Nine Arches Press – förlag

In Bycatch, a new collection by the Ted Hughes Prize shortlisted-poet Caroline Smith, the poems ask where personhood is when memory and language are gone. They capture the faltering years of a life gradually scraped bare by the deep-sea trawler of dementia – yet find amongst the isolation and sadness, moments also of clarity, epiphany and love.Whilst these poems chart deep waters, they remind us also of the enduring and miraculous bond between those who have known each other for a lifetime. With grace and often with humour, Smith unravels the intricate nature of care, the symbiosis of family, and ultimately the sense of self held in the memories and personal histories of her own parents. It is in the swell of the wave, as ageing and loss threaten to engulf even the words, these extraordinary poems remain tender, unforgettable and salt-sharp.Forward Prize for Best Collection shortlist, 2026

In Angela France's third poetry collection, Hide, what is invisible is just as important as what lies within plain sight. Layers of personal history are lifted into the light and old skins are shed for new; things thought lost and vanished long ago are just on the edge of perception, yet certainties before our eyes vanish in the blink of an eye.These poems possess their own rich heritage of stories and experiences; themes of magic, wisdom, age and absence are woven into the fabric of this skilful and succinct collection. Readers should also keep their wits about them, for these poems are cunning and quick; they hide nothing, but delight in camouflage, disguise and secrets, patiently awaiting someone who will seek."France's writing engages sensitively with the world as she searches for meaning in the ordinary and movingly explores the borders between shared and private experience. These are poems that make an honest deal with discomfort, following the trails and 'ghostly outlines of existence' with integrity, thoughtfulness and care." Deryn Rees-Jones"'Invisibility must be achieved for success', writes Angela France, revealing one of the truths of why the best poets serve language and are annihilated in the process. Hide is a book of wisdom, dignity and first witness. It offers poems of scrutiny and strength of character. And the poet's language possesses and is possessed by a gloriously sheared weight and shared music." David Morley"Angela France's new collection is a deft and resonant exploration of the half-hidden, taking us 'over there' and 'in there' under the hide of the 'other' and the liminal spaces they inhabit, all evoked with an uncanny command of language and image." Nigel McLoughlin"There are fifty-two complex, thought-provoking poems in this, Angela France's fascinating third collection, all of them engaged with what are clearly deep, lastingly cental preoccupations and, despite her view in "Anagnorisis" that "My only surety is carbon and water, ashes; / language as sensation, / no words", more than justifying the fulsome back-cover endorsements of Nigel McLoughlin, Deryn Rees-Jones and David Morley, who speak of the "integrity, thoughtfulness and care of her work", its "uncanny command of language and image", the sensitivity with which she perceives the world "as she searches for meaning in the ordinary" and its "gloriously sheared weight and shared music"."Ken Head"Angela France's collection not only brings immediate rewards - its depth satisfies more and more on rereading. I enjoyed it immensely."Matthew Stewart, Rogue StrandsAngela France has had poems published in many of the leading journals, in the UK and abroad and has been anthologised a number of times. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Gloucestershire and is studying for a PhD. Publications include Occupation (Ragged Raven Press) and Lessons in Mallemaroking (Nine Arches Press). Angela is features editor of Iota and runs a monthly poetry cafe, Buzzwords.

Richie McCaffery's debut collection of poems, Cairn, begins in a dedication and ends with ghosts - in between lies hoards of artefacts and long-forgotten antiquities; a police whistle, a tarnished silver spoon, the bookmark lodged in a boring book decades before that sings of a lost age. These poems find their stories in the overlooked places of everyday, and take utter delight in the unexpected image and turn of phrase. Soaring, often short and bitter-sweet, the poems form markers in the landscape of love, lore and family, making mementoes to the buried and the living.Richie McCaffery (b. 1986) lives in Stirling and studies and works as a teaching assistant at The University of Glasgow. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets, Spinning Plates (HappenStance Press, 2012) and Ballast Flint (Cromarty Arts Trust, 2013). His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Dark Horse, Stand, The Rialto and The Best British Poetry 2012.

Love, sex, boats and friendship. And yet Jo Bell's second poetry collection, Kith, is about so much more, as these bold and generous poems interweave bigger questions of place, identity and community and what these mean to us, here and now.Delighting in the belting, beautiful turn-of-phrase, Jo Bell's poems are lyrical and joyous, but always precise and clear as birdsong. They take us the long way home, plot histories along the route of backwaters, and are occasionally diverted for a roll in the hay; hearts are broken and boats are dry-docked. There will be tears, but there will also be love, safe harbours, and the company of wise and faithful kith.Jo Bell - archaeologist, boat dweller and erstwhile director of National Poetry Day - is a poetry pundit and deviser of online poetry community 52. Winner in 2014 of the Charles Causley prize and Manchester Cathedral prize, and placed in the Bridport, Wigtown, and Ballymaloe international competitions, she has had a fortunate year. She is currently building new projects with the writer Tania Hershman and poet Michael Symmons Roberts. Kith is her second collection of poems.

Robert Peake's incredible eye for detail illuminates a collection of stirring and delicately attuned poems that not only roam but actively seek – travelling far and wide to all manner of places but also moving through time, taking leaps of faith or journeys into memory and sensation.From postcards to portraits, from ancient and modern wars to cosmopolitan cities, wildlife, and even a tiny ornamental skeleton, Robert Peake finds a sharp focus for the bigger picture both far and wide and closer to home. These carefully-controlled and eloquent poems know the subtle and deep consequences from each small gesture; the ripple-effect across each story, the altering of lives and history; the still, quiet centre from which it all begins.Robert Peake is a British-American poet living near London. His newest short collection is The Silence Teacher (Poetry Salzburg, 2013). His previous short collection was Human Shade (Lost Horse Press, 2011).

The 52 project started with a simple idea: Write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. It became a phenomenon. Hundreds of poets took up the challenge and their poems swept the board of poetry prizes, publications and personal successes.This book brings together the 52 prompts written by poet Jo Bell and by guest poets ranging from David Morley to Rachael Boast, so that you can pick up the challenge yourself. With contemporary poems to illustrate each prompt, it s a fine anthology as well as a book of lively and engaging exercises for poets, whether beginner or well established.

In her fourth collection Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places in poems that are vivid forays of discovery and resistance, arrival and loss. Bearings sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets – the voices of John Berryman, Michael Donaghy, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. And there is respite for the weary traveller – jazz in the shadows, an exuberant play of words between the fire and tremors.As Dixon explores form and subject, conflict and the self, she keeps a weather eye out for telling detail, with a sharp sense of the threat that these journeys, our wars and stories, and our very existence pose to the planet.

‘Bird Sisters exerts a powerful hold, as if to read it is to be haunted by things one half-remembers.’ – Moniza Alvi‘All is strange or estranged in fact, but it is articulated in poems of supple inventive concentration. In that sense Bird Sisters is a book that casts deep shadows.’ – George SzirtesJulia Webb’s Bird Sisters is a surreal journey through sisterhood and the world of the family via the natural world. Fascinated by the ‘otherness’ of things, her poems expose places and relationships that are not always entirely comfortable places to exist. Many of them feature transformations of some kind – both real and metaphorical: a woman wears a dress of live bees or becomes a bird and family members turn into owls and sparrows.In exploring the ways in which both adults and children are casually cruel to one another, often within a mythological framework, Julia Webb blurs the boundaries between fairy tale and reality. These families are terrifying in their complexity and dysfunction, yet utterly compelling and convincing and with dark undercurrents of humour that ensure the poems are never bleak.

This debut collection of poems by former Birmingham Poet Laureate Roy McFarlane explores love, loss, adoption and identity in powerful, precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers and parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love and learning to say goodbye that come along the way.Themes of place, identity, history, and race interweave personal narratives, with and poems that touch on everything from the ‘Tebbitt Test’ and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that 'place just off the M6'. Distinct and memorable, McFarlane’s poems are beautifully focused, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love.

Gregory Leadbetter’s first full collection of poems, The Fetch, brings together poems that reach through language to the mystery of our being, giving voice to silence and darkness, illuminating the unseen. With their own rich alchemy, these poems combine the sensuous and the numinous, the lyric and the mythic.Ranging from invocation to elegy, from ghost poems to science fiction, Leadbetter conjures and quickens the wild and the weird. His poems bring to life a theatre of awakenings and apprehensions, of births and becoming, of the natural and the transnatural, where life and death meet. Powerful, imaginative, and precisely realised, The Fetch is also poignant and humane – animated by love, alive with the forces of renewal. ‘The Fetch is a terrific, precise and dazzling collection. The whole book exemplifies a poetry of being that shows what is possible when we allow ourselves to be fully human in our perception and poetry.’ – David Morley

How to be a Poet is the brainchild of poet Jo Bell and editor Jane Commane. As a natural follow-on to the 52 Project of 2014, this book aims to help poets taking the next step in developing, working and participating in the wider creative community as a writer.How to be a Poet combines practical advice and topical mini-essays that examine both the technical and creative dimensions of being a poet. It’s a no-nonsense manual where we’ve replaced the spanners with lots of ink, elbow grease and edits. At each step, we ask plenty of questions: what makes a poem tick over perfectly, how do we get it started when it stalls, and which warning lights should you never ignore?

A Fold in the Map charts two very different voyages: a tracing of the dislocations of leaving one’s native country, and a searching exploration of grief at a father’s final painful journey. In the first part of the collection, Plenty — “before the fold” — the poems deal with family, and longing for home from a new country, with all the ambiguity and doubleness this perspective entails. In the book’s second half, Meet My Father, the poems recount events more life-changing than merely moving abroad — a father’s illness and death, the loss of some of the plenty of the earlier poems.

In The Tempest Prognosticator leeches warn of storms, whales blunder up the Thames, beetles tap out their courtship rituals, and women fall for deft cocktail makers and melancholy apes. With her keen eye and a gift for vividly capturing the natural world, Isobel Dixon entices the reader on a journey where the familiar is not always as it seems at first, where the sideways glance, the double take, yields rich rewards. From Crusoe to Psycho, Pink Floyd to Fred Astaire, the human zoo’s at play here too, in a collection filled with ‘miracle and wonder’, wit and bite.

In 2015, Inua Ellams was poet in residence at the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London. His #Afterhours project took him on a voyage of cultural translation and transposition through time and place, to the heart of the libraries' rare books collection, and through his own life’s story as he selected poems published during each year of his life, from birth to the age of 18.In return, Ellams opens up a captivating and potent dialogue between poems, writing a diary and intricately-crafted poems of his own in conversational response to the poems he selected from the Poetry Library collections. Here, for the first time together, are the collected #Afterhours poems alongside the re-discovered poems which inspired them and the diary entries which follow this journey. In Ellams’ meticulous hands, this becomes an entire narrative in its own right, compelling and magnetic, drawing parallels of displacement, language and reclamation, and showing poetry’s great capacity to be a powerful amplifier of human experience.

From politics to pop, from the UK to California, wherever digital heartbeats flutter and stutter, Ticker-tape is a maximalist take on 21st century living. Rishi Dastidar’s first full collection showcases one of contemporary poetry’s most distinctive voices, delivering effervescence with equal servings of panache and whiplash-quick wit.Here is sheer madcap ingenuity and also impressive breadth; ranging from odes of love to deconstructed diversity campaigns and detonations of banter’s worst excesses, plus appearances from ex-SugaBabes, a shark who comes to tea, to the matters of matchstick empires and national identity. Ticker-tape is bold, adventuresome and wry – an unmissable and irrepressible debut.

Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka and Daniel Sluman co-edit Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, a ground-breaking anthology examining the poetics of disabled and D/deaf cultures. With contributions that span Vispo to Surrealism, and range from hard-hitting political commentary to intimate lyrical pieces – these poets refuse to perform or inspire according to tired old narratives. Five years after the seminal U.S. anthology, Beauty is a Verb, Nine Arches Press brings you its exciting UK progeny: Stairs and Whispers. The first of its kind and packed with fierce poetry, essays, photos and links to accessible online videos, this book showcases a diversity of styles, opinions, and survival strategies for a world that often works to shut us down.

Jacqueline Saphra’s All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamourous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp.With an emphasis on the cultures of the different times, we tread a tantalising tightrope between the confessional and the invented. These astute poems step assuredly from childhood’s first exposures to the scratched records and unsuitable lovers of young womanhood, the slammed doors of daughters and sons, the tears and salted soups of friendships, and the charms of late love. All the time, incandescent and luminous as an everlasting lightbulb, at the heart of each of Saphra’s poems is a delicate filament kicking out a heavy-duty wattage.

Tania Hershman’s debut poetry collection, Terms and Conditions, urges us to consider all the possibilities, and to read life’s small print before signing on the dotted line. These measured poems bring their stoical approach to the uncertain business of our daily lives – and ask us to consider what could happen if we were to bend or break the rules, step beyond the boundaries and challenge the narrative.In feats of imagination and leaps of probability, falling simply becomes flying, a baby sagely collects data, and even the evidence often leads us astray. In between this, Hershman’s precise poetry elegantly balances the known, unknown and unknowable matter of existence, love and happiness, weighing the atoms of each, finding just the exact words that will draw up the perfect contract of ideas.

Khairani Barokka’s first full poetry collection, Rope, is a spellbinding and impressive debut, kaleidoscopic in detail and richly compelling. With a meticulous artist’s instinct, these finely-tuned poems ask urgent questions about our impact upon the environment, and examine carefully the fragile ties that bind our lives and our fate to our planet, our ecosystems and to our fellow humans. Sensual and ecologically attentive, Rope draws on issues of climate change, sexuality, violence, nature, desire and the body. Lush with detail, alert to its own distinct sounds, this is poetry in urgent and vivacious action - intent on finding vivid joy and hope amidst the destruction and dangers of the Anthropocene era.

With contributions from Jay Bernard, Malika Booker, Kat Francois, Jay T. John, Anthony Joseph, Ishion Hutchinson, Charnell Lucien, Vladimir Lucien, Rachel Manley, Tanya Shirley and Karen McCarthy Woolf. What does it mean to fight for a ‘mother country’ that refuses to accept you as one of its own? Britain’s First World War poets changed the way we view military conflict and had a deep impact on the national psyche. Yet the stories of the 15,600 volunteers who signed up to the British West Indian Regiment remain largely unknown. Sadly, these citizens of empire were not embraced as compatriots on an equal footing. Instead they faced prejudice, injustice and discrimination while being confined to menial and auxiliary work, regardless of rank or status. As a collaborative project, co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, BBC Contains Strong Language and the British Council, Unwritten Poems invited contemporary Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora poets to write into that vexed space, and explore the nature of war and humanity – as it exists now, and at a time when Britain’s colonial ambitions were still at a peak. Unwritten: Caribbean Poems After the First World War is a result of that provocation and also includes new material written for broadcast and live performance.

Deborah Alma's debut poetry collection Dirty Laundry is raucous, daring and honest, drawing contemporary women’s lives and those of our foremothers into the spotlight. It voices bold, feminist songs of praise: of persistence, survival, adventures of sexual rediscovery, each reclaiming the space to speak its mind and be heard and seen. A perfect remedy for the heartsick and weary, Alma’s intimate and particular poems are resolute enchantments, a form of robust magic.The collection brims with poems which are unafraid of airing secrets, desires and untold stories. From growing up mixed-race and learning to survive as a woman in the world, to tales of the countryside and themes of escape and finding joy, this book of poems is as vivid as it is frank and fearless. There’ll be no need for any tears, it’ll all come out in the wash…

Roy McFarlane’s second poetry collection, The Healing Next Time, is a timely and unparalleled book of interwoven sequences on institutional racism, deaths in custody and of a life story set against the ever-changing backdrop of Birmingham at the turn of the millennium. Here forms a potent and resolute narrative in lyrical and multidimensional poems which refuse to look the other way or accept the whitewashed version of events. Courageous, rageful and mournful, these are poems of Black history and Black presence, poems of witness and poems of activism. McFarlane’s intricate lines make record of injustice and mark the names of those who have lost their lives and dignity to prejudice and hatred. The Healing Next Time also asks vital questions of the future, and of the reader – and reminds us where the power to change things lies. It is also a poetry of personal discovery, of revelation and resilience – where the influence of Jazz and of James Baldwin infuse and shape this unique, remarkable book.

Suzannah Evans’ debut collection Near Future is doom-pop-poetry with an apocalyptic edge, a darkly humorous journey through sci-fi lullabies and northern mysteries. This is a future simulation stripped of the space-age gloss of progression - one where the robots have gone rogue and the hopes of a new millennium are malfunctioning; this is a skewed yet oddly familiar world gone uncannily wrong.These playful, sharp, poems are also about more than dystopias and five types of possible apocalypse - in looking at the worst-case scenarios, Evans comes closer to the bigger narrative; universal truths of change, whether man-made or natural, preventable of inevitable, and the uncertain business of human existence where 'there are disasters that you cannot prepare yourself for'. Evans brings a distinctive, skilful and wonderfully peculiar roving eye to our restless and unpredictable times.

The poems in Threat, Julia Webb’s second collection, train their eagle-eyes on life at the margins, and on family, love, loss, belonging and not belonging. They are not afraid to visit the uncomfortable places where true humanity resides. Threat is an examination of self from multiple perspectives. Its narratives of both past and present tread a fine line between fantasy and reality – these are the lives we have led, the lives we could have led, or the lives we are leading still. Forensically detailed and disturbing, the dark and sometimes brutal undertow of small-town existence seeps to the surface of these unsettling poems.

Theresa Lola’s debut poetry collection In Search of Equilibrium is an extraordinary and exacting study of death and grieving. Where the algorithms of the body and the memory fail, Lola finds the words that will piece together the binary code of family and restart the recovery program. In doing so, these unflinching poems work towards the hard-wired truths of life itself - finding hope in survival, lines of rescue in faith, a stubborn equilibrium in the equations of loss and renewal. “Theresa Lola’s poems never fail to surprise with her breath-taking ability to create unexpected imagery; they never fail to move as she laments the last years of a loved one; and they never fail to delight with the transformative and healing power of poetry to create beauty.” - Bernardine Evaristo

Zebra is the debut collection from Hebden Bridge-based Ian Humphreys. These acutely-observed and joyful poems explore mixed identities, otherness, and coming-of-age as a gay man in 1980s Manchester. Humphreys is a fellow of The Complete Works programme (which aims to promote diversity and quality in British poetry) and was highly commended for his work at this year’s Forward Prizes.

Jessica Mookherjee, highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes, presents her second collection of poems, Tigress. Mixing myth, magic and migration, these poems explore the impact of choice upon our lives and concentrate their magnificent, kaleidoscopic imagination on the intricate and often fraught nature of childhood and family, selfhood and womanhood. Fierce, often funny, always charged and revealing, Mookerjee’s acute attention to detail tracks lives lived between Bengal, Wales and London. In exploring the intense displacement and loss that marks the experience of migration, the poems move into territories of danger and safety, illness and heartbreak, and ultimately into self-discovery; a rich and sensual moonlit menagerie of bears, big cats, wolves, and ‘forest mothers’. At every step, Tigress is wildly inventive, elegant and utterly distinctive.

What to do when everything goes up in flames? Summon up A Man’s House Catches Fire, Tom Sastry’s debut collection of poetry, with all its elegant, satirical and hurt-quenching power: here are nightmares and fairytales, museums full of regret, mis-enchantments and magic for dark times.Whilst the accelerants of complicity and violence seep from these exacting poems, Sastry’s wit and stoicism slake the bonfire of modern troubles. They defiantly ask us: why do “the great marquees of England” stand empty? How old is your heart? Why aren’t we listening to the sea, and what it has to say? Funny, marvellously frank and often courageous, A Man’s House Catches Fire urges us to take a long hard look into the flames and avert the disasters of the heart, home and nations that threaten to befall us all.“Tom Sastry is a magician of deadpan. He’s kind of like if the Atlantic Ocean had a laugh track. Terrifying and hypnotic, but also desperately funny. This collection is generous in both its clarity and mystery." — Hera Lindsay Bird“Tom Sastry’s poems stare down the ridiculousness of the world we live in, and offer us ways to carry on in spite of it. These are poems of bright wit and astonishing vulnerability, with one eye always on the future. A Man’s House Catches Fire gives us the simultaneous pain and joy of being a human being; reminds us it is marvellous / that it still hurts.” – Suzannah Evans

"Examining regional accents and our attitudes to them are a way of peering into Britain's soul. I can't wait for this book" – Sathnam SangheraSpake: Dialect and Voices from the West Midlands with contributions from Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), Julie Walters, Liz Berry and many of the regions best known writers.Spake is a love letter to the West Midlands voice and a challenge to the preconceptions and prejudices that abound about dialect and non-standard English. Much maligned, frequently overlooked or simply left out altogether: the English West Midlands has for decades been diminished in the national conversation - and with it, the rich dialects and voices of the region are often misunderstood, ignored or worse – ridiculed and mocked. But who’s to say that the way we ‘spake’ isn’t every bit as vital and precious a part of the landscape as other accents and dialects? This anthology features contemporary writing that draws upon dialect in ways that explore the potential of the narrative and poetic voice, bringing to life the silent histories and harsh realities of a vanishing working-class way of life in what was once Britain’s industrial heartland. From contemporary re-imaginings of the interwar decades in Steven Knight’s TV series Peaky Blinders to Liz Berry’s prize-winning poetry and up and coming new talent, this book celebrates and gives voice to experiences rooted in the region that have largely lain at the margins.