Cinnamon Press – förlag

Liliana Pasterska is the maven of finding emotional depth in the detail of the everyday. In Brontë Journey we are invited to walk alongside a love story, one that is sundered by loss, yet shines all the more brightly for that.The language is clear and precise. The places resonate with the beauty and grief that unfold in the personal story of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nichols at the heart of the collection. The voices of her subjects carry across time, not an act of ventriloquism, but of empathy and immersion. And if for Arthur, grieving as he leaves Yorkshire six years after Charlotte’s early and sudden death, “Roadside fuchsia will greet him / as if nothing had passed.”, the clue is in the ‘as if’. For so much has passed and this exquisite collection has allowed us in, invited us to share a moment with creatures whose lives still touch us.An elegant, heart-stopping collection.

In The Third Sister Speaks Liliana A Pasterska immerses us in the voice of Anne Brontë—a frontierswoman and trailblazing writer of the mid 19th century who stepped out of ‘female’ territory to expose the taboos of her age, including gender inequality, marital abuse, the terrible conditions in which many women teachers worked and the effects of alcohol and substance abuse. A woman at the margins of her time, Anne Brontë lived for only 29 years, yet left a wealth of acute observation and sharp insight in her writing, as well as poetry that witnesses to her personal, spiritual and literary intelligence. For all of this, her voice is the one not often heard amongst the extraordinary Brontë sisters. But here is a corrective to this. In lyrical poetry originally commissioned for a programme of music and words celebrating Anne Brontë’s bicentenary, we enter Anne’s world. In this careful and beautifully achieved debut pamphlet, the voice of the poet reaches into the voice of a young woman still calling to the modern reader across time: elegant, spare, leaving space for silence and allowing its questions to resonate long after reading:I am a teller of truth a seer—can you hear me?

In this kaleidoscopic and engrossing novella, the reader is drawn into the shifting world of Beirut, “city of whores and city of dames”, when Yusuf, an inveterate observer of his native city, is given several unfinished stories by one of his most promising students and finds that his life’s drift is about to hit rough water …

Combining poetry with the long essay ‘Thirty Ways of Looking at the Sea’, which charts her involvement with the Marine Conservation Society as resident poet as they launched an appeal to tackle the threats facing thirty marine species, Words the Turtle Taught Me sees Susan Richardson writing at the height of her powers as a poet, an ecological campaigner and as a writer about the process of composing inventive, compelling poems.

Praise for Robin Thomas’s work:"He has clearly used his logical, scientific way of thinking; his ability to dissect and deconstruct, to write in a way that is fresh and inspiring and allows us to glimpse his deep compassion for all of us flawed human beings." Susan Jane Sims on A Fury of Yellow "There’s real power in the sparse language and the use of repetition. Thomas writes with compassion but without a trace of sentimentality." Ama Bolton on A Fury of Yellow

Growing from a year-long commitment to write one haiku a day, Catstrawe ranges through family history and female relationships, the stimulation of travel and the inspiration to found in the immediate environment, politics and the world situation, but always, at its heart, the experience of living with cancer. Quickly outgrowing the limitations of seventeen syllables to explorer more extended forms, this is a book about living life to the full in the face of the inevitability of death.

How do we hold on to what is constant within us when circumstances challenge our sense of who we are?At the heart of the story is the mystery of Isabel Grey, a successful opera singer who disappeared in the late 1970s and has not been heard of since. Two musicians, facing life-changing crises of their own, decide to look for her. Stephen Bennett's career as an orchestral bassoonist has been ended by a violent mugging; singer Alice Wade is suffering serious vocal problems and trying to move on from the latest in a long line of failed relationships. Stephen takes a job as Archivist for Hope Street Theatre and becomes intrigued by a young woman who appeared there in the 1960s. Nearby, Alice is taking refuge in the house she's inherited from her godmother, Imogen, and while trawling through paraphernalia Imogen left behind, she learns of a sister, Isabel, about whom Imogen never spoke and who vanished forty years earlier. Their discoveries are woven into Isabel's gradually unfolding story, the silent language of keepsakes becoming signposts to the past, revealing the truth of what really happened.As Isabel emerges from the shadows, Alice faces the loss of all she values most. Not wanting her life to become a sad echo of Isabel's, she must face the future with courage and acceptance.

A recipient of an Eric Gregory Award as a young poet, Ian Gregson’s debut collection, Call Centre Love Song went on to be shortlisted for a Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Described by Carol Rumens as ‘combining a postmodernist’s sense of ‘things being various’ with a traditionalist’s concern for shape and completeness’, Gregson’s work is formally diverse, eminently accessible and packed with wit, but this is never glib or throw-away. There is deep commentary going on in these poems, on how we make and break connections, on the possibilities and limits of language and perception. Brilliant, often funny, frequently poignant and always timely, The Slasher and the Vampire as Role Models, is a new and collected that shows Gregson at the height of his linguistic dexterity as poet with something real to say.‘Gregson’s work is characterised by a belief that poetry should include and incorporate modern experience and not simply cordon off a special lyric arena where the world stops and ‘poetry’ begins.’ — Patrick McGuinness

The sense of place and of senses porous to land and sea bring to life this stand-out sequence of poems. The voice, at once conversational and distinctive, is enraging and personal. There’s an ache at the core of the beauty here, not of self-pity or of indulgence, but of empathy, of griefs, both human and beyond human, that held to the light, recognised, and invite compassion. This is clear-eyed but gracious poetry.

In Cold Crash, when Archaeologist Max Falkland, the Anglo-American daughter of a British peer, meets American John Knox in London in April 1952, her already troubled life takes on mystery. As the Cold War thriller progresses, Max finds herself in increasing danger, but three weeks after the events of Cold Crash, the point at which The Running Lie begins, Max has found an archaeological dig in London and John Knox has entered her life. But even now, can he be trusted? Max encounters both skulls and sexism on the dig site at the bombed out shell of St. Bride's Church in London. A family request sends her to the Berlin International Film Festival, away from the dig and her growing relationship with John Knox. But after she sees John in Berlin with another woman, Max forces him to confess he is an American spy. When his current case collides with her family life, Max has to find a way to navigate layers of lies. As fireworks explode for the Fourth of July party, Max must make a dangerous choice if she wants to save both John and her family.The Running Lie is a page-turning Cold War spy thriller that reboots old school cloak and dagger — Max Falkland is the James Bond of the 21st Century.

Joseph Schneider grows up in a Cherokee-Jewish family in the Smokey mountains of North Carolina. He dreams to be a cook on the biggest ship there is in the world but his attachment to his mother Rachel and his rootedness to the little mountain village keep him from moving on. When his mother falls ill she reveals she stole him from a Palestinian girl Aliya in the 80s when she volunteered at a hospital in Gaza. Joseph refuses to know anything more about his biological mother, but later when Rachel dies, Joseph honors his promise to her and embarks on a painful pilgrimage to the holy land, a walk in the footsteps of his American mother and a search for Aliya.

Jay Whittaker's debut collection, Wristwatch, won the 2018 Saltire prize for Poetry Book of the Year. In this eagerly awaited follow-up, Jay explores themes of origin, asking what shapes us most: our biological heritage or the societies we find ourselves born into? Her work draws deeply from the landscapes of the Hebrides and East Lothian, from the natural world in general. Yet, often, it returns to the fleshly bodies we inhabit and through which we experience everything — as in her debut, in Sweet Anaesthetist Jay discusses the frailty of the body and the task of living with cancer — but she also turns outwards, to beings encountered and too easily overlooked in the rush of the day-to-day: friends, acquaintances, the smallest creatures with which we share our days. Culminating in the prose poetry sequence, 'Egg Case', Sweet Anaesthetist is a vibrant, transfixing plunge into the stuff of life itself.

An exhilarating and powerful poetry pamphlet, that is as direct as it is accomplished. Loose the smouldering arrow:start the fire.While the prey-birds circle,drench my pyre withprecious oils andlet me blaze once more.(from Codicil)

Politically and environmentally aware collection of poems from a deeply committed voice.

"For me, to be a citizen of nowhere is to be uncertainly poised between those challenges [we face today] and a defiant hope that, five hundred years on from More’s great contribution to literature, can rightly call itself utopian."from Rowan B. Fortune’s Forward Thomas Moore's no-place that might be anywhere, anywhen, Utopia, has haunted our imaginations for over 500 years. Dismissed as a lost realm in this Age of Despair, Citizens of Nowhere offers route maps to this place where our ideals and our lives can coincide. Now more than ever, we need the hope of utopia. Citizens of Nowhere reminds us that it is never far away. Finding utopias within sci-fi, horror, romanti fantasy and modernist fiction, Citizens of Nowhere brings together stories from: Nina Anana, Fiona Ashley, Sonya Blanck, Rowan B. Fortune, Ben Jacob, George Lea, Greg Michaelson, Jez Noond, James Perrin, Diana Powell, Omar Sabbagh and Robin Lindsay Wilson.

When it comes to those we love, even our most yearned-for states of union are subject to change. afterlove endures the swarming devastations of loss as consummately as it enters love’s raptures, ever alive to devotion’s flow and ebb. From domestic paean centred on the beloved, through a father’s unabashed affection for his children, to the sometimes savage realisations of love’s dissolution, these poems succeed in spanning relationship heaven and hell. Mario Petrucci generates love (and non-love) poetry that refuses to squint in the glare of experience. With characteristic candour and inventiveness, whether through light-filled lyric or a murderous remaking of myth, Petrucci takes us just about everywhere love can go. afterlove is a collection marked by emotional openness and imaginative risk. These poems of family connection and disconnection are probing, and those featuring the poet’s relationship to his children are particularly striking in their tenderness and honesty. Moniza Alvi

A young girl discovers that riding a bike is more than simply learning balance…A village is commandeered by the army for target practice…A drive south for the summer becomes a journey through language to an inner place…An unassuming young man is driven to murder…Weaving together compassion and acute observation with a fine ear for the nuance of identity and nationality, Isabelle Llasera’s debut short story collection is serious, humorous, tragic and inspiring by turns. Sometimes intimate, sometimes cast against broader backdrops, these stories show that the private and personal are always present. Smog demonstrates, time and again, that the big things in our lives are always less important than our fundamental humanity.

Charting winter journeys, travelling to funerals and to the anniversary of a young death, David Batten reflects on loss in its many guises. Facing grief with a meticulous attention, whether it strikes in close family or political reality, Winterreis touches on truths as urgent now as when Willhelm Müller wrote his own Winterreise, a poetry cycle with which Batten resonates and echoes, or when Franz Schubert composed his song cycle of the same name, based on Müller’s poems. The poems here become an “assembly of the omens encountered while wandering in contemporary Europe...” and a commemoration of those making music and poetry, who too often die young. Poignant, cathartic and ultimately life-affirming, this is considered poetry written with grace.

Full of wry intelligence, and a sideways perspective that digs beneath the surface of things, Robin Thomas’s second collection is creative, witty and warm. Never predictable, leaning on images from art, the cadences of jazz and remarkable moments, whether from history or life, there is an unswerving pressure on language and a sense of mischief that can turn out to be unnervingly serious. This is accomplished, confident work.

Willoughby’s new landlady at Gladstone Terrace is not what he expects. The flamboyant Ruby Hoffman wears a green beret on which she’s pinned a velvet bird by its feet, explaining that she busks with her cousin, Gregor – Ruby playing accordion while Gregor dances. Ruby and Gregor, born nine years and one country apart, are bound to each other by a family weighed down with sacrifice in the Dutch resistance on one side and Nazi collusion on the other. While Ruby’s colourful persona hides a brittle fragility, Gregor’s burden of guilt is channelled into caring for others, feeding their strange group of tenants, each barely clinging to the edges of society. But when the enigmatic Leda Godwin turns up, wanting to know Gregor’s story, the delicate balance of their lives is shaken.Peopled with intriguing and memorable characters and told with exquisite precision, The Dancer at World’s End explores the legacy of violence, whether perpetrated by those committing genocide or those opposing them and how the stories handed down to us of who we are or should be, who we should love or hate, go on shaping lives across generations. An extraordinary sequel to the powerful events recounted in The Green Table, this is a courageous, heart-rending and important story. Set in mid-seventies London, the story goes back to Nazi Germany, as replete with pomp and ambition as it is with horror, and to post-War Netherlands, building a complex tale of identity, survival and grace.

Light Airs confirms Mick Evans as an exceptional poet whose linguistic dexterity in making every phrase work on multiple levels is matched by his impressive range of references. Whether the metaphors are of love or change, hubris or the banality of evil, the control and voice is always unerring, the precision always honed and intelligent. There are poems here that will chill and unsettle the reader and poems of exquisite tenderness. What unites them is there is never a complacent, sentimental or glib word. These are poems of depth and passion threaded with humane humour. Pushing at the boundaries of form, Light Airs is an inventive, honest and distinctive collection that will resonate long after reading.

Opening a conversation with paintings and sculptures from the 16th Century to the present, this second collection by Nigel Hutchinson displays all his hallmark wit and insight. Artists as diverse and Brueghel (elder and younger), Lautrec, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth and Cezanne find themselves taking a skewed but searching view of the points at which life and art rub together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes with greater friction. Humane, wry, always spirited, Do Not Enter Alarmed Area is a testament to the power of both words and images.

[P]oems like delicate essays, in the sense of attempts—circling, being-with, tentative and tender […] poems like seed heads, fragility and delicacy, balanced, a symmetry […] seeding more thinking [… a tender] engagement with moss, air, horizon, the political, the scientific, the human, the non-human and the spaces-between where these things meet. The space on the page, within the poems, and between the poet writing and the world observed, is so delicately balanced.— Dr. Kim Laskyslow buildinside/outsidewhat is left unsaidwhat is beneathwhat is noticedwhat is undeclaredwhat evolves, enmeshes, becomes, deniesvisual—like camouflagelike a movement—eyes dance on page, not sure where to gofeeling accumulate through pattern of words – many unsaid, but feltWhat is near talks about what is far—deep time—what is within—unsaid earth suffering earth joy, despite it all— Chris Drury[an exploration of] the political, the specifics of natural things (eg. birds, moss, trees, landscape), boundaries and spaces; and the sense of place, all with sensuality and infinite sensitivity, including the self and its relationship to nature. We were especially aware of how [the poems] handle the very contemporary sense of language with all its problems of reference [exploring] the interconnectedness of all things through linguistic and visual means.— Professor Peter Abbs & Dr. Lisa Dart

In this prequel to The Standing Ground, we travel back two generations to the origins of the oppressive E-Government state that infiltrates every aspect of people’s lives in the decade following Brexit and a global pandemic. But, as the darkness overtakes Britain and other areas of Europe, the light of resistance wakes in a community that spans the Celtic outposts of Brittany and North Wales. And in a strange child, Myrddin Emrys, also known as Merlin.Weaving together Arthurian legend and exploratory fiction of the near future, The Roots of the Ground explores the human cost of a monoculture that tramples freedom and privacy and asserts with Carl Jung that:'As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.'

In a near-future world without privacy or freedom, life is unravelling for Luke, a teenager whose questions and individuality have no place in surveilled society. A virtual encounter with a girl who claims to live beyond the all-controlling grip of E-Government sets him on a quest not only for answers, but for escape. But is Alys real? Why are there echoes of her world in his father, Nazir Malik’s home, especially since Nazir is a celebrity artist trusted by E-Government? And what role can characters from Celtic Arthurian legend possibly play in saving the future? Most urgently, can Luke overcome the threats that surround him and find the Standing Ground?"A wonderful novel… a fresh rendition of the future that draws on technologies that are currently emerging… and on Arthurian legend… akin to Philip Pullman’s street-smart, other-worldly creations, complete with convincing, humorous and likeable characters… a gripping read."Anna Kiernan

2121: Wading through a drowned fenland, Jean is searching for a lost village and a hillside church that appears only in dim memories of the world before it was engulfed by rising sea levels, deserts and floods. She is looking for a time capsule buried over 160 years ago, a symbol of hope for a different future.1958: Coming of age in a drab and exhausted post-War London, Ida finds herself questioning the assumptions of her mother and her Uncle Roy. Wanting more from life, she is drawn into circles of political activism, jazz clubs, and life lived on the margins of conformist society – places where there are as many questions as there are possible answers.Separated by decades and a planet turned upside down by climate shifts, the lives of these two women begin to draw together. As Jean closes in on the location of the time capsule and Ida prepares to take part in the first Ban the Bomb march to the nuclear weapons research centre at Aldermaston, their fates dramatically collide.