In Retail

Jeremy Dixon was born in Essex and spent 45 year in rural South Wales making Artist’s Books that combine poetry and photography. He now lives on the Wirral. His poems have appeared both online and in print in Roundyhouse Magazine, Riptide Journal, Lighthouse Journal, Durable Goods, and Really System, among others. Arachne Press published his first poetry pamphlet, In Retail, and his first full collection, A Voice Coming From Then, which won the Wales Book of the Year 2022 Englsih Language Poetry Category Cherry Potts is the Director of Arachne Press, for whom she is editor of almost all our anthologies and runs the Annual Solstice Shorts Festival. Cherry is the author of an epic fantasy novel, two collections of short stories, a photographic diary of a community opera, and has had many stories in anthologies, magazines and online. Her novel of sibling hatred in the 1920s, The Bog Mermaid, won the Quill LGBTQ+ Prose prize 2022.

The situations are recognisable, written without judgemental comment and the poems report the shortcomings of petty bureaucracy without ranting or taking sides. In Retail offers insights and knows how to end a story precisely on the punchline. Each page has the title In Retail in grey reversed print at the top. Each even page has the message ‘Thank you for your custom’ in grey reversed print. Each odd page has a different message, e.g. ‘All made in China’, ‘Obey the till’, ‘Hurry they won’t last long’ in grey reversed print. This layout suggests a receipt roll and the poems appear to be printed on the back, a subversively humorous reflection of how they were composed.