North American Poetry Titles: Authors R to Z

Published 2018. Paperback, 72pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615991 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"Poetry is the antagonist of denial. Complicating the familiar world purely with the evidence of eye and insight, it insists upon the Spirit of things, even as life desolates our spirits with coarse familiarity. Pam Rehm, in this magnificent book of Showings, reveals new content and new contours in the breaking day. Her voice is a guide and guarantor." —Donald Revell

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 2010. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848610880 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Anime, Animus, Anima is formed from a mass of influences but most prominently from three classic Japanese anime. Parts One and Three evolved from imagery in Ghost in the Shell (1995, Production I.G.), an adaptation of the manga of the same name by Masamune Shirow, directed by Mamoru Oshii and written by Kazunori Ito, and Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, Production I.G. and Studio Ghibli), written and directed by Mamoru Oshii. Part Two evolved from imagery in Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995, Gainax), both the television series and the movies, written and directed by Hideaki Anno. Imagery from Cowboy Bebop (1998), the Japanese animated television series directed by Shinichiro Watanabe and written by Keiko Nobumoto, appears throughout all three sections.

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 2015. Paperback, 72pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613935 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



The poems in Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way arise amidst those remnants, historical and everyday, that redefine what we know to be underfoot in the places we live. From the Rose Creek Preserve to Koppel Farm Community Garden to a backyard on Pioneer Hill – and in many spaces in between – these poems suggest that, as ecologically-attuned 21st century inhabitants, we need to not only understand the complex of relationships – as scientists help us do – but also to listen deeply for meanings at every level with a various awareness of what lives and thrives.

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 2012. Paperback, 84pp, 9x6ins, £10.95 / $18
ISBN 9781848612570 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



This poetry unhinges the sensible cultural body and activates other oscillations of the sensible, which chime with acts of love and political subjects resuturing what are given to be facts. The poems are verbal machineries of encounter, brain music in relational life.

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 2008. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700851 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



The Invention of Culture is the third full-length collection of poems by Lisa Samuels, whose second volume also appeared with Shearsman. The poems in this new collection are committed to bending forms and genres. They mix prosodic syncopation with prose staccato and floating page space, as though the page were not only paper but also skin, film, and musical score and as though language were eyes and fingers tapping out the news. And there is news here: the strained topicality of the poems is an index of imaginative vision meeting the world's insistence that it be experienced. These poems are stories without names – literary cousins, parallax histories, dreams, compound love songs and dirges – whose inhabitable spatial structures are like event horizons that mean to let you come back to the world.

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.



Published 2014. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613195 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Northern Soul is the second poem in a major sequence entitled Universe , following on from Revelator — published by BookThug in Canada in 2013. Universe is a work that, were Ron Silliman to live long enough, would take him three centuries to complete; it is a poem of globalization and post-global poetics (an important reason for publishing several sections outside the author's native USA). Northern Soul is a book-length poem of observation and reminiscence, a kaleidoscope of impressions occasioned by visits to Lancashire, in the north-west of England, where the author has several times appeared at the Bury Text Festival; Lancashire is also home to the Northern Soul music scene — another moment of US/UK interpenetration.

Shearsman Library Vol. 22. Edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron & Andrew Zawacki.
Published 2025. Paperback, 194pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23

ISBN 9781848619296

Gustaf Sobin's Collected Poems appeared posthumously in 2010, but left out work which had been collected in special limited editions — and which were outside the main trajectory of his work — as well as work which had been published in magazines but which had then been dropped from his main published collections. This Uncollected volume redresses the balance, and, for good measure, includes an interview with the Mexican poet, Tedi López Mills, which has only previously been published in Spanish. The volume in which that interview appeared, like the rest of the contents of this book, is no longer in print elsewhere.

Shearsman Library Vol. 19
Published 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 2015. Paperback, 94pp, 8x8ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848613881 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Model City is built from a missing antecedent, an “it” as mysterious as it is familiar: What was it like? What was what like? One’s life? The city from which one fled? The city to which one did so? The last century? The one before that? The weaving in and out of traffic? Love? Candlelight from a curtained window or the dull, digital glow of a smart phone from the balcony below? Here, those old utopic dreams and social experiments collide with the age of excess information, leaving behind broken bits of experience: precise, exacting, aphoristic, arresting — the emotional residue of just how one deals with one’s tiny-cog-in-a-big-machine conundrum allowed to curdle into language as concerned with form and structure, with feats of architecture and engineering, as it is with real human relationships. This book is a marvel. — Noah Eli Gordon

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

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

Longlisted for the Griffin Prize

“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.



The Shearsman Library 8

Published 2018. Paperback, 68pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848615915 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



This volume was originally a chapbook, first published in Mississippi in 1985, and demonstrates in shorter poems how Tarn’s work was developing in the '80s. It contains some remarkable work that stands up today, as fresh as the year in which the book was first published. In this second edition, the original contents are joined by three other long sequences from the same period to turn it into a full-length book.

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 1982. 12pp, centre-stapled.

ISBN-10 0907562019. Out of print.

Originally issued as part of the 4th issue of the first series of Shearsman magazine. More recently excerpted in the author's Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), and in Palenque (see below), as well as At the Western Gates (see above).

Published 2020. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848617278 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



In Country of Warm Snow , the author seeks to represent the duality of a life lived in two places at once. It is the life of an immigrant who has been in this country for fifty-odd years, whose heart, when he’s in one place, yearns for the other. To combat the geographical dislocation, there arises the invention of an impossible land, a country of the imagination, a snow that is beautiful and warm.

Published 2017. Paperback, 102pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848614970 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



The Master Portrait Painter, Mervyn Taylor, is visiting his old haunts, the island he has sketched time and again with indelible ink, the Brooklyn of his residence in exile, and the journey back and forth, the poet returning to fill up his paint bottles, to recount the stories of voices that carry from dreams, memories, the Port of Spain that has changed forever and yet remains the city that is his own. 

     In this new collection, that is at the same time as old as the eternal truths he tells, we celebrate the voices the poet hears: we see him walk beside the Savannah, people calling out, hello Uncle, Daddy; we lament the turning of green places into dangerous fields, and we cry quietly while accompanying “the boy walking with his broken kite/to find the old Indian who bought him/the thread, to tell him how well it flew.” —Indran Amirthanayagam

Published 2014. Paperback, 88pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

?ISBN 9781848613300 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"Mervyn Taylor is a poet of great sensibility. His astute, quiet and resonant poems bring us into what is not said as easily as he does portraitures that are singular in their insight. His poems shine without calling attention to themselves. Whether in NY or Trinidad, whether about love, forgiveness or adventure, his poems are gorgeous. This is a book to be savored. Here is a mature and muscled poet, writing that gives us what we look for in poetry: that brew of word, sound, truth." —Veronica Golos

Published 2010. Paperback, 90pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611412 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



There are those inhabitants of islands who say they "'fraid sea", meaning they have an abiding respect for the restless ocean and for whatever lies unseen past the horizon. 'Sea have no back door' is the phrase they use to indicate the idea of no return, of being swallowed up in the vastness of a world outside the shore that is a natural boundary.

These poems chart the journeys, metaphorical and literal, of those who stay, and those who go, and the dilemma of the immigrant soul trying to live in two places at once.

Published 2009. Paperback, 136pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848610415 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing lays bare the richness of classic American texts and their fraught relationship with what Jon Thompson sees as a culture of violence and war. Focusing on William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation , Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener , Walt Whitman's Specimen Days, Emily Dickinson's Letters and Michael Herr's Dispatches , After Paradise offers a series of moving, interconnected reflections upon what Thompson calls "the fate of American writing." Part cultural reflection, part lyrical criticism, part idiosyncratic literary history, After Paradise attempts to restore a sense of the original strangeness of American literature and culture by pushing the boundaries of the essay form.

Published 2014. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613492 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"All along the highway," Jon Thompson writes in his mesmerizing collection of cinematic landscape poems, Landscape with Light , "strange civilizations congregate in small settlements, like a vision of the past, suddenly there, evident to the eye." Otherworldly, uncanny, melancholy, there like the past, like the present, the place (not the people) remains: a glimpse, a flicker, a trick of light that excavates the dark, the endless accretion of shadows. What is to be found there? " Desire like a dream of paradise ." Ekphrasis is rarely this eclectic, this moving. —Eric Pankey

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 2019. Paperback, 86pp, 8 x 8ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848616486 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Organized around three sequences of numbered tercets, Notebook of Last Things maps a city undergoing dynamic, transformative change along with the sense of living that change—its rhythms and patterns, its peculiar commitments, its urgencies and pleasures as well as its inequalities, tensions, and fateful “unsaids.” Possessed by the drama of the ephemerality of experience, tuned into the drift of the present, Notebook of Last Things draws on the lyric to meditate on the present, and the powers, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that make it up.

“ Notebook of Last Things is written in dialogue with (or in counterpoint to) Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History and his/her/its “unreadable tally of catastrophe.” Thompson has an eagle eye for the rips and fissures destroying our social fabric, for the discrepancies that seem ironic and then reveal themselves as tragic, the “Art Deco walkway over the beltline/[ with a] Chain link fence to discourage jumpers.” In the quality of his attention, he could be a minimalist version of Ron Silliman or a Basho-inflected George Oppen. His steady gaze is well worth following.” —Rae Armantrout

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 2014. Paperback, 78pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848613447 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



How does one overcome the thought that "past failures dictate future performance"? Maureen Thorson's second book of poetry follows a couple as they put their separate histories behind them and create a new life together. In My Resignation , fragments of overheard dialogue, close observations of the changing seasons, and a wry sense of humor blend to narrate the transformation of doubts into certainties, as past heartbreak is set aside with this motto: "Proceed with caution, but always proceed."

Published 2007. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781905700165 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Rhyme and ancestry — literary and otherwise — become contemporary in Elizabeth Treadwell's newest collection, Birds & Fancies , which traces a deepening initiation into the mysteries and continuities of history and biology brought on by motherhood. "Oh daughter thou/shalt grounde & playe."

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Published 2019. Paperback, 86pp, 9 x 6ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848616332 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed , Amish Trivedi’s second book, is an exploration through a wandering mind in the middle of external chaos. The poems trace private and public histories, from Lincoln mythos to serial killers, tied together through contorted bodies, whipped lungs, one eye firmly on the abyss, and one hand reaching back from it. “One more nightmare and I’m out,” but what are we waking into?

Published 2020. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848617155 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Motive & Opportunity is principally located in Los Angeles, where the poet has lived and worked since 1968. The five pieces collected here are various attempts at poetic language trying to settle in this metropolitan sprawl of contradictions. Or as Carey McWilliams called it in his seminal Southern California: an Island on the Land, “very much a city that refuses to know itself.” From ‘Driving Platitudes’ and ‘The Grid,’ both written while driving across the seemingly endless metropolis, to the most recent ‘Motive & Opportunity,’ a detective poem, this book moves around Vangelisti’s almost native city, leaving a trail of affections and casual encounters.

Published 2013. Paperback, 84pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848612365 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

A Neon Tryst is a collection of ekphrastic poems featuring the films L'Eclisse (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni); Seconds (dir. John Frankenheimer); and Wild Strawberries (dir. Ingmar Bergman). Though divided in three separate sections by film, the collection stands as one, cohesive piece, as all main characters share an internal conflict — losing identity with the passage of time.



Published 2020. Paperback, 132pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848617025 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Molly Vogel’s first collection of poems, Florilegium is an exploration of life written in ‘the language offlowers’. The poems regard flowers as both symbols and means of communication; in a broader sense,they deem the natural world essential to our understanding of words, ourselves, and the divine. LikeColeridge’s rook in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, the flower is a sign that connects thosedisparately placed, both geographically and emotionally. Florilegium finds its blooms in Scotland as wellas California; in free verse as well as stricter form; in books as well as dreams; on streets and at shrinesas well as in wild gardens. Fittingly, the poems are varied and vividly colourful, inviting and surprising.They precede a long-form glossary, a meditation growing out from the poems’ words but also from theentire history of literature and thought around flowers. Though intertwined with the poems, theglossary is a collection in itself: in equal parts literary criticism, philosophical treatise, and prose poem.

Published 2011. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611535 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



bird book is written in collaboration with a field guide to North American birds. Each page both borrows and departs from language found in an individual bird entry. The resulting text is an investigation into dissolved and dissolving narrative, into the permeable boundaries between "human" and "natural," and into the partial and shifting nature of narrative and memory themselves, "wet and traveling maps." Here, as in bird song, gap and repetition create their own story. To welcome "accidental field," "to take the songbird out of your mouth," to examine the ever-shifting relationship between what we receive and what we project, is to move through a porous and shared space, affecting and affected, where "yellow spectacle" hovers over "a suggested house": "exuberant ground."

Published 2011. Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848611382 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]

Haunted by Cocteau's version of the Orpheus myth since 1968, Craig Watson collected a palimpsest of renderings, fragments and images from the Orphic tradition for the next 40 years. In 2008, he returned to these materials in the wake of a near fatal stroke. The result is Sleepwalking with Orpheus , a constellation of voices that recount the legendary singer's continuous journey through the realms that compose a life.



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 2009. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £10.95 / $18

ISBN 9781848610712 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



Lush, languid, enamored with the natural world, The Ocean Liner's Wake is a book of longing. In these wide-ranging poems the Other takes many forms: lover or God, a bridge, a sprig of forsythia. But always, the poems seem to say, what we hunger for is union. In spare, chiseled lines Wehle examines what it means to be fully alive to the world.

Published 2015. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9781848614130 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



"This is a barefoot poetry, almost in the very oldest Asian sense of that phrase, a poetry of voice & body that recognizes that even body-language has accents, which surely it does. The eye is keen, the humor self-deprecating. Mark Weiss has reached that point on life’s mesa where forgiveness (to oneself as well as others) may well be the most important of gestures. A book to make you glad to be in the world." —Ron Silliman

2nd Edition. Published 2013 (first edition, 2003) . Paperback, 150pp, 8x5ins, £12.95 / $20

ISBN 9780907562344 [Download a sample PDF from this book here .]



This second edition, issued on the 10th anniversary of its first publication, is presented in a larger format, with a larger typeface, and with a few very minor typographical errors corrected, but is otherwise unchanged.

This collection covers the entire poetic career of David Wevill, who has faded from view as a poet in the UK since his departure for the United States in the early 1970s. His first four collections won many prizes and gained him a reputation as one of the finest poets of his generation, as well as a place in all the major anthologies of the period and in the seminal Penguin Modern Poets series. His subsequent collections were all published in the author's native Canada and have been difficult to obtain either in the UK or the USA. David Wevill now lives in Austin, Texas.

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.