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Dear Reader,

April is the cruelest month... if you're not a fan of amazing independent publishing that is. I can't quite believe I wrote that, I feel a bit queasy, but I'm sure you get my point. It's going to another exciting month here at Inpress.

Commiserations first of all to Carrie Etter, whose collection Imagined Sons was beaten to the Ted Hughes Award by Andrew Motion last Thursday night. No shame in that! It's still brilliant and you should check out the sample poem here. 

The highlight of last month was Mark Thompson's glowing review of the Istros Books publication The Great War in the Times Literary Supplement, he called it, "the most noteworthy comic novel since Jaroslav Hašek’s ‘The Good Soldier Švejk'..." Hooray! Read it, it's brilliant.

More recently, Simon Barraclough was on the Nature podcast, you can hear him talking about his new collection about the sun here. There's a sample poem below, should you curiosity by piqued. 

You'll find this newsletter even more jam packed with poetry than usual, in celebration of our new poetry prize. But more of that below, without further ado, here's what's making waves so far this month. 

Rebecca
 
 
Cherry Pie

Poem of the Month

Cherry Pie by Holly McNish

When my mum sliced the cherry pie on the table my grandad ran off and threw up.
'I’m so sorry dad', said my mum, 'I'm so sorry I forgot that the tanks all blew up'.
I was nine years old then no idea what had happened but when my papa came back he explained.
Two weeks of waiting on the shore of a war beach as rowing boats came to collect them and the only thing there for the soldiers to eat were pre-packaged sweet syrup cherry tins.
His mates were shot dead,
The cherries were blood red,
Stench of rotting and sweet fruit,
He was gagging with each breath.
He said, 'War is a sham.'
We had ice cream instead
He said, 'Be kind not revengeful Hollie,
Don't believe all you read,
And don't eat cherries in syrup,
Cos that stuff rots your dreams.'
Buy it here.
 
 
Campaign in Poetry

Campaign in Poetry

Campaign in Poetry is a powerful collection of poems about political and social issues in the UK featuring original poems written by contemporary poets in the months leading up to the UK General Election.
Buy it here.
 
 
The Art of Falling

The Art of Falling

The Art of Falling is Kim Moore’s keenly anticipated debut poetry collection. A young poet from Cumbria, she writes with a compelling directness and power about her life and the lives of others.
Buy it here.
 
 
Life Class

Life Class

Jo Reed’s second collection offers readers more of her trademark mix of memory, myth and magic. The magic of Life Class is found in the single consciousness that connects the poems.
Buy it here.
 

Book of the Month

A new book from Steve Ely following on from the success of Oswald's Book of Hours:

After the battle of Brunanburh, when Æthelstan’s army defeated an invading alliance of Scots, Irish, Britons and Norse, the Viking mercenary Egil Skallagrimsson extemporised a panegyric for the English and their king.

Englaland is a stunning re-imagining of Skallagrimsson’s song, an unapologetic and paradoxical affirmation of a bloody, bloody-minded and bloody brilliant people. Danish huscarls, Falklands war heroes, pit-village bird-nesters, aging prize-fighters, flying pickets, jihadi suicide-bombers and singing yellowhammers parade through the book in an incendiary combination, rising to the challenge of the skald’s affirmation: you are the people in the land; know you are the people; know it is your land.
Buy it here.
 
 
 

Inpress Presents: The London Book Fair Poetry Prize 2015

To celebrate the formal arrival (at long last) of poetry at The London Book Fair in the form of the Fair’s first-ever Poetry Pavilion, you are invited to join in the fun and enter the inaugural Inpress London Book Fair Poetry Pavilion Prize.

We are inviting entries in the following categories:

  1. A sonnet on the subject of ‘London’. Each entry must follow the form of a Shakespearean sonnet (14 lines each of 10 syllables, following the rhyme scheme abab, cdcd, efef, gg).
  2. A haiku on the subject of ‘A Book’ or ‘Books’ (using the haiku form of three lines of 5, 7, 5 syllables)
  3. A nonnet on the subject of ‘The Fair’ or ‘Fairs’ (using the nonnet form of a 9-line poem commencing with a nine syllable line, reducing by one syllable per line until the final line is just one syllable).

    Click here for more info.
 
 
 
My Father's Dreams

My Father's Dreams

My Father’s Dreams: A Tale of Innocence Abused, is a controversial and shocking novel by Slovenia’s bestselling author Evald Flisar, and is regarded by many critics as his best.
Buy it here.
 
 
The Whale House

The Whale House

The stories in this collection range across Trinidad’s different ethnic communities; across rural and urban settings. Trinidad in all its social tumult is ever present in these stories
Buy it here.
 
 
Stranger Visitor Foreigner Guest

Stranger Visitor Foreigner Guest

At the heart of this novel from Cinnamon Press are the true events of the Bushiri War, where one woman's involvement echos down the generations.  
Buy it here.
 
 
 
 

The Sun woke me this morning
with a swift kick to the door,
its rays full with a breakfast tray
rattling with silverware,
orange juice and sunny-sides-up,
and crisped toast slathered
with butter fattened on all that grass,
saying, “Hey! Budge up,
let me slide in alongside,
it’s a whiteout outside,
the schools are closed,
the roads are glazed in bottle-ice,
no-one’s going anywhere today.”
Buy it here.
 

An Inpress Favourite

Eve naming the birds

I give him language and he looks for flint.
I’ve done the beasts, he says. Your turn.
I name them into shame, weeping for their loss.

So, the wordless world is finched and hawked,
shriked and paradised into the light we make;
the swans and dodos, gannets, grebes and rails.

He cannot see a feather till it’s limed:
as if dominion were what we ought to want,
as if they ought to be ashamed of merely flying.

We shall name it into shape, he brightly says –
be it God or anything that’s naked, we shall clothe it
in a word. Now, what shall we call you?

I think it – but unspoken, it is still my own –
Enemy. From this day forward, I know
he shall bruise my head, and I his heel.

- taken from Kith by Jo Bell
Buy it here.
 
 

“I like David Attwooll’s lack of pretension and preciousness. He is playful and experimental…” Hilary Menos, Sphinx Review
 
 

Viral on YouTube and now here, flung
above the lake a swirling weft of birds.
Black but diaphanous this skirl of stars twists
and banks to its own mysterious arithmetic.

Neural networks more subtle than markets
conjure an aerial screensaver
contingent as crowds that flock the ether
to counter power, occupy tents.

Dark webs encode surprise: the tip of a system’s
critical transitions, poised, then instantly
transformed, as filings magnetise, or continents fold
and drift, framing new maps, possible worlds.
Buy it here.
 
 
 

Thank you for reading, if you'd ever like a sample of any of our titles please just get in touch. We can normally rustle something up! 

Don't forget you can still get 25% off with the code LAUNCH1, but not for long.
 
 
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