Penned in the Margins – förlag

WITCH is a strange, visceral and darkly witty debut by a startling new voice in British poetry.Rebecca Tamás reckons with blood and earth, mysticism and the devil, witch trials and the suffragettes, gender and sexuality. At turns lyrical, philosophical and obscene, WITCH evokes the intimate, sensual power of nature and merges it with the revolutionary potential of women’s voices. These are poems as spells — spells against suppression, silence and obedience; hexes that cling to your body like sweat, full of a messy, violent joy, ‘a small, bright, filthy song’.Feminist, ecological and occult, WITCH grabs history and shakes it, demanding: ‘Wake me up when it really gets started’.

Featured on BBC's Newsnight Review.Mono-browed cousins, clandestine paperboys, murderous action heroes and Swiss euthanasia clinics jostle for position in Ross Sutherland's intelligent and wildly entertaining debut collection of poetry.Sutherland charts the never-ending urban excursions of Pac-Man; constructs mash-ups of celebrity obits; and dons a surgical mask to conduct an 'Experiment to Determine the Existence of Love'. Things To Do Before You Leave Town is a sharp, ambitious and blackly comic exploration of the end of things, where 'all the roads that lead out are really leading back in'."In his free-wheeling lyricism, caustic wit and brilliantly surreal turn of image, Sutherland is a truly contemporary original. His poetry rejuvenates techniques as disparate as collage, memoir, sound experiment and formal appropriation in vigorous but finely wrought lines. Refreshingly fearless and bleakly funny, Things To Do Before You Leave Town collects works that shock and delight in performance but reveal their true depth on the page."Luke Kennard"Ross Sutherland's poetry approaches the epic; a kind of epic on a human scale. If he were a piece of furniture, he would be an elegant high stool that felt uncomfortable and stylish at the same time."Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3Ross Sutherland was born Edinburgh in 1979. A former lecturer in electronic literature at Liverpool John Moore's University, Ross now works as a freelance journalist and as a tutor in creative writing. He was one of The Times' Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008. Ross's poems have been published in Rising, Reactions, Orbis, Mercy, Tears in the Fence, The Fix and NME. He co-edited the new writing anthology Rock/text (Pen & Inc, 2002). A founding member of Aisle16, Ross has co-written eight live literature productions, including the critically acclaimed Poetry Boyband and Found in Translation. Ross makes regular appearances at Manchester Literature Festival, Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Glastonbury, Latitude Festival, Port Eliot Literary Festival and venues around the UK.

Highly Commended by The Forward Prize 2010At once erudite, humourous and stylishly contemporary, Sarah Hesketh's debut collection invokes a world of frozen lakes, 'snow-spun streets' and people who have stayed too long.With formal control and precise, crafted language, these poems examine the 'small relics of lives': china horses in an old people's home, a caged bird, the thighbone of a Saxon saint. Drawing from myth, history and a close reading of the present, Napoleon's Travelling Bookshelf is an impressive and engaging journey into love, identity and what it is to be alone – 'lost from sight / behind the ice-mapped waves'."What Sarah Hesketh's poems do so remarkably is to string a row of images together in such a way that each keeps its distinct hardness while at the same time contributing to a crystalline whole. They are original and utterly convincing."Bernard O'Donoghue"Sarah Hesketh writes superbly crafted poems with a very firm hand. Her poems are overflowing with intelligence and scorn for the easy and the clichéd, but her ear is as keen as her passion for the right word, the properly perceived state of affairs. When she writes lines like: 'I am content to form / the small oh of glory, / to add a little polish / to your morning epaulettes' (in 'Faking') you know that the irony you are dealing with is as intricate as lace but as sharp as daggers. Her terrain is not, to extend our analogies, exactly Jane Austen's 'two inches of ivory' because Hesketh's imagination ranges far and wide into some fairly exotic real and literary spaces, but the sense of ivory is there, as is the fierce, delicate carving. It is a melancholy but rigorously beautiful world her poems describe. We also know that every tiny part of every line has been fiercely fought for and that that is the source of the authority."George Szirtes"Hesketh's first collection is a striking debut, abounding in verve and rigour. In stark, lucid language, pared to the bone, summoning images that are sometimes cryptic yet always singing, Hesketh whirls us through a breathless breadth of forms, subjects and perspectives, from an old woman "forever remembering the waltz" in 'The Ballroom at West Riding Asylum' to 'The Boy Who read Homer to His Cat', juggling a giddying array of themes and allusions, often in the same poem, such as in 'Chaconne for Ice', where Roald Amundsen and Neil Diamond meet cheek by jowl for the first and probably only time. There is a real musicality to Hesketh's writing, imbuing her whittled words with a rhythmic vitality that is utterly compelling. A fine first collection from an exciting new poet."Poetry Book Society BulletinSarah Hesketh was born in 1983 and grew up in Pendle, East Lancashire. She attended Merton College, Oxford and holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA. In 2007 her collaboration with composer Alastair Caplin was performed at the Leeds Lieder Festival. She currently works as Assistant Director at the writers' charity English PEN.

From urban sketches of London and warped love poems to a paean to the Boston Tea Party and a letter to an American in Afghanistan, Metrophobia establishes a poetry that is inventive, quirky and packed with humour.Metrophobia, n.Fear or hatred of poetryStephanie Leal's satirical verses, visual poems and prose chunks gnaw at the edges of pop culture and the everyday. Her language twists and turns in unexpected ways, revealing a bold new writer ready to 'french kiss life square in the mouth'."A searching and resourceful imagination is at work here, seeking new perspectives with vitality and insight."Penelope Shuttle"Leal [is] playful, experimental, questioning of 'poetry' as a specialised, rarefied state enjoyed only by sensitive types, her poems with a touch of theatre and bravura."George Szirtes"These poems are an alternative news broadcast from a young American correspondent abroad in the world. Contained within them are many of the domestic and emotional snippets which CNN will never give you."Martin Newell"The poems turn familiar tropes and warp them into new, peculiar shapes; the one-night stand becomes a defiant one, stories of her grandfather take a hallucinatory turn. Stephanie Leal's world is one where preconceived ideas unravel suddenly, leaving a strange and unfamiliar territory behind them. [...] She is neither militant nor fawning – a struck bell that demonstrates a romantic but pragmatic spirit."Andrew SpraggStephanie Leal is originally from New Jersey, USA. She received her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2007 and is studying for her PhD in Philosophy. She currently lives in Norwich.

City State showcases the work of twenty-seven London writers between the ages of 16 and 36. From hyperlinked walks of Battersea bombsites and guerilla gardening projects to jagged urban lyrics and dark hymns to the East End, City State presents a confident, entertaining and truly diverse snapshot of the best new poetry from London.Featuring poems by: Jay Bernard, Caroline Bird, Ben Borek, Siddhartha Bose, Tom Chivers, Swithun Cooper, Alex Davies, Inua Ellams, Laura Forman, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Christopher Horton, Kirsten Irving, Annie Katchinska, Amy Key, Chris McCabe, Marianne Munk, Holly Pester, Heather Phillipson, Nick Potamitis, Imogen Robertson, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Ashna Sarkar, Jon Stone, Barnaby Tidman, Ahren Warner, James Wilkes, Steve Willey"We are offered London as a test case for a new diversity of means and manner, from sassy performance scripts to the solid blocks of densely disjunctive language characterised as innovative or avant-garde. [City State proposes] a central space that is also the meeting place of many edges."Philip Gross, Poetry London"City State is [a] journey across the metropolis in rush hour: a journey that by turns bewilders, delights and throws up unpalatable truths. The anthology showcases a real range of styles, from Jacob Sam-La Rose's heartfelt verse, to Chris McCabe's complex, darkly witty observations. Though diverse, the poets featured here often seem to riff around several themes that are associated with London itself: dislocation, escapism, breathlessness."Helen Mort"Performance poets are wedged side by side with the new crop of post-langpo practitioners and sculptors of sound; formalism and new narrative jostle for position with cut-ups, found poems and the inheritors of a confessional poetics [...] What seems to unit the best of the poets here is a quality of looking outward: they are aware of, and play with, the possibilities of language and form; they draw on a recognisable tradition but refresh it, linguistically and subjectively [...] There is a great deal of vitality and versatility among the younger generation of emerging poets in the country's capital."Simon Turner"Here is a good, deep shaft drilled into the poetry of the capital. [...] What I like about this anthology is its range. There are poets here who, I guess, could fit into the latest Bloodaxe catalogue with relative ease. There are others, like Nick Potamitis or Steve Wiley and Alex Davies, who are much more experimental and are carrying on the work of poets such as Allen Fisher and Iain Sinclair. And there are poets coming out of a more performance-oriented stream such as Jacob Sam-La Rose, whose wonderfully ironic 'How to be Black' is one of the many highlights of this collection.[...] A true anthology of what's going on in poetry now."Steven WalingTom Chivers (editor) was born in 1983 in South London. A writer, editor and promoter of poetry, his publications include The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009) and How To Build A City (Salt Publishing, 2009). A winner of the inaugural Crashaw Prize, he is Associate Editor of Tears in the Fence, was Poet in Residence at The Bishopsgate Institute, London, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Tom is Director of Penned in the Margins and Co-Director of London Word Festival.

Where can the poem go in the age of the supercomputer? Why is poetry taught so badly at school? What do Wordsworth, Byron and British rapper Roots Manuva have in common? Would Emily Dickinson have watched vampire series Twilight? Is slam poetry any good, and what is "postavant" anyway? These are just some of the questions posed in Stress Fractures, a new and wide-ranging collection of essays on the future of poetry."Good news for poetry."Richard Morrison, The Times on Penned in the MarginsTom Chivers was born in 1983 in south London. A writer, editor and promoter of poetry, his publications include The Terrors (2009) and How To Build A City (2009). A winner of the inaugural Crashaw Prize, he is Associate Editor of Tears in the Fence, was Poet in Residence at The Bishopsgate Institute, London, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Tom is Director of Penned in the Margins and Co-Director of the London Word Festival.

One of The Times' "ten rising stars of British poetry".'Kalagora' is a Hindi neologism meaning 'black man / white man'. This book tells his story: from a wild Millennium eve party in Manhattan to homecoming amid the grime and glory of London's East End. In this dazzling debut collection by Siddhartha Bose, the global wanderer pays witness to traffic accidents and street surrealism in Mumbai – the irresistible 'city of motion' – observing the uncanny and the unexpected at the start of the 21st century. Across continents and time-zones, a story emerges of love, chaos and addiction, a tale that evokes the colour and raw energy of these hybrid, multi-cultural cities. "Bose's métier is a kind of breathless urban Romanticism… daring the reader to keep up."Simon TurnerSiddhartha Bose is a poet and performer based in London. He grew up in Mumbai and Calcutta, followed by a seven year itch in the USA. Selections of his work have appeared in the anthologies City State: New London Poetry(Penned in the Margins, 2009) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Bose has recently completed a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, where he also teaches poetry and Shakespeare. He is playwright-in-residence with WhynotTheatre, Toronto.

"At the centre of Rob Stanton's The Method… is the long and highly rewarding sonnet sequence 'The Tuymans Sonnets'. Splicing between the elliptical and the discursive, the ekphrastic and the idiosyncratic, these sonnets linger long after the last. They are their own world. Relics remain, asking, somehow, for a response, or maybe just a listening. [...] Stanton's poems are distant, detached, but they are also insistent and demanding. Much of what matters lies in these sites of silence."Nikolai Duffy, Stride"From the opening Tuyman's Sonnets, which depict the cultural detritus of recent history as evidence of the severed real, to the sly, deft, minimalist lyrics of the book's second half – The Method is a tour de force which shows Rob Stanton to be a poet to watch."Rae Armantrout"The world and its words collide in Rob Stanton's The Method, forming a 'gesture arrested in bloom' that moves beyond the ekphrastic (you'll find Vermeer and Luc Tuymans ghosting in the margins) by giving the lyric a swift sonic kick to the shins."Joseph Massey"Through translation, through omission, through compression and the minimalist precision of 'canny wee things,' Rob Stanton creates a marvelous texture of voices and references which offers us a glimpse of the just-barely-thereness of a world thought into being by language. At the centre of the book is a vital sequence of sonnets, written in response to Luc Tuymans' paintings, that pushes the boundaries of the sonnet form. As Rilke comes in and out of view as muse and phantom, The Method shows that, while 'completeness' might not need our 'witness,' we, however, nearly wither under its impenetrable gaze."Stephen CollisRob Stanton was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham in 1977, raised in the West Midlands and educated in Cardiff (BA) and Leeds (MA, PhD). He currently lives and teaches in Savannah, Georgia. His poems and critical writings have appeared in Canadian Literature, Dusie, Eoagh, Fascicle, First Offense, Great Works, Octopus, The Rialto, Jacket and Salt. In 2005 he was shortlisted for the Eric Gregory Award. The Method is his debut collection of poetry.

Click on Download / View above to download your exclusive e-card!Winner of the inaugural Jane Martin Prize for Poetry.Love / All That / & OK, an anti-confessional by experimental British poet Emily Critchley, brings together a diverse range of work previously published in chapbooks since 2004, and includes new material from the sequences 'Poems for Luke', 'The Sonnets' and 'Poems for Other People'."Her formally adventurous poetry implicates its author in, then deftly upends, the conventions - political, sexual, intellectual, and emotional - that threaten to diminish the purview of any fierce, bright, 21st-century female. Critchley practises a brisk vernacular anti-lyric, often in the name of love and always in a language that (pounding Pound) 'hath 'ham' innit.' As an antidote to a future that 'may be very wrong,' these poems are absolutely right."Jean Day"The project is high electrics and considerable. I particularly care for the frailty and edges of coherence loss. It's the intelligent frays that push under my thought and matter most."Allen Fisher"Really intelligent, coquette, fuck-you work... a space for a new kind of anti-misogynism in poetry."Marianne MorrisEmily Critchley was born in Athens in 1980 and studied at the Universities of Oxford, Bristol and Cambridge. In 2006 she organised the first experimental women's poetry festival at Cambridge University and in 2010 she curated the London Cross-Genre Festival at the University of Greenwich, where she currently lectures in English and Creative Writing.

Steve Spence follows his Forward Prize-shortlisted debut with Limits of Control, a fizzing, wit-laden investigation of contemporary society in prose poetry."These poems are likeable, funny and intelligent, their satire exact for these times."Michael Mackmin, The Rialto (on A Curious Shipwreck)Steve Spence lives in Plymouth and co-organises the live poetry group The Language Club. His reviews and poetry have appeared in Great Works, Shearsman, Stride, Tears in the Fence, Tenth Muse and The Rialto. He was assistant editor of Terrible Work magazine and in 2007 completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Plymouth. His debut, A Curious Shipwreck (Shearsman, 2010), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Melissa Lee-Houghton's A Body Made of You is a series of poems written for other writers, artists, strangers, lovers and friends. The process began by interviewing each muse, and then working from photographs and in a couple of cases, paintings of them or by them. Charged with sexuality and an uncomfortable sense of the strange, this debut collection introduces a powerful new voice in poetry."Melissa Lee-Houghton's highly original and innovative debut might be considered an epistolary tour-de-force, split into fifteen sections dealing with Others identified only by their forename... they conjure relationships and exchanges, memories and transgressions in strikingly off-kilter, compelling narratives that often contain piercingly memorable lines... It is an extraordinary achievement and a must-read book for 2011."Chris Hamilton-Emery"Melissa Lee-Houghton's highly original and innovative debut might be considered an epistolary tour-de-force, split into fifteen sections dealing with Others identified only by their forename. We begin to see those named through the refractions and concerns of the poems, as they conjure relationships and exchanges, memories and transgressions in strikingly off-kilter, compelling narratives that often contain piercingly memorable lines. The final Other of the collection is actually a sublime self-portrait played out in the form of an interview and indeed the whole book can be seen as an extended interview or interrogation of intimacy. It is an extraordinary achievement and a must-read book for 2011."Chris Hamilton-Emery"Melissa Lee-Houghton's A Body Made Of You is a restless book; images pile high full of a deep questioning of the friends, lovers and strangers who populate these poems. This collection is an intense 'naming of parts' made of body, soul, and memory."John Siddique"I feel alive when I read Melissa's poetry. It is raw, anthropological and sassy. Sympathetic studies of character, gender and address that poke, prod, irritate and echo..."David CaddyMelissa Lee-Houghton was born in Wythenshawe, Manchester in 1982. Her poetry, short fiction and reviews have been published in literary magazines such as Succour, The Short Review, Magma and Tears in the Fence. She lives in Blackburn, Lancashire.

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for Spring 2012. Welcome to a strange new world in which a poem can be written using only one vowel, processed through computer code, collaged from film trailers, compiled from Facebook updates, hidden inside a Sudoku puzzle, and even painted on sheep. Discover a multitude of new and unusual poetic forms – from tweet to time-splice, and from skinny villanelle to breakbeat sonnet – in this inspiring and inventive anthology. Adventures in Form features over ninety poems by forty-six contributors including Patience Agbabi, Christian Bök, Joe Dunthorne, Inua Ellams, Roddy Lumsden, Ian McMillan, Paul Muldoon, Ruth Padel and Hannah Silva. Editor: Tom Chivers is a writer and literary arts producer. His books include How To Build A City (2009) and The Terrors (2009), which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award. He has edited the Penned in the Margins books Generation Txt (2006), City State: New London Poetry (2009) and Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry (2010). He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2011. He was also co-Director of London Word Festival from its inception in 2008 until 2011, and was a recipient of a Breakthrough Award from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

In his ambitious second full collection, Ross Sutherland is an uneasy observer of our age of inauthenticity, hacked computers and digital avatars. Emergency Window features new poems alongside excerpts from two recent sequences, including a hilarious and strangely prescient version of 'Little Red Riding Hood', a poem written using Google Streetview, sonnets inspired by the Street Fighter 2 video game, and a sequence of computer-generated translations of classic literature.Surreal, funny, intelligent and experimental, these poems chart a search for meaning in a disintegrating world."If he were a piece of furniture, he would be an elegant high stool that felt uncomfortable and stylish at the same time."Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3"Sparky, surprising, joyous poetry" Roddy LumsdenRoss Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. His first collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2009, followed by the limited-edition mini-book Twelve Nudes in 2010 and the free National Poetry Day e-book Hyakuretsu Kyaku in 2011. Ross regularly appears at the Aldeburgh, Manchester, Glastonbury and Latitude Festivals; he is taking his latest show, Comedian Dies in the Middle of Joke, to the Edinburgh Fringe 2012. He lives in Cambridge.

"Beautiful Girls is not a book for the faint-hearted. The reader has been invited to a sleepover at the asylum, a night in which five-year old girls drift alone through the wards, where the mentally unstable do sit-ups when nobody is watching and where heaven is a place between "the sky and the planets" reserved for those with personality disorders. The book will be a home-to-home for sufferers and a journey through terrible night for those who've been fortunate enough to take the non-scenic route in life. [...] Mental suffering is here shown in all its nocturnal and diurnal detail: the nurses, the drugs, the lack of sleep; the disconnect from the yearned-for true self. Beautiful Girls will survive as a testament to poetry's force in overcoming."– Chris McCabeMelissa Lee-Houghton was born in Wythenshawe, Manchester in 1982. Her poetry, short fiction and reviews have been published in literary magazines such as Succour, The Short Review, Magma and Tears in the Fence. Her first collection, A Body Made of You, was published in 2011 by Penned in the Margins (ISBN 9781908058003). She lives in Blackburn, Lancashire.

Where Rockets Burn Through: Contemporary Science Fiction Poems from the UKWhere Rockets Burn Through is a ground-breaking anthology of sci-fi poetry, featuring poems from over thirty writers currently living and working in the United Kingdom, including Joe Dunthorne, W.N. Herbert, Ross Sutherland, Ron Butlin, Ken MacLeod, Jane Yolen, Aiko Harman, Jon Stone, Kirsten Irving, Lorraine Mariner, Chrissy Williams, plus work by the late Edwin Morgan, a pioneer of sci-fi poetics.From alternate worlds and dystopian futures to alien landings and photon guns, this collection of interstellar poems will delight and excite Trekkie and poetry fan alike.Russell Jones is an Edinburgh-based writer, editor and researcher. His chapbook of science fiction poems, The Last Refuge, was published in 2009 by Forest Press. He is guest editor for the Interdisciplinary Science Review and is currently completing his PhD in Creative Writing and tutoring in Scottish Literature at Edinburgh University.

Taking his cue from Japanese author Kenzaburō Ōe's Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!, Alan Cunningham has produced a debut novella that is both beautiful and experimental – a powerful exploration of sexuality and the body.Count from Zero to One Hundred is written as a series of prose fragments, fluctuating from conversation to philosophical reflection in an anxious staccato, as its narrator moves across some of the great cities of Europe – Berlin, London, Dublin, Budapest – and other parts of the world. Traces of Beckett and Joyce are felt in this moving and contemporary meditation on the limits and vulnerability of the body, and the power of language and imagination to transcend those limits.Alan Cunningham is a writer from Northern Ireland. Currently based in London, he was born in Newry and has previously lived in Belfast, Dublin and Berlin. He has taught at the Node Centre for Curatorial Studies, Berlin, and at Queen Mary, University of London. Count from Zero to One Hundred is his first book.

Click the Extracts tab above to read three poems from Mondeo Man: 'Thaxted', 'A Hornchurch Commuter' and 'Houses that Used to Be Boozers'."One of the funniest and most brilliant poets of his generation" – Johann Hari, The Independent"The best young performance poet around" – The ObserverExplosive political satire and acerbic wit leap from stage to page in this hotly anticipated debut collection from Luke Wright. Mondeo Man celebrates and laments a country of disappearing pubs, celebrity anti-heroes and motorway service stations, perfectly capturing the English idiom at the turn of the twenty-first century. Yummy mummies and debauched Tories mingle with drunk Essex commuters and leering tabloid paps; a small town chip-shop becomes the site of a heart-wrenching story of failed marriage; and a televised manhunt enthralls an entire nation. Fast-paced and inventive, this is poetry at its most approachable, satirical, fun, and archetypally English."Whatever it is that Luke Wright has been ingesting, artists of all genres need to get it bottled right now."The List"Visceral, poignant and riotously funny." The Scotsman"Performance poetry's key revivalist." MetroLuke Wright was born in Hackney in 1982. His poetry stage shows have toured the UK, Europe, Australia and China, including sold-out runs in London and Edinburgh. His latest UK tour is Your New Favourite Poet (2012-13). He is a resident poet on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live. His first book, Who Writes This Crap?, co-written with Joel Stickley, was published by Penguin in 2008 ("An inspired piece of parody", The Guardian), and the pair's short film Crash! Bang! Wallow! won an award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. His 2009 verse documentary for Channel 4, The Seven Ages of Love, was nominated for a Grierson Award. He lives in Suffolk, where he hosts Latitude Festival's Poetry Arena, Europe's largest single poetry event.

Reader's nomination for Guardian First Book Award 2013Anchors, shipwrecks, whales and islands abound in this first collection by young Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien. Trévien's is a surreal vision, steeped in myth and music, in which everything is alive and – like the sea itself – constantly shifting form. Fishermen become owls; a woman turns into a snake, while another gives birth to a tree; a glow-worm might become a wasp or 'a toy on standby'.Struck through with brilliant, sometimes sinister imagery reminiscent of Pan's Labyrinth or an Angela Carter novel, The Shipwrecked House is a lyrical and hallucinatory debut from a poet featured in Salt's Best British Poetry 2012.Claire Trévien was born in Brittany. Her pamphlet Low-Tide Lottery was published by Salt in 2011. Her work also appears in the recent anthologies Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt, 2012) and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon, 2012). She is the editor of Sabotage Reviews and the co-organiser of Penning Perfumes, a creative collaboration between poets and perfumers, featured in the Guardian (June 2012) and the Financial Times (August 2012). She is currently in the fourth year of a PhD at Warwick University.

Oliver Dixon's debut poetry collection maps the city of London and its inhabitants: from starlings and plane trees to a Stockhausen-listening street cleaner. But Human Form is as much a reflection on an interior world on the cusp of change. The book is a search for form, combining elegant lyrics with dense blocks of prose poetry and fractured texts. Dixon is a poet open to invention and re-invention: reflective yet lively, philosophical yet grounded – a brilliant observer of people, place and moments of uncertainty coalescing into meaning.Oliver Dixon was born in Sussex and, aside from travels across Europe and Asia, has lived most of his adult life in London. He is a specialist teacher for students with learning disabilities. His poems and reviews have appeared in PN Review, The London Magazine, The Wolf, The Frogmore Papers and New Welsh Review. He lives in West London.

PBS Recommended Translation for Spring 2013The Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf is brought to life by American poet Meghan Purvis in a vigorous contemporary translation. Written across a range of poetic forms and voices, this rendering captures the thrust and gore of battle, the sinister fens and moorlands of Dark Age Denmark, and the treasures and glories of the mead-hall. But can the hero defeat his blood-thirsty foes, save the Geats from being wiped off the map, and claim his just rewards?Combining faithful translation with innovative re-workings and poems from alternative viewpoints, Purvis has created an exciting new interpretation of Beowulf – full of verve and the bristle of language.Meghan Purvis received her MA and PhD in Creative Writing from UEA. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Rialto, The Frogmore Papers and Magma. She won the 2011 Times Stephen Spender Prize for an excerpt from her translation of Beowulf; another poem was commended. She lives in Cambridge.

"A distinctive, important new voice" – Jo ShapcottTim Cresswell's poems delight in language and geography, and the collision point of the natural and the urban. A fox climbs to the top of a London skyscraper; sandworts take root in abandoned mine shafts; and geological time is glimpsed through the 'crushed structures' of the city. Cresswell is interested in hinterlands, the in-between places: airport lounges, urban parks, the muddy verge of a river. The title sequence is a startling examination of man's relationship with the very stuff of earth, redeploying the language of science and archaeology with surgical precision and innovative flair. Soil introduces Tim Cresswell as a significant new poet of place, and our changing relationship to it."If this poetry was a geological formation, it would be layered and folded, with scientific knowledge and a quick linguistic wit, with echoes of folk song, unsentimental ecological awareness, word games and a sharp but not unkind eye on the everyday – all this, but metamorphic too, fused by human warmth into a memorable voice."Philip GrossTim Cresswell is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of four books on the role of space and mobility on cultural life. Soil is his first collection of poetry.

None of this is the city. All of it is you.In his follow-up to Kalagora, Siddhartha Bose imagines the poet as a 21st-century beatnik, a ravenous language-machine eating up the margins of the city. Dreams trigger extraordinary visions of an apocalyptic London; beat-boxers and graffiti writers as urban oracles; the ghosts of a multicultural city moving through banks and brothels, kebab shops and squat parties. Dispatches from the post-industrial landscapes of the North, and from the poet's hometowns of Mumbai and Kolkata, complete this raw and uncompromisingly modern collection.Siddhartha Bose is a poet, playwright and performer based in Hackney. His poetry has appeared in Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009; ISBN 9781852248383), Dear World and Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013; ISBN 9781852249496) and the HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (HarperCollins India, 2012; ISBN 9789350290415). His first book, Kalagora, appeared in 2010 from Penned in the Margins (ISBN 9780956546746). Siddhartha has been featured on BBC 4 TV, BBC Radio 3 and was dubbed one of the 'ten rising stars of British poetry' by the Times. He is a Leverhulme Fellow in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.

Forms of Protest collects together for the first time the work of Hannah Silva, a poet known for her fearless and wholly original vocal performances. These poems and experimental texts oscillate between sense and nonsense, meaning and music, deconstructing traditional discourse and always testing the limits of language to represent the lived world.Ranging in form from sound poems to collaged spam email, from monologues to lists of insults, and embracing subjects as diverse as war, sexuality and giant squid, Silva's poetry is like nothing else you've read.Hannah Silva is a poet and playwright. She has performed internationally and throughout the UK, including at Latitude Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe and on Radio 3. Her solo show Opposition toured in 2011-12 and was described in a five-star review by What's on Stage as "radical, political, courageous". Her writing has been published in the anthologies Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2012; ISBN 9781908058010) and Dear World & Everyone In It (Bloodaxe Books, 2013; ISBN 9781852249496). She lives in Plymouth.

Did you know that an invisible mountain is rising above the streets of the capital - and, at over 1,400 metres, it is Britain's highest peak? This ingenious new book is an account of the ascent of Mount London by a hardened team of writers, poets and urban cartographers, each one scaling a smaller mountain within the city - from Crystal Palace (112m) to Primrose Hill (78m) - until the accumulative climb exceeds the height of Ben Nevis.Also available as an eBook here.The essays and stories in Mount London unpeel London's history, geography and psychogeography, reimagining the city as mountainous terrain and exploring what it's like to move through the urban landscape. Ascents of London's natural peaks are offset by expeditions to the artificial mountains of the city - the Shard (306m), the chimneys of Battersea Power Station (103m) - and the search for 'ghost hills' in the back streets of Whitechapel and Finsbury.Mount London is a unique and visionary record of the vertical city. With contributions by Iain Sinclair, Helen Mort, Joe Dunthorne, Sarah Butler, Inua Ellams, Bradley Garrett and many more.

Join McCabe on the hunt for a great lost poet, as he walks the winding Gothic paths of the Cemetery and makes an unexpected discovery underground in the catacombs. The stories of those loved and dismissed by Charles Dickens are carefully uncovered; those who influenced Lewis Carroll and Winston Churchill; and those whose burial in the common ground has not been enough to silence them. A startling and original work of literary detection, In the Catacombs is written across a range of forms - prose, Gothic fiction, criticism and poetry - and places West Norwood Cemetery and its dead poets back into the foreground of the London psyche.Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His poetry collections are The Hutton Inquiry, Zeppelins and THE RESTRUCTURE. His work is included in numerous anthologies including Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets, Adventures in Form and Dear World & Everyone in it. His plays Shad Thames, Broken Wharf and Mudflats have been performed in London and Liverpool.His work has been described by The Guardian as: 'an impressively inventive survey of the uses of English in the early 21st century'.

Since 2004 Penned in the Margins has produced, commissioned and published a diverse range of literary projects, working with over one hundred and fifty writers, musicians and artists.From award winning anthologies such as Adventures in Form to critically acclaimed debut collections like Claire Trévien's The Shipwrecked House. This new anthology comprises over seventy-five poems and texts from our forty titles and celebrates the first decade of one of the UK's most innovative literary publishers.