Banshee Press – förlag

From acclaimed poet Rosamund Taylor comes a compelling, genre-bending coming of age story. Orla is discovering her sexuality in the hostile and misogynistic world of Ireland's school system; when her friend Muireann rejects her advances, she turns to her online community for support, and her charismatic English teacher Irene Wall for a love affair both passionate and annihilating. A novel in verse telling a story of sexual awakening, masochistic love, and the transformative possibilities of communities that transcend binaries, Filly introduces two unforgettable characters in Orla and the complicated and magnetic Irene Wall. Written with Taylor's trademark earthy lyricism, Filly is an exploration of intergenerational love and trauma, and an explosion of queer joy.

In this dark, glittering collection of short stories, Deirdre Sullivan explores the trauma and power that reside in women's bodies. A teenage girl tries to fit in at a party held in a haunted house, with unexpected and disastrous consequences. A mother and daughter run a thriving online business selling antique dolls, while their customers get more than they bargained for. And after a stillbirth, a young woman discovers that there is something bizarre and wondrous growing inside of her. With empathy and invention, Sullivan effortlessly blends genres in stories that are by turns strange and exquisite. Already established as an award-winning writer for children and young adults, I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay marks her arrival as a captivating new voice in literary fiction.

In her debut collection of poetry, Bebe Ashley spins gold from the detritus of the internet. A landscape often depicted as a wasteland is illuminated in poems that explore celebrity, obsession, sexuality, coming of age, and that charismatic enigma, Harry Styles. Inspired by sources as diverse as Styles's track listings, Scandi webseries Skam, and One Direction newsletters, Ashley spins us across continents on a tour of the surreal highs and absurd lows of celebrity culture. These are poems of youth and yearning, yet they're suffused with the hard-won wisdom that the communities we build can be as meaningful as the families we're born into. Perceptive, witty, and exuberant, Gold Light Shining introduces an essential new voice; one that captures how pop culture's Technicolor joy disrupts our greyscale world.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2024In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lens of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports - the high jump. Formally inventive, these poems speak in a capacious voice which can be vulnerable, fragmented, and rapturous; exhorting us to imagine and reimagine our possible selves while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters. Taking us from the arroyos of New Mexico to a West Cork farm in winter, these meditations on beauty and the elusive nature of love are insightful, and hard-won. Here, the spirit triumphs, even when body falls: 'having/ reached for sunlight,/ even if I failed to hold it.'

An eerie discovery at a building site triggers a crisis for a garda and his family. A grieving woman comes to believe that she is being possessed by the spirit of her mother, and seeks an unusual exorcism. A brave new world is established as Galway disappears slowly underwater. And a young woman experiences the morning after the night before in a strange, condemned midlands town. In these stories of an Ireland both strange and achingly familiar, Claire-Lise Kieffer animates our collective past, present and future. Humorous, off-kilter, savage and surreal, she depicts the bonds that hold couples, families and communities together with a sharp, humane and deeply original slant.

In her latest collection of dark, hilarious and provocative short stories, Lucy Sweeney Byrne explores women on the brink - of love, of joy, of disaster - with her signature wit, insight and daring. A newlywed grapples with the chasm that has opened up between her and her husband on the subject of children. A young mother tries to eke out a life for her family on an island named for a dead man, unaware of the psychic toll that is taken on her by the land and sea. And a woman at a drug-fuelled house party ruminates on the dark past she shares with one of the guests. In Let's Dance, Lucy Sweeney Byrne, in her signature hypnotic prose, explores subjects such as physicality, identity and disillusionment. Utilising forms ranging from flash fiction to novella, Let's Dance is a glittering display of fiction's ability to probe, startle and entertain.

Trieste, 1904. James Joyce - not yet famous - arrives in the city by train with Norah Barnacle. Penniless, he goes to seek out a loan, leaving Norah sitting on a suitcase outside the train station for almost an entire day and night. In reality, Norah waited for him; they were reunited, and the rest is history. But what if she hadn't?In Penelope Unbound, one of Ireland's greatest living novelists weaves a spellbinding speculative narrative. By unhooking Norah from her famous husband, Mary Morrissy gives her a compelling new voice, with heartbreak and humanity all her own. Sensual, inventive and uproariously funny, Penelope Unbound reimagines a Joycean heroine for the modern age.

In these eleven stories, debut author Lucy Sweeney Byrne invites us to experience travelling the world alone as a young woman, with all its attendant pleasures and dangers. The staff of a boat moored in Brooklyn rebel against their tyrannical boss. A drifting writer house-sits in the wilds of Donegal in the midst of a health scare. In a Texas dive bar, two former lovers try to salvage a friendship from their intense connection. And in Mexico, a frustrated artist navigates a city both dangerous and alluring. Whether set in New York, Oaxaca, Havana or back home in Dublin, the result is by turns sharp, fearless and heartbreaking. Laced with biting humour and devastating observations, Paris Syndrome introduces a unique literary talent.

In her debut collection, Rosamund Taylor dares us across thresholds and invites us to glimpse the world as we've never seen it before. She boldly charts a journey of survival and transformation with poems on history reimagined, astronomy, sorcery, wild landscapes, talismanic creatures, and queer love. Taylor explores what it means to live in a female body that is not defined by lack, or want, or perpetual suffering, but is possessed by a real and defined sense of erotic autonomy. These poems burn from the inside out with possibility, and there is magic, mystery and reclamation at every turn. In Her Jaws is a landmark debut that extends and deepens the Irish tradition of writing the female perspective, while also breaking new ground.

Every time I write about my heart, I write about walking. Every time I write about walking, I write about my heart. What is it like to be born with a congenital heart defect? What does it mean to live knowing your heart will one day fail you? How do you walk without moving a muscle? In Pacemaker, poet David Toms deftly blends creative nonfiction, poetry and diary in an account of resisting, confronting, and living with a rare heart condition. His experience, including his hospitalisation during the Covid-19 pandemic, speaks to all of us in its exploration of what it means to live in a fragile yet resilient body, to walk multiple challenging paths, and to always a find a way to keep moving.

Deeply attuned to those things that make and unmake us, Dylan Brennan's Let The Dead concerns itself with life's alchemical processes. A couple breathe life into a doomed poppet, a photographer immortalises a corpse, Joyce and Breton rub shoulders on the streets of the poet's adopted Mexico, where life is a tapestry of 'delicate anthers' and 'disembodied tongues'. These dark meditations are set against poems which consider love, miscarriage, childbirth and the daily miracle of family life. Beautiful and disturbing by turns, these reflections on Ireland and Mexico's shared colonial past invoke topographies both real and imagined, where 'things in the ground have a tendency to grow.' Let the Dead reminds us of the power of art to shape our perception of history, and of the artist's responsibility in a time of violence.

Bebe Ashley's prizewinning second collection charts the poet's efforts to qualify as a British Sign Language interpreter. Intershot with enquiries into the nature of language as it is spoken and signed, how our medium of communication shapes our words, and the process of leaving and finding home, Harbour Doubts is a collection that tangles with the burning desire to communicate in the isolation of a late capitalist, post-pandemic world. It's also a love letter to the delights of linguistics and language, a three-dimensional exploration of words and the body. Bringing together meditations on language as mediated through sound, sign, vision, and film, this exciting sophomore collection cements Bebe Ashley's reputation as a fearless experimenter.

Noted novelist and essayist Tim MacGabhann's debut collection demonstrates a rare confidence and coherence. These formally assured and blackly funny poems chart the course of addiction and recovery, contemplating the injuries a body and mind can sustain, and what joys we find in these darker spaces in the shape of friendship, music, and community. The spare, stark poems of love and survival in Found in a Context of Destruction open windows on rarely-seen vistas, bringing us on a delirious but vividly captured journey from Ireland to Mexico.