Latest Releases

Published April 2024. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618916 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

In her second collection Kate Ashton examines woman’s estate from the warring perspectives of creativity and procreativity. Born into her biological destiny, woman is harnessed at adolescence to procreative necessity; she may refuse, she must choose. But what if the unconscious leads inexorably towards another equally all-consuming fate, as artist?

The overwhelming gravitas, beauty and mystery of motherhood is presented in all its extraordinary, paradoxical reality. Here is an often jarringly intense examination of emotive and moral integrity, refuting soft focus. Dawning awareness of a distinctly matrix-centred spiritual reality; one that can find no foothold, no expression within any hierarchical system.

A majestic alternative worldview: primeval, anarchic, ambivalent, self-referential and innately free of masculine conceptualisation. One in which acts of artistic creation and procreation may either brutally oppose or embrace each other, but which always involve a tender agony of love.

Published April 2024. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619449 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Simon Perril’s new collection gathers two discrete works:

45 Days in the Company of Robert Walser turns to the Swiss modernist as guide to the inner workings of educational workplaces, and the lived experience of them. Alchemy, according to Jung, was a quest for individuation. Inhabiting Walser’s pioneering absurdist work exploring a school for servants, Perril finds alarming parallels between the transformative ‘suffering’ of metals in their journey to a higher state, and contemporary workplace rhetorics of self-development and transformation. 

Sun  Deck  Set  Cogitation collapses the boundaries between reading and writing by playing with two texts by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The first is a forensically detailed moment by moment account of a sunset written in 1935 while en route from Marseilles to Brazil; the second his account of a 1941 voyage escaping occupied France alongside fellow refugee André Breton. As Perril explains, ‘I inhabited Lévi-Strauss’s text like it was a ship’s deck I was walking across or around.’ The poet takes impetus from an early epiphany Lévi-Strauss had looking at the formal intricacy and structural play of dandelion seed heads that give rise to other forms. His poetic ‘treatment’ of the source texts scatter and recombine word-seeds in surprising combinations: blowing on a seed-head and spreading palimpsestic filaments.

Published April 2024. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £9.95 / $17

ISBN 9781848619241.

The first double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2024 contains poetry by Rizwan Akhtar, Isobel Armstrong, Jack Barron, Leia K. Bradley, Tom Cowin, Claire Crowther, Katy Evans-Bush, Mark Fiddes, Giles Goodland, Sylee Gore, Ellen Harrold, Jill Jones, Norman Jope, Karin Lessing, Bernadette McCarthy, Katherine Meehan, David Miller, Sophia Nugent-Siegal, Joseph Nutman, Anne Pelletier-Topping, Janet Sutherland, Helen Tookey, Jay-Philippe Vibert, Margaret Ann Wadleigh, Mark Ward & Alex Wong.



Published April 2024. Paperback, 244pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619456

Addiction is the story of a double struggle. It is about the effort of Jeremy Hooker and his wife, Mieke, to combat the alcoholism that eventually contributed to her death. Based largely on the poet's journal, it contains poems written as acts of survival. The book concludes with a sequence of elegiac poems.

Translated from Spanish by Kathleen Snodgrass

Published March 2024. Paperback, 172pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23. Bilingual edition.

ISBN 9781848619302

“Luis Miguel Aguilar’s work is a conversation, between the past and the present, between the educated and the lay person, between useless details and essentials, between erudite data and the vital impulse. It is not a spur of the moment conversation, but one that arises from the serenity of an extended, long-term approach, tying up loose ends and giving rise to complete, complex and exalted theories.” —Juan Manuel Gómez 

“There are poets who are born mature, broad-browed and clear of vision. Luis Miguel Aguilar is one of them. Each book is a gift full of surprises, riddles and enigmas that invite the reader to reread, drop by drop, to savour them: there is an erudite, cultured, referential voice; then there is a more melodic, simple voice that recites ballads and popular songs; and finally there is the intimate monologue, which deals with the familiar terroir and tries to decipher the meaning of life, with all its furies and its sorrows.” —Arturo Dávila

Published March 2024. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619197


“Indelible and deeply resonant, Linda Black’s Interior demonstrates a poet at the peak of their powers. This collection constitutes a wondrous neo-Cartesian studio evoking an ars poetica that emphasizes language as both trace and palimpsest. Here, Black explores the intersections of writing, desire and creativity in marvellously fragmented and Frankensteinian ways. In haunting poems, the poet-artist is resurrected as defamiliarizing and uncanny: ‘I rest / my hand outside / myself & draw’. Interior gives priority to improvisation and bricolage, and a questioning semiotics, as it lightly and powerfully sketches the body’s relationship to the world. Black employs compelling dualisms to engage with both the breakdown and articulacy of an utterly contemporary language fully attuned to the ineffable: ‘In my heart my two loves merge. This is all I can tell you.’” —Cassandra Atherton

Published March 2024. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619166

‘Sarah Cave’s collection is, by turns, sinuous, troubling and sensuous. Its central conceit – that Jesus’s sister Yona is cursed to live until his return at the Apocalypse – is certainly ambitious, but is handled with real tenderness and humanity. Indeed, Cave interrogates the registers of queer desire, of faith and of bodies without ever losing sight of what Donne calls “Love’s mysteries”.’ —Rachel Mann

‘Witty and sensual, The Book of Yona invites us into intimacies of the feminine, queer and sacred with a holy jouissance. With verbal elasticity and playful fusions of time and geography, Sarah Cave traces a via negativa through secret truths that were there all along in the half-light of cedar branches, the archives, the anchorage… read and be drawn into companionship, divine encounter, love.’ —Phoebe Power 

Published March 2024. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619210

"Intense questioning marks the poems of this deeply engaging collection as it addresses the separations between aspects of the self, between past and present, between one’s ideals and the actual world: 'the struggle to find words for what’s happened to the country that grows more unfamiliar with time.' Death, war, loss, and confusion run through complex poems that also evoke the contrary in mountains and trees and flowers – the in-betweenness of experience is very much a motif here. The strength of these poems is their clarity and surety while addressing complex issues and the often painful nature of current life. The poems are also deeply aware that all we have to think with is language and the book captures both the slipperiness and beauty of language: 'sentences running together the vowels in a wet shimmer.' With sharp intelligence, The Distances calibrates the distances that separate and haunt us." —Martha Ronk

Published March 2024. Paperback, 118pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619432

Colours Nailed to the Mast is not so much a memoir as an immemoir, fretting at traces, gaps and losses that start to expose absence as the productive heart of my poetic life; for with poetry I have needed to fill in the absence, not by attempted retrievals as in some of these essays, but by linguistic analogues that aspire to life, golems if you like. The unexpected absence of the final step. At best the poems emerge from my immemory into independence, even if their familial resemblance may be obvious. More so than some of what I seem to recall here, sharing the dream quality that has most intrigued me – a conviction my dreams have been annexed by another consciousness with a history and range of knowledge I cannot claim.  (John Wilkinson)

Translated from Spanish & French by Eliot Weinberger

Published March 2024. Paperback, 124pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618190

This volume presents the 4 chapbooks published by Huidobro in 1917–18 and offers, at first glance, an odd mixture. Chronologically, we have El espejo de agua, written in Spanish in 1914–16, ostensibly first published in 1916, but, to all intents and purposes not available until 1918;  Ecuatorial (written in Spanish, although the author also made a French version, Équatoriale, which is believed to be later), Hallali and Tour Eiffel, the last two being composed in French. The last two publications from this period, Hallali and Tour Eiffel—both marked by textual experimentation—were important for the rising wave of the new Spanish avant-garde. The 4 chapbooks were bookended, so to speak, by the French-language volume Horizon carré and the Spanish-language collection, Poemas árticos (both already issued in this series). This second, expanded edition now offers the French version, Équatoriale, as well as alternative versions of Tour Eiffel in both French and Spanish.

Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte
Published March 2024. Paperback, 110pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619333

From 1912 to 1920 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote copiously but published no books. Later she would claim that at least three major collections had fallen by the wayside in those years. The poems translated here offer readers the flavour of those vanished books, covering the period roughly from her daughter Alya’s first birthday to the Tsar’s abdication in March 1917 and the summer which followed. They reflect involvements with the poet Sonya Parnók and with a married economist of Polish origin, Nikodim Plutser-Sarnya. But there are also evocations of the Middle East, tributes to the Jews and to her sister Asya, plus a cycle in which Don Juan accosts Carmen and is buried in a grave amidst the Russian snow. Generally appearing in English for the very first time, they include several of the most accomplished and unforgettable poems Tsvetaeva was ever to write.

Edited by Colin Bramwell, with Gerda Stevenson

Published February 2024. Paperback, 136pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619050

Aonghas Macneacail (1942–2022) originally intended for this book to signal his return to the literary sphere after a long convalescence. As his health declined, he was clearly comforted by the fact that this work would see the light of day: we talked together frequently about it, until he was unable to do so. He wanted this book to correct the perception of himself as a Gaelic writer, first and foremost. Gaelic was one of his three languages – Scots and English were the others. Before we started working on the book, I visited him to interview him about the project. We both agreed that a book of English-language work might have some public utility, as proof that Scottish writing is polyglot by nature. We thought that correcting the public perception of him as a Gaelic poet entirely would also be to correct perceptions of division in the language situation in Scotland more generally. Now that the process of putting this book together has come to an end, the truth of that feels clearer, to me. Aonghas’s work looks forward to a future where, as he puts it in ‘last night’, ‘my language [will] embrace / its sister tongue’. As with any bilingual poet, the point must be made: his English poetry drew from the same source as his Gaelic work. It is the intertwining of tongues which creates the tenor of the work. Aonghas’s famous poem ‘tha gàidhlig bheò’ (‘gaelic is alive’) ends with the following lines: ‘ach dèan dannsa dèan dannsa / `s e obair th`ann a bhith dannsa’. ‘be dancing be dancing / it is work to be dancing’. Of course the dance will require a partner. English was a partner-language to Aonghas’s Gaelic. Scots was another. This linguistic hybridity defines him, as much as it defines the general tenor of Scottish literature today. —from Colin Bramwell's introduction

Published February 2024. Paperback, 478pp, 9 x 6 ins, £19.95 / $37.50

ISBN 9781848619227

Toby began writing poetry while in high school and he continued writing it while in the U.S. Navy, and later as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He received a Master’s Degree at Long Island University in New York, after which he taught Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His first novel was The Life of Jesus, and this was followed by eleven books of fiction and many books of poetry. He considers himself a poet who also writes fiction, and now, in his mid-eighties, he continues in the writing of both arts. 

       The first books included in this volume were published by Walter Hamady’s Perishable Press, and these were followed by books issued by Karl Young’s Membrane Press, Barlenmir House, Doctor Generosity’s Press, Landlocked Press, Permanent Press, and New Directions.

Published February 2024. Paperback, 480pp, 9 x 5ins, £19.95 / $37.50

ISBN 9781848619234

Though there were poems written in the years between 1983 and 94, most of my efforts in those eleven years were spent writing fiction. Four novels were published in that time, and come 1994 I found I had enough poems for a book, Unfinished Building, and while I continued with fiction, I also found I was writing poetry, and since then I have managed to work at both arts. This volume, including the aforementioned book, also contains the collections Human Nature (New Directions), Darklight and Death Sentences (both from Shearman), and See / Saw, published here for the first time.  (Toby Olson)