of the Americas (such as the Popol Vuh) with the contemporaneity of their historical crises (colonialism to current tr

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Of Necessity & Wanting is a collection of lyrical, atmospheric stories of varying lengths set in urban Pakistan."Deliciously written, always entertaining and filled with striking imagery, Akhtar's stories do the most magical thing - they show us who we are."

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"The brilliant Verity Spott has a new book out, called Hopelessness and published by the 87 Press. The work defies categorisation: Verity is a poet, and this book is certainly poetry, but large parts are in prose form and towards the end it even takes on the structure of an absurdist play. There seems to be a loose narrative, and even recurring character voices, so I’m tempted to call it a short experimental novel, in the vein of Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal Of Albion Moonlight (a personal favourite). Ultimately though I’d just call it a book; one full of words that are profound, moving, silly, sad, challenging and beautiful in equal measure. Even though it’s still a boldly experimental piece, in some ways Hopelessness feels like the most accessible thing Verity’s done. Without wanting to sound condescending, it’s also the most mature. You don’t get much more universal than death, love and loss, and these seem to be the main themes explored here. Another is language itself, the way it defines and limits our experience, and the way that we’re constantly at the mercy of words and phrases as they’re deployed by the authorities, the media, and eventually our own thought processes. Dissenting voices continually talk over one another throughout Hopelessness, often sampled from outside sources, or parodies thereof: Sappho, MR James, traditional hymns and folk songs, Hollywood movies, talk radio, tabloid newspapers, dreams and demagogues. Through it all there’s a painful lesson about how loss can make us bitter and hard, and how by refusing to move forward we become empty caricatures mouthing meaningless clichés to wound and hurt. But grief and loss can also teach us about love, if we let them, and there is so much grief and love in this book. Verity continually rearranges reality (that is, language) as if searching desperately for a way out, but in the end, as always, there is just life, love, and death. Hopelessness is a bravura performance, wholeheartedly recommended." – Ben Graham

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"These experimental translations will grab you — some will give you goose bumps, some will rub off their lyric pensiveness and cheeky melancholia; some will make your fierce-pipped heart feel fiercer again, in solidarity." - Sophie SeitaDebut collection of mistranslations of Petrarchan love poems by Kat Addis. For Fans of: Shakespeare, Anne Carson, Katherine Angel, Jacqueline Rose, Alice Notley.

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Home Radio brings together 75 poems written between 2011 and 2020. These are weathered forms of attention: pocket songs and daybooks, odes and longer workouts, bitter little lyrics and sweet generalisations. It’s all staked on the seasonal, whatever the edge is, where poetry ends and history muscles in. For Fans of: Peter Gizzi, Barry MacSweeney, J. H. Prynne, Frank O'Hara

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The first in a trilogy of genre defying, formally innovative, dystopian poetry by renowned and acclaimed author Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

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From debut novelist Joseph Coward: Run-Out Groove is the story of Jude, a kid leaving home under a hail of his father's fists, escaping to a big city in search of something, anything else. He finds the alluring Astrid, a musician who takes him under her wing, and propels him onto a waiting music scene. Quickly discovering the dangers of success, Jude realises he must now survive this new, turbulent life, leaving behind where he has come from without forgetting who he is. For fans of: Samuel Beckett, Ann Quin, Nick Hornby.

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"Gorgeous and real poetry. This book is a bright spot in a bleak time." - Peter Gizzi A True Account collects works written between 2013 and 2020, published by a variety of small presses in the UK and the US. Here are variously refracted the student movement, austerity, general election, referendum, the crisis of 2020 or 2019 or any year you care to name; the Massacre of the Innocents, the housing question, the October Revolution in November; Sappho, Mingus, Storm Ophelia; Rukeyser, Rilke, Rodefer; the aesthetics of resistance, the insistence of history: luxury and voluptuousness, peace and pleasure, beauty and order, the questions that still remain unanswered and the problems that remain unsolved. "Wanting poetry to save my life, to shame my life, as LONG as the WORLD is WIDE, and as WIDE as the WORLD is LONG." For Fans Of: Sean Bonney, Amiri Baraka, Fred Moten, Peter Gizzi

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The fourth collection of poetry in Juana Goergen's rich trajectory, Mar en los huesos [Sea in my Bones] bears witness to a shared collective experience of trauma. It interweaves indigenous and African belief systems, languages, and memories to recollect the Caribbean's ancestral past and its imagination of the future. As is true of all memory work, Sea in my Bones simultaneously speaks to the broken present: its cry against injustice rests on the hope that through its labor, "the Zemies might awaken and the Caribbean peoples' origin be remembered." A multilingual tour de force that slips between Spanish, Taino, and Yoruba, Goergen's deployment of the poem as trace, as evidence, results in a cacophony of voices that bring together what life has torn apart. At the same time, the collection poses questions for all of us about the role of poetry in communities that have survived collective trauma. In the absence of justice can such poetry of witness serve as a form of restitution? Or does it hold the promise of something else? For Fans Of: Nathalie Diaz, Aria Aber, Alycia Pirmohamed, Bhanu Kapil

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Dean Blunt is the most important British artist of the current century because he fundamentally does not care about Britain. His importance makes it shocking that such little critical attention has been paid to his work. His indifference explains it. Dhanveer Singh Brar’s Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) looks to initiate a conversation that needs to be had about Dean Blunt, about Britain (through Blunt’s indifference to it), and about Blackness in Britain (through the depth and complexity of Blunt’s feeling for it). Using the 2016 album ‘BBF Hosted By DJ Escrow’ as a means of navigation, Brar hears Blunt in order to access the long contested dream of Britain’s disappearance that was conducted under the name of Black British Arts. Partial (in the sense of his relation to Blunt) and partial (in the sense of unfinished), Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) see’s Dhanveer Singh Brar give the dream a grammar, if not a name.“To encounter BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow through Dhanveer Brar’s ears is to see Babylon through his eyes, and to sense Britain — to uncover with ‘accuracy, brutality and beauty’ the complexities of its meaning — through the social music, social vision and social feel of those who refuse the Britishness that is withheld from them. Brar discerns Dean Blunt’s rightful place in a cultural field where critical discourse and sonic dream are fundaments of a dub university curriculum whose various approaches show the absolute necessity and generativity of stealth, flaw and the resistance to category. Blunt’s “love letter to the blackness of Hackney” deserves the most rigorous, gentle, erudite attention. Happily, Dhanveer Brar is here to provide it.” – Fred Moten

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