Latest Releases

Published January 2026. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.

ISBN 978-1-83738-011-4

In its tragicomic navigation of different forms of loss, Forgetfulness moves from the allegorical to the abstract lyric, through to the surreal-absurd, and finally to a series of splintered memories. It is a collection which seeks to re-construct and re-inhabit the past through the truths of imagination and fiction, as well as the storytelling of remembrance. Throughout these pages, the end is uncertain, forever in the making, and only possibly true. 

Published January 2026. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380060

A retablo is a painting created in thanks for divine protection or a miracle. In this luminous collection, Michelle Penn transposes the art form into poems that explore aspects of the female experience. Her retablos capture moments of vulnerability, confrontations with politics and societal ideals, the struggle to construct a self, and the search for something to believe in when protection and miracles seem rare. A rich palette of images — from nuclear blast glass and an atomic Madonna to a sword-swallowing Pierrot and a muse-for-hire — creates a compelling picture of endurance, defiance, and ultimately, hope.



Translated from Spanish by Francisco Aragón
Published January 2026. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619869

Manual de espumas was published in 1924 and was one of the most important eruptions in the early phase of the 20th-century Spanish avant-garde. Heavily influenced by Vicente Huidobro and his theories of Creationism, the book is effectively the first Creationist volume by someone other than Huidobro himself, while also being the volume that carried the banner for Ultraism, Spain's first native movement of the vanguardia.

Published January 2026. Paperback, 196pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619623

Six poets each from India and China and six poems from each poet, all poems jointly translated: new voices, familiar faces in a new guise, a gallimaufry of the right words in the right order. For teachers and researchers of translation there are PhDs by the dozen here, on the how, the why, and the what of it all. 

        For poetry lovers there is more than the usual ration of delight and surprise, of the catch in the throat, the gasp of recognition, the laugh or the sob that tells you this is the real thing you’re reading. 

        This is the new world, the sound of globalisation, waiting for you. When two leading international poets like Sudeep Sen and Yang Lian join their vision and skill to produce an anthology like Himalayas, you get a cracker of a book! 

     —BRIAN HOLTON

Poets included are: Ranjit Hoskote, Jennifer Robertson, Sudeep Sen, Ravi Shankar, Arundhathi Subramaniam, C P Surendran, Zang Di 臧棣,  Yang Lian 杨炼,  Yan Rong 晏榕,  Dai Weina 戴潍娜,  Yang Xiaobin 杨小滨,  Wang Ziliang 王自亮.

Published February 2026. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619548

Culhwch and Olwen (Culhwch ac Olwen), is a prose tale, written in medieval Welsh, which survives in two manuscripts from the 14th century. The story, in its current version, probably dates from the 11th, though some parts may be much older. It is one of the eleven stories collected in The Mabinogion. When Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones translated the collection, they placed Culhwch and Olwen in a group they called ‘The Four Independent Native tales’. The ‘oldest surviving Arthurian tale’, it is unlike any of the other stories in the collection and I think it is one of the great literary performances. Whoever put the surviving version together was a genius; a wayward or accidental genius, but a genius.

By modern literary standards it is chaotic and unsure of its genre. It is episodic, inconsistent and contradicts itself. There are conversations which read as though parts have been lost or misunderstood, and episodes in which the sequence of events

seems to be scrambled. But if one accepts the story is the way it is because its audience liked it that way, then it is a reminder that ‘modern literary standards’ are not the only way of approaching a text, and any attempt to cling to them will ruin your enjoyment of what follows. It has the logic of dreams and the morality of nightmare.

2nd edition Published November 2025. Paperback, 188pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619913
Ebook edition (available only from retailers) 9781848619920, £5.99 / $9.99

Venus Blue was Sobin's first novel, published in 1991. A haunting tale of obsession with golden-age Hollywood, the novel tells of Stefan Hollander, a collector of memorabilia connected with the 1930s starlet, Molly Lamanna, whose myth has only grown in proportion over the years, despite her having only appeared in five movies. Hollander comes into possession of a diary written 50 years ago by another who had been fascinated by Molly: Millicent Rappoport, a great beauty herself, and the wife of studio executive. Fuelled by his new discovery, Hollander begins to investigate, taking a journey that parallels that made by his predecessor, and the truth is slowly revealed, ever more complicated, and a tale worthy of the days of film noir is laid before our eyes. Molly, Millicent, and Molly's double, Vivien, come out of the shadows from behind a pall of cigarette smoke, enigmatic figures from another age.

2nd edition Published November 2025. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619876
Ebook edition (available only from retailers) 9781848619906, £5.99 / $9.99

It was the last chance Guy Fallows would give himself. A stunning 16th-century Provençal dovecote he'd found while hiking had given him both the inspiration and the material necessary to write a new novel. It had also led him to Solange Daubigny who'd inherited that seemingly weightless structure, years earlier. Together they found themselves enveloped in a clandestine affair: each Thursday, the elegant, highly sedate Solange flourished under the pseudonym of Frédérique. As their passion grew, so did the tower in Fallows' novel.

          The dovecote also led Fallows to reconstitute its recent history. For, during the war years, it had been restored to its present glory by an obscure Italian stonemason, Guido Stampelli. How, though, had Solange's mother — who'd commissioned the work — paid for such labour, given that she'd been left penniless by her husband, despised collaborator who'd fled to West Africa?

           In Gustaf Sobin's consummate narrative one hypnotically absorbing love story reflects another. Like the limestone monument itself his novel soars to a power quite its own.

Translated from Spanish by Sue Burke & Christian Law-Palacín. Bilingual edition.
Published November 2025. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380022

Jorge Valdés Díaz-Vélez   was born in Torreon, Mexico, in 1955. He is considered by critics as one of the foremost contemporary poets of Latin America. His work is crossed by universal references that are transformed and enriched thanks to the author’s voice: the four elements, the coordinates of space and time, nostalgia and hope, remembering and forgetting, music and silence, certainties, losses, distances, love and sensuality of high flying, where breathes the great poetry, original, true, eternal and habitable.

Liquid Sand consists of a selection of poems from the books, Jardines sumergidos (2003); Cámara negra (2005); Los Alebrijes (2007); Otras horas (2010); Mapa Mudo (2011), and Nudista (2014).

Published November 2025. Paperback, 76pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619722

This is the author's fourth collection and the poems in it are, she says, the most personal she has ever written. They also make up what she says will be her final collection. As with her previous collections, the poems engage with the language she uses as her medium – and it is her third or fourth language, depending on how one calculates – in the manner of an observer on the outside looking in, rather than one inhabiting that language. It all goes to prove that native speakers do not have it all their own way when writing poetry in English. As the first 2 lines in the book say: "Lip-locked, / place-ridden."

Published October 2025. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619654

This is Australian poet Jane Frank’s third collection of poems but her first in the UK. It transcends terrestrial boundaries, exploring profound connections between the natural world and human experience. Ranging from confessional and ekphrastic poems to surreal evocations of Australian place that express strong emotional connection, these poems maintain a rich dialogue with visual artists and writers of the past and present. Whether she is writing about hang gliding with Leonardo da Vinci, being lost inside a rainforest snow globe or witnessing a pinball game between galaxies, this is tactile and visual writing that bristles with striking language. Moving through her poems is like walking through a forest of imagery, layered and verdant, and is also an expedition through the fabled landscape of imagination and memory where love, longing and loss are familiar compass points. Her poems are often meditations on the joineries of life, the spaces where is meets was and might have been. The introspective is illuminating but there is also an understanding of the ways in which the poet seeks to garden her own life in the face of personal and planetary challenges. The poet is accessible, empathetic and yet displays masterful form and craft. She makes us want to go with her, share the journey, wherever it ends.

Published October 2025. Paperback, 78pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619852

In this notable debut collection, Christina Hennemann charts the complex terrain of growing up, becoming, and belonging. Her keen ecological awareness infuses the work with vivid landscapes from both her German roots and Irish home. With unflinching honesty and lyrical precision, she explores the intersections of gender, class, and sexuality against the backdrop of intergenerational trauma. She weaves personal history with ancient mythologies and archetypes into poems with a vatic and haunting nature. Characteristic of her poems is her playful approach to bilingualism, while her feminist-psychoanalytic lens brings sharp focus to the personal and political dimensions of growing up in a dysfunctional family amid global upheaval.

Shearsman Library Vol. 23. Edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron & Andrew Zawacki. [Second edition; first UK edition]
Published September 2025. Paperback, 740pp, 9 x 6ins, £29.95 / $42.50 (paperback); £39.95 / $52.50 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781848619944 (paperback); 9781848619982

Sobin's Collected appeared posthumously in 2010, and has been unavailable for some two years. Given our long association with the author — his work appeared in the very first issue of Shearsman magazine in 1981, and we published chapbooks of his work at various times in the 1980s and 1990s — we are delighted to be able to bring this important volume back into print. Sobin was an American poet of a very singular kind, but allied in some ways to the Objectivists and to poets such as Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Crucially, he spent most of his adult life in Provence, and counted France, and French poets, among his most important influences. This makes him stand apart from his US contemporaries and leaves him in a slightly odd corner of the literary landscape. What is not in doubt, however, is the quality of the work. Sobin was a major poet, by any standard.

Sobin “is a master of hoverings, hesitances, etched definitions of movement, soundings, fine measurings of air. He leads the mind into a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarities renewed.” —Robert Duncan

“I can’t think of anyone in our time who has trod the via negativa so determinedly and with such purpose. The texture of the ground, but also the grain of what lies beneath it. And so, the miracle, as Oppen would say, that there is a music in all this, in all this nothing, our brief glimpse.” —Michael Palmer