Shearsman Books | North American Authors A to D
Published 2007. Paperback, 104pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781905700370 [Download a sample from this book here .]
On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005 is Rachel Tzvia Back's second full-length collection and tracks the cycle of violence marking the lives of Palestinians and Israelis in the last intifadah (uprising).
Published 2012. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612037 [Download a sample PDF from this book
here .]
"Aptly titled are these poems: they are like vials without bottoms… held up, looked through, a universe can be discerned. They pour and continue to pour a mixture of guile and subterfuge, language that contradicts, and bargains for its own sanity, contents in volume denying the size of these trick vessels." — Mervyn Taylor
Longlisted for the Bocas Literature Prize, 2016.
Published 2015. Paperback, 70pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848614154 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
“Shapely intimations of disaster, poems of incendiary grace.”
—Mervyn Morris, Poet Laureate of Jamaica
“ Burn is a kaleidoscopic, surreal and stunning collection. Bagoo forges carnivalesque, enigmatic, experimental, vivid, wild and wonder-inspiring poems full of verve and utterly fresh language that are, by turns, eerie, elegiac, fleshy, pensive, mournful, rhapsodic and absolutely scorching…
Poems traverse geographical locations, from his island home of Trinidad, to other Caribbean islands and as far distant as Iceland. There, personal and societal angst, passions and pleasures are held up to a ‘sea of mirrors,’ into which we gaze. Bagoo explores daily life, love, art, history, literature, myth, popular culture, ritual and the molten ground of memory, bringing together and animating douens, lionfish, Auden, Mozart, Caravaggio and Tchaikovsky, among other figures. Bring the fire, burn.” —Loretta Collins-Klobah
Published 2007. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700363 [Download a sample from this book here .]
Analfabeto / An Alphabet was written in Recife, Brazil, and Brooklyn, New York. Part dictionary, part travel diary, part historical record, it crosses genre boundaries narrating a story of fragmented shifts in identity — cultural, gendered and sexual. It addresses the complications of translation, not only linguistic translation, but also the multiple ways we translate ourselves when we are away from whatever we might call "home."
Published 2012. Paperback, 86pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611979 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
The Explosion of Binary Stars explores themes of loss in the author's own life and in the lives of her patients. The themes are universal: divorce, breast cancer, war, addiction, PTSD, ageing, depression and, most importantly in this book, the death of a sibling. The book is not maudlin, rather the intimate poems invite the reader to enjoy an honesty that ultimately celebrates life, while funny poems about love and travel are scattered throughout as a balm.
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation
Published 2019. Paperback, 116pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848616738 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
“[…] a word-smithy that is now owned by an incorruptible woman of letters. Her words are in open view and in plain hearing for the eyes and ears of people who value every single tongue but not the forked one.” —Christopher Ricks, Dead Ground 2018-1918
“I can certainly attest […] now, after being in Bugan’s world of ‘frail syllables’, that such an equilibrium between history and art is not only possible, but is often the only way to assuage pain, to release the caged birds, to free oneself from the shackles of grief.” —Simon Gatev, Dundee University Review of the Arts
“Carmen Bugan has the ability to transform deeply personal experiences into poetic language without losing the radiant particulars from which they sprang.” —Frank Beck, The Manhattan Review
Published 2025. Paperback, 88pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848619661
In
Tristia, Carmen Bugan tests the lyric against loss once again, as everything collapses around her, but this time much closer to home. These are poems about forging a stronger self in the fires of her lifetime, whether they are the forest fires that cover the American continent, the war in Ukraine, or her own world turned to ashes. The speaker in the poem 'Enheduana' laments:
He spat on my oven full of food,
Walked over my baskets full of bread,
Soiled the marriage bed, left the children crying,
And my heart toiling with heaven and earth.
Her poems insist on the beauty of the natural world, itself under threat, as a source of strength, as in 'Hawk,' where the speaker prays:
Hawk, take everything
That is weak in me,
In your claws: eat it.
Leave me wise and patient.
Published 2015. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848614512 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Vahni Capildeo is a British Trinidadian writer of poetry and prose. Her recent work also appears in New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015).
Published 2025. Paperback, 98pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848619661
Measures of Weather is about more than just weather. What isn’t weather? Weather here is a stand-in, for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovernable. And what does it mean to measure? To find intersections. To articulate complex subject positions. To use language to make tangible changes in the material world. To call attention to the invisible in all its myriad of forms, from the minuscule to the gigantic. To articulate the inchoate, to give shape to the ineffable, the transient, and the impossible. Carpenter uses language as a medium to grapple with organisational structures and their failings, to think beyond the scale of the human body, to engage with a tangle of vast systems — of air, of glass, of wind, of west.
Published 2008. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781905700462 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
Jennifer Clement has published three collections of her work in bilingual editions in Mexico, where she was born and still lives. Although better-known outside Mexico as a novelist / prose-writer ( A True Story Based on Lies, Widow Basquiat, Prayers for the Stolen ), she has been writing poetry for many years and runs the annual San Miguel Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende with her sister, Barbara Sibley. This volume draws on her Mexican collections and also includes more recent work.
Published 2019. Paperback, 104pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848616448 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"A masque: it's all a mask, celebrating the "organic" . . . British nature (transplants to US), in layers of spring and subsequent decay, within a long cultural history and a (to middle age) lifespan, personal pain, modernization, human war, gods and goddesses speaking anywhere. The poem has an enormous and muscular musicality (including prose musicality); the Poet constantly wondering how to Bee, how a Fool can Bee (symbol of all good qualities, sunniness, industry, royalty and divinity, various Saints) . . . A stunning, pleasurable book." — Alice Notley
"Martin Corless-Smith is a gifted and brilliant poet. His work is filled with poesy and all that can mean for the depth of the art. The mind is vertical as it moves through the master box of diction and form. Here is a generous voice with wild lyric runs and gorgeous music throughout—we are only made richer by this tender work. The Fool & the Bee is a fabulous book of the poetic imagination." —Peter Gizzi
Published 2024. Paperback, 120pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619487
"Golden Satellite Debris is my 13th book. I don’t feel particularly superstitious about that. I do still feel as if a book of mine coming into the world is still an unprecedented surprise. I feel a mix of hope and failure. The title points towards a sense of the wonder and glory of life on this planet, the Golden (with a hint of the sun setting no doubt), but also a sense of life as an aftermath, Debris, a sort of arbitrary and accidental outcome of equations and collisions only some of which we are aware of. I see the earth as a Satellite, a contingent object moving in space, but on a smaller scale also the human and the poem, spinning around some unknown centre, whether we call that truth, being, love or death." —Martin Corless-Smith
Published 1996. 44pp, A5 Paperback, £5 / $9.95
ISBN 9780907562214. OUT OF PRINT.
A rare UK publication for this major US poet, for many years resident in Japan, this is a collection of the short lyrics for which Corman (1924–2004) was renowned.
2nd edition. Published 2012. Chapbook, 36pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £7.50 / $10.95
ISBN 9781848612273 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
"Veering — often within a single poem, often within a single line — from self-lacerating anger to desperation, from mordant satire of the confessional mode to stunned (and stunning) autobiography, from irreverence to a state of fearful silence, Leaf Weather is a 'chapbook' in no diminutive sense of the term. In 'peeling/away the sun,' Shira Dentz unlooses equal parts verbal anxiety, formal adventure, and emotional reckoning. It's one thing to write poems; it's quite another to live, as Dentz does, in the marrow of one's words." —Mark Levine
Published 2016. Paperback, 150pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848614710 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]
“By turns erudite and lyrical, esoteric and oracular, profane and ethereal – Joe Doerr’s Tocayo contains multitudes. This vast miscellany, a bravura poetic performance by every measure, signals the aborning of a new, necessary literary idiom for this mashed-up American age: the ineluctable punk sublime.” —John Santos
“Disturbs all the codes.” —John Kinsella
Edited by Gavin Selerie and Justin Katko
Published 2013. Paperback, 102pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848612785 [Download a sample PDF from this book here. ]
Edward Dorn's Two Interviews brings together two largely unseen interviews from 1971 and 1981, conducted in Vancouver and London, with Tom McGauley, Brian Fawcett, John Scoggan, Stan Persky, J.H. Prynne, Ralph Maud, and Gavin Selerie. Published alongside the interviews are uncollected extracts from Dorn's Day & Night Report (1971), extracts from his unpublished prose work Juneau in June (1981), and three uncollected poems from 1981. Along with Justin Katko's preface to the book, which focuses on Dorn and Prynne's 1971 trip to Vancouver, and an extended introduction to the 1981 interview by Gavin Selerie, which deals with Dorn's geographical and linguistic alignments, particularly those relating to his first period in England, this book includes unpublished photographs, and a bibliography of Dorn interviews.
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