North American Poetry Titles: Authors A to D

Published 2009. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610125 [Download a sample from this book here .]



The poems in Diorama with Fleeing Figures delicately point to devastating historical events. Instead of mounting judgments, the poems accrue power gently, even stealthily. Evoking a language at once lost, familiar, original, and dying, they balance fragments of culture, with a locus of Jewish Eastern Europe, against intimate imagery of the body — "the most confused part of the forest."

Published 2007. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781905700370 [Download a sample from this book here .]

On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005 is Rachel Tzvia Back's second full-length collection and tracks the cycle of violence marking the lives of Palestinians and Israelis in the last intifadah (uprising).

Published 2019. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616400 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"Rachel Tzvia Back transmutes the hard and sharp facts of the world into green and gold in these poems that bristle with desperate hope. She’s always biblical to me, not just because the Galilean landscape she lives in is so like that of those old psalms, but also because she too was a mother who sent her son to war, though she sees in that son another’s son—a boy killed on a beach in far Gaza, while playing. The poet here becomes mother to both, she rises up in need to save both, to spin these new and much needed psalms. Shone upon by a tradition of humanism and compassion, Back dares to ask the famous questions first articulated by Fanny Howe: 'Where did the days go? Where to now?' And the last one, the one that always haunts her, throughout all the poems in this painful and wise book: 'Are my children safe?' 'We will need a new language,' Back warns. Good then that she’s giving it to us". — Kazim Ali

Published 2012. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612037 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"Aptly titled are these poems: they are like vials without bottoms… held up, looked through, a universe can be discerned. They pour and continue to pour a mixture of guile and subterfuge, language that contradicts, and bargains for its own sanity, contents in volume denying the size of these trick vessels." — Mervyn Taylor



Longlisted for the Bocas Literature Prize, 2016. 

Published 2015. Paperback, 70pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848614154 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

“Shapely intimations of disaster, poems of incendiary grace.” 

—Mervyn Morris, Poet Laureate of Jamaica

“ Burn is a kaleidoscopic, surreal and stunning collection. Bagoo forges carnivalesque, enigmatic, experimental, vivid, wild and wonder-inspiring poems full of verve and utterly fresh language that are, by turns, eerie, elegiac, fleshy, pensive, mournful, rhapsodic and absolutely scorching…

      Poems traverse geographical locations, from his island home of Trinidad, to other Caribbean islands and as far distant as Iceland. There, personal and societal angst, passions and pleasures are held up to a ‘sea of mirrors,’ into which we gaze. Bagoo explores daily life, love, art, history, literature, myth, popular culture, ritual and the molten ground of memory, bringing together and animating douens, lionfish, Auden, Mozart, Caravaggio and Tchaikovsky, among other figures. Bring the fire, burn.”  —Loretta Collins-Klobah

Published 2011. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611627 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



I have organized Parallel Lines somewhat chronologically. There are stylistic (not thematic) groupings which break the chronology and there are repetitions, such as a number of "breath" poems, which go counter to the breaks and provide connections. The longest poem, 'Scarf', wanders and a scarf, as you know, can be wrapped around anything, any subject. Or a scarf can be comforting, keep you warm, or make you fashionable. Or it might be used by the magician for conjuring acts. For me in writing 'Che Tempo', one of the shortest poems in Parallel Lines , I heard in my head Marcello Mastroianni and a sort of post-war angst in the midst of la dolce vita. (Dennis Barone) 

Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700363 [Download a sample from this book here .]

Analfabeto / An Alphabet was written in Recife, Brazil, and Brooklyn, New York. Part dictionary, part travel diary, part historical record, it crosses genre boundaries narrating a story of fragmented shifts in identity — cultural, gendered and sexual. It addresses the complications of translation, not only linguistic translation, but also the multiple ways we translate ourselves when we are away from whatever we might call "home."



Published 2018. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615755 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



“ Further than the Blood contains only the briefest excerpts from Cold Mine, Shownman, Travelling Mercies ". Perhaps Birchard will be persuaded to put those series back together… His vivid, offbeat, casually learned and masterly language is refreshingly modest, individual—unfashionable. I’m not sure there’s a poet with a better ear, and I’m also unsure if another has a feeling for how intelligence moves within and between lines that is any way superior.” —David Miller.

He has been thus persuaded, as has Shearsman.

Published 2012. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611979 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The Explosion of Binary Stars explores themes of loss in the author's own life and in the lives of her patients. The themes are universal: divorce, breast cancer, war, addiction, PTSD, ageing, depression and, most importantly in this book, the death of a sibling. The book is not maudlin, rather the intimate poems invite the reader to enjoy an honesty that ultimately celebrates life, while funny poems about love and travel are scattered throughout as a balm.



Published 2011. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611498 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Comprised of both poetry and essays, Joseph Bradshaw's In the Common Dream of George Oppen makes its premise to imagine what bodies of work might exist in Oppen's fabled 25 year silence. By turns, the book forcefully projects a singularly fabricated biography onto the figure of Oppen, then self-reflexively retracts, divagating through a poet's desire for mentorship and community. Bringing in everything from ruminations on blurry memories of Idaho's landscape, to dialogues held across centuries & continents with the likes of figures such as the Elephant Man, In the Common Dream of George Oppen brushes up against the fragile boundary between the finished and the unfinished poem, or a finished or unfinished life.

Published 2014. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613249 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



The House of Straw is Carmen Bugan's second collection, and follows her well-received memoir of life under the Ceaucescu regime in Romania, Burying the Typewriter .

'Bugan's poetry is subtle, tends towards reticence, yet has an indelible staying power. Crossing the Carpathians is a moving exploration of the costs of survival and the survival of love.' —Jacquelyn Pope on Crossing the Carpathians in Harvard Review .

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

Published 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616738 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

“[…] a word-smithy that is now owned by an incorruptible woman of letters. Her words are in open view and in plain hearing for the eyes and ears of people who value every single tongue but not the forked one.” —Christopher Ricks, Dead Ground 2018-1918

“I can certainly attest […] now, after being in Bugan’s world of ‘frail syllables’, that such an equilibrium between history and art is not only possible, but is often the only way to assuage pain, to release the caged birds, to free oneself from the shackles of grief.” —Simon Gatev, Dundee University Review of the Arts

“Carmen Bugan has the ability to transform deeply personal experiences into poetic language without losing the radiant particulars from which they sprang.” —Frank Beck, The Manhattan Review

Published 2022. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618039 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"In these poems, many addressing the 'long Sunday' of the pandemic years, Carmen Bugan reflects on the impact of the virus through the prism of personal family moments and local experience. She writes with disciplined precision, always attendant to the necessary nuance poetry demands. Her lyric voice and moral imagination in these poems gathers its energy from the urgency of daily concerns and anxieties, as well as the need to witness. Set against a time of crisis, she maintains a sense of wonder at the resilience of nature, her children, her own spirit. At the heart of this compelling collection is assurance and the poet’s good instruction to herself 'to feel the real, to protect myself against the imagined': advice each of us should heed." —Gerard Smyth, Poetry Editor, The Irish Times.   

Published 2025. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619661

In Tristia, Carmen Bugan tests the lyric against loss once again, as everything collapses around her, but this time much closer to home. These are poems about forging a stronger self in the fires of her lifetime, whether they are the forest fires that cover the American continent, the war in Ukraine, or her own world turned to ashes. The speaker in the poem 'Enheduana' laments:

He spat on my oven full of food,

Walked over my baskets full of bread,

Soiled the marriage bed, left the children crying,

And my heart toiling with heaven and earth.

Her poems insist on the beauty of the natural world, itself under threat, as a source of strength, as in 'Hawk,' where the speaker prays:

      Hawk, take everything

      That is weak in me,

      In your claws: eat it.

      Leave me wise and patient.

Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848614512 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Vahni Capildeo is a British Trinidadian writer of poetry and prose. Her recent work also appears in New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015).

Published 2025. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619661

Measures of Weather is about more than just weather. What isn’t weather? Weather here is a stand-in, for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovernable. And what does it mean to measure? To find intersections. To articulate complex subject positions. To use language to make tangible changes in the material world. To call attention to the invisible in all its myriad of forms, from the minuscule to the gigantic. To articulate the inchoate, to give shape to the ineffable, the transient, and the impossible. Carpenter uses language as a medium to grapple with organisational structures and their failings, to think beyond the scale of the human body, to engage with a tangle of vast systems — of air, of glass, of wind, of west.

Edited by David Miller & Richard Leigh.

Published 2025. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848615281

Alfred Celestine was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and came to London in 1977, remaining there until his death in 2009. He published two books of poetry: Confessions of Nat Turner (The Many Press, 1978) and Passing Eliot in the Street (Nettle Press, 2003). Weightless Words is easily the most comprehensive selection of his poetry to date, revealing his range and power as a poet.

This new edition replaces one issued in 2017 under a slightly different title, which, we only discovered in mid-2025, included some material not in fact by Alfred Celestine but which had been found in his posthumous papers. This one, by contrast, is ALL by Al. The earlier edition has been withdrawn from sale.

Published 2008. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700462 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Jennifer Clement has published three collections of her work in bilingual editions in Mexico, where she was born and still lives. Although better-known outside Mexico as a novelist / prose-writer ( A True Story Based on Lies, Widow Basquiat, Prayers for the Stolen ), she has been writing poetry for many years and runs the annual San Miguel Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende with her sister, Barbara Sibley. This volume draws on her Mexican collections and also includes more recent work.

Published 2010. Paperback, 144pp, 8.5x5.5ins. Out of print.

ISBN 9781848610989.

Now reissued by Canongate in the UK and Random House in the USA.

Widow Basquiat explores the love story between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Suzanne, his muse and lover. It is also a profound portrait of New York City during the early 1980s' art scene and the striking cast of characters from that time: Andy Warhol, Madonna, Keith Haring, Debbie Harry, Julian Schnabel and William Burroughs, among others.

Published 2019. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616448 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

"A masque: it's all a mask, celebrating the "organic" . . . British nature (transplants to US), in layers of spring and subsequent decay, within a long cultural history and a (to middle age) lifespan, personal pain, modernization, human war, gods and goddesses speaking anywhere. The poem has an enormous and muscular musicality (including prose musicality); the Poet constantly wondering how to Bee, how a Fool can Bee (symbol of all good qualities, sunniness, industry, royalty and divinity, various Saints) . . . A stunning, pleasurable book." — Alice Notley

"Martin Corless-Smith is a gifted and brilliant poet. His work is filled with poesy and all that can mean for the depth of the art. The mind is vertical as it moves through the master box of diction and form. Here is a generous voice with wild lyric runs and gorgeous music throughout—we are only made richer by this tender work. The Fool & the Bee is a fabulous book of the poetic imagination." —Peter Gizzi

Published 2024. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619487

"Golden Satellite Debris is my 13th book. I don’t feel particularly superstitious about that. I do still feel as if a book of mine coming into the world is still an unprecedented surprise. I feel a mix of hope and failure. The title points towards a sense of the wonder and glory of life on this planet, the Golden (with a hint of the sun setting no doubt), but also a sense of life as an aftermath, Debris, a sort of arbitrary and accidental outcome of equations and collisions only some of which we are aware of. I see the earth as a Satellite, a contingent object moving in space, but on a smaller scale also the human and the poem, spinning around some unknown centre, whether we call that truth, being, love or death." —Martin Corless-Smith

Published 1996. 44pp, A5 Paperback, £5 / $9.95

ISBN 9780907562214. OUT OF PRINT.

A rare UK publication for this major US poet, for many years resident in Japan, this is a collection of the short lyrics for which Corman (1924–2004) was renowned.

Published 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700714 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Vauxhall is pitched where voice and experience coincide. The poems sing and dance through heavenly mansions and real bungalows, tourist traps and museums, pharmacies and vending machines. Vauxhall is a calendar. It's an "all occasion" greeting and gift.

The Hollywood pitch for Vauxhall might have been "Marianne Moore meets Joan Jett" or "Alexander Pope goes to night school."

Published 2008. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700660 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



In Let's Not Call It Consequence , Richard Deming's first full-length collection of poems, the poet brings together abstraction and precise images to explore the intensities and reversals of lyric thinking, that "infinitely stuttering thing." These poems searchingly engage the content and form of anger, violence, intimacy, and the poetics of proximity, exploring the intricacies of language use to find the ways that "to ache, so to speak, is human."

Published 2016. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848614857 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Day for Night , Richard Deming’s searching new collection of poems, takes its title from the cinematic term for shooting night scenes during the day. With a complex lyricism, these poems often explore the ways that art, in whatever form, creates the possibilities of an address by which we hope to encounter other people even as it reveals the impossibilities of ever truly knowing others or ourselves. Haunting the poems in echoes and allusions is Shakespeare’s Hamlet and that play’s profound meditation on skepticism and the role of art in knowing the self. The poems bring together high and pop culture, hope and loss, loneliness and belonging, melancholy and transcendence. Poems from this collection have appeared in such places as The Nation, The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary , and elsewhere.

2nd edition. Published 2012. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848612273 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"Veering — often within a single poem, often within a single line — from self-lacerating anger to desperation, from mordant satire of the confessional mode to stunned (and stunning) autobiography, from irreverence to a state of fearful silence, Leaf Weather is a 'chapbook' in no diminutive sense of the term. In 'peeling/away the sun,' Shira Dentz unlooses equal parts verbal anxiety, formal adventure, and emotional reckoning. It's one thing to write poems; it's quite another to live, as Dentz does, in the marrow of one's words." —Mark Levine

Shortlisted for the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize

Published 2014. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613263 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Shortlisted for the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for Best First Collection.

Bottomland is a collection of six longer sequences of poems: American Rough-leg; Bottomland; Catalogue of Utilities; A Pictorial History of Wilderness; Route to Cloudless: Day; and Mimesis, Synaptic . In this collection, Laressa Dickey sustains something of the spirit and space of the poem over a longer period of time, and explores the poem as an improvisational space. The poems were born in the deep chill of the Minnesota winter, and they begin out of her experience and memories of growing up on her family's tobacco farm in Tennessee, but move on to much more.

Published 2016. Paperback, 150pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848614710 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



“By turns erudite and lyrical, esoteric and oracular, profane and ethereal – Joe Doerr’s Tocayo contains multitudes. This vast miscellany, a bravura poetic performance by every measure, signals the aborning of a new, necessary literary idiom for this mashed-up American age: the ineluctable punk sublime.” —John Santos

“Disturbs all the codes.” —John Kinsella

Shearsman Library Vol. 21
Published 2025. Paperback, 186pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619838

This to That and Thus contains four separate complete collections, the author’s first four books, thus demonstrating the wellsprings of a remarkable career.

“For a poetry that yields such immediate and immense pleasure, the work of Joseph Donahue remains hard to characterize. Joseph Donahue has spent [four] decades crafting a sensibility that straddles the often-reductive binaries of literary discourse. As sacred as it is profane, as popular as it is avant-garde, and as funny as it is forlorn, Donahue’s poetry puts forward a voice that resists easy categorization. While there are many aesthetic reasons that make Donahue’s poetry difficult to encapsulate, the most pressing obstruction to characterizing his poetry is the little precedence that exists for such an endeavor.” 

 —J. Peter Moore, Jacket2

Edited by Gavin Selerie and Justin Katko

Published 2013. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848612785 [Download a sample PDF from this book here. ]

Edward Dorn's Two Interviews brings together two largely unseen interviews from 1971 and 1981, conducted in Vancouver and London, with Tom McGauley, Brian Fawcett, John Scoggan, Stan Persky, J.H. Prynne, Ralph Maud, and Gavin Selerie. Published alongside the interviews are uncollected extracts from Dorn's Day & Night Report (1971), extracts from his unpublished prose work Juneau in June (1981), and three uncollected poems from 1981. Along with Justin Katko's preface to the book, which focuses on Dorn and Prynne's 1971 trip to Vancouver, and an extended introduction to the 1981 interview by Gavin Selerie, which deals with Dorn's geographical and linguistic alignments, particularly those relating to his first period in England, this book includes unpublished photographs, and a bibliography of Dorn interviews.