North American Poetry Titles: Authors R to Z

Published 2011. Paperback, 103pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611603 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

What guides us through the unknown? What offers us the keys? In The Perforated Map , Eléna Rivera’s guide is language as she attempts to navigate the distances, the disturbances, the suggestions, the mistakes, the perforations. In these poems, language is the map, the matter that fills/affects the body, the organizing principle between the self and the world, and the forms that it gives rise to. The sentence is filled with holes. What is graspable between self and other? Is not all language in transit, moving in gradations of light, between knowing and the fuzzy conveyance shaped by words whose meaning is a matter of further adumbrations? How are we able to communicate our experience? How will understanding be sparked? What message is there for the poet/the reader? That is what is at stake in these poems, finding the word, the specific word, to illuminate the way, the experience of life, this moment, this time, this period of history.

Published 2019. Paperback, 396pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $30

ISBN 9781848616646 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

A Life in a Poem is, as the subtitle says, "a memoir of a rebellious Bible translator". For David Rosenberg is that strange combination: an avant poet as well as being a Biblical scholar, and translator of parts of the Bible, coming at it as a poet. In addition he is a biographer: of Abraham and Moses. As Rosenberg says, "Recently, as a visiting professor of creative writing at Princeton, I came to know a young English professor interested in my youthful editorship of The Ant's Forefoot , a periodical of avant-garde poetry. I attempted to explain how I, a translator of Rimbaud and student of the Blues, turned into a biblical scholar. Rimbaud stopped writing poetry, moved to a country along the Red Sea, and studied science, just as I moved from Manhattan to Israel and pursued the origins of Hebrew authorship. That is, how one becomes a writer for a tiny, ancient readership in Jerusalem that wants history delivered with the truth test of great poetry."

Published 2023. Paperback, 74pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618763 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Livestream is digital capture thrown elsewhere, body fluids that charge being, and planetary liquid flows. Livestream 's poetry entangles with those phenomena. The poems erupt, stagger, hold, and reflect as they evoke events and responses distributed through bodies and ethical borders. How language conjures us, and how we sense (with) it, is Livestream ’s constant ecology. The photographs are resonators, and witnesses.

Published 2017. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615472 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



This book records a sustained plunge into the imaginative elixir of a dream. The dream starts with a waking vision – ‘the door of the train flew open’ – and continues as reverberations in the sensorium, the seat of felt thought. With the sonnet as its anchor note, the symphony blends the machine’s body and the garden, crash and after-sound. 

Published 2011. Paperback, 114pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611696 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Gender City is in our skins, in the law, in our names (like Trudi and Terra), in places like the Barbie Doll Museum, in events like falling on the sidewalk, being in prison in a city with buildings made of skin, rupturing murder in language (pure meaning's urge), considering language as tattoo in a city with mouths that manifest like a disgorgement in your gender, in the city that has no center as the tattoo of poetry (the skin under your dress) has no center.

Published 2009. Paperback, 9x6ins. 104pp, £12.95 / $18 

ISBN 9781848610507 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Tomorrowland is a book-length poem of bodily transit and colonial forgetting. Its names and events perpetually arrive in a new world, whose versions here combine promised lands and historical suicide. Eula moves among these real and imagined place-times with other symbolic names and unnamed figures, and Jack plays death. The primary formal note is the interrupted iambic.



Published 2005. 96pp, paperback 9x6ins. £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9780907562672 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A first UK, and second full-length US collection for this talented American writer, who teaches literature, poetic theory, and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition to poetry, she has published work on modernist and contemporary writers, on intellectual property in the humanities, and on critical practices.



Published 2012. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848611924 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

The poems of Red Arcadia present a jittery, spasmodic—often obscured—series of moving x-ray images of contemporary culture in its frenetic contradictions, its self-destructiveness, and sometimes in its moments of fractured sublimity; a wobbly digicam portrait of the bewildered, mournful, and sometimes bemused subject caught in the rush of sounds and images, scrabbling through the levels of the city's palimpset / midden, checking his watch for the arrival of some heroic Captain Modernism.



Shearsman Library Vol. 19
Published August 2023. Paperback, 80pp, 9 x 6 ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848618961 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Marking the 50th anniversary of the earliest of the poems collected in this volume, we now offer a second edition of Gustaf Sobin's first collection, a book which has been hard to find, other than within the pages of his posthumous Collected Poems (itself now out of print), which is itself difficult, and expensive, to obtain for readers outside the USA.

“Gustaf Sobin’s poems are not, in any superficial sense, ‘painterly’, but there is about them that sense of the intangible which anyone who has done graphic work must have felt hovering about the image and its physical counterpart. They often seek to render this intangibility of a world not yet known at the moment it is seized upon by the forms of language. The forms of language are thus, for Sobin, a fundamental measure of human activity although his poems do not look at that activity within an immediately social context. Sobin’s attitude to language and to the way it stylizes our world for us recalls the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the spatial concepts of the Hopi Indians. And Sobin’s world, like that of the Hopi, is basic, stripped, often sun-drenched, sometimes arid-and mysterious.” —Charles Tomlinson

Published September 2023. Paperback, 114pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848618862 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

“Swensen is psychopomp back to an orphic sense of voice, one the critic Elizabeth Sewell, in The Orphic Voice, describes as ‘…a kind of manual of language and mind as a dance of relations, moving and not static, which may help us forward.’ That could serve as worthy blurb for And And And. Swensen is returning us to a kind of first poetics, a prima poieia, in which word and world are co-creative and mutually flourishing. Here language doesn’t define, doesn’t categorize, doesn’t lay claim to fact or knowledge. What paltry things such certainties are against the ongoing mystery of the vital energy stitching one life to every other…”  —Dan Beachy-Quick

Published 2011. Paperback, 132pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848611436 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Last century, I temporarily borrowed Jorge Luis Borges' chatelaine. I slipped off a certain key and made a copy before I returned it to its chains and the old man (OMG: can he ever snore!). Since then, I've been able to slip into Jorge's Library of Babel whenever I wished—that permanent stain on the 7th floor's limestone windowsill was from the d'Yquem I'd carelessly spilled from my treasured wine glass (stolen previously from Vermeer). About a year after I wrote all of the novels that comprise Silk Egg , I returned to the Library of Babel's 7th floor with a bottle of Ajax cleanser ("stronger than dirt!") that I'd hoped would work this time in erasing proof of my unpermitted visitations: that hardened pool of "nectar of the gods" ever winking out a small sun from the bibliophilic dimness. (Eileen Tabios)

The Shearsman Library Vol. 1

Published 2018. Paperback, 180pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615854 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Alashka is a lost book. It was first published as half of a very large, well-printed volume in 1979, spliced together with Tarn’s Selected Poems up until that point. The publisher was a new outfit in Boulder, Colorado, called Brillig Works and born in an eponymous bookstore. Distribution was poor, and fitful, and copies were notoriously hard to come by. This ensured that what was, in effect, Janet Rodney’s first collection, vanished from view. Also, a valuable expansion of Tarn’s anthro-poetics gained little or no attention, whether in Alaska or in the lower states. The book finally gets its own set of covers here, and a chance to find its own niche.

The Shearsman Library 2

Published 2018. Paperback, 106pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615878 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

At the Western Gates was published in 1984 by the splendidly-named Tooth of Time Press in New Mexico, and contained five longish sequences that are central to Tarn’s work in the 1980s. In this new edition, a sixth sequence from the same period, 'Birdscapes with Seaside', has been added.

The Shearsman Library 9

Published 2018. Paperback, 176pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848615922 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Nathaniel Tarn emigrated to the USA in the early 1970s, and took up a position teaching at Rutgers in New Jersey, he quickly confirmed his new identity as an American poet by publishing two major volumes: Lyrics for the Bride of God , a book-length work, with New Directions, which is still in print, and this collection, which was published on the opposite coast by Black Sparrow Press. Both books staked out his territory in a startling manner, and laid the foundations for a burgeoning oeuvre.



Shearsman Library Vol. 17
Published June 2023. Paperback, 92pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $18.
ISBN 9781848619036 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Palenque was first published jointly by Shearsman Books and Oasis Books in 1986, and sought then to offer British readers an overview of what the poet had been up to since his expatriation to the USA in the early 70s. This book is now revived here as part of the Shearsman Library series, which is devoted to recovering significant out-of-print, or hard-to-find editions of modern poetry.

Shearsman Library Vol. 18
Published 2023. Paperback, 112pp, 9 x 6 ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619043 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

A Nowhere for Vallejo was first published by Random House, New York, in 1971, and by Cape in London in 1972, with the material collected in it dating back to 1969. A major staging post in the author’s career, it pre-dates Lyrics for the Bride of God and The House of Leaves, Tarn’s other two major publications from the 1970s, and (apart from Bride of God) was the last major UK publication of his work. The dramatic title sequence takes the form of an imaginary journey to the Inca empire, seen through the eyes of the first and last of the Inca emperors and of two great half-Inca writers, both exiles: Garcilaso de la Vega and César Vallejo. This sequence and ‘Choices’ were written in Guatemala during the summer of 1969 by Lake Atitlán where the author had carried out fieldwork as an anthropologist many years earlier. The book is completed by the ‘October’ sequence, which ends with the moving and tragic “in memoriam” poem ‘Requiem pro duabus filiis Israel’.

Published 2016. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848614826 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Fascinated by strangeness that’s made in the U.S.A.—its beliefs and organization, its affinity for violence and its elusive relationship with the past— Strange Country lyrically addresses itself to defining American landscapes/dreamscapes, and to their unaccountable beauty.

"In Strange Country Jon Thompson addresses the voices, amongst others, of ‘the traffic of fear’, and bids their speakers join the living. It is also an invitation to the reader to enter a specifically American poetry of the here-and-now. The accomplishment of Strange Country begins with the exact measure of its line and its discovered idiom in the face of what may well be termed the present contradictions of a strange country. What sustains that accomplishment is a poet’s attention to a ‘wide-open polyphony’ equal to the multiple realities of its subject." — Kelvin Corcoran

Published 2024. Paperback, 76pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619210 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

"Intense questioning marks the poems of this deeply engaging collection as it addresses the separations between aspects of the self, between past and present, between one’s ideals and the actual world: 'the struggle to find words for what’s happened to the country that grows more unfamiliar with time.' Death, war, loss, and confusion run through complex poems that also evoke the contrary in mountains and trees and flowers – the in-betweenness of experience is very much a motif here. The strength of these poems is their clarity and surety while addressing complex issues and the often painful nature of current life. The poems are also deeply aware that all we have to think with is language and the book captures both the slipperiness and beauty of language: 'sentences running together the vowels in a wet shimmer.' With sharp intelligence, The Distances calibrates the distances that separate and haunt us." —Martha Ronk

Published 2023. Paperback, 76pp, 8.5 x 5.5 ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848618848 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Described as “one of our most original and compelling poets,” Craig Watson makes his long-awaited return to poetry with Apologia , his thirteenth book. It is being published posthumously following his passing in January 2022 at his home in Jamestown, Rhode Island. […]

Craig was a unique and dynamic voice in a fascinating, contentious, and multi-layered community of artists. While he indulged his passion for music and expanded his creative endeavors through painting, collage, and sculpture in later years, he never abandoned his love for and fascination with words. 

Published 2024. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848619395

In 2011 Duncan Wu moved into the forests of northern Virginia in a place largely unchanged since the Civil War. Here, he learnt, indigenous people had once lived in considerable numbers but at some point after the War all had disappeared. Contemporary documents held in local archives provided no explanation although they confirmed all indigenous settlements had gone from the area by 1778. He would learn a good deal more by walking through the wilds of northern Virginia with his dog Dakota, who would guide him to the places that witnessed the end of Powhatan and his people.