George Economou Ananios of Kleitor
Published 2009. Paperback, 144pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 978184860330 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ananios of Kleitor
introduces to the revolving stage of world literature the work of an ancient Greek poet largely unknown and hitherto unread outside of a small circle of cognoscenti. The poet's extant poems and fragments, as well as the record of their reception and preservation, are presented in this one-of-a-kind book of the sort that would have appealed to Menippus of Gadara and his followers, a medley of verse and prose and a diversity of genres, ranging from the epistolary novel to scholarly annotations and an Index Nominum. Ananios and his scholars and commentators perform their work at the edge of the real world and the margins of a thoroughly historicized and critically acute context.
George Economou Unfinished & Uncollected
Published 2015. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614369 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Partly an addendum to George Economou’s versions of the canonical Cavafy poems, published by Shearsman in 2013, this volume also includes a number of Economou's own uncollected poems and translations, giving us a picture of both poet and translator, as well as a shadowy image of Cavafy himself.
"Invaluable as they are, these retrieved Cavafy poems at moments seem a prologue to Economou's own, so deeply has he assimilated, in the course of decades of translation, both the older poet and the store of Greek classic poetry in which he also was invested. But the very American wit and formal hijinks are Economou's own, as are the grace, for instance, of an epithalamion that Sappho might have sung—this isn't pastiche, but a bringing of past into present, as Cavafy did, and also of present into past. This is the stance of irony, which demands a double vision. As its final gift this eloquent book treats us to a fractured narrative of the poet's education in the irony that is and has been an essential armament of survival for those in both his benighted lands." —Mark Weiss
Theodore Enslin To an Unknown Shore
Published 2017. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615557 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Theodore Enslin (1925–2011) is widely regarded as one of the most musical of American avant-garde poets. He was born in Chester, Pennsylvania. His father was a biblical scholar and his mother a Latin scholar. He studied musical composition at Cambridge, Mass. His teacher, Nadia Boulanger, was the first person to recognize his ability as a writer and encouraged him to pursue his interest in poetry. He said, "I like to be considered as a composer who happens to use words instead of notes." His first book, The Work Proposed, was published by Origin Press in 1958.
Enslin moved to Maine in 1960 and lived in Washington County until his death, working at odd jobs and making and selling handmade walking sticks. The Maine landscape forms an integral part of his poetry, as does the isolation, both geographic and in terms of the distance from literary fashion and the academy that his life on the physical margin of the United States allowed. To an Unknown Shore
contains his final poems.
Aidan Fine A Nest This Size
2nd edition. Published 2020. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617360 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Aidan Fine's A Nest This Size
is a journey embarked on via contradictory terms that occur when one attempts to explore the limitations of human (vs.) sentient abidance. Postmodern problems with things and places such as home, body, language, tradition, sleeve, machine/vehicle and rabbit hole become the relative metastructures through which these contradictions are channeled.
Norman Finkelstein Track
Published 2012. Paperback, 310pp, 9x6ins, £16.95 / $25
ISBN 9781848612068 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Track is a book-length poem, originally released in the USA by Spuyten Divil in three volumes.
"Norman Finkelstein's Track undertakes a voyage beset by recombinatory duress. An excursis through realms where "the letters / arrive to be destroyed," this wickedly wise poem keeps on arriving long after it's done — a lingering trade or track of mind in mind, trouble in mind. It is a beautiful, beguiling book of unrest." —Nathaniel Mackey
Jennifer Firestone Flashes
Published 2013. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
[Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Reflections on the individual and community flash in this urban web of buildings, technology and news bits, where the "city" looms and the inhabitants submit. Bits and pieces of Abu Ghraib, the Iraq war and 9/11 will be recognized, along with 24/7 newscasters and U.S. political figures welded together as one gigantic talking head. Paranoid neighbors, fashion rags and Walmart also take the stage. A menacing yet cartoonish shark probes the waters, a projected sign of the times. Yet within this hyper-reality a desire weaves, searching for a place in which to land, "Unpoured like animals from the ark we became friendly/like old days, we offered each other liquid/put away green bills, undid our jackets/clustered."
Jennifer Firestone Holiday
Published 2008. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700530 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
While ostensibly documenting a European vacation, Holiday
interrogates historical narratives and artistic representations, examining patriarchal and nepotistic political and religious connections that are repackaged into the souvenir experience. From stripped reportage to dream fragments, Holiday
positions the "traveler" in a hyper-conscious lens that undermines conventional notions about the meaning of a holiday. Beneath the careful recording of art, food, and guidebooks’ “most visited sites” are reverberations of war and power exposing the traveler's consumer culpability and the role of choice in demarcating and memorializing personal and historical trajectories.
Edwin Frank Snake Train. Poems 1984–2013
Published 2015. Paperback, 136pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848613621 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Kabbalist hymns, a Futurist dragon, Wagnerian vaudeville, Virgil in India, and Pinocchio, in love and at a loss, among the philosophers, are among the mirrors and reflections found in Snake Train, a gathering of the poetic sequences and longer poems (plus one piece of prose) that Edwin Frank has published over the years in various journals and chapbooks. Though haunted by ghosts, this book of waiting and wanting is very much set among the shiny constructions and destroyed or abandoned spaces of today’s continuous present, in which the lyric echoes from some past—or future—remove.
Bill Freind (ed.) Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums — Essays on the Poetry of Araki Yasusada
Published 2012. Paperback, 339pp, 9x6ins, £19.95 / $27.50
ISBN 9781848611849 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Araki Yasusada, allegedly a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, had his work published posthumously and in translation in the mid-1990s. The work was widely praised and seemed to fuse traditional Japanese forms and themes with more innovative North American techniques and a sprinkling of French critical theory. However, Yasusada was an invention, and while no one claimed responsibility for the work, most readers agree that Kent Johnson was the creator, although Johnson insists the actual author is Tosa Motokiyu, the pseudonym for an unnamed writer who is now dead.
This book considers all aspects of the Yasusada phenomenon.
Cameron Gearen Some Perfect Year
Published 2016. Paperback, 90pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614840 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Cameron Gearen’s first full-length collection of poetry, Some Perfect Year, opens with a poem entitled Invitation, and it’s one we should heed. “Come with stones and a selectively green car. / I’ve set aside a weekend for crying and sleeping,” the poem begins. Indeed, it would be a treat to spend a weekend or longer with this book. Crying might result as some of the subject matter is heavy, but Gearen leads us to a tentative redemption in the end: her final poem, called Aubade, mentions “the morning’s promise,” and foretells a more sanguine future.
Richard Georges Make Us All Islands
Published 2017. Paperback, 86pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615274 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, 2017.
"Singing ‘light into bleakness,’ in vivid poetic language that shakes us out of apathy, Georges’ harsh and lyrical hymns portray the painful beauty of the Virgin Islands and Caribbean archipelago. Searching wherever indelible traces of history may be found, in the undersea abyss of multiple shipwrecks, cholera coasts, accounts of disaster and cruel murder, hillside ruins, heaps of stones, and shifting sands, the poet brings us ancestral stories of the women of the slave ships, fishermen, migrant seasonal workers, cane cutters, cocolos, coal burners, domino players and family members who at great cost and risk have endured. If history divides us, these poems of the past and present, as strong as boiling bush and as honest as jumbie truths, have the power to revive, and, perhaps, even, connect us." —Loretta Collins Klobah
Jim Goar The Dustbowl
Published 2014. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848613218 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Dustbowl
is a collection of serial poems that intertwine Arthurian legend and Dust Bowl Americana with fragmented memories of Arizona and California. The book's polyphonic voices conjoin perpetually questing knights and those journeying west into a single body. The Guardian's review of Dear World & Everyone In It
complemented the anthology for its inclusion of pieces from this "expertly challenging" sequence.
Anne Gorrick Kyotologic
Published 2008. Paperback, 108pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610040 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Anne Gorrick's first collection is a remarkable reworking of themes from the ancient Japanese Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.
"A densely beautiful book, young poems growing out of old poems, vines round an ancient pine. Imagine language talking to itself, all skin and rain and blossoms, scattering like leaves, seeming to remember some other country some other time—yet always being vividly present like a strange food you've taken into your mouth that's too sweet—but after a moment, just barely sweet enough, as we get to like this world Gorrick has incarnated for us here, safe in our deepest feelings." (Robert Kelly)
Anne Gorrick I-Formation (Book I)
Published 2010. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611184 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"In this book, Anne Gorrick writes poems of heft and delicacy. Each is constructed as a musical thinking through of an idea, as she builds a poem through deft and fluid repetition and musical ways of speaking. Even though these poems exist here only on the page, her voice, unique and personal, is present in each, and it guides us through her surreal landscapes of concrete abstraction with gentle tenacity and a rich and vivid vocabulary. Everything exists, in her poems, as a thought, as a vision, as a sound through space, and all at once. What a poem must do to justify its existence is to surprise us with its necessary inevitability, which is what these poems do piece by piece, one by one, and together." —Geof Huth
Anne Gorrick I-Formation (Book 2)
Published 2012. Paperback, 150pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612372 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
I-Formation in its entirety is comprised of four separate groups of poems, that when ordered in a particular way, tell a Genesis story. The first book (2010) begins in a garden and ends with an incarnation of Eve meeting her coeval. The break between books expresses a break in the story. Something has happened. Something perhaps as simple as eating an apple. The second book addresses the things we are left with once we are thrown out of the garden: co-identity and depiction, the self and landscape. The first section of the second book is a collection of poems based on anagrams of people’s names, and forms a relationship map of this poet’s life. The final section is comprised of poems based largely on the Hudson Valley landscape, a world exterior to and surrounding the garden.
Derek Gromadzki Horology
Published 2021. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617407 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Horology
teeters on the brink; “faience” and “plumbago” float to the surface like literary flotsam but the vessel is never quite sunk. Words are strung like trade beads carrying faint signs of meaning along with their chief task of beauty, a miraculous conjuration of song. As you look at the collected bones and feathers in this Kunstkammer, suddenly it wriggles free, not a shipwreck, not an archive, but a living creature. The clock and the poem are as close as we have come to making parts cohere into a living organism. Imagine Verlaine transcribing lyrics for an opera drawn from a Burtonian study of seafaring and clocks: “a chanticleer of fo’c’sle songs” indeed." —Martin Corless-Smith
Carol Guess My Father in Water
Published 2011. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611856 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"My father hovers in the aperture of a glistening window, suicide botched by his mother's ghost. Numbers from his slide rule pause on the sill, fallen by chance into a brilliant formula."
This interlinked collection of lyric essays documents Carol Guess's relationship to her father, a brilliant scientist whose intensity and eccentricity shaped family life in humorous and often lonely ways. In musical prose, writing as a poet, teacher, and queer activist, Guess describes a life lived in service to language. At once accessible and enigmatic, funny and somber, My Father In Water
is a haunting examination of the impact of family history on one artist's journey.
Anthony Hawley Forget Reading
Published 2008. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700707 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In Forget Reading, Anthony Hawley's second collection for Shearsman Books, poems speak up despite themselves, and in doing so they affirm poetry's slight, subterranean power inside a culture of overwhelming and decadent ugliness. Due to the very odds stacked against them, these beautifully moving poems enact a radical little protest, unheeded by the majority rule.
Anthony Hawley The Concerto Form
Published 2006. Paperback 8.5x5.5ins, 92pp. £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9780907562849 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Born in 1977, Anthony Hawley grew up in New England and was educated at Columbia University. He is the author of the chapbooks Afield (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Vocative (Phylum Press), and his poems have appeared in various publications including Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, The Paris Review, 26,
and Volt. He currently lives in Nebraska with his wife and daughter and is on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Concerto Form
is his first full-length collection.
Michael Heller Beckmann
Variations & other poems
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610873 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's description of Achilles's shield or Keats' Grecian Urn, is here transformed in Michael Heller's meditations in poetry and prose on work by the painter Max Beckmann. Heller navigates, sometimes with Yeats as his Virgil, through a gallery of Beckmann's pictures, seeing them as uniquely bringing home contemporary civilization's catastrophic impulses ("as if days were not for sanity"), impulses at once horrific and unsettling yet strangely beautiful and restorative.
Michael Heller Speaking the Estranged — Essays on the Work of George Oppen
Published 2012. Paperback, 175pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20. 2nd, Expanded Edition
This expanded edition of
Speaking the Estranged
brings together Michael Heller's writings on the work of George Oppen (1908–1984), one of America's most remarkable and distinguished poets. Heller's essays, written over the last twenty years since his ground-breaking book on the Objectivist poets,
Conviction's Net of Branches , cover all of Oppen's poetry and how other poets and critics have read him. They touch on all phases of his career, from his early roots in the Objectivist tradition to his abandonment of poetry for political and social activism in the 1930s and his coming back to poetry in the 1950s. Oppen's work won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and is considered by many to be one of the most extraordinary and original bodies of poetry in the twentieth century.
Michael Heller Uncertain Poetries — Selected Essays
Published 2012. Paperback, 256pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $23. 2nd Edition
ISBN 9781848612181 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
These essays concern the uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry. Dealing with such major figures as Pound, Stevens, Moore, Oppen, Duncan, Niedecker, Lorca, Rilke and Mallarmé and of poets in more contemporary modernist and post-modernist lineages, they examine how these poets articulate, virtually in the same breath, both affirmation and doubt concerning poetry, history and knowledge.
Michael Heller Within the Inscribed — selected prose and conversations
Published 2021. Paperback, 214pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848617513 [Download a PDF of the Introduction to this book here.]
From his pioneering studies of the Objectivist poets and of uncertainty and representation in modernist and contemporary thought, Michael Heller has been seeking to expand the terms of how we read and discuss poetry. In these recent writings, at once revelatory and precise, Heller deepens the exploration, articulating a sense of poetic language’s inscription and trace, often with respect to aspects of Judaic thought and Buddhist influences, the “poetics” of Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, the Objectivists, Oppen and Reznikoff, H.D., Robert Duncan, and other twentieth century writers and thinkers. As Xavier Kalck writes in his Foreword to this collection, Heller’s concern is with “the sacred as a function of language and as an objective in his poetics.”
Janet Holmes The ms of m y kin
Published 2009. Paperback, 180pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £14.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848610354 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
If you write out "The Poems of Emily Dickinson" and erase some of the letters very neatly and precisely, you can get to The ms of m y kin — the manuscript of my kin, as it were; the manuscript of my family. It might also be said to be the manuscript of my kind. (Janet Holmes)
Brandi Homan Hard Reds
Published 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700813 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A first collection for Chicago-based poet and small-press publisher, Brandi Homan.
"Like the stream of cut-paper hearts in her Valentine Factory, Brandi Homan's poems are connected 'at the blade's edge,' are all 'hard reds'—an intelligent and imaginative woman coming to terms with desire. This collection is an exciting 'kick-start' for her electric voice." — David Trinidad
Brandi Homan Bobcat Country
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610859 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country
is the unholy love child of Lynda Barry and Ween. Fabulously honest, surprising, and hilarious, these poems are a TGIFriday's extravaganza of retarded American enthusiasm, deftly rendered. Homan loves the "Fuck yeaaaah!"s our culture hoots just before it drives its rental car off a cliff. Her details are so spot on, their mere presence relieves us of the need for contrived, 'poetic' resolutions. That's what makes the poems true—there are no easy answers in them. They make me proud to be a woman ......" —Jennifer L. Knox
Judith Infante Love: A Suspect Form — Heloise and Abelard
Published 2008. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700820 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Heloise and Abelard—since the 12th century writers, artists, and musicians have been inspired by the details of their story—famous philosopher and his pupil, forbidden love affair, abandoned son, castration, monastic life, and heresy trials.
In this remarkable collection Judith Infante gives us a series of poems that form a verse novel about the medieval lovers. The poems make clear how bound was their relationship to its period, yet capture the intensity of their timeless and conflicting emotions.
Heloise and Abelard became different people as their story moved from romance to life apart and finally to their individual deaths and the mysterious change that implies. By interweaving Ovid’s myth of Atalanta with the story of Heloise and Abelard, Love: A Suspect Form calls attention to the many and often disorienting aspects we present to each other.
Nazifa Islam Forlorn Light — Virgina Woolf Found Poems
Published 2021. Paperback, 96pp, A5 format, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848617841 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“To write these poems, I select a paragraph from a Woolf novel—The Waves or Mrs. Dalloway—and only use the words from that paragraph to create a poem. I essentially write poems while doing a word search using Virginia Woolf as source material. I don’t allow myself to repeat words, add words, or edit the language for tense or any other consideration. These poems are simultaneously defined by both Woolf’s choices with language as well as my own. They feel like an homage to this writer I so admire as well as a way of authentically expressing my lived experience.” —Nazifa Islam
Kent Johnson Homage to the Last Avant-Garde
Published 2008. Paperback, 120pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781905700950 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Homage
contains a wide variety of poems and prose, representing all strands of Johnson's work: versions from the Greek, traduced to an extraordinary degree; anti-war poems, overflowing with rage; stink-bombs tossed in the direction of some famous poets, mostly meant in an ironic, joshing way. But not all. And then there are memoir
poems of persons met and places visited, that may well be documentary in nature, or may also be artfully disguised. Memory is, after all, an awkward thing, and not to be trusted, just as politicians and their henchmen are not and there is no irony in their treatment in this book. No, sir, none at all.
Kent Johnson Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House
Published 2020. Paperback, 90pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616998 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Johnson’s poems are like unchained pit bulls tossed into a school yard – somebody is going to get bit." — Ron Silliman
The provocative position of Kent Johnson in American poetry over the past two decades—as both its foremost gadfly and its anti-institutional conscience—is unequalled. Admired and abhorred in like measures, he is the author, translator, or editor of more than thirty titles of poetry, criticism, nonfiction, and metafiction. This collection represents a follow-up to his widely reviewed 2008 classic from Shearsman, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde. He has recently retired, after many years of teaching English and Spanish. In 2004, he was named State Teacher of the Year by the Illinois Community College Board of Trustees. From 2016 to 2020, with Michael Boughn, he oversaw the highly controversial Dispatches from the Poetry Wars.
Kent Johnson Nuper Verba
Published 2022. Paperback, 90pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848618572 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“If, as it has been claimed, the satirist is a left-handed writer, the analogy seems made for Kent Johnson’s inimitable, fearless and much needed contribution – the one-in-ten, or more like one-in-a-thousand corrective, antidote, ballast, counterpoint, to the worst excesses and insincerities of western poetry’s decadence and pomposity. In Nuper Verba – the Latin title is apposite – he takes aim at poetry’s postures of antagonism, even as it drains the last best wine and lounges on a mouldering couch of bursaries. Truth-sayer or holy fool, insider’s outsider or witnessing spirit, the moral force of Johnson’s project, as well as its sublime humour, shines like so many corroding rays, here reaching moments of unanticipated lyrical brightness. He’s never been funnier or more strangely moving. Refusing consensus and mentioning the unmentionable remains the true poet’s calling, and Johnson’s poetry reminds us of this, with the beautiful sobering chill of genuine veracity.” —Sam Riviere
Cralan Kelder Give Some Word
Published 2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611443 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
A is for Accessible. Give Some Word
is a somewhat irreverent book of poems. Cralan Kelder believes that people who read poetry should be delighted, not confused. Poems are not riddles. The poetry in Give Some Word
is no exception; equal parts distilled language, contrary, and pushing everyday language out of conformity. Humor lurks just below the surface in many these shorter, condensed poems.
Nancy Kuhl The Wife of the Left Hand
Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700066 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In her first full-length collection of poems, The Wife of the Left Hand, the poet Nancy Kuhl explores the lyric possibilities found within the sometimes narrow space of the domestic interior, caught between the quotidian and the uncanny. In language that is by turns sensual and spare, elegant and oneiric, the images and music of this collection reveal and recast the daily ambiguities of living with others, "the fragile arrangement all blue / at the seams," and the uncertain line between the hidden and the apparent, like a "house / with its unswerving spine exposed."
Nancy Kuhl Suspend
Published 2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848610866 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"Taking place within a lunar month, and likewise, within a menstrual cycle, Suspend
is deeply concerned with pregnancy, sexual desire, self and self-doubled and doubling. In this collection of poems, fragments, prose, askew children's verse, and insomniac's jottings, Kuhl privileges the difficult inquiry of the whole book over the jewel-like quality of her 'finished verse'. The work often feels manic, written down as quickly as the unconscious gives its fragments of memories connected to an insomniac's roving/raving mind; then, in extraordinary counterpoint, the poems assemble the urgent fractures of the diary-like notes into verse of remarkable formal beauty and integrity." —Dan Beachy-Quick
Nancy Kuhl Pine to Sound
Published 2015. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614123 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“If an echo is a ‘pining into sound,’ Kuhl rewrites it in a way that gives pining uncommon agency — this is not a ‘pining away’ but a pining toward, a pining into. It’s vigorous; it’s vivid, but nonetheless graceful in its manipulation of the layers and columns of the human psyche. Rangy in her syntax, tight in her rhythms and sounds, Kuhl exposes the intricacies of daily acts, events and sights, slowly extending them out beyond their own boundaries to where ghosts whisper into open mouths and the ‘past is wild but almost / over.’ This exceptional poet hits a new height with each new book, and the view from this one is great!” — Cole Swensen
Nancy Kuhl On Hysteria
Published 2022. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848618374 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
On Hysteria, Nancy Kuhl’s fourth collection of poems, is a lyric engagement of voice, memory, longing, and the fraught ways we speak ourselves. In conversation – and sometimes conflict – with Sigmund Freud’s foundational text of psychoanalysis Studies on Hysteria (1895), Kuhl reframes the discourse surrounding cases of so-called hysterical girls and women, expanding and shifting given narratives. With intensity and emotion, On Hysteria examines how ideas may be converted into physical symptoms, thought collapsed into sensation, articulation fused with forceful action. Above all, Kuhl’s poems consider ways suffering itself becomes unbounded expression: “Her pain is a voice / pulled by handfuls / from the throat.”
Maryrose Larkin The Name of This Intersection Is Frost
Published 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611177 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Monochromatic kaleidoscope of winter. Limited components revolving, generating a shifting mosaic that replicates the passage of the winter days themselves. A modeling of time, its observable passage through the observations of weather, interior and exterior. Seasons, shifting in microns, are the recurring vocabulary of time itself. This limited vocabulary, the vocabulary of nearly identical instants, forms the center of time's concealed circularity. To make this available in language requires a particular patience of attention. There are few elements on the face of the traditional watch — the action is circular and repetitive. The elements of late winter — what we can perceive — do perceive — arrive, if closely observed, on a sparsely adorned cylinder. There is a mathematics to the passage of time — a sense of odds — percentages — chances — intrinsic in time's forward motion. Yet, how can this strange, wondrous circularity be expressed on the page — where word must follow word — the project of the poem may be to arrange a paradox we live beside in such a way that we can enter it, inhabit it, view it intentionally, from the inside.
Mary Leader Beyond the Fire
Published 2010. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611221 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The work in Mary Leader's third collection, Beyond the Fire,
does not conform to any one habitation, nor aesthetic persuasion, nor name. On the contrary, just about every poem invents its own territory and its own terms. Some poems are straightforward narratives, while others repeat spells and castings. Many are figural; some are classical; some even aspire to anonymity. The book is designed to range the globe and fathom the centuries, albeit, in the end, the poet's settlement is but a momentary locality.
Mary Leader She Lives There Still
Published 2018. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615847 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
“Leader has more ideas than she knows what to do with. And each of her poems offers something new: together they adumbrate an enticing and insistently personal way of looking—both at the sights the world offers, and at the people with whom she hopes to share them.” —Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry
“Leader owes some of her intimacy with the American sublime to Dr. Williams but much more of it to her own quite remarkable sensibility, which is one of the most self-possessed in contemporary poetry.” — The New Yorker
Mary Leader The Distaff Side
Published 2022. Paperback, 92pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618060 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Oklahoman Mary Leader, after years as a lawyer, published her first book of poems at age forty-nine. That was Red Signature, which — having been selected by Deborah Digges for the National Poetry Series — was published by Graywolf Press. Besides the red signature "Mary Leader" on the title page, the book made way for signatures of other Oklahomans, such as Clara C. Hake, a woman imagined within a list of lowly items and homely documents, inventoried in the law-inspired poem "Probate." Twenty-five years on, Leader's fifth collection, The Distaff Side, resumes the work of making present signatures of persons often missing from the record, particularly women and, among those, particularly women who, time out of mind, have made their marks using a distaff and a spindle: to spin yarn, and knit it up; to spin thread, and sew it up. The book discusses needlework, which is one thing, but moreover, the book depicts needlework in lines and pages that resemble it. The phrase "the distaff side" also refers to the maternal branch in genealogy, and Mary Leader's personal heritage is traced here, especially in the most direct link, to her mother, Katharine H. Privett, an Oklahoman and, very much in her own right, a poet.
Anna Leahy Aperture
Published 2017. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848615168 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
As the title suggests, Aperture
opens gaps through which to see and hear the lives of imagined and actual women. This collection becomes a stage on which these women perform, and the poems play with notions of staging, with how we present ourselves and how we are perceived and represented by others. The stories and voices in Aperture
“bend and come back again,” telling the truth slant.
Karin Lessing Collected Poems
Published 2010. Paperback, 210pp, 9x6ins, £14.95 / $24
ISBN 9781848611313 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Karin Lessing — born in Germany, raised in the USA, and resident for decades in France — is one of those poets who exist outside the tides of literary fashion, and indeed beyond the ken of most readers, although she has a devoted band of supporters, among whom your editor at Shearsman Books must be counted. Her last two collections were published here, and this survey of her entire writing career, which brings together all of her books, together with a number of uncollected poems, is vital to reaching an understanding of her work.
Karin Lessing In the Aviary of Voices
Published 2001. A5 Paperback, 62pp. OUT OF PRINT
ISBN 9780907562313.
In the Aviary of Voices was Karen Lessing's third full-length collection, and her first for ten years. INCLUDED IN THE COLLECTED POEMS above.
Karin Lessing The Winter Dream Journals
Published 1991. A5 Paperback, 40pp. £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9780907562801
The second full-length collection by this woefully under-recognised expatriate American poet, following on from her early Montemora collection, The Fountain (1982). INCLUDED IN THE COLLECTED POEMS above.
John Levy 54 poems, selected and new
Published June 2023. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618909 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The earliest poem in this book (‘The Sleeper’s Blue Shirt’) is from 1972. The most recent poems are from 2022. Ken Bolton edited this selection, drawing from five books and one chapbook.
“John Levy has a magical deftness that makes world upon world appear out of nowhere. He marvels at the most ordinary circumstances and things (waiting for a bus, wrong numbers, accordion straps, a hammer, the letter K) and when he does so, there is nothing else in the universe. The work is meticulous, precise yet always unlabored. The poems come from Paris, Kyoto, Greece, Tucson, Edinburgh (among other places), and the poet has worked as a public defender. Reading Levy’s wondrous poems, I say to myself again and again, “so this is how it’s done!” His book is like no other.”—John Martone
erica lewis murmur in the inventory
Published 2013. Paperback, 96pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612389 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
"murmur in the inventory
haunts and sweeps the reader up to move its half told lessons along. Erica Lewis's lines are deftly derailed and as quickly reattached. Each word can be taken as a single beat or allowed to fuse into pure separate lines of music (allowing for escape). "We live in a place of corridors/ it is true and not real and you turn the corner." I feel this inventory as a petrified forest of high tension, rapture and incision, a trifecta that activates all physical endings. The line is cut sometimes mid-way in order to answer back immediately, truly a poetics of the exposed nerve. A gorgeous and arresting book." —Cedar Sigo
