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
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 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 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 1996. 44pp, A5 Paperback, £5 / $9.95
ISBN 9780907562214. OUT OF PRINT.
A rare UK publication for this major US poet, long 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
Shearsman Books Ltd. All rights reserved
Shearsman Books Ltd registered office 30–31 St. James Place, Mangotsfield, Bristol BS16 9JB ( address not for correspondence ). Registered in England as company no. 4910496.