Kirsten Irving – författare

How well do you know Gaius Valerius Catullus, Ancient Rome's most notorious scandal-monger, filthsmith and lovelorn wretch? Impress your friends by having his muckiest quotes and most stinging jibes to hand at all times! In this customisable handbook, you'll find him at his most sexy, tender, savage and scurrilous, translated in myriad ways by Sidekick Books' many talented scribes. Catullus is seven genres; emoji Catullus; Catullus in Scots; poems sculpted into sex positions - and pages for you, the reader, to fill in, in your own obsene fashion.

“Very ready we are to say of a book, ‘How good it is – that’s exactly what I think!’ But the right feeling is, ‘What the hell did I just read?’”— John RuskinWhy a book of misquotations? Because what’s captured in such a book is the jittery, jumbled essence of truth: that wisdom and edict alike are constantly customised, iterated, adjusted. Nothing stays the same. Say It Again gathers the sage words of philosophers, statesmen, artists and authors alongside proverbs, sayings and scripture – all distorted with varying degrees of deliberation. Some are stitched into poems (or something like poems) while others speak to the present in bizarre new ways. Whether or not they retain their former authority, or the power to lower the reader into the deep well of human experience, these refigured fragments are evidence that everything we know may be shaken, like the grains in a kaleidoscope.

“Nobody is going to buy the book if I say nice things about you, Werner.”— Klaus Kinski to Werner HerzogWhat are the things you can’t live with or without? What can we expect from relationships that refuse to resolve themselves one way or the other? You Again collects together accounts of ruinous tension and blighted passion, mixing extracts and cut-ups from famous works with fresh slivers of contemporary writing. There’s romance, of course – but other kinds of entanglement as well, all awash with delight and frustration, rage and joy, hope and perplexity.

“If his cypher was discovered too soon, his life would be the forfeit. If never, his labour would be in vain."In this volume, we invite you to reflect on all the ways messages can be hidden – and uncovered – in other messages. More than that, we invite you to think about the relationship between the within and the without, and what it tells us about ourselves. Look Again is a compilation of curious poems, short texts and extracts from longer works that all have something to hide or reveal, taking their cues from riddles, cyphers and imaginary languages.Be aware: you may be left with a mind to see secret writing everywhere you look.

In scenarios which recall the mid-20th century craze for atomic monsters and stop-motion titans – as well as the existential fears they continue to embody – these ten sprawling poems and lyrical tales turn on terrible confrontations in modern metropolitan centres. The poets behind them are fighters, guardians – their lines and stanzas weapons of resistance. And while the beasts themselves may be somewhat figurative, somewhat fantastical, the danger they represent is sometimes very real indeed ...

“One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—”When a poet turns to the subject of ghosts, it’s as much conjuration, or spectral evocation, as it is a story. We have gathered here ten in one slim book — ten possible summoning spells, primed to plant sounds and images deep in the ear and eye. Would you risk reading them aloud? Be careful — repetition is a kind of incantation. And the ghosts in these lyric tales are as angry as they are mournful as they are cold ...

Do poets make good detectives? Find out by following their feats of deduction, in this set of ten wildly varied accounts of mystery and murder. See them soften the tight lips of witnesses, squeeze the hearts of suspects, and wrestle with the muddledness of the inner life exposed. Watch for their subtle skill, but also for the all-too-human weaknesses and maddening contradictions that all honest poetry (and all good detective fiction) holds up, glintingly, to the light.

Poets are famous rakes, seductresses and time travellers, are they not? Cast all doubt from your mind by taking in these ten tantalising accounts of extremely inter-generational flirtation, whereby prominent persons from history are left weak-kneed and willing. But is that all there is to it? Or are our poets, as poets tend to be, up to much else besides mere dalliance? And will they change the past forever, or vanish into it?

Long before we went to the moon, we dreamt of going there, of what it would be like, in every medium from cinema to comic strip. Now, ten brave cosmonauts have resurrected that most rickety, most celestial of technologies – the lyric poem – as a means of reaching out as far as any of us has ever gone, in a space race from which some of them may never return. What will they find out there, amid the cold craters of the forbidding lunar crust?

"Behind the thin glass, the wind chanted not warnings but invitations... " They’re done with the land, its reckless rulers and its unjust laws! Now ten poets set sail under the bold black flag, as pirate queens, gentleman corsairs and salty dogs, to sing shanties most boisterously and comb for treasure. But what kind of treasure? And what varieties of creature await them in the deep? And what happens when the rum runs dry? Is the journey really what it seems to be? Did they ever, in fact, escape the shore?

Poets make natural spies. Nondescript these days, they’re subtle and ever-watchful. Shifty in their skins, you might say. They are practised at fleeing and giving pursuit, and quick to reach for a pen (which may conceal a poison dart). Most importantly, they are experts at slipping the grip of rival operatives, at least one of whom is their own dark double.Ten Poets Do Their Bit for the Secret Service passes out the passports to ten such agents, sending them out on new missions to capture, conceal, communicate and (hopefully) come back alive…Featuring new work by: Alison Brackenbury, John Clegg, Michael Conley, Grace Ellis, Jac Harmon, Safa Maryam, Claire Orchard, Jess Richards, Robert Sheppard, Jeremy Wikeley