Launch reading by Matthew Caley, MacGillivray and Abigail Parry (improved audio version) Bloodaxe Books 2023-11-28 | Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Matthew Caley, MacGillivray and Abigail Parry celebrating the publication of their new poetry books.They will be reading live and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live.To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links.Matthew Caley: To Abandon Wizardrybloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/to-abandon-wizardry-1335MacGillivray: Ravage: An Astonishment of Firebloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/ravage-1336Abigail Parry: I Think We're Alone Nowbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/i-think-we-re-alone-now-1334*Matthew Caley: To Abandon WizardryTo Abandon Wizardry, Matthew Caley's seventh collection, explores a world where it's harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not. Where our political and cultural reality seems so unbelievable, we search for a plot and find one that comes from the Harry Potter playbook. Our sky proves CGI, our touchstones AI. Our screens full of wonders, our streets full of decay. We could nod at Deep Fake, QAnon, fake news versus the 'truth' of official news, all manner of waning national myth, or ponder the elsewhere we always think of escaping to, that will no doubt prove equally illusory.Set within this almost parallel world, To Abandon Wizardry features a long central poem where someone enjoys an alfresco Americano in Shadwell, London, while in dialogue with a mesh-protected sapling that transmits all the polyglot talk of the city. Either side of this we encounter revenants, disembowelled wizards, talking horses and flying houses, as the book forges its aesthetic out of the simulation, hyper-association, and over-stimulation of living in the 21st century. And it's all true.*MacGillivray: Ravage: An Astonishment of FireRavage: An Astonishment of Fire draws together MacGillivray's extensive research into the life and work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge, who vanished from Eilean a’ Bhàis in the Outer Hebrides in 1961. Comprising two previously unpublished manuscripts by Norge, Optik: A History of Ghost (1950) and Ravage (1961), this collection also includes rare original material, giving insight into Norge's troubled existence and mysterious disappearance.Optik: A History of Ghost, the opening triadic poem, typifies Kristján Norge's early work and is a meditation on Greek optics, horary ghostliness and illumination by fire. Composed in 1950, Optik draws on letters twelve and thirteen of the correspondence between scientist-inventor Sir David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott on natural magic, to isolate the figure of 'John Christ' whom Norge positions as a visionary homunculus created from the saline ash of alchemical phantasmic experiments.Ravage is the centrepiece of the collection, a numinous tract written in the months preceding Kristján Norge's disappearance in 1961, convinced he was a demon. Washed up in a storm, subsistence on Eilean a’ Bhàis had proved an increasing strain on Norge, who felt his self-exiled status intensively. In response to both this isolation and the unexpected revelation of his demoniacal status, Norge evolved a complex amnesiac system, aware that if only he could forget this singular aspect of himself, then release might follow. Inevitably cryptic, this Norgesian schema has been recovered from fragments concealed at ten sites on the Scottish island. Norge's impression of Eilean a’ Bhàis as an underworld threshold leant weight to his suspicion that the island was indeed attracting the Sluagh nam Marbh, or Host of the Dead, a Gaelic westerly wind of malign voices that allegedly imparted the knowledge of his demonhood to him.*Abigail Parry: I Think We're Alone NowI Think We’re Alone Now was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.I Think We’re Alone Now is Abigail Parry's second collection and is shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2023. Her first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019.
Launch reading by Marie Howe, Philip Gross and David Constantine Bloodaxe Books 2024-10-09 | Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Marie Howe, Philip Gross and David Constantine, celebrating the publication of our three new November titles. All three poets will be reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early November). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:David Constantine: A Bird Called Elaeusbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/a-bird-called-elaeus-1358Philip Gross: The Shores of Vaikusbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-shores-of-vaikus-1359Marie Howe: What the Earth Seemed to Saybloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/what-the-earth-seemed-to-say-1360
Launch reading by Nia Broomhall, Niall Campbell, Sarah Holland-Batt, Laura Wittner & Juana Adcock Bloodaxe Books 2024-09-25 | Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Nia Broomhall, Niall Campbell, Sarah Holland-Batt and Laura Wittner, plus Laura's translator Juana Adcock, celebrating the publication of our four new September titles. All the poets will be reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. Nia Broomhall's pamphlet Backalong is the winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition. To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early September). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:Nia Broomhall: Backalongbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/backalong-1370Niall Campbell: The Island in the Soundbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-island-in-the-sound-1361Sarah Holland-Batt: The Jaguarbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-jaguar-1353Laura Wittner (trans. Juana Adcock): Translation of the Route / Traducción de la rutabloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/translation-of-the-route-1354
James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 Bloodaxe Books 2024-09-20 | Join Bloodaxe Books and Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts to hear readings from the winners and shortlisted poets in the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize.Launched in 2021, the James Berry Poetry Prize is Britain’s first and only poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Its joint organisers are Newcastle University and Bloodaxe Books. The three equal winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 each receive year-long mentoring during 2024-25 plus £1000 and publication of their debut book length collections with Bloodaxe in 2026. The 2024 winning poets will be mentored by poets Patience Agbabi, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and Jacob Sam-La Rose, one of the judges of the 2021 inaugural prize. There are five judges for the 2024 prize: Neil Astley, founding editor of Bloodaxe Books; poet Imtiaz Dharker, holder of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and Chancellor of Newcastle University; poet Theresa Muñoz, director of Newcastle Poetry Festival and James Berry Poetry Prize manager; Nathalie Teitler, diversity specialist and director of The Complete Works; and poet and professor Major Jackson, who holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in the US and has worked with Newcastle University on previous projects including Freedom City.The winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize were Kaycee Hill, who was mentored by Malika Booker; Marjorie Lotfi, mentored by Mimi Khalvati; and Yvette Siegert, mentored by Mona Arshi. Kaycee Hill’s debut collection, Hot Sauce, and Marjorie Lotfi’s The Wrong Person to Ask were published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2023. The debut collection by the third winner, Yvette Siegert, will be published in 2025. Marjorie Lotfi's The Wrong Person to Ask was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for Winter 2023 and is on the shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2024 and the longlist for the poetry category of the Saltire Book Awards 2024.More information about the James Berry Poetry Prize can be found here: bloodaxebooks.com/inclusive-publishing
Launch reading by Dzifa Benson, Nia Davies and Helen Ivory Bloodaxe Books 2024-09-03 | Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Dzifa Benson, Nia Davies and Helen Ivory, celebrating the publication of their new books. All three poets will be reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early October). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:Dzifa Benson: Monsterbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/monster-1357Nia Davies: Votive Messbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/votive-mess-1356Helen Ivory: Constructing a Witchbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/constructing-a-witch-1355
Abigail Parry: I Think Were Alone Now (at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2024) Bloodaxe Books 2024-08-02 | Abigail Parry read poems from her second collection I Think We're Alone Now, published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2023, at the Newcastle Poetry Festival. I Think We're Alone Now was Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 and for the English-language Poetry Award in the Wales Book of the Year 2024.
Carolyn Forché: In the Lateness of the World (Newcastle Poetry Festival 2024) Bloodaxe Books 2024-08-02 | Carolyn Forché read poems from her fifth collection In the Lateness of the World (Bloodaxe Books, 2020), followed by some new poems, at Newcastle Poetry Festival.In the Lateness of the World (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/in-the-lateness-of-the-world-1059) is a dark book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history. Forché imagines a place where 'you could see everything at once… every moment you have lived or place you have been'. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and 'there is nothing that cannot be seen'. In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.
Fleur Adcock: Collected Poems (at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2024) Bloodaxe Books 2024-08-02 | Fleur Adcock read poems from her Collected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books in February 2024, at Newcastle Poetry Festival. Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006.Collected Poems (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/collected-poems-1338), the first complete edition of Fleur Adcock's poetry, was published on her 90th birthday, superseding her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with the addition of five later collections published by Bloodaxe, Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid's Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems.
Imtiaz Dharker: Shadow Reader (at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2024) Bloodaxe Books 2024-08-02 | Imtiaz Dharker read poems from her seventh Bloodaxe collection Shadow Reader, published in May 2024, at Newcastle Poetry Festival.Shadow Reader (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/shadow-reader-1348) is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy. The poems bind this looming curse to the occupation of countries, the earth and its creatures, those who own the story and those who redirect it through art or artifice. ‘Does the warp look back at the one who is weaving and say, This is not how I remember it…?’ Imtiaz Dharker’s collection pays attention to wilful erasures, exclusions and also to places of sanctuary. This is poetry as music, as momentum, as the texture and taste of languages, joyously sensuous and rich in images. While it acknowledges the everyday and its shadows, it is also an irreverent, playful celebration of life.
Jane Clarke: A Change in the Air (at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2024) Bloodaxe Books 2024-08-02 | Jane Clarke read poems from her third collection A Change in the Air, published by Bloodaxe Books in May 2023, at Newcastle Poetry Festival. A Change in the Air was Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023, the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2024 and the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023, as well as being Longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023.A Change in the Air (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/a-change-in-the-air-1322) is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place. In luminous language her poems explore how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in the face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences these intimate poems of unembellished imagery accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love poems to our beautiful, fragile world.
Patricia Smith reading at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2024 Bloodaxe Books 2024-08-02 | Patricia Smith read a selection of poems from her previous collections at Newcastle Poetry Festival. Bloodaxe published her collection Incendiary Art (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/incendiary-art-1206) in the UK in 2019.Patricia Smith is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Unshuttered (Triquarterly, USA, 2023) and Incendiary Art (Triquarterly, USA, 2017; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2019), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. Her other collections include Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, and Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology – New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir.
Jessica Traynor: Pit Lullabies Bloodaxe Books 2024-07-16 | Jessica Traynor reads and introduces seven poems from her collection Pit Lullabies (2022). These intimate, visceral and often wickedly funny poems journey through the darker days of new parenthood, teasing out the anxieties which plague us when night falls. Pit Lullabies is Jessica Traynor’s third collection and her first from Bloodaxe, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Ireland’s Dedalus Press.Neil Astley filmed Jessica Traynor reading from her new collection at her home in Dublin in April 2024. The poems she reads here are: ‘Anatomy Scan’, ‘In the Birthing Room’, ‘If You Can Tame a Wildcat You Can Raise a Baby’, ‘Pit Lullaby, V’, ‘Pit Lullaby, VII’ and ‘Lullaby’. For more on the book see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/pit-lullabies-1293
Launch reading by Matt Howard and Katrina Porteous Bloodaxe Books 2024-06-27 | Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Matt Howard and Katrina Porteous, celebrating the publication of their new books. Both poets will be reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early June). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:Matt Howard: Broadlandsbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/broadlands-1350Katrina Porteous: Rhizodontbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/rhizodont-1351
Launch reading by Amanda Dalton, Imtiaz Dharker and Katie Donovan Bloodaxe Books 2024-05-22 | Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Launch reading by Amanda Dalton, Imtiaz Dharker and Katie Donovan, celebrating the publication of their new books. All three poets will be reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early May). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:Amanda Dalton: Fantastic Voyagebloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/fantastic-voyage-1349Imtiaz Dharker: Shadow Readerbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/shadow-reader-1348Katie Donovan: May Swimbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/may-swim-1347
Brenda Shaughnessy: Liquid Flesh Bloodaxe Books 2024-05-04 | Brenda Shaughnessy is one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. Spanning twenty years and five collections, LIQUID FLESH: New & Selected Poems (2022) introduces readers outside the US to her work. Since debuting with the sexy swagger of 1999’s Interior with Sudden Joy, Shaughnessy has honed a poetic voice rich with contradictions: her poems are simultaneously tricky and blindingly honest, sensual and grief-stricken, coy and utterly self-possessed. She is a moralist with a profound sense of play, taking the patriarchy and the malevolent powers-that-be to task.Shaughnessy is omnivorous and fearless, even as she stares down her terrors, whether the blaze, fizzle, or explosion of wild love between women, or the unquenchable pain of a son’s birth injury. She celebrates, too, revelling in the pleasures and powers of the body and the transcendence of art. Beginning with the youthful love lyrics of Interior with Sudden Joy, and opening onto the wily reckonings of Human Dark with Sugar, the unsparingly fierce mother-love and parallel worlds of Our Andromeda, the reverb-soaked coming of age and coming to consciousness of So Much Synth, the dark sci-fi prophecy of The Octopus Museum, before new poems that pay homage to women artists and their pathbreaking art, LIQUID FLESH collects an unprecedented body of work unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. It was followed by her sixth collection, TANYA (2023), published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2024.Neil Astley filmed Brenda Shaughnessy reading from her Bloodaxe titles in April 2024 during Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland. The poems she reads here from LIQUID FLESH are ‘Dancing in My Room Alone’, ‘Head Handed’, ‘Miracles’, ‘Big Game’, ‘Identity and Community’ and ‘Blueberries for Cal’. A separate video is available of her reading from TANYA in Galway (youtu.be/UTDjAIkw6cg).
Brenda Shaughnessy : Tanya Bloodaxe Books 2024-05-04 | Brenda Shaughnessy is one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. In TANYA she weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors, and circles the mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss. In this powerful gathering of poems about her own “influencers” – as well as poems on Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim and the young choreographer Lauren Lovette – Shaughnessy remembers the women who set her on her artistic path. In the title poem, she explores the eternal quality of an intense touchstone relationship with Tanya, about whom she writes, 'Everyone’s not you to me… Worth loving once, why not now?' Shaughnessy leads us down into her generative core, exposing moments of spiritual and intellectual awakening, her love of art and the written word, and her sense of the life force itself, which is ignited by the conversation – across time and space – with other women. Tanya is her sixth collection, her first since LIQUID FLESH: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), which introduced her work to readers in the UK.Neil Astley filmed Brenda Shaughnessy reading from her Bloodaxe titles in April 2024 during Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland. The poems she reads here from TANYA are ‘Saeculum’, ‘Moving Far Away’, ‘The Poets Are Dying’, ‘Afterlife’, and part XII of the title-poem ‘Tanya’. A separate video is available of her reading from LIQUID FLESH: NEW & SELECTED POEMS in Galway (youtu.be/Rns5Q0Bqfqw).
Katie Donovan: Rootling Bloodaxe Books 2024-05-04 | Irish poet Katie Donovan writes about the hungers which haunt our flesh and our fantasies, the conjunction of myth and the physical world of body and earth. Her visceral poems render new sensations, landscapes and perceptions, taking a fresh look at family and history, with daring imagery interwoven with language by turns playful and elegiac. The poems she reads here are: ‘Butter’, 'Yearn On', 'Stitching’, ‘Day of the Dead, New Orleans’, 'Rootling' and ‘Buying a Body’ from ROOTLING: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (2010). Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Katie Donovan reading her poems at her home in Dalkey, Co. Dublin, in June 2009. This film is from the DVD-anthology IN PERSON: WORLD POETS, filmed and edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). Separate videos are available of her Donovan reading from her other books, Off Duty (youtu.be/519CWidNS8I) and May Swim (youtu.be/nEVATgkq_Zw).
Katie Donovan: May Swim Bloodaxe Books 2024-05-03 | Katie Donovan reads and introduces six poems from May Swim (2024), her sixth book of poetry from Bloodaxe. By turns lyrical and sardonic, this timely collection is characteristically watery – candid and uncompromising in its refusal to inhabit the safer reaches of the shore. Themes of loss, widowhood and ageing co-exist with observations of her wild garden and its inhabitants, including a mangey fox she helps to survive.Small acts of salvage are often all that is possible, such as the permission given during the Covid-19 pandemic to go 2km from home. This allowed Donovan to swim at White Rock, her local beach, thus staying afloat through the fear of that brutal time and what came next – the death of her mother. In some of these poems the comforting delusion of rescue is highlighted as a flawed but human necessity. Other poems give voice to the remorse that is the haunting of a failed rescue.Neil Astley filmed Katie Donovan reading from her new collection at her home in Dalkey, Dublin, in April 2024 ahead of the book’s publication in May 2024. The poems she reads are ‘Two Women, One Grave’, ‘Deluge’, ‘May Swim’, ‘The Seal’, ‘Stories’ and ‘Home to Vote’. Separate videos are available of Katie Donovan reading from her earlier books, Rootling (youtu.be/UsaPJYlAo2M) and Off Duty (youtu.be/519CWidNS8I).
Katie Donovan: Off Duty Bloodaxe Books 2024-05-03 | Katie Donovan reads and introduces five poems from Off Duty (2016), her fifth book of poetry from Bloodaxe. Shortlisted for the Irish Times–Poetry Now Award, this powerful collection combines Katie Donovan’s unflinching insight into our human foibles with her exceptional descriptive gifts. The years of her late husband’s throat cancer are charted in poems by turns tender, harsh and darkly humorous. Donovan gives voice to the carer’s duty of being the one who watches, and contains, what is both a searing tragedy and a chainlink of domestic chores. Meanwhile the sulky electrician and the garrulous taxi driver are part of a cast of unlikely extras who provide a contextual chorus from the everyday world that inevitably carries on. Donovan grasps talismans of survival: birds foraging in the snow; her daughter’s singing – which lights up the hospice in midwinter – and her son’s success at soccer. The title-poem resists the classic definition of the grieving widow, instead capturing one of Donovan’s enduring motifs – the moment when the mask slips and the true human response is released.Neil Astley filmed Katie Donovan reading from Off Duty at her home in Dalkey, Dublin, in April 2024. The poems she reads are ‘Labour’, ‘Dyno-Rod’, ‘Operation’, ‘What Can I Give Him’ and ‘Off Duty’. Separate videos are available of her Donovan reading from her other books, Rootling (youtu.be/UsaPJYlAo2M) and May Swim (youtu.be/nEVATgkq_Zw).
Launch reading by Ellen Cranitch, Helen Farish and Brenda Shaughnessy Bloodaxe Books 2024-05-01 | Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Ellen Cranitch, Helen Farish and Brenda Shaughnessy celebrating the publication of their new poetry collections.They will be reading live and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live.To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early April). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:Ellen Cranitch: Crystalbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/crystal-1344Helen Farish: The Penny Droppingbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-penny-dropping-1345Brenda Shaughnessy: Tanyabloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/tanya-1346(Published in North America by Alfred A. Knopf)*Ellen Cranitch: Crystal'Utterly mesmerising... This is what poetry at its best and truest can do. A wonderful achievement.’ – Stephen Fry‘Tender and profound… honest and brave’ – Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The ReturnCrystal traces the arc of one woman’s experience after the discovery that her partner is addicted to crystal meth. In a highly original poetic act of reclamation, it plunders the drug itself and makes of it an overarching conceit to articulate the devastating impact of living with a loved one who is utterly changed. Deeply felt, tirelessly inventive, this collection gives voice to addiction’s explosive effect within a family. At the same time it speaks universally and with urgency of the power of poetry to take one through the darkest of times. Crystal is Ellen Cranitch's second collection, following The Immortalist (Templar Press), which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best Collection 2018.*Helen Farish: The Penny Dropping'As a whole, it has all the coherence of a novel; but there is so much more to this beautifully realised lyric collection of the kind that she is a recognised master of. It is a masterpiece in both forms to a very unusual degree.' – Bernard O'DonoghueThe Penny Dropping offers an account of a cherished relationship from first meeting to eventual break-up. Distance gives the writer a retrospective clarity from which she does not flinch despite its challenges (‘Look at me,’ laments the speaker in ‘Pretty Woman’, ‘stepping back into the dress, / pulling up the side zip, smoothing it down, / as though that’s all it took.’).But ultimately poems such as ‘No Point Now’ undo their own argument that the penny has dropped years too late, for the process of re-evaluating the past bestows on it a new and altered value. In ‘Films We Saw at The Phoenix’, the speaker recalls the lovers in one film whose relationship is also at an end, but who look back and ‘spread it out tenderly, the tapestry / of their love which they alone could see'. The immediate power of these poems is such that much is at stake on every page.Helen Farish won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.*Brenda Shaughnessy: Tanya'Chief among the new book’s many subjects are love, absence and loss: how to live with or without them… [Shaughnessy] writes about love as being “timelessness itself”. This is a book in which the poet’s ability “to imagine and to wonder / fiercely” never flags.' – Amy Gerstler, New York TimesBrenda Shaughnessy is one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. In Tanya she weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors, and circles the mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss.In this powerful gathering of poems about her own “influencers” – as well as poems on Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim and the young choreographer Lauren Lovette – Shaughnessy remembers the women who set her on her artistic path. In the title poem, she explores the eternal quality of an intense touchstone relationship with Tanya, about whom she writes, 'Everyone’s not you to me… Worth loving once, why not now?' We all have our own Tanya, and in this book we meet friends, mentors, sisters, lovers, who inhabit a verse classroom where Shaughnessy’s passion for literature – forged in her own formative studies, as in the poem 'Coursework' – is our teacher. In flowing stair-step tercets, Shaughnessy leads us down into her generative core, exposing moments of spiritual and intellectual awakening, her love of art and the written word, and her sense of the life force itself, which is ignited by the conversation – across time and space – with other women.Tanya is her sixth collection, her first since Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), which introduced her work to readers in the UK.
Seven poems from Soul Feast read by the poets Bloodaxe Books 2024-03-23 | Soul Feast (2024) is a companion anthology to Bloodaxe’s Soul Food (2007), offering up a further feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit, bringing hope and light in dark, uncertain times. Edited by Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce, the book was published by Bloodaxe Books in March 2024. Here seven poems from Soul Feast are read by the poets: Imtiaz Dharker: ‘Living Space’; Arundhathi Subramaniam: ‘Prayer’; Kerry Hardie: ‘Flesh’; Jane Hirshfield: ‘The Envoy’; Naomi Shihab Nye: ‘The Art of Disappearing’; Imtiaz Dharker: ‘How to Cut a Pomegranate’; Tomas Tranströmer: ‘Tracks’ (‘Spår’), translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton. The poets were filmed in London, Mumbai, Galway and Stockholm, and on Achill Island, by the editors of Soul Feast, © Neil Astley & Pamela Robertson-Pearce 2006, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2024. For more information see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/soul-feast-1341
Launch reading by Jane Hirshfield (USA) and Maria Stepanova (Russia) with Sasha Dugdale Bloodaxe Books 2024-03-20 | Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Jane Hirshfield and Maria Stepanova, plus Maria's translator Sasha Dugdale, celebrating the publication of their new books.They will be reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. The event will also include readings of poems from the new Bloodaxe anthology Soul Feast, which is also published in March 2024 and which features four of Jane Hirshfield’s poems as well as Sasha Dugdale’s translation of a poem by Elena Shvarts.To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early March). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:Jane Hirshfield: The Asking: New & Selected Poemsbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-asking-1342(Published in North America by Alfred A. Knopf)Maria Stepanova (trans. Sasha Dugdale): Holy Winter 20/21bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/holy-winter-20-21-1343Neil Astley & Pamela Robertson-Pearce (eds.): Soul Feast: nourishing poems of hope & lightbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/soul-feast-1341
Imtiaz Dharker: poems for schools Bloodaxe Books 2024-02-23 | Imtiaz Dharker reads and introduces six of her poems, four of which have been or are studied in UK schools on a number of syllabuses. These are from four of her seven collections published by Bloodaxe: ‘They’ll say, ‘She must be from another country’’ (from I speak for the devil, 2001), ‘Living Space’ (Postcards from god, 1997), ‘Tissue’ (The terrorist at my table, 2006), ‘A century later’ (Over the Moon, 2014), ‘The right word’ (The terrorist at my table, 2006) and ‘Speech Balloon’ (Over the Moon, 2014). She often includes these poems when reading to Poetry Live audiences of school students. For more information see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/imtiaz-dharker
Imtiaz Dharker: Dharker Speech Balloon Bloodaxe Books 2024-02-23 | Imtiaz Dharker reads ‘Speech Balloon’ and nine other poems from four of her seven collections published by Bloodaxe: ‘Speech Balloon’ from Over the Moon (2014); ‘Dealing with the devil’ from I speak for the devil, (2001); ‘Trust’ and ‘Purdah 1’ from Postcards from god (1997), ‘A Century Later’ from Over the Moon (2014); ‘Chaudhri Sher Mobarik looks at the loch’ from Luck is the Hook (2018); ‘In Wales, wanting to be Italian’ and ‘Undone’ from Over the Moon (2014); and ‘The trick’ and ‘This Tide of Humber’ from Luck is the Hook (2018). Neil Astley filmed Imtiaz Dharker reading poems from her books at her home in London in January 2024. For more information see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/imtiaz-dharker
Imtiaz Dharker: Shadow Reader Bloodaxe Books 2024-02-23 | Imtiaz Dharker reads and introduces a selection of poems from Shadow Reader, her seventh collection from Bloodaxe. Shadow Reader is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy. The poems bind this looming curse to the occupation of countries, the earth and its creatures, those who own the story and those who redirect it through art or artifice. All her poetry collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of the books; she is one of very few poet-artists to work in this way. This video includes some of the drawings from Shadow Reader showing their visual connections with particular poems from the book. Neil Astley filmed her reading from her new collection at her home in London in January ahead of the book’s publication in May 2024. For more information see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/shadow-reader-1348. (Warning: This video includes so-called "bad language".)
Launch reading by Fleur Adcock, Kerry Hardie and Aoife Lyall Bloodaxe Books 2024-02-21 | Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Fleur Adcock, Kerry Hardie and Aoife Lyall celebrating the publication of their new poetry books.They will be reading live and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live.To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early February). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:Fleur Adcock: Collected Poemsbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/collected-poems-1338Aoife Lyall: The Day Beforebloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-day-before-1340Kerry Hardie: We Go Onbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/we-go-on-1339*Fleur Adcock: Collected PoemsFleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships.Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She has also written movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit.This first complete edition of her poetry is published on her 90th birthday, superseding her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with the addition of five later collections published by Bloodaxe, Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid's Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining 'Against Coupling', 'Smokers For Celibacy' and 'The Prize-winning Poem' to modern classics such as 'The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers' and 'Things'.*Aoife Lyall: The Day BeforeAoife Lyall’s The Day Before beautifully captures the ordinary moments in life that crystallise in the face of crisis and threat. Focusing on the earliest weeks and months of the pandemic, these intimate and meticulous poems mark the lived experience of someone who must navigate a world she no longer understands, exploring first steps and last breaths, milestones, millstones, emigration, fly-tipping and the entire world to be found in the space behind the front door.Tender, challenging, and historically significant, The Day Before asks what it means when home is the one place you cannot leave, and the one place you cannot go.The Day Before is Aoife Lyall’s second collection, following her widely praised debut, Mother, Nature, which was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book Award in Scotland's National Book Awards in 2021*Kerry Hardie: We Go OnThis is a book about the irreducible core of what it is to be human in a world that changes constantly yet repeats and repeats. It uses images that speak to a place in us that does not depend on fashion but braves that over-used word ‘archetypal’. It is mostly specific to a landscape the author knows very well yet sometimes ventures beyond, always with the awareness that fear is our constant companion, but also joy.Its title echoes Beckett's ‘I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (from his novel The Unnameable), with something of this despair, while holding to the irrational conviction of ‘being enclosed by light’. Kerry Hardie’s work – as Claire Askew has noted – is ‘a dark and gorgeous hymn to mortality’. It recognises that all localness is part of humanness; that the dominance of one sort of humanness to the exclusion of another sort diminishes all humanness, representing both loss and the degradation of the whole. Knowing this, the poet resolves –just to go onand keep making storiesto tell to the childrenthe hungrythe huntedthe old and the hauntedto pass the timemark the hourfind the answergo on trying
Out of Sri Lanka: eight poets Bloodaxe Books 2024-02-06 | A selection of contributors to the Out of Sri Lanka anthology read their poems. Featuring readings from Yasmin V. Tambiah, Cheran, Megan Dhakshini, Sandaresee Sudusinghe, Mishal Mazin, S. Pathmanathan, Ratna Sri Wijesinghe and Romesh Gunesekera.Edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett, Out of Sri Lanka features over a hundred poets writing in English, or translated from Tamil and Sinhala. It brings to light a long-neglected national literature, and reshapes our understanding of migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. Poets long out of print appear beside exciting new talents; works written in the country converse with poetry from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Poems in traditional and in open forms, concrete poems, spoken word poems, and experimental post-lyric hybrids of poetry and prose, appear with an introduction explaining Sri Lanka’s history.Out of Sri Lanka on the Bloodaxe website: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/out-of-sri-lanka-1327
McGillivray: Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire Bloodaxe Books 2023-11-29 | MacGillivray introduces Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire and the work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge at the book's joint online launch event. The full launch video is available at: youtube.com/watch?v=nx9EuH_-vxURavage: An Astonishment of Fire draws together MacGillivray's extensive research into the life and work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge, who vanished from Eilean a’ Bhàis in the Outer Hebrides in 1961. Comprising two previously unpublished manuscripts by Norge, Optik: A History of Ghost (1950) and Ravage (1961), this collection also includes rare original material, giving insight into Norge's troubled existence and mysterious disappearance.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/ravage-1336
Marjorie Lotfi: The Wrong Person to Ask (at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts) Bloodaxe Books 2023-11-28 | Marjorie Lotfi read poems from The Wrong Person to Ask, published by Bloodaxe Books in October 2023, at the James Berry Poetry Prize winners' launch event in Newcastle. Marjorie Lotfi’s first full collection The Wrong Person to Ask (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-wrong-person-to-ask-1333) is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest. The Wrong Person to Ask is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for Winter 2023.The James Berry Poetry Prize is the UK’s first poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Organised by NCLA with Bloodaxe Books, and supported by special funding from Arts Council England, the prize was launched in April 2021. Marjorie Lotfi and Kaycee Hill were announced as joint winners of the inaugural prize in October 2021, along with Yvette Siegert, whose debut will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025.
Kaycee Hill: Hot Sauce (at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts) Bloodaxe Books 2023-11-28 | Kaycee Hill read poems from her debut collection Hot Sauce, published by Bloodaxe Books in October 2023, at the James Berry Poetry Prize winners' launch event in Newcastle. Kaycee Hill's Hot Sauce (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/hot-sauce-1332) is a searing first collection that captures the visceral vulnerabilities of navigating life on the cusp. Kaycee Hill frankly explores coming of age as a woman – and the intricacies of connection and memory – against an urban-pastoral landscape.The James Berry Poetry Prize is the UK’s first poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Organised by NCLA with Bloodaxe Books, and supported by special funding from Arts Council England, the prize was launched in April 2021. Marjorie Lotfi and Kaycee Hill were announced as joint winners of the inaugural prize in October 2021, along with Yvette Siegert, whose debut will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025.
Kaycee Hill and Marjorie Lotfi at the James Berry Poetry Prize launch event Bloodaxe Books 2023-11-28 | Marjorie Lotfi and Kaycee Hill read from their winning debut collections, both published by Bloodaxe in October 2023, at a special event held on 9 November 2023 at Newcastle University, hosted by Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley and poet and director of the Newcastle Poetry Festival Theresa Muñoz. The readings were followed by a Q&A with Neil, Theresa and the audience asking questions.The James Berry Poetry Prize is the UK’s first poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Organised by NCLA with Bloodaxe Books, and supported by special funding from Arts Council England, the prize was launched in April 2021. Marjorie Lotfi and Kaycee Hill were announced as joint winners of the inaugural prize in October 2021, along with Yvette Siegert, whose debut will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025.Kaycee Hill's Hot Sauce (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/hot-sauce-1332) is a searing first collection that captures the visceral vulnerabilities of navigating life on the cusp. Kaycee Hill frankly explores coming of age as a woman – and the intricacies of connection and memory – against an urban-pastoral landscape.Marjorie Lotfi’s first full collection The Wrong Person to Ask (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-wrong-person-to-ask-1333) is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest. The Wrong Person to Ask is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for Winter 2023.
Launch reading by Matthew Caley, MacGillivray and Abigail Parry Bloodaxe Books 2023-11-22 | A version of this video with improved audio is available here: youtube.com/watch?v=nx9EuH_-vxUJoin Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Matthew Caley, MacGillivray and Abigail Parry celebrating the publication of their new poetry books.They will be reading live and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live.To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links.Matthew Caley: To Abandon Wizardrybloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/to-abandon-wizardry-1335MacGillivray: Ravage: An Astonishment of Firebloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/ravage-1336Abigail Parry: I Think We're Alone Nowbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/i-think-we-re-alone-now-1334*Matthew Caley: To Abandon WizardryTo Abandon Wizardry, Matthew Caley's seventh collection, explores a world where it's harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not. Where our political and cultural reality seems so unbelievable, we search for a plot and find one that comes from the Harry Potter playbook. Our sky proves CGI, our touchstones AI. Our screens full of wonders, our streets full of decay. We could nod at Deep Fake, QAnon, fake news versus the 'truth' of official news, all manner of waning national myth, or ponder the elsewhere we always think of escaping to, that will no doubt prove equally illusory.Set within this almost parallel world, To Abandon Wizardry features a long central poem where someone enjoys an alfresco Americano in Shadwell, London, while in dialogue with a mesh-protected sapling that transmits all the polyglot talk of the city. Either side of this we encounter revenants, disembowelled wizards, talking horses and flying houses, as the book forges its aesthetic out of the simulation, hyper-association, and over-stimulation of living in the 21st century. And it's all true.*MacGillivray: Ravage: An Astonishment of FireRavage: An Astonishment of Fire draws together MacGillivray's extensive research into the life and work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge, who vanished from Eilean a’ Bhàis in the Outer Hebrides in 1961. Comprising two previously unpublished manuscripts by Norge, Optik: A History of Ghost (1950) and Ravage (1961), this collection also includes rare original material, giving insight into Norge's troubled existence and mysterious disappearance.Optik: A History of Ghost, the opening triadic poem, typifies Kristján Norge's early work and is a meditation on Greek optics, horary ghostliness and illumination by fire. Composed in 1950, Optik draws on letters twelve and thirteen of the correspondence between scientist-inventor Sir David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott on natural magic, to isolate the figure of 'John Christ' whom Norge positions as a visionary homunculus created from the saline ash of alchemical phantasmic experiments.Ravage is the centrepiece of the collection, a numinous tract written in the months preceding Kristján Norge's disappearance in 1961, convinced he was a demon. Washed up in a storm, subsistence on Eilean a’ Bhàis had proved an increasing strain on Norge, who felt his self-exiled status intensively. In response to both this isolation and the unexpected revelation of his demoniacal status, Norge evolved a complex amnesiac system, aware that if only he could forget this singular aspect of himself, then release might follow. Inevitably cryptic, this Norgesian schema has been recovered from fragments concealed at ten sites on the Scottish island. Norge's impression of Eilean a’ Bhàis as an underworld threshold leant weight to his suspicion that the island was indeed attracting the Sluagh nam Marbh, or Host of the Dead, a Gaelic westerly wind of malign voices that allegedly imparted the knowledge of his demonhood to him.*Abigail Parry: I Think We're Alone NowI Think We’re Alone Now was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.I Think We’re Alone Now is Abigail Parry's second collection and is shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2023. Her first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019.
Bernardine Evaristo on Mapping the Future Bloodaxe Books 2023-10-21 | Bernardine Evaristo talks about the cultural importance of The Complete Works, which she set up, and the anthology MAPPING THE FUTURE,drawing on the Foreword she wrote for the book. MAPPING THE FUTURE: THE COMPLETE WORKS POETS brings together work by all 30 Fellows of the Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme supporting British poets from diverse backgrounds. The Complete Works supported 30 poets from 2008 through to 2020, and has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. In her Foreword to the anthology, Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo explains why she was prompted to set up The Complete Works programme. A report she initiated found that in 2008 the level of poets of colour published by major presses was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry played a significant role in this transformation of the British poetry scene, producing five Forward Prize winners, two T.S. Eliot Prize and Ted Hughes Award winners, along with single prize wins for the Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have gone on to judge every major poetry award, publishing over 40 collections between them.For more information see: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/mapping-the-future-1331 and ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJYqfzvGdjA
Launch of Mapping the Future: Nathalie Teitler and Karen McCarthy Woolf with special guests Bloodaxe Books 2023-10-18 | Join Bloodaxe Books for the launch of Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets with anthology editors Nathalie Teitler and Karen McCarthy Woolf, plus special guest poets.Both editors will be discussing the anthology with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, and will be joined by special guests including Denise Saul, Leo Boix, Nick Makoha, Edward Doegar and Will Harris, who will be reading a selection of their poems from Mapping the Future. A special video of other pre-recorded readings from the anthology will also be shown as part of the launch event.To receive reminder emails for the event, please register via TicketTailor: tickettailor.com/events/bloodaxebooks/1026258. If you register to attend on TicketTailor you will receive an event link reminder by email by midday the day before the event. For those who can't make it live, the reading will be available on YouTube afterwards on this page. If you miss the registration deadline, you can still watch live via the Bloodaxe YouTube channel.To order copies of the anthology direct from Bloodaxe, please click on the links below (available via the Bloodaxe website from early October). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:UK: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/mapping-the-future-1331Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/mapping-the-future-the-complete-works/*Mapping the Future: The Complete Works PoetsMapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets is a new anthology bringing together work by all 30 Fellows of the Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme supporting British poets from diverse backgrounds. The anthology is edited by Nathalie Teitler, Director of The Complete Works, and Karen McCarthy Woolf, a Fellow of the programme who went on to edit the second two TEN anthologies featuring work by The Complete Works poets. In her introduction to Mapping the Future, Nathalie Teitler recounts the history of The Complete Works, which supported 30 poets from 2008 through to 2020, and which has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. In her Foreword to the anthology, Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo explains why she was prompted to set up The Complete Works programme. A report she initiated found that in 2008 the level of poets of colour published by major presses was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry played a significant role in this transformation of the British poetry scene, producing three Forward Prize winners, two T.S. Eliot Prize and Ted Hughes Award winners, along with single prize wins for the Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have gone on to judge every major poetry award, publishing over 40 collections between them.Mapping the Future presents new or recent work by Complete Works Fellows including Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Jay Bernard, Malika Booker, Kayo Chingonyi, Inua Ellams, Will Harris, Sarah Howe, Roger Robinson, Warsan Shire, Yomi Ṣode and Karen McCarthy Woolf. It also includes ten engaging essays re-drawing the map of British poetry, touching on some of the most significant topics of our time.*Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. She is a Fellow of The Complete Works, and was included in its first anthology, Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word (2010), edited by Bernardine Evaristo & Daljit Nagra. McCarthy Woolf edited the subsequent anthologies, Ten: The New Wave (2014) and Ten: Poets of the New Generation (2017), also co-editing Mapping the Future: The Complete Works (2023) with Nathalie Teitler, all from Bloodaxe Books. Her first collection, An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014), was shortlisted for both the Forward and Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prizes. Her second, Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet, 2017), was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.Dr Nathalie Teitler was born in Buenos Aires and holds a PhD in Latin American Poetry (King’s College London, 2000). She has run literature programmes promoting diversity in the UK for over 20 years and is Director of The Complete Works. She co-edited Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers (flipped eye, 2019) with Nii Ayikwei Parkes, and Mapping the Future: The Complete Works (2023) with Karen McCarthy Woolf. She was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, and was appointed Projects Manager for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships in 2018.
Poems from Mapping The Future: The Complete Works Poets Bloodaxe Books 2023-10-11 | Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets brings together work by all 30 Fellows of the Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme supporting British poets from diverse backgrounds.This video features poems from Leo Boix, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Ian Humphreys, Degna Stone, Rishi Dastidar, Adam Lowe, Eileen Pun, Rowyda Amin, Malika Booker, Roger Robinson, Denise Saul, Seni Seneviratne and Inua Ellams. The Complete Works supported 30 poets from 2008 through to 2020, and has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. In her Foreword to the anthology, Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo explains why she was prompted to set up The Complete Works programme. A report she initiated found that in 2008 the level of poets of colour published by major presses was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry played a significant role in this transformation of the British poetry scene, producing three Forward Prize winners, two T.S. Eliot Prize and Ted Hughes Award winners, along with single prize wins for the Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have gone on to judge every major poetry award, publishing over 40 collections between them.Hear poems from even more contributors at our live online launch event on Tuesday 17 October (7pm BST), when we will be joined by Denise Saul, Leo Boix, Nick Makoha, Edward Doegar and Will Harris, as well as anthology editors Nathalie Teitler and Karen McCarthy Woolf.Watch live or later here: youtube.com/live/75BWs7oncw4 Mapping The Future on the Bloodaxe website: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/mapping-the-future-1331
David Constantine: A Bird Called Elaeus Bloodaxe Books 2023-09-30 | The Greek Anthology, marvellous salvage from the vast shipwreck of the Ancient World, is a collection of about 4500 poems composed over more than 1500 years by about 300 authors, a colossal continuity and variety from pre-classical times through Roman into Byzantine.For A Bird Called Elaeus – his small anthology of the vast original – David Constantine has gone particularly not just to the renowned love poems but also to poems that treat man’s dealings with the earth, his work and trades there, the creatures other than himself who inhabit it and the divinities whose care it is. He has quite often taken the liberty of bringing already urgent poems closer to home and our drift towards the Sixth Extinction. Several times he expanded a Greek text; once or twice combined two poems into one; or wrote a poem of his own which he could not have written had he not read and translated the ancient words first. But most often he kept close, doing his level best to bring into my English what was so livingly there in the Greek.The Ancient World was not populated by humans harmless to Mother Earth, not at all: often they, like us, did the worst their means enabled them to do. Still there were laws. These things you must not do. Doing them nevertheless was understood as transgression of laws beyond the human laws. You offended Demeter at your peril. Understand that how we like, it’s the same now. And the peril is infinitely greater, threatens to be final, consuming the innocent with the guilty.A Bird Called Elaeus will be published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2024. It is David Constantine’s seventh translation from Bloodaxe, following three editions of Friedrich Hölderlin, and collections by Henri Michaux, Philippe Jaccottet and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, including two books for which he received the European Poetry Translation Prize and the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation of Goethe’s Faust is published in Penguin Classics and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is published by Norton. His own poetry is published by Bloodaxe and his fiction by Comma Press. He was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013.
Launch reading by Jen Campbell, Courtney Conrad and Nicole Sealey Bloodaxe Books 2023-09-20 | Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Jen Campbell, Courtney Conrad and Nicole Sealey celebrating publication of their new collections. Courtney Conrad's pamphlet I Am Evidence is being published by Bloodaxe after winning the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition.All three poets will be reading live and discussing their new collections with special guest host, poet John Challis. The whole event will be available afterwards on this YouTube page once it has finished.In her first set, Courtney Conrad reads 'John 19:28' by Gboyega Odubanjo, in tribute to this poet, who tragically died in late August of this year. Gboyega's friends and family have launched the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation for low-income Black writers, and a link to donate to the fund in his memory can be found here: gofundme.com/f/gboyega-odubanjo-beloved-son-brother-friendTo order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early September). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:Jen Campbell: Please Do Not Touch This Exhibitbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/please-do-not-touch-this-exhibit-1328Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/please-do-not-touch-this-exhibit/Courtney Conrad: I Am EvidenceUK: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/i-am-evidence-1337Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/i-am-evidence/Nicole Sealey: The Ferguson Report: An Erasurebloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-ferguson-report-an-erasure-1330Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/the-ferguson-report-an-erasure/Nicole Sealey: Ordinary Beastbloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/ordinary-beast-1329Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/ordinary-beast/***Jen Campbell: Please Do Not Touch This ExhibitPlease Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals — both as a disabled person, and as an adult reflecting on childhood while going through IVF.*Courtney Conrad: I Am EvidenceWinner of the 2022 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet CompetitionCourtney Conrad’s powerful work interrogates the tensions within Caribbean migration, gender-based violence and national politics. Migrating from Kingston as a teenager, she is unflinching in her attempts to capture the vibrancy and violence of her experiences in both the UK and Jamaica. Her poetry draws together subversive diasporic imagery, national political commentary and shatteringly personal narrative in its exacting response to the political corruption and violence she witnessed as a young girl in Jamaica in the wake of its colonial subjugation under the British Empire. The themes of her work stretch across state- and gender-based violence, religion, raw bodily introspection and lush cultural memorabilia that reimagines the warmth and blood of both her homes.*Nicole SealeyThe Ferguson Report: An ErasureIn August 2014, Michael Brown – a young, unarmed Black man – was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. What followed was a period of protests and turmoil, culminating in an extensive report that was filed by the Department of Justice detailing biased policing and court practices in the city. It is a document that exposes the racist policies and procedures that have become commonplace – from disproportionate arrest rates to flagrant violence directed at the Black community. It is a report that remains as disheartening as it is damningNow, award-winning poet Nicole Sealey revisits the investigation in a book that redacts the report, an act of erasure that reimagines the original text as it strips it away. While the full document is visible in the background – weighing heavily on the language Sealey has preserved – it gives shape and disturbing context to what remains.The Ferguson Report: An Erasure is published simultaneously by Knopf in the US and Bloodaxe Books in the UK. Nicole Sealey’s first collection, Ordinary Beast (2017), is published in the UK by Bloodaxe at the same time.Ordinary BeastThe ranging scope of enquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast – at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential – is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge.
Jen Campbell: Anatomy of the Sea from Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit Bloodaxe Books 2023-09-12 | Jen Campbell's second collection Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals — both as a disabled person, and as an adult reflecting on childhood while going through IVF. Do Not Touch This Exhibit is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Jen Campbell's first book-length collection, The Girl Aquarium (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019 and was a semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category).Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/please-do-not-touch-this-exhibit-1328Jen Campbell: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/jen-campbell
Jen Campbell: Alopecia from Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit Bloodaxe Books 2023-09-12 | Jen Campbell's second collection Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals — both as a disabled person, and as an adult reflecting on childhood while going through IVF. Do Not Touch This Exhibit is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Jen Campbell's first book-length collection, The Girl Aquarium (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019 and was a semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category).Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/please-do-not-touch-this-exhibit-1328Jen Campbell: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/jen-campbell
Ahren Warner at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023 Bloodaxe Books 2023-08-09 | Ahren Warner has published four books of poetry with Bloodaxe. His 2011 debut, CONFER (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/confer-1009), was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013, and followed in 2013 by PRETTY (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/pretty-1072) and by HELLO. YOUR PROMISE HAS BEEN EXTRACTED in 2017 (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/hello-your-promise-has-been-extracted-1157), which was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. His fourth collection, I’M TOTALLY KILLING YOUR VIBES, was published in 2022 (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/i-m-totally-killing-your-vibes-1307). His collections have received three Poetry Book Society Recommendations and awards including an Arts Foundation Fellowship. He works across writing, photography and moving image, with an intermedia project, THE SEA IS SPREAD AND CLEAVED AND FURLED published by Prototype in 2020, and a film – I’M THINKING WHAT WOULD SOUND SINCERE BUT ALSO, LIKE, OH, THAT’S SUPER CUTE, selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2020).In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Ahren Warner reads a selection of extracts from the three sequences that make up I’m totally killing your vibes.
Maura Dooley at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023 Bloodaxe Books 2023-08-08 | Maura Dooley was born in Truro, grew up in Bristol, worked for some years in Yorkshire, and has lived in London for the past 30 years. Maura Dooley’s family background in Ireland and Wales has long been central to her work. She is a freelance writer and lectures at Goldsmiths’ College. She edited Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets (1997) and The Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems (2002) for Bloodaxe, and How Novelists Work (2000) for Seren. Her selection, Sound Barrier: Poems 1982-2002, was published by Bloodaxe in 2002, drawing on collections including Explaining Magnetism (1991) and Kissing a Bone (1996), both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Kissing a Bone and her later collection Life Under Water, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2008, were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem 'Cleaning Jim Dine's Heart' was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2015, and was included in her collection, The Silvering (2016), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2016. Her translation (with Elhum Shakerifar) of Azita Ghahreman's Negative of a Group Photograph (Farsi title: نگاتیو یک عکس دسته جمعی) was published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2018. Negative of a Group Photograph received an English PEN Award and was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2019.In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Maura Dooley reads the poems 'Letters from Yorkshire', 'Out', 'Talks About Talks' and 'Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide', followed by an extract from ‘The Source’. She then reads several poems from her 2023 collection FIVE FIFTY-FIVE (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/five-fifty-five-1321): 'Fam', 'Quiver', 'Fine Wind, Clear Morning' and 'The Unforgotten'. Maura ends the reading with her Forward Prize shortlisted poem 'Cleaning Jim Dine’s Heart', from THE SILVERING (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-silvering-1108), and 'A Bunch of Consolation' from Five Fifty-Five.
Clare Shaw at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023 Bloodaxe Books 2023-08-08 | Clare Shaw was born in Burnley in 1972. Their first two collections with Bloodaxe were Straight Ahead (2006), which was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award for Poetry and attracted a Forward Prize Highly Commended for Best Single Poem, and Head On (2012), which according to the Times Literary Supplement is 'fierce, memorable and visceral'. Their later collections are Flood (2018), a New Writing North Read Regional title in 2019, and Towards a General Theory of Love (2022), written after winning a Northern Writers' Award. Clare is co-director of Kendal Poetry Festival, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, and a regular tutor for the Writing Project, the Poetry School, Wordsworth Grasmere and Arvon. Clare also works as a mental health trainer and has taught and published widely in the field.In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Clare begins with ‘My father was no ordinary man’ from FLOOD (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/flood-1187). Clare then reads a selection of poems from TOWARDS A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/towards-a-general-theory-of-love-1298): ‘Monkey Writes a Poem About His Mother’, ‘Rhosymedre: Prelude on a Welsh Hymn’, ‘Monkey and I Discuss the Difficulty of Working Therapeutically with Non-verbal Traumatic Memories’, ‘Monkey Joins a Dating App’, ‘Monkey Reads William Blake’ and ’Child Protection Policy’. Clare ends the reading with ‘Who knows what it’s like’, from Flood.
Yvonne Reddick at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023 Bloodaxe Books 2023-08-04 | Yvonne Reddick is an award-winning writer, editor, ecopoetry scholar and climber. She has received a Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Poetry Society’s inaugural Peggy Poole Award, a Northern Writers' Award and a Creative Futures Literary Award. She has published four pamphlets, including Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), winner of the Mslexia Women's Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureate’s Choice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation for early 2019 in the London Review of Books.Her first book-length collection, Burning Season, was published by Bloodaxe in May 2023. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/burning-season-1323) The title poem from Burning Season won third prize in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry 2022. In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Yvonne reads five poems from Burning Season: 'The Flower that Breaks Rocks', 'The Gift', 'Burning Season', 'Ptarmigan', 'Rime' and 'Waterland'.
Matthew Hollis at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023 Bloodaxe Books 2023-08-04 | Matthew Hollis was born in Norwich in 1971, and now lives in London. His debut Ground Water (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He has published the handmade and letterpress pamphlets Stones (Incline Press, 2016), East (Clutag Press, 2016), Leaves (Hazel Press, 2020) and Havener (Bonnefant Press, 2022). He is the author of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Faber & Faber, UK, Norton, US, 2022). Matthew Hollis's second book-length collection, Earth House, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/earth-house-1320) In Earth House, Matthew Hollis evokes the landscape, language and ecology of the isles of Britain and Ireland to explore how our most intimate moments have resonance in the wider cycle of life. Beginning in the slate waters of the north, the book revolves around the cardinal points and the ancient elements: through the wide skies of the east and the terrain of a southern city, to the embers of places lost to us, to which we can no longer return.In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Matthew reads five poems from Earth House: 'A Harnser for James', The Diomedes', 'A Red Hairband in Iveragh', 'Deor' and 'Causeway'.
Kris Johnson at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023 Bloodaxe Books 2023-08-04 | Kris Johnson is from America’s Washington state but has lived in the UK since 2007. She received her MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Newcastle University where she has also taught and worked as a researcher. In 2019, she was awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies, including Ambit, Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry London. Her debut pamphlet, Skinny Dip, was published in 2022 by Enchiridion. Her first book-length collection, Ghost River, was published by Bloodaxe in 2023. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/ghost-river-1324) In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Kris reads eight poems from Ghost River: 'Rainier', 'Bodies of Water', 'Ghost River', 'Theoretical Geographers', 'Pseudotsuga menziesii', 'Passage', 'Northwest Passage' and 'Tectonics'.
Imtiaz Dharker at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2023 Bloodaxe Books 2023-08-04 | Imtiaz Dharker grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. She was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2014 for her fifth collection Over the Moon and for her services to poetry. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief. She is also an accomplished artist, and all her collections are illustrated with her drawings, which form an integral part of her books.In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Imtiaz reads the poem 'Chaudhri Sher Mobarik Looks at the Loch' from her 2018 collection LUCK IS THE HOOK (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/luck-is-the-hook-1173), followed by 'Undone' from OVER THE MOON (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/over-the-moon-151) and then ‘The Trick’, also from Luck is the Hook. The rest of the reading features several new poems which will be included in SHADOW READER, forthcoming from Bloodaxe in May 2024. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/shadow-reader-1348).Shadow Reader is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and earthy Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy. Imtiaz Dharker’s new collection pays attention to wilful erasures, exclusions and also to places of sanctuary. This is poetry as music, as momentum, as the texture and taste of languages, joyously sensuous and rich in images. While it acknowledges the everyday and its shadows, it is also an irreverent, playful celebration of life.
Aleš Šteger - Newcastle Poetry Festival 2019 Bloodaxe Books 2023-08-04 | Aleš Šteger was born in 1973 in Ptuj, Slovenia, where he grew up, then part of the former Yugoslavia ruled by Tito, which gained its independence when he was 18. He published his first collection at the age of 22, Chessboard of Hours in 1995, and was immediately recognised as a key voice in the new generation of post-Communist poets not only in Slovenia but throughout central Europe.Notable for its moral engagement, Šteger’s poetry is acutely precise in its observation and concentration as well as multi-layered and technically versatile, ingenious and inventive, adventurous and playful yet serious in intention. Above all, his poems are incessantly curious in their investigations which the reader is invited to share – and he loves to ambush the reader with the unexpected.Burning Tongues, his first major poetry book to be published in the UK, was published in November 2022 by Bloodaxe Books and was translated by Brian Henry. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/burning-tongues-1304)
Brenda Shaughnessy: Liquid Flesh (at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts) Bloodaxe Books 2023-08-02 | Brenda Shaughnessy is an Okinawan-Irish American poet who grew up in Southern California. After graduating from University of California, Santa Cruz, she moved to New York City where she received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and published her first book, Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her six full-length collections include The Octopus Museum (Knopf, 2019), a New York Times Notable Book, and Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon, 2012), a finalist for the Griffin International Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Recipient of a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She lives with her husband, the poet Craig Morgan Teicher, and their two children, in New Jersey.Brenda Shaughnessy's first UK publication, Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/liquid-flesh-1303) At this reading at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts in October 2022, Brenda read poems from Liquid Flesh and spoke about her work with Bloodaxe Books editor Neil Astley.Her sixth collection, Tanya, was published by Knopf in the US in 2023 and is due from Bloodaxe in April 2024. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/tanya-1346)
Launch of Out of Sri Lanka: GemArts Masala Festival / Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts 2023 Bloodaxe Books 2023-08-02 | Out of Sri Lanka anthology editors Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett joined NCLA Director Preti Teneja to discuss this new anthology of Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry from Sri Lanka and its diasporas, the first book of its kind. The event featured an exclusive video of contributors to the anthology reading their poems.Out of Sri Lanka features over a hundred poets writing in English, or translated from Tamil and Sinhala. It brings to light a long-neglected national literature, and reshapes our understanding of migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. Poets long out of print appear beside exciting new talents; works written in the country converse with poetry from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Poems in traditional and in open forms, concrete poems, spoken word poems, and experimental post-lyric hybrids of poetry and prose, appear with an introduction explaining Sri Lanka’s history.Out of Sri Lanka on the Bloodaxe website: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/out-of-sri-lanka-1327
Abigail Parry: I Think We’re Alone Now Bloodaxe Books 2023-06-26 | Abigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish and Japanese, broadcast on BBC and RTÉ Radio, and widely published in journals and anthologies. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe Prize, the Troubadour Prize, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, JINX, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2018, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019. Neil Astley filmed her reading these poems from her second collection, I THINK WE'RE ALONE NOW, at her home in Cardiff in May 2023 ahead of the book’s publication in November.I THINK WE'RE ALONE NOW was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles. She reads eight poems from the book: ‘In the dream of the cold restaurant’, ‘Some remarks on the General Theory of Relativity’, ‘Speculum’, ‘Whatever happened to Rosemarie?’, ‘The Fly Dressers’ Guide’, ‘Giallo’, ‘The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space’ and ‘It’s the lark that sings so out of tune’.
