"Rope is the debut of a unique lyric voice -- inventive and varied, rich in imagery, and always rooted in a searching intelligence. These beautifully written poems fizz with all the 'shimmer and jazz’ of modern life." Jane Yeh
Khairani Barokka’s first full poetry collection, Rope, is a spellbinding and impressive debut, kaleidoscopic in detail and richly compelling. With a meticulous artist’s instinct, these finely-tuned poems ask urgent questions about our impact upon the environment, and examine carefully the fragile ties that bind our lives and our fate to our planet, our ecosystems and to our fellow humans.
Sensual and ecologically attentive, Rope draws on issues of climate change, sexuality, violence, nature, desire and the body. Lush with detail, alert to its own distinct sounds, this is poetry in urgent and vivacious action - intent on finding vivid joy and hope amidst the destruction and dangers of the Anthropocene era.
You can buy Rope here
When she realises that her five year old son Roo has followed her, Ishwari struggles with her identity and responsibilities as a mother, versus the guilty knowledge that she cannot want her own child when his existence requires her to suppress her own dreams.
Ishwari and Roo wander the streets at night, looking for a place to stay, until an elderly caretaker takes pity on them and offers them an empty room on the terrace of a guest house. Ishwari gets work as a caregiver to the handsome gentleman who lives next door, while Roo, who is lame, spends all day locked up in the room on the roof. Pulsating with raw energy, Abandon gives voice to the perpetual conflict between life and art.
You can buy Abandon here
]]>Your Silence Will Not Protect You collects the essential essays and poems of Audre Lorde for the first time, including the classic ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’.
Her lyrical and incisive prose takes on sexism, racism, homophobia, and class; reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope that remain ever-more trenchant today. Also a celebrated poet, Lorde was New York State Poet Laureate until her death; her poetry and prose together produced an aphoristic and incomparably quotable style, as evidenced by her constant presence on many Women’s Marches against Trump across the world.
A trailblazer in intersectional feminism, Lorde’s luminous writings have influenced a new generation of thinkers and writers charged by the Black Lives Matter movement. Thirty years after they were first published, this beautiful edition honours how Lorde's work continues to resonate and inspire.
You can buy Your Silence Will Not Protect You here
We Need to Talk is a poetry collection on sexual violence, survivorship and solidarity. On gender-based violence and genuine social change. On things that are hushed and need to be spoken of with empathy - and fact-checking.
Poet Agnes Török writes honestly and courageously about lived experience and statistical societal structure, inviting the reader to reflect and join in the conversation on how to end gender-based violence. With sections speaking directly to victims and survivors, and directly to their friends and families, We Need To Talk is an empathic engagement with an experience shared by 1 in 3 women, 1 in 2 trans and non-binary people, and 1 in 5 men – sexual violence.
Török discusses issues surrounding the normalisation of violence through economics, politics and online activity, and challenges the logic by which most of us personally know a victim of sexual assault or abuse, but few of us will believe we know any perpetrators.
Writing exercises for those affected by gender-based violence are also included, because making art is a form of speaking. And We Need To Talk.
You can buy We Need to Talk here
Vladimir Mayakovsky's Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is a 3,000 line epic poem which provides an extraordinary record of the utopian excitement of the early revolutionary years – as well a warning that Lenin should not become an icon.
Written immediately after Lenin's death in 1924, it proudly and passionately sets the story of the Bolshevik leader’s life against the history of capitalism and the trajectory of Soviet communism.
After initially appearing in Soviet newspapers, it became Mayakovsky's most celebrated work, with a public reading at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1930 receiving a 20 minute standing ovation. Out of print in English for over thirty years, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin remains relatively unknown in the west, but based on Dorian Rottenberg’s 1967 translation, Rosy Carrick’s new bi-lingual edition of the poem firmly re-establishes Mayakovsky’s reputation as one the most important political poets of the twentieth century.
You can buy Vladimir Ilyich Lenin here
Having lived with mental illness for the last six years of her life, Beech, a performance poet, probes the power and vulnerability that comes from being a depressed, aspirant, intelligent and flawed young woman in 21st Century Tory Britain.
She dedicates her second poetry collection to "anyone struggling to be the protagonist of their own life [and] for all the girls beneath glass ceilings who refuse to stop throwing stones".
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You can buy Spit and Hiss here.
]]>Kate Fox's Chronotopia is a collection of poems written from a variety of residencies and thoughts. From Glastonbury and the Great North Run to a Muslim girl's school in Bradford, Chronotopia documents her diverse experiences and performances.
Kate Fox is a writer and performer from Bradford who keeps her Northern roots at the heart of everything she does. She is a regular speaker and panellist for radio shows and has toured the country with her stand-up comedy. She is currently two years into a PhD at the University of Leeds, looking at class, gender, 'Northernness' and solo stand-up performance. Fox will be taking part in the "Contains Strong Language" poetry festival programmed by the BBC in Hull.
You can buy Chronotopia here
]]>Karl Riordan spent much of his late teens in a tattooist’s studio, fascinated by the declarations of love, badges of pride and intricate designs that reminded him of the Stilton legs of his grandfather, a miner tattooed by a working life spent underground. In his powerful debut collection, Riordan recalls and celebrates growing up in the South Yorkshire coalfield – holidays and haircuts, football pools and pool halls, Mackeson and Temazepam, Saturday night and Monday morning.
Karl Riordan is a Disability Support Worker. His writing has been published in many magazines and in How Do You Sleep? New Stories by Sheffield Writers. He lives in Sheffield. The Tattooist’s Chair is his first full-length book. You can buy it here.
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Larkinland is a study in the quotidian. It is an exploration of Philip Larkin’s poetic landscape – a setting that is vivid with mundanity. When Spring arrives ‘at Bloody last’ the writer reports, it may bear ‘bridal blossom’, but it also carries a ‘bouquet of stinking fish’. It is this dose of misery that lends Tulloch’s portrait of 1950s Hull so perfectly to Larkin’s world.
Having already authored seven novels, spanning themes of friendship in Newcastle to a crises of faith in Teesside, Tulloch is no stranger to confronting – and making sense of – relationships and emotions, in a frank, colloquial, and distinctively ‘Northern’ manner. Larkinland centres on the character of Arthur Merryweather, based on Larkin himself. Sweary and sullen, Arthur is endearing from the start: we follow him as he lodges with the ‘landlady from Hell’ and stumbles across the mystery of Mr Bleaney, falling in love along the way.
Buy it here.
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The poems and poets included prove to be as diverse as the county itself, acknowledging more than just the picturesque yet dangerous landscape, writing too about the urban. The poems comment on how the wild expanses of open land have been tamed and changed by man in the past few centuries, to the varied county they now know and love.
For many of the poets in this anthology, Yorkshire is home; where they were born, raised, or still live. As a result, the poems are a very personal response to a part of Britain that they feel particularly close to, revealing an often raw emotion in their poetry. Far from the praises of the wild, unruly landscape of the poets of the past, this anthology considers the people in this modern and changing landscape and their relationships with one another and with nature.
The train’s too fast for catching names,
though –stone must play a part, and –field.
The bridges have a solid, four-square set
about their jaws, and mortar sitting proud-
gritty assurance that they’re built to last.
-‘Heading North’ by D A Prince
You can buy it here.
]]>Some elderly people in nursing homes take to watching television endlessly, doing crosswords or gazing out of the window, but Esrnest Noyes Brookings was set a task by David Greenberger to write poems. Greenberger would supply a topic for the poetry and the next day, whilst working at the nursing home, he would receive the finished poem. Brookings’ poems all follow an ABAB rhyme scheme but the utter lack of concern with literary devices and self-consciousness which often strangles writers is a fresh relief when reading this large, enduring collection.
While all flake cheese
Pressed out of milk
Requires no sneeze
No relation to silk
On plates evident
Relieving partial hunger
Costs more than a cent
But a delicious wonder.
- ‘Cheese’
Available to buy on the Inpress website here, now on sale!
On Friday 27th January there will be a chance to get your hands on all of the books featured on the blog this week, check back then to see how you can win!
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Boy: Are you Michael Rosen?
Me: Yes.
Boy: Really?
Me: I am Michael Rosen.
Boy: You look just like him.
- Conversation on a Bus
Available to buy on the Inpress website here, now on sale!
On Friday 27th January there will be a chance to get your hands on all of the books featured on the blog this week, check back then to see how you can win!
]]>My Mother Is a River is Di Pietrantonio’s first novel. The novel chronicles the relationship between a daughter and her aging mother who has dementia and is slowly drifting away from reality and into her own perception of the world. The relationship between mother and daughter is strained, but the narrator, as eldest daughter, takes care of her and helps her cope with her identity which is fading away.
Some days the illness eats away at her emotions too. The body is listless, it leaks the emptiness that drains it. It loses the ability to feel. It doesn’t suffer, it doesn’t live, not then.
The check-ups are for my benefit. They reassure me; it wasn’t I who made her sick and the progression is slow. Some abilities are partially preserved. I go with her, I look after her, I am a good enough daughter.
Available to buy on the Inpress website here, now on sale!
On Friday 27th January there will be a chance to get your hands on all of the books featured on the blog this week, check back then to see how you can win!
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I know it was a blessing
when she landed like a fly on my forehead
as I was trying to write,
her cicada rustle scribbling in and out
before the flick of my hand sent her to hide
in the plumbing, where she whined for weeks
until I found her, toad-shy and morning-blind
in the kitchen sink. I held her, for the first time then,
revived her with what has become her favourite wine.
- 'Imp' by Gregory Leadbetter
‘Leadbetter’s poems are finely-made and quietly powerful – every word is the right word. But they can also be deceptive and unsettling, showing us the darkness at the edges of our everyday lives. As he puts it in ‘The Departed’: “I see what the part of me that died has seen.”’ – Patrick McGuinness
You can pick up a copy of The Fetch here, now on sale!
On Friday 27th January there will be a chance to get your hands on all of the books featured on the blog this week, check back then to see how you can win!
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Between his first and third heart attack
passed my father’s Summer of Love.
An unknown younger man came back:
Between his first and third heart attack.
- ‘Digitalis’ by Martin Malone
‘It’s difficult to avoid the adjectives ‘moving’ and ‘touching’ when commenting on many of these poems, but to their credit they are rarely sentimental and some do portray less than perfect relationships. […] While many address the angsts and anxieties of being a father, and how easily a child can be hurt, most are joyful and the exuberance of twenty-first century fathers contrasts with the buttoned-up-ness of many of their earlier incarnations portrayed here.’ — Jacqui Rowe for Bare Fiction
You can but a copy of The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood here now on sale!
On Friday 27th January there will be a chance to get your hands on all of the books featured on the blog this week, check back then to see how you can win!
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In 1928, American journalist and activist Agnes Smedley left the United States for Shanghai. Rising quickly and travelling widely, she soon became the top correspondent on the Chinese Civil War for the Western world.
Author Marlene Lee explores Smedley's life in her new novel No Certain Home, published by Holland House this month. She focuses on her experiences throughout her time in Northwest China; it is believed that she was the only Westerner living amongst the Chinese Red Army.
I spoke to the author about her process of writing this novel.
Tell me about Agnes Smedley and why she interests you.
Like Agnes, I feel like an outsider and can identify with her. She interests me because she turned her personal weaknesses and unfavorable circumstances into useful work wherever she was. Her limited education (she dropped out of school at age 10) only spurred her to educate herself informally all of her life and to become a world-class journalist in demand not only for her writings but for her speeches about twentieth-century China. Her challenges to the status quo were sufficient to attract the interest of the American FBI and, earlier, British intelligence. All of this from the daughter of a Missouri tenant farmer/alcoholic coal miner! Agnes Smedley never forgot her origins among the underprivileged.
How did your research influence your writing?
My research, both reading and travel, allowed me to see Agnes in context. Because I visited Milan (Missouri), Trinidad (Colorado), Tempe (Arizona), San Francisco, San Diego, New York City, Berlin, Truro (Denmark), and Shanghai, Xian, and Yen'an in China, I could write scenes that brought the facts of her life into vivid, fictional reality. She lived so many lives in so many locations! Following her through research was a breathtaking experience for me and put me in touch with the world, both outer and inner, that she inhabited.
What are your hopes for the book?
I'd like for readers to appreciate Agnes Smedley. She has almost been forgotten, and she deserves to be remembered because of her progressive activities furthering social and gender justice. Maybe readers of No Certain Home will think harder about how we view the weak and the poor among us. I'd like for people to know more about China's history, too. And I want people to enjoy Agnes' personality as well as the book itself!
No Certain Home is available now on our website.
]]>The gothic The Shadow of Nanteos, published by Y Lolfa last year, soared to success in book awards and reviews in an exceptionally short amount of time. Here, author Jane Blank discusses her experience of her novel's success.
My second novel was launched at the Georgian mansion and hotel Plas Nanteos on the second of October 2015. The following week it had been picked by Waterstones to be their Wales November Book of the Month.
During that magical month I was invited to signings in bookshops all over Wales, asked to read in London and appeared on S4C. The novel was reviewed extensively in the press and featured several times on national radio. The book had to go into a second print run after only two weeks. Bookings from libraries, book groups, festivals and media interviews keep coming in and now stretch as far as October 2016.
Before publication the book was long-listed for the Historical Novel Society Awards 2015 – but I don’t feel shy about telling you this. It doesn’t even feel like boasting. It feels like a miracle: like something that needs to be shared with all the hard-working writers who, like me, have slogged for years, staring into a black hole.
Yes, it’s a good read, but that is not what has made this novel, rather than my first and rather than all the thousands of other small press or self-published gems, a success.
There are many elements that have come together to make the difference; some are a result of deliberate decisions by those involved with the production. The most important factors though are what I call ‘the goodness of fortune’. It is these that have made the most difference. Let me explain:
As I started writing the book, the beautiful Georgian mansion of Nanteos was a building site – now it is a Country House Hotel, visited by Prince Charles, with its own helicopter landing site. This was not my doing but has meant that I have the most wonderful companion marketing and perpetual sales outlet. I made sure to include the hotel name in my title. (My rule for writers: find a ‘hook’ for future sales). Wherever my book goes, the hotel is publicised: whoever visits the hotel (in person or online) is exposed to my book.
Personal circumstances led to the BBC’s Robert Peston being kind enough to read the manuscript. His strapline made a whole world of difference to how people regarded both the book and, to be honest, me.
It’s a genre novel: historical, romantic, gothic. We released it at the right time: before Halloween and in time to create some excitement going into the first Christmas.
Very importantly, I think, I approached a respected local press (Y Lolfa). The book, based as it is in a real location that can be visited and is, in itself, famous, has worked extremely well. People are buying the book as they’re interested in the locale – a market that can be expertly mined by a local press.
The house is notorious as one of the most haunted locations in Wales. I picked the real historical figure of Elizabeth Powell, the ‘Grey Lady’ of the mansion, as my heroine, thus harnessing an existing interest. Luck also brought huge coverage of the house when The Holy Grail/ Nanteos Cup was stolen and featured on Crimewatch. The Grail is important to my story and, though thankfully the relic has now been recovered, the publicity did me no harm at all.
Last of all, working as hard after the book’s publication as before it, is essential. I’ve said yes to every opportunity – from 10 ‘take no prisoners’ readers in a tin hut near Machynlleth to bookings at major literary festivals. It hangs on a thread – but if the book is not just about you, if it can ride on other interests/ places /passions, it might just win through.
Look out for Jane Blank's tour dates on our website, Twitter, and Facebook, coming soon!
]]>We celebrated International Women's Day this week to commemorate the achievements of women in history and in contemporary culture. It would be impossible to leave out one of this week's most exciting new titles, Before and After from Two Rivers Press, a memoir of Edith Morley, the first female professor in the UK.
Since childhood she 'hated being a girl'; understandable, considering the fact that she grew up in late Victorian era. She was aware of the restrictions put on her simply from 'being a girl' and made every effort to break through them, from defying her father's wishes and attending school rather than being educated at home, to her later life when she overcame many different obstacles as she navigated through a male-dominated environment of Edwardian academia. She was appointed Professor of English Language at Reading in 1908.
I spoke to Sally Mortimore and Barbara Morris (editor) of Two Rivers Press about the book and of the significance of Morley's achievements and what they mean today.
What stands out to you about Before and After, and what will stand out to readers?
The restrictions placed on girls and women in the early part of the 20th Century, though we read about them, are hard to take on board until you read a first hand account from an intelligent and energetic, personable woman. Edith's memoir makes you wish you could have invited her to dinner. Such was her range of knowledge and pursuits, her clear interest in others and her pragmatism, it's easy to imagine late night conversations full of laughter and name dropping! Her memoir is easy to read and resonant of a life-affirming personality. She is honest about the challenges she faced, about her own personal weaknesses and about the people she came into contact with. The result is the reader's opportunity to go back in time, experience the events that made our lives what they are today and make a commitment to future generations to live our ordinary lives as if they matter.
What makes Edith Morley an important figure, in her time and ours?
Edith Morley was an ordinary woman. Ordinary in that her circumstances and upbringing were typical of many women of her time. But she possessed extraordinary determination and energy which she used to change the course of her life and the lives of many women following in her footsteps. Although her personal achievement was tarnished by the attitude of her peers to the women in leadership positions, nevertheless, the status she did manage to attain paved the way for future female academics of all ranks to fulfill their potential.
What would you most want this book to achieve?
Huge sales! But also an understanding amongst women today that the path we tread was laid by some unassuming but determined women, many of whom are not noticed by history, but whose legacy was hugely significant. We can but aim to do likewise.
Before and After is available to order on our website, along with many other titles from Two Rivers Press.
]]>Poet Andy Willoughby finds himself transported on a mock epic, high-octane locomotive beat journey from his native post-industrial Teesside to deepest Siberia and back again.
With an improvised soundtrack of half-forgotten Irish Catholic hymns, Fenno-Ugrian magic chants, Russian folk tales and a battered old Bob Dylan cassette, Between Stations ricochets between present and past with a raggletaggle bunch of Finnish fellow-travelling poets and the hallucinatory shades of Blake, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein and Mandelstam on a ramshackle quest for the Golden Woman of Khanty Mansiysk.
]]>Nine years after her clan was almost obliterated and her sister disappeared, Brede is unwillingly and unhappily living in the marshes. The sudden ending of a decade-long drought brings with it rumours that the rain was bought at the price of a King’s head and the Dowry Blade, the sword needed for such a sacrifice, is missing.
The arrival of Tegan, a wounded mercenary, brings even more questions. After a series of discoveries and revelations about the Dowry Blade, Tegan and Brede begin their journey to the capital in search of Brede’s sister.
Our favourite from December and a preview of what January has to offer!
During the last seven years of his life Ernest Noyes Brookings wrote nearly four hundred poems on a wide variety of subjects arranged with his gentle mixture of faith and logic.
The Golden Rule now presents his best work in a single volume. With a biographical memoir by David Greenberger (editor of The Duplex Planet, and also the man who first encouraged Brookings to write), photographs and facsimiles of handwritten poems, this book commemorates a truly distinctive and wonderfully enjoyable writer.
Buy it here.
Typewriters, plagiarism and the poetic line are just three of the subjects under the spotlight in this book of essays by much-loved literary blogger Katy Evans-Bush.
Combining the intellectual rigour of the literary critic with the dynamism of a seasoned traveller in the blogosphere, these essays place poetry at the heart of contemporary culture, meeting at the borders it shares with music, politics and sculpture.
Buy it here.
Taking you from 1612 Lancashire to modern day Dushanbe, here's November's top picks!
Malkin is a vivid evocation of the trials of the Pendle Witches in 1612. The sequence of poems is delivered in the form of epitaphic monologues, with the accused men and women eerily addressing the reader with their confessions and pleas.
Strikingly, poet Camille Ralphs has employed the technique of ‘free spelling’ throughout the monologues, bringing out new meanings in familiar words and encouraging the reader to immerse themselves in the world of the poems.
Buy it here.
Rich with sense of place and deeply humane, Annika Milisic-Stanley tells a story of how two women survive and thrive in difficult circumstances.
Buy it here.
Our favourite international writers from October!
It is only in the past quarter-century or so that Yevgeny Abramovich Baratynsky (1800–1844) has gained wide recognition in Russia as one of the great poets of the 19th century. While his psychologically acute love elegies and meditations written in the early 1820s earned him some fame during his lifetime, his later lyric verse was ignored or misunderstood by most of his contemporaries. Yet it is this body of work in particular, where he explores fundamental questions about the meaning of existence from an analytical epistemological perspective, that today seems remarkably modern.
Buy it here.
Don’t Forget the Couscous is a book of poetry about exile and home, love and loss. It is a beautiful love-song to the Arab world – Syria, Kurdistan, Morocco, Palestine and his native Aleppo. It is a memoir of the failed Arab Spring and the civil-war that has turned his native Syria into a ‘fountain of blood’. It is a bitter account of the demonization of Islam in the West, and the violent interference of the West in the Islamic world. It is about being a Muslim and not a terrorist.
Buy it here.
Some riveting reads from September!
In a series of beautifully structured sequences, Laura Seymour deploys an extraordinary linguistic dexterity; muscular yet tender, precise and inventive, conjuring images that brim with surprise. So hair is ‘a fistful of needles’ (The National Grid) or a ‘room fills with loose organs / of straw’ (Mick) and ‘’The sea is a cage of ferrets’ (Where Did You Get That Lipstick?)
Buy it here.
In January 2011, aged 21, Tom Preston was diagnosed with stage 4 advanced aggressive lymphoma. His chances of survival were optimistically placed at around 40%. This short, autobiographical work tells the story of the fight in the months that followed – but this is no ordinary cancer memoir.
The Boy in the Mirror is written in the second person – so the events in this book are happening to you, the reader, living through the hope, love, suffering, death and black comedy encountered by Tom during the battle to save himself.
Buy it here.
We were overwhelmed by the choice of Summer Reads in August!
Ancestor to Colonel Blimp, Sir Blandford Candy is an irascible old drunk with a hatred of poets and a love of hats. After an argument with his new neighbour Alexander Pope, he looks back on his life and the start of the Civil War.
Young Blandford sets off for London following an illicit affair with his brother’s betrothed and joins the army to fight the King, taking part in the battles of Edgehill and Turnham Green. As he bounces from battlefield to bedroom, Blandford unmasks Cavalier plots, earns the enmity of the King’s agents and uncovers an attempt to steal thousands.
All whilst dealing with murderous brothers, scheming sisters and puritan displeasure. Flashman meets the Three Musketeers in a picaresque romp through Stuart England at its nadir/through the Civil War. Buy it here.
From reflecting on the complexities of belonging to coming home early for a sandwich at the back of the fridge, The Secrets I Let Slip is a collection of poems that bounce between the personal and political.
Inspired by themes of social justice, protest, identity and failed dreams of becoming a rock star, this debut pamphlet from Selina Nwulu considers the beauty and pain of living in a modern age.
Buy it here.
Two fantastic collections of poetry from July.
Following a series of unsuccessful operations on his spine, the poet Gordon Hodgeon has ben confined to his bed, unable to move his arms and legs or breathe without the help of a ventilator. He recently has lost the power of speech. Today he can only communicate with the outside world by blinking at a Dynavox computer screen.
Nonetheless, Hodgeon has continued to write, recording the changing seasons of his disability and the changeless seasons outside his window. The result is this extraordinary series of poems from the furthest edge of human endurance.
Buy it here.
Buy it here.
Marking the halfway point in our series of favourites from 2015, here’s June!
A debut poetry collection from Matthew Siegel centers on containment: the containment of blood in our bodies, our bodies as containers, and the ways in which we contain ourselves.
"The deceptive directness of Matthew Siegel’s debut is remarkable; in his capable hands, illness reveals how barely contained any human being is, and how we reach, alone and together, for whatever will hold us." - Mark Doty
Buy it here.
This is the story of Esther, who lives in the Pennines with her father. Esther is obsessed with experimenting with different ways to pass out: from snorting Daz powder at school to attempted auto-asphyxiation in a serviced apartment in north London. But what happens when you take something too far? And what has Esther’s mother, a beautiful dancer wasting away in her bedroom, to do with it all?
Buy it here.
May was a world class month for poetry!
The Good Dark is the place we go to remember. The Good Dark is the place we go to take account. In his powerful second collection, Ryan Van Winkle charts loves won and loves lost. A lyric voice that is both familiar and strangely different leads us through the forests of memory and towards a grim acknowledgement of the obligation to get up, to be careful, to move. Buy the collection here.