Latest Releases

Published October 2025. Paperback, 112pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619654

This is Australian poet Jane Frank’s third collection of poems but her first in the UK. It transcends terrestrial boundaries, exploring profound connections between the natural world and human experience. Ranging from confessional and ekphrastic poems to surreal evocations of Australian place that express strong emotional connection, these poems maintain a rich dialogue with visual artists and writers of the past and present. Whether she is writing about hang gliding with Leonardo da Vinci, being lost inside a rainforest snow globe or witnessing a pinball game between galaxies, this is tactile and visual writing that bristles with striking language. Moving through her poems is like walking through a forest of imagery, layered and verdant, and is also an expedition through the fabled landscape of imagination and memory where love, longing and loss are familiar compass points. Her poems are often meditations on the joineries of life, the spaces where is meets was and might have been. The introspective is illuminating but there is also an understanding of the ways in which the poet seeks to garden her own life in the face of personal and planetary challenges. The poet is accessible, empathetic and yet displays masterful form and craft. She makes us want to go with her, share the journey, wherever it ends.

Published October 2025. Paperback, 78pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619852

In this notable debut collection, Christina Hennemann charts the complex terrain of growing up, becoming, and belonging. Her keen ecological awareness infuses the work with vivid landscapes from both her German roots and Irish home. With unflinching honesty and lyrical precision, she explores the intersections of gender, class, and sexuality against the backdrop of intergenerational trauma. She weaves personal history with ancient mythologies and archetypes into poems with a vatic and haunting nature. Characteristic of her poems is her playful approach to bilingualism, while her feminist-psychoanalytic lens brings sharp focus to the personal and political dimensions of growing up in a dysfunctional family amid global upheaval.

Published October 2025. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £9.95 / $17

ISBN 9781848619999

The second double issue of Shearsman magazine for 2025 features poetry by Ophira Adar, Alan Baker, Ian Davidson, Adam Flint, Alexander Gaul, John Goodby, Lucy Hamilton, Ellen Harrold, Lynne Hjelmgaard, Peter Larkin, John Latta, Dorothy Lehane, Iain MacLeod, Colin Campbell Robinson, Peter Robinson, Biljana Scott, Aidan Semmens, Penelope Shuttle, Andrew Taylor, Steven Taylor and translations of Catullus (by Jennifer Ingleheart), of Dmitry Blizniuk (by Yana Kane), of Vicente Huidobro (by Tony Frazer), and of César Vallejo by Valentino Gianuzzi.

Shearsman Library Vol. 23. Edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron & Andrew Zawacki. [Second edition; first UK edition]
Published September 2025. Paperback, 740pp, 9 x 6ins, £29.95 / $42.50 (paperback); £39.95 / $52.50 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781848619944 (paperback); 9781848619982

Sobin's Collected appeared posthumously in 2010, and has been unavailable for some two years. Given our long association with the author — his work appeared in the very first issue of Shearsman magazine in 1981, and we published chapbooks of his work at various times in the 1980s and 1990s — we are delighted to be able to bring this important volume back into print. Sobin was an American poet of a very singular kind, but allied in some ways to the Objectivists and to poets such as Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Crucially, he spent most of his adult life in Provence, and counted France, and French poets, among his most important influences. This makes him stand apart from his US contemporaries and leaves him in a slightly odd corner of the literary landscape. What is not in doubt, however, is the quality of the work. Sobin was a major poet, by any standard.

Sobin “is a master of hoverings, hesitances, etched definitions of movement, soundings, fine measurings of air. He leads the mind into a poetry of great distinction, awakening the spirit to a world of errant clarities renewed.” —Robert Duncan

“I can’t think of anyone in our time who has trod the via negativa so determinedly and with such purpose. The texture of the ground, but also the grain of what lies beneath it. And so, the miracle, as Oppen would say, that there is a music in all this, in all this nothing, our brief glimpse.” —Michael Palmer 

Published September 2025. Paperback, 112pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380091

Kenny Knight’s fourth collection was written between 2020 and 2022, a time when ordinary towns frequently resembled ghost towns, the author’s native Plymouth being no different from anywhere else in this regard. His surreal mix of deadpan narrative, skewed memory and keen observation – the latter made poignant by the great deterioration in the author’s sight over recent years – is sui generis. For the reader, it’s a delightful road to be on, and Kenny Knight the ideal travel companion.

Edited and introduced by Paschalis Nikolaou

Published September 2025. Paperback, 158pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781837380039

Things We Leave Behind gathers poems from all five of Josephine Balmer’s acclaimed volumes, excavating a common ground between the distant past and our contemporary world. From the universal grief that echoes down through the centuries in both her ground-breaking first collection, Chasing Catullus (2004), and later Letting Go (2017), to the mirroring of ancient exile and modern warfare in The Word for Sorrow (2009), her poetry finds urgent new ways to voice ‘the sound of words you can’t say’. The Paths of Survival (2017), shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize and a Poetry Book of the Year in The Times, explores the fragility of the written word; Ghost Passage (2022) mines the debris of everyday lives from the ‘dark earth’ of Roman London, rendering them fresh and familiar. Edited and introduced by Paschalis Nikolaou, this Selected Poems also includes new verse from Balmer’s work-in-progress, Archaeology of Home, unearthing the devastating effect of dementia on families past and present. Things We Leave Behind offers new insights into Balmer’s poignant and compelling work, celebrating her ‘necromancer’s task of easing breath / into moss-flecked lungs of our long, long dead’.

Published September 2025. Paperback, 108pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619968

This follows a 12-year year halt, and the first product of the new phase was Feathers on Glass (2023). 'A history of shopping' was started around 2003 and falls on both sides of the gap. That series deals with exchange and retailing, as a successor to a prolonged interest in manufacturing and production. “The Goths as inventors of tourism”, deals with the legend of wealth and culture as the motive which leads barbarians from the world-periphery to surge towards the Mediterranean as if to a shopping mall. The flow of goods lifts people off their feet, is like a river of dreams. 'One absolutely perfect cultural object' describes perfection as what you can't have and which still motivates the life cultural. A poem deals with William Hallam Pegg, a Nottingham lace designer and communist who, during the Depression, produced a monumental design for an allegory of Want and Plenty, as a pattern to be realised in Jacquard lace. 

In central place is the long poem 'Calendar Rite', an autobiographical sequence constructed in a double line like two banks of a river; the poem is strung out along a V where there is a hinge and poems along each arm repeat each other’s themes in an altered or defective symmetry. The speaker is faced with a cold river and has to shed every possession to get across it without being swept under. He remembers everything which must be lost, which stored heat and which generated heat. Scenes of unresolved conflict play out in a dream landscape. The rival journeys of several hundred poets are recounted as a race between so many ships, in which almost all are wrecked, their anatomies altered by terminal stresses. Past performances are recalled along with past poems, realised as chains of irrational and compulsive images. Irrational motives for symbolic action are re-voiced as the mineralisation of cherished objects, a personal museum of impassioned seizures which are models for verbal objects, moving from inside to out and surrounding the speaker. The choices infallibly leading to rejection of collective and imposed imagery make for a history of dissidence, symbolised in a tiny 5th century papyrus codex, written at millimetric scale to be easily hidden during police raids, and read with the help of a convex lens. The hidden is boundless and space vanishes into the cracks. 

Edited by David Miller & Richard Leigh. Revised edition.

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

ISBN 9781837380138

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, 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.

Published August 2025. Paperback, 99pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619951

Jofrid Gunn tells the story of a woman who came from the Faroe Islands in the 16th century to marry into the Clan Gunn, in the north of Scotland. Inspired by the glimpses of lives found in archives, this is a biography in poetry. Each poem can be read individually, but when put together they tell the story of Jofrid’s life – descriptions of the incredible natural places she lived in, the power of the sea, her family life, encounters with the huldufólk or 'hidden people' of legend, and her small part in the clan battles and blood feuds of the time. 

Published August 2025. Paperback, 114pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781837380008

While editors and publishers in the past have always described my short form poems as haiku, I prefer to call the majority of the short form poems of the type in this collection as One-strike Poems, since the term ‘haiku’ relates to a very different cultural and historical mind-set and developmental literary process. And long before my awareness of haiku, the source of my short form poems came originally from my interest in the chants and prayers of indigenous peoples, and then later, graffiti on the walls of the various cities I either lived in or visited. Resulting in my early poems often being of an aphoristic or epigrammatic nature.

              My poems at this time were also sourced in my encounters with an object or event, when a poem might immediately and spontaneously arise out of the experience and be committed, just as it is, to any piece of paper to hand, in that moment. And in the few instances where any change was made afterwards, it was only in the moving of a word or two from one line to another, or on very rare occasions, perhaps the changing of a single word.      (Malcolm Ritchie)

Published August 2025. Chapbook, 34pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781837380046

Under Tainaron recasts elements of the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice and is rooted in the locations where that mythology originated. On that basis Corcoran’s libretto discloses its poignant relevance to our present world.



Published July 2025. Paperback, 136pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848619821

"Eliza O’Toole’s landmark work is much more than a ‘word-hoard’ of and around the farmland of East Anglia, the territory of Constable and Gainsborough. This is an angular book of linguistic inventiveness and substance, at once multilingual and polyphonic employing different registers to accommodate a divergent range and depth of agricultural, botanical, lepidoptera, historical and etymological knowledge. Each poem is in the present with an imposing sense of the past being visible within a mutable natural world. This is a mapping of place that digs deep down into the biochemistry and fragility of the land, wildlife, plants, insects, animals and farming life. In its slant investigation of the layered traces of time worked into the land, it considers whether current farming practices are obsolete by asking obliquely, ‘can the land afford a farm’ or ‘has the farm already been bought’? As a lexical analogue of the land, it delivers a vibrant, messy, stricken world of polychronic becomings. This is an extraordinary achievement." —David Caddy

Published July 2025. Chapbook, 32pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95

ISBN 9781848619975

“The sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat…” (Book of Revelation). Poems of comfort and cream, of Lima, intimes, and home; still lives, still life, still alive… Bookish ruts, mystic prisons, spangles, cathedrals, islands, marshes; expungement; release. A small collection of torment and consolation.