2027 Titles — in date order

Published January 2027. Paperback, 82pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.

ISBN 9781837380596

A captivating collection from poet/translator Brian Sneeden that turns the ordinary into the fantastic.

Described by Kiki Petrosino as "a beautiful invasion," Year of the Labyrinth draws upon Sneeden's experiences as a translator and multilingual writer working in language preservation to explore boundaries between speech and ritual, myth and ecology. "In these fiercely imagined poems," Petrosino writes, "our speaker passes between seemingly fixed physical and conceptual worlds--human/animal, past/present, forest/field. This voice finds lyric power in liminal spaces--in 'the pollen line' and 'a change of wind.' With the speaker, we travel through mirrors to places where you might grasp an animal if only 'by the curve of its name,' and where 'a bird that ha[s]n't yet been invented' may sing. This poet's imagination makes porous the landscapes we thought were familiar." Kelly Link, in her judge's citation for the Barthelme Prize, writes: "How wonderful it is, the marriage of economy and the arcane, as if a story could be a kind of lozenge that, slipped under the tongue, estranges us from our idea of how both life and language work. Every sentence has the effect of an acupuncturist's needle, small pricks that let in strange energy."

Published January 2027. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380565

Published January 2027. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380664

Published January 2027. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380602

Translated from Spanish by Anna Crowe
Published January 2027. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380435

A Year and Three Months brings together the poems written by Luis García Montero after the death of his wife, Almudena Grandes, due to cancer, in November 2021. They are poems which describe, with delicacy and an emotion at times contained, at others unrestrained, the trajectory of the illness and the couple’s combined resistance, and the loneliness and intensity of living through it. In this collection the poet unfolds the story of their final summer stroll, the unexpected diagnosis, the many ostensibly grim and intimate aspects of care, New Year’s Eve in hospital, the crushing pain of grief, the empty house, the memories summoned by loss, the moments in a long love story brought together here in all their significance.

        This is perhaps the most moving of all Luis García Montero’s books of poems for its restraint, for its calm evocation of moments of great anguish, and for the immense tenderness in the way he records and celebrates the shared life and memory of one who is no longer there. I believe that these are poems which, in their honesty, plain-speaking, and unsentimental approach to illness and death, offer powerful consolation and sympathy to all who have to face loss and grief at some point in our lives.

Translated from Arabic by Ghareeb Iskander with Hassan Abdulrazzak. Bilingual edition
Published January 2027. Paperback, 122pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380657

Abdul Wahab al-Bayati (b. Baghdad, 1913, d. Damascus, 1999) was one of the Iraqi poets who revolutionised Arabic poetry in the mid-20th century, moving into free verse and away from classical forms. Living in exile for much of his life, or as a diplomat when in favour, he became a kind of ambassador for Arabic literature in the West. Author of over 20 volumes of poetry, only one volume has previously appeared in English, with which this edition does not overlap.

Published February 2027. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781837380558

Published February 2027. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 978183730466

For this book-length sequence, Perril turns his poetic attention to the emergence of musique concrète, courtesy of Pierre Schaeffer and others, in the late 1940s and 1950s. This was a moment full of excitement, and heresy, that redefined musical activity and opened a path to an electronic music then yet to be trodden. The title Just About Music hums and puns with Schaeffer’s self-scrutiny of being concerned ‘solely’ with music, and yet also barely approximating accepted notions of it; in a new art form where previous understandings of musicianship, instruments, performance, and listening were all in flux. Perril riffs on W.S. Graham’s exemplary sequence ‘Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons’, concerning the eighteenth-century flautist’s treatise on teaching the transverse flute – a playful ruse allowing the poet to muse on poetry and poetics. 

Published February 2027. Paperback, 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380619

Published April 2027. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.50 / $18

ISBN 9781837380695

The first double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2026 contains poetry by

Translated from Spanish by Tony Frazer

Published 2026, date tbc. Paperback, 208pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $24

ISBN 9781848618640

Altazor is increasingly seen as one of the key works of the 20th-century Hispanic avant-garde in poetry. Apparently put together over several years, it looks back in part to the ground-breaking volume Ecuatorial (1918), imbibes a number of futurist tropes from that same era, takes in the surrealist wave that took hold in the mid-1920s, and ends with shattered pieces of language that appear to admit of the impossibility of finishing the work coherently, or even of coherent speech, while also implying a more pessimistic view of the world than that which Huidobro would have espoused as a younger man during the heyday of Cubist Paris. In amongst all this, the poem’s eponymous protagonist flies high and low, taking in the heavens and the depths of hell, following both Dedalus and Orpheus. While the book evidently left his contemporaries puzzled, and had minimal initial impact, Altazor today looks uncannily prophetic, even post-modern, in its emphasis on verbal games and trickery, on defamiliarisation, and being comfortable with a lack of any conclusion. Huidobro even boasted of this lack in a letter to Luis Buñuel, referencing Lautréamont and Rimbaud as other “failures” who sought no closure, and whose company he was glad to keep.

Poem texts translated from French by Tony Frazer. With an essay by Rosa Sarabia and a dozen full-colour images.
Published 2026. Date tbc. Paperback, ca. 96pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618206

In 1922, in Paris, Vicente Huidobro exhibited a dozen painted poems: poster-sized, these exotic creations were an attempt by the poet — who was close to a number of the leading painters of the time — to take the Cubist leanings in his verse to their logical extreme. Here Apollinairean calligrammes — and Apollinaire was one of Huidobro's first friends in Paris — move from being pictorial poems to being pictures in their own right. The volume includes all the recreated versions made for the 2001 Salle XIV exhibition at Madrid's Reina Sofía Museum, along with with as many reproductions of the originals, and their drafts, that we have been able to assemble.

First UK edition. Translated from Russian by John E. Bowlt.
Published 2026; exact date tbc. Paperback, 284pp, 9 x 6ins, £16.95 / $25

ISBN 9781848619623

This is a memoir, first published in 1933, of the author's Futurist years in pre-WW1 Russia and Ukraine. While there were other memoirs by the participants in the frenetic avant-garde of those years, most are short and give little real impression of the scene. Livshits (1887–1938), a poet of Ukrainian Jewish origin, was invited to join the young Hylaea [Гилея] grouping, later styled "Cubo-futurist", by its self-appointed leader, David Burliuk (1882–1967); other members were David's brothers, and the experimental poets Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), Aleksei Kruchyonykh (1886–1968), and poet-playwright-artist, Vasily Kamensky (1884–1961). The latter was born in Perm, Mayakovsky in Georgia, and Khlebnikov in Astrakhan, whereas the others were all born in Ukraine. In those days of the Russian Empire, all the participants in the movement spoke Russian as a first language, wrote in it and – in the case of Livshits – translated into it. The group collaborated closely with the major artists and composers of the era – Malevich, Exter, Rozanova, Matyushin, Lourié to name just a few – published wild manifestos, artist's books, gave readings that were more like late-20th-century happenings, and generally shook the intellectual world up. The movement burned brightly, but only for a short time, and was destroyed by war, civil war, revolution and exile. Livshits himself was to fall afoul of Stalin's purges in the 1930s, but he left us this remarkable memoir, without which the era would be much hazier. This translation first appeared almost 50 years ago in the USA, and was reissued in a fully-illustrated edition St Petersburg some 20 years ago, but is finally available in the UK and the US again in this new edition.