Partus Press – förlag

Winner of the Hollingworth Prize for Poetry

Her Fault is the debut pamphlet of poems by NJ Stallard. Stallard’s work is cutting and tender in equal measure. It registers the ‘smallish tremors’ of everyday experience, recognising that it is these small adjustments, and not the seismic quakes, that make up a life. Stallard's poems are interested in the world and the way we fail to live up to it. The ‘faults’, then, are not only our flaws and mistakes, but the fissures between things—between times and places, between people, and between our senses of self. Language is important because it is one of the ways we can mend those cracks. Despite their faults, our words give us something to work with: ‘Here they are: stiff and trying.'

‘Not only are Stallard’s poems full of the richness and vivid detail of life, they seem themselves living things—sharp, evocative, almost tangible. This is a completely transportive collection.’ – Rebecca Perry

Elle Heedles's debut poetry collection, Rain Noise, shows there is no world apart from the way we feel about it—there is only the feeling world in which hope and rain both dribble through gravity as equals, and apricots and forgiveness are equally juicy. Heedles’s poems are tuned to the strange, soundless music of everything, to the way things harmonize and ache, both sonic and supersonic, beyond us and within us. Here, the wind is in consort with one’s pockets, which are in consort with the moon. The poems land with a kind of gentle, cooling tenderness, and bribe us to be bigger by showing us that we are made mostly of our conditions, the way rain is mainly wet noise.

The Fountain opens on the Viennese U-Bahn, emerging into startling winter sunlight. This image of subterranean eruption is one of many in the book, which returns obsessively to real and figurative fountains. Isaac Nowell’s fountain is a social and mythical locus, a place of memory and forgetting, the source to which history returns and is recycled. Roaming freely between classical and contemporary registers, Nowell’s twelve-line poems feel less like narratives or speeches than fragments of scenes or sensations. The movement of a lover’s hand in the dark, or the gradation of light at dawn, are points of momentary contact with that ‘one big wonderful dangerous accident’, life itself.

For over three decades, the work of Kristín Ómarsdóttir has thrived in the vanguard of Icelandic literature. Waitress in Fall offers anglophone readers the first substantial selection of her poems in translation. Spanning thirty years and seven collections – from her first to her latest – this wide-reaching introduction celebrates a vital voice in contemporary European poetry.Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s work resists the sweet, the neat or the certain. Her poems delight in the lush mess of actual life, in its hands and fingers, lemons and clocks, socks, soldiers, snow, knives, mothers, nightstands, sweat, and crockery. The domestic is at the heart of the poems, but it is a domesticity tinged with threat: something ‘clear and ominous’ persists between the lines.These are surreal, unsettling landscapes, in which children lap milk from trees and car tyres are ‘soft as skin’. But Kristín’s poems are also full of laughter, sex, and love. They accept vulnerability as a condition of intimacy. Erupting ‘wherever thirst is ignited’, they are not afraid to strike, to rage, recognising a right – a responsibility – to risk the necessary word, even to ‘wound the language’.