Latest Releases

Published April 2026. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 978-1-83738-036-7

Some Things I Do Not Know is a luminous work of mourning, written after the loss of the author’s best friend to suicide. These poems work their magic in the tension between knowing and not knowing, and in the grief of things unsaid. Allen explores with fearless honesty the ways in which we carry love and absence forward – into the afterlife and back again. This collection offers both solace and challenge, constituting a personal and open ritual for how to live on with what we have lost.

"The opening sequence honestly left me breathless." —Andrés N. Ordoricas

"Read this book when you want to be held, but don’t know how. Here is a companion, to hold your questions’ hand."

—Brian Sonia-Wallace

Published April 2026. Paperback, 72pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380176

A Book of Psalms is about a life retrieved in which the commonplace is made new in poetry and everyday experience is undramatically revealed as approaching the miraculous. Gazing through the windows of the public library offers a prosaic starkness, ‘Leaking radiators, polished floors, books on everyday wellness’ somehow transformed via a ‘Leaf-vein atlas suddenly awake to sun on wings,’ so that in a playground, at the side of the road with cars passing, we are with ‘a local deity of the edgelands.’

        And in this newly entered world this poet sees the immiseration of the dispossessed for what it is; tent cities in the underpass and men at traffic lights cleaning windscreens, fit subject for elegy and lament from a poet equal to the task. Baker’s declarative lyricism is a lifeline sustained throughout these 64 psalms. This is not just a poet writing poetry with its usual tricks and epiphanies. Baker has taken Sidney's advice and looked in his heart to write. In this way the marketplace in town is a vision of the world with poetry in its very bones.

‘And all the people chilled and shouting their wares
Seemed living words that carry a history
In each syllable a song in every vowel’ 

—Kelvin Corcoran

Published April 2026. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380305

Rooted in the geographies of the Nordic region—Oslo, the Norwegian fjords, the Baltic, the Faroe Islands—these poems chart a path through ecological disquiet, emotional estrangement, and the metaphysics of climate and weather. They're interested in the failure of traditional notions of the sublime to accommodate our contemporary moment: how climate collapse, grief, and urban fatigue both mirror and resist the old frameworks of awe. Across seasonal rotations and drifting landscapes, the collection tests what it means to endure, to observe, and to remain unsettled. 

Published April 2026. Paperback, 94pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380145

In this collection Angela Gardner explores the many ways of looking. Ripped by a wind that raptures, The Closed Spaces explores the human intertwine of pain and bliss, asking: are we windows or mirrors? How can we hold and restore our attention, resisting the commodification of our gaze? In a society under pressure who gets to look and who is seen? Showcasing a dirty and unequal war, a video game, the mechanics of optics to view a landscape, and the exchange between model and painter each of the poems shows us a different way of being in the body. From the utilitarian hunt of a bird of prey and the helplessness of a political prisoner under the predatory gaze of his captor, to the gaze of a lover finding the attention that Hannah Arendt equated with love.

Translated from Turkish by George Messo, English only.
Published April 2026. Paperback, 84pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380350

Edip Cansever (1928–1985) was born in Istanbul. He grew up in a country transitioning from the Ottoman Empire into a modern Turkish republic. As a student of law and sociology he was widely influenced by Western modernism and Eastern mysticism. To the outside world, Cansever’s was an unremarkable life, spending most of it in Istanbul’s Covered Bazaar where he worked as an antiques dealer. It’s entirely fitting that a poet who came to define Turkish modernity should have made his living among the residues of its past.

          His extraordinary poetry speaks of familiar twentieth-century conditions, of rapid change, migrations and transports, of historical realities and ethnic diversities. His language mirrors the unique human landscapes of his city, a geo-political crossroads, of people dispersed by conflict and poverty, renewing themselves in a world unmapped.

          Cansever's poetics are marked by simplicity and depth. Often colloquial and irreverent, his accessibility belies the turbulent sexual and emotional undercurrents that run through much of his work. He’s off-hand and humorous just when he’s at his most serious. He can be profound and silly in a single breath. Central to Cansever’s poetic idiolect are the demands he makes on its linguistic resources, stretching the expressive capacity of language to breaking point, a kind of jazz, alive to its own fluid semantic possibilities and cognitive riffs.

Published April 2026. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £9.95 / $17

ISBN 9781837380329

The first double issue ofShearsman magazine for 2026 contains poetry by Annemarie Austin, Jonathan Baddon, Jack Barron, Regi Claire, Stuart Cooke, Claire Crowther, Vincent De Souza, Tom Docherty, Amy Evans-Bauer, John Greening, Tamsin Hopkins, Alicia Byrne Keane, Michael Loveday, Damen O’Brien, Alasdair Paterson, Antony Rowland, David Rushmer, Ananya Kanai Shah, Ian Stephen, James Sutherland-Smith, Maria Sledmere, G.C. Waldrep, Rebekah Wallace, Ruth Wiggins, and Alex Wong; plus translations of Guillaume Apollinaire (by Ralph Hawkins), Miklós Radnóti (by Steven Capus), Mercè Rodoreda (by Rebecca Simpson) and István Vörös (by Ágnes Lehóczky & Adam Piette).

Published March 2026. Paperback, 172pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781837380466

Timothy Adès has translated all the 154 sonnets of the Bard’s love-life into lipograms, not using letter E. He has included headings and notes to help the reader to understand and enjoy the narrative that the original poems relate. All the original sonnets are included in parallel with Timothy Adès’ ingenious translations, making this an excellent study guide to William Shakespeare’s sonnets as well as an entertaining collection in itself.

Stephen Fry has commented: “I simply do not know if I can find words to applaud your work as much as I should… Genius.”

Published March 2026. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380183

"Like Italo Calvino's invisible cities, these oneiric architectures rise up revealing a glimmering imagination. The visually compelling constructions in these poems possess a beauty that can be subtly unsettling in its materials, proportions, or the relationships or emotions hidden within. At a time when our eyes are already jaded from the remixed possibilities of AI-generated imagery, this intriguing collection is balm for the inner eye, offering an expansive poetics of space as well as an invitation to take in a sharper and more intricate view of the details around us, and savour the questions about our ways of inhabiting." —Juana Adcock

Published March 2026. Paperback, 106pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380237

Varying States of Grace (Polygon, 1989) evoked this response from James Aitchieson in The Herald:  ‘His main subjects – seas, winds, tides, shorelines and horizons – are expressed in precisely observed details of shape, colour, texture and movement that capture the spirit of a place as well as the topography in poem after poem, until voyaging becomes fact and metaphor in Stephen's work, a way of life and a way of interpreting life.’
         The way of working in response to travels, land and sea, does not seem to have changed much. But Stephen has been fortunate in being able to range from home shores in the Outer Hebrides to enter geographies as varied as those of Tasmania, the Saskatchewan prairie and those observed in 2025 during a circumnavigation of Iceland.
         This book is composed from poems in response to travels, but on what might be called home ground as well as far afield or at sea. A small number of uncollected poems from further back in time have also found their home in this grouping.
         Ian Stephen also publishes fiction and non-fiction. A reader’s report of the work which became Waypoints (Bloomsbury 2014), by Shearsman poet Tom Lowenstein, helped link poet and publisher.

Translated from Spanish by Terence Dooley, Bilingual edition.
Published March 2026. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380220

"Mario Martín Gijón’s Dis(illusion) shows us language as a web of interlinked meanings. Opposites lurk within each word like sprung traps; allusions haunt them; one must proceed with immense delicacy. With the virtuosity of a lacemaker, Martín Gijón brackets and pleats his syllables and the meanings they carry in this extended, fractured reflection on living as loss." —Fiona Sampson

"Martín Gijón deliberately creates ambiguity and multiple possible meanings – harking back to the Cubists’ ambition to paint the same object from different perspectives within the same picture. Thus, the poet is not only navigating loss but also, in a phenomenological approach, examining the way his own consciousness is fractured into different possible responses to a situation where his sense of being a self has been shattered." —Ian Seed

Translated from Hungarian by Ágnes Lehóczky & Adam Piette. Bilingual edition
Introduction and afterwords by Ágnes Lehóczky, George Szirtes, György Tverdota, Aranka Kemény & Adam Piette

Illustrations by György Békeffi.

Published February 2026. Paperback, 386pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $30

ISBN 9781837380015

These translations by Piette and Lehóczky form a five-year long project with an ambition to translate a significant selection of the poems of the modernist, socialist, working-class Hungarian poet, Attila József (1905–1937). József lived a poverty-stricken, passionate and unstable life as a wanderer, a bohemian, a poet, a thinker, a non-conformist, a vagabond and a lover till his untimely death by suicide, struck by a train, in Balatonszárszó on Lake Balaton, aged only 32. His poetry is surrealist, existentialist, Villonesque, tough-minded, quasi anarchist, deeply drenched in Hungarian folklore and the folk song, passionate, lyrical, elegiac, marked by his solitary wandering, his keen observation of the lives of the people, by his psychoanalytically inflected gaze into the unconscious, into the mind and body of lovers, his philosophical focus on dialectic and social injustice. The lyrics, free verse and formal, in an astonishing number of experimental forms, range from the metaphysical to the memoir, have filiations to French medieval, post-symbolist and surrealist poetry, fuse Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel and Freud in daring raids on the inarticulate, sing with haunting vernacular and ancient beauty and rise to extraordinary heights and flights of the imagination, yet are always grounded in the real, in the concrete particulars of the metropolis, the dark streets of the underclasses of this world.

Published February 2026. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380183

A boy scratches his name on a staircase as the decades sweep him over him. Young people run from childhood to claim a city that may destroy them, while in the aftermath of a terrible event even our own minds desert us. These are poems of disconnection, from ourselves and from a world that has come unmoored. They ask hard questions about our complicity in creating that world. But they are poems too about what may be found and honoured in that unforgiving space. The city with its 'centuries of settlement and bone' is also a place of refuge and consolation, while the physical world 'which built us and birthed us' is 'with us to the end'. Fragile young lives, caught 'between wonder and dismay', are witnessed without judgement. Face it asks us to take an unflinching but compassionate look at everything we've made and everything that has made us, as we struggle through the constraints of our own nature, continually seeking our own selves and 'something that looks like home'.

Published February 2026. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 978183730152

Drawing from, and reflecting on, the experience of teenage years stilled by illness and pain, for this, her second collection, Keri Finlayson has made poems concerned with the complementarity and tension of movement and stasis.

Many of the poems explore the meanings of textile as a weight and as a constant, as covering and as clothing. Some take comfort in the reassuring permanence of trees. Others, by contrast, represent fluidity: the flow of gossip, bird song, nursery rhymes, smoke, speech and scent; things that might move around the still island of the body or the bed. 

Here poetry is shown to be an attempt to make objects out of all that movement, and all that stillness.

Published February 2026. Paperback, 114pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380053

In Martyn Crucefix’s powerful new poems, the unearthed bones of the dispossessed gather together to march; in rural England, the whinnying of horses heralds an apocalyptic unease; amid October storms, there rises an acute sense of decline and fall as we stand, ‘in hope maladroit as the woods riot’. Elsewhere, the ancient pike remains ‘the weapon / of choice in the defence of democracy’ as Our Weird Regiment evokes a sense of menace and insecurity in the environmental, political and personal spheres.

"Crucefix has, as always, an exceptional ear . . . superbly intelligent . . . urgent, heartfelt, controlled and masterful" —Kathryn Maris