Becka Mara McKay A Meteorologist in the Promised Land
Published
March 2010. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610835 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In these poems, the reader carries her "lone heartbeat" while sifting through the confusion of a psychically, physically rubbled world. There is loss, transcribed literally as spaces in the poems, because in truth there is no "word-/for-word translation." But in this stark landscape there is the "body's strange persistence"; there are meanings made and held close, words collected "in secret". Language equals transcendence and the bridge on which all other things are built: "tell me// your name."
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Christopher Middleton Poems 2006-2009
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 182pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611276 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Christopher Middleton remains, in his eighties, a restless and inventive poet of the very first order. This volume contains three complete collections, and is the first to be published since the author's Collected Poems were published to considerable acclaim in 2008.
"Middleton is amongst the most consistently inventive, original, and audacious of the so-called 'experimental' or 'innovative' poets of these past twenty-five years." —August Kleinzahler, Threepenny Review
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John Muckle London Brakes— a novel
Published
January 2010. Paperback, 296pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611016 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Tony Guest is welcome wherever he goes—a motorcycle courier on a big bike, picking up and dropping all manner of urgent parcels, letters, and duly getting his dockets signed. In July he rides in a sweat bath, in February the rain is freezing needles, the roads of the West End are greasy with spilt diesel, glistening tracks of motorcyclists weaving through them like slug trails. But where is Tony going? What is contained in his ultimate mystery packet? What becomes of lost friendships? He chases his shadow-man through an illusory maze of skid pans, trick exits—the answer to every question he can frame seems to lie behind every locked door in London town. Set in the 1980s, London Brakes shows us an England of conflicting loyalties and low impostures—a city divided by inequality and opportunism: a place where forgetting is compulsory and paranoia is the outcome. Tony is determined to cut through it all to the truths of his life.
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Alasdair Paterson On the Governing of Empires
Published
April 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611160 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Finding Kristallnacht in an optician's chart, flushing heresy from a Michelin guide, procuring princesses courtesy of furnishings catalogues and constructing a guided tour of Bedlam from the names of British moths, Alasdair Paterson brings a Byzantine range of techniques—cut-and-mosaic, palimpsest dialectic, diplomatic transplant and induced mutation—to a series of innocent texts, most without a prior thought of poetry in their heads, to build an indispensable vademecum for the imperially and post-imperially inclined.
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Translated
from Spanish by Kristin Dykstra
Published November 2010. Paperback, 150pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611320 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Born in 1964 in Havana, Cuba, Omar Pérez is a member of the first generation to live fully under the auspices of the island's post-1959 government: children raised to envision the present and future in socially experimental terms. His second poetry collection, Oíste hablar del gato de pelea?, or Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat?, offered a mature, yet unusual, response to that ongoing challenge. The book was originally published by Letras Cubanas in 1998.
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The Phoenix Nest (1593)
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 8(The Tudor Miscellanies Vol.
2) 
Published January 2010. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17 / Can$18.95
ISBN 9781848611047[Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Following the publication of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557, a number of other such miscellanies appeared, none of them especially significant from an artistic point of view. In 1593, however, a still-unidentified gentleman known only by his initials (R.S.) published this relatively slim, well-printed and well-designed compilation, which included works by a number of significant poets of the day—those identified are Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Lodge, Nicholas Breton, Robert Greene, George Peele, the Earl of Oxford, Sir Edward Dyer, and Thomas Watson. It is almost certain that the Phoenix of the title was Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), to whom the first three elegies in the book are dedicated.
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Elaine Randell Faulty Mothering
Published
February 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610897 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Faulty Mothering is based on my work with families but focusing on mothers in particular who are experiencing problems in attachment to their children. A backdrop to such difficulties maybe poverty, mental-health problems, substance misuse, adoption, fostering, domestic violence or being poorly parented themselves. I am interested in the capacity of people to change and in the courage of children and young people who adapt and survive adversity. The poems explore those issues. The 'Song Cycles', which make up the rest of the book, come from a call and response, using sentences sometimes written by others in novels which have resonated for me. — Elaine Randell
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Peter Riley The Derbyshire Poems
Published
September 2010. Paperback, 204pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £11.95 / $18.50
ISBN 9781848610927 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The Derbyshire Poems brings back into print two important earlier collections (from the 1970s and 1980s) by Peter Riley, Lines on the Liver and Tracks and Mineshafts, together with the explanatory essays that were originally issued alongside the latter volume, and an uncollected sequence from the same period which belongs with the other poems dealing with the Peak District. This is an important volume which provides the background to Riley's later forays into writing in, of, and under the landscape.
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Peter Robinson (ed.) An Unofficial Roy Fisher
Published
June 2010. Paperback, 222pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $22
ISBN 9781848611207
Published to coincide with the poet's eightieth birthday, An Unofficial Roy Fisher is a showcase for the work of this extraordinary contemporary British poet. It begins with an unofficial gathering of poems and prose pieces covering the writer's entire career, none of which are to be found in The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955–2005, his most recent collected edition. This is followed by a poet's poets' anthology of works by Fisher's extensive international following among significant contemporaries and juniors, including Fleur Adcock, Peter Didsbury, Laurie Duggan, August Kleinzahler, R.F. Langley, Angela Leighton, John Matthias, and John Wilkinson. This is followed by a group of informal essays and other prose comments on working with Fisher or Fisher's work by, among others, Charles Lock, Peter Makin, Ralph Pite, Richard Price, and David Wheatley. All in all, An Unofficial Roy Fisher is a must-have for the poet's fans, new and old, with its sequence of intriguing insights into the oeuvre and abiding significance of this unique literary artist.
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Jaime Robles Anime Animus Anima
Published
March 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610880 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Anime, Animus, Anima is formed from a mass of influences but most prominently from three classic Japanese anime. Parts One and Three evolved from imagery in Ghost in the Shell (1995, Production I.G.), an adaptation of the manga of the same name by Masamune Shirow, directed by Mamoru Oshii and written by Kazunori Ito, and Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, Production I.G. and Studio Ghibli), written and directed by Mamoru Oshii. Part Two evolved from imagery in Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995, Gainax), both the television series and the movies, written and directed by Hideaki Anno. Imagery from Cowboy Bebop (1998), the Japanese animated television series directed by Shinichiro Watanabe and written by Keiko Nobumoto, appears throughout all three sections.
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David Sergeant Talk Like Galileo
Published
April 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611122 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Eggs, woods, football, nations, smoke, birds (common, other), tigers, murders, curtains, rivers, chromosomes, love (varieties of), Welles (Orson), pints, bras, partings, heartings, breakings, namings, and diverse other matters, in poetry free and formal, within this book, the first from its author.
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Steve Spence A Curious Shipwreck
Published
February 2010. Paperback, 88pp, 9x6ins
ISBN 9781848610972 £8.95 / $15 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Shortlisted for the 2010 Forward prize for Best First Collection
These are poems which are ostensibly about pirates yet the subtext has a satirical impulse which is fueled by surrealism and a delight in upending the apple cart. The author revels in entertaining juxtapositions and in breathless passages of 'stream-of-consciousness' rant, which work wonderfully on the page or performed live. While there are playful references to traditional pirate mythology these poems also talk about the times we live in, from the joint catastrophes of global warming and the credit crunch to popular culture and media trivia. Wordplay is endemic. There's more than a hint of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in this book, as the shadowy figure of Alice entices the pirates into further adventures, yet the ships run aground or never manage to leave the harbour. Absurdity is the keyword, as a sense of fun runs parallel to a skewed commentary on topical events.
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Mervyn Taylor No Back Door
Published
September 2010. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611412 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
There are those inhabitants of islands who say they "'fraid sea",
meaning they have an abiding respect for the restless ocean and for whatever
lies unseen past the horizon. 'Sea have no back door' is the phrase they use
to indicate the idea of no return, of being swallowed up in the vastness of
a world outside the shore that is a natural boundary.
These poems chart
the journeys, metaphorical and literal, of those who stay, and those who go,
and the dilemma of the immigrant soul trying to live in two places at once.
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Scott Thurston Internal Rhyme
Published
April 2010. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848610903 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Internal Rhyme is a sequence in four parts which continues the author's preoccupation with time and process as compositional elements. The book also explores how meaning can change when viewed from different perspectives as each poem in the book can be read vertically as well as horizontally. The subjects and themes are diverse and include poems responding to Blake, Klimt and Twombly alongside refigurings of the theoretical works of Alain Badiou. This is Scott Thurston's third collection with Shearsman.
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Shearsman
Classics Vol. 7 (The Tudor Miscellanies Vol. 1)
Published January 2010. Paperback, 300pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $21 / Can$22.95
ISBN 9781848611030[Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
1557 saw the publication of this ground-breaking volume: the first printed anthology of contemporary poetry in English. The book is built on a foundation of two recently-deceased aristocratic poets, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who had by their example given English poetry a new direction, above all with the introduction of the Petrarchan sonnet, but also with the invention of blank verse. The anthology was to have an enormous impact, giving witness to the latest developments in English verse for a far bigger public than would have been the norm in the mid-16th century, when manuscripts tended to circulate anonymously and in a small circle of gentlemen.
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Lars Amund Vaage Outside the Institution — Selected Poems
Translated
by Hanne Bramness and Frances Presley
Published April 2010. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610750 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The first collection in English by Lars Amund Vaage, one of the most significant poets and novelists of his generation in Norway.
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Robert Vas Dias Still • Life
Published
May 2010. Paperback, 134pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611214 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
In this generous assembling of work from the past ten years, the Anglo-American poet Robert Vas Dias explores meanings and resonances inherent in art and the suggestive implications of objects which both make up the quotidian and help to define us. This is a poetry of 'domestic tranquillity' as well as chaos, of the absurd and the numinous, of the serious and comedic.
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Alan Wall Doctor Placebo
Published
October 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611337 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Doctor Placebo finds himself at the end of the western intellectual tradition, and on certain mornings feels almost as old. As a medical practitioner he broods about his patients; as a writer he broods about his poems. Sometimes the two intermingle and he can't remember whether he is a doctor moonlighting as a poet, or a poet moonlighting as a doctor. One thing at least remains constant: moonlight. The end of the western intellectual tradition, like Placebo himself, is insomniac.
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Shearsman
Classics Vol. 6. Edited by Michael Smith.
Published January 2010. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611023 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) was born at Allington Castle in Kent. he studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and served King Henry VIII in various capacities both at home and abroad. he was knighted in 1535, but was imprisoned in the Tower a year alter following a quarrel with the Duke of Suffolk, but also perhaps because of suspicion that he had been the lover of Anne Boleyn—a woman he had known for many years and with whim he had been linked at one time. He was released the same year, then was to fall afoul of authority on at least two further occasions, but was again pardoned. He is remembered today as one of the most important poets in the English language, and as the man who brought the sonnet into English, with his spectacular imitations and re-creations of Petrarch. His work is broader than that, however, and he also showed himself to be a fine elegist and satirist, as well as a lyric poet of the very first order.
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Michael Zand lion: the iran poems
Published
May 2010. Paperback, 98pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611153 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
lion is a narrative of sorts, but it is necessarily disruptive and disjunctive: ideas and literary structures are questioned, even the fixed boundaries of language itself are challenged. lion is a meditation on the role of kinship in the development of cultural identity and the importance of rites of passage as cultural artifacts in the modern world. Ultimately, lion is about the impact of the loss of identity amongst the Iranian diaspora, and the creation of myths of origin.
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