Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets – serie

Oils is a gorgeous, beguiling collection of poems where the poise of the delivery belies the emotional, existential turmoil within.Through his portraits of an atheist, a pickpocket and a spinach-loving sailor (among others), Stephen Sexton evokes a strange kind of melancholy as he strives to reconcile passion with detachment and profound self-doubt with unwavering love.

Rachel Piercey charms and disturbs in her first full-length pamphlet, which considers the frailty of human relationships and makes a strong case for approaching life with an open mind and a generous spirit. These are poems which recognise and dip into cynicism but never fully yield, and that Piercey's sharp, unflinching world view still leaves room for romance is both glorious and heart-rending. This is a beautiful collection of poems about love, identity and home.

In her heady debut pamphlet Myrtle, Ruth Wiggins celebrates the primal forces of nature and the human heart. Interweaving the ancient with the modern world, she explores fertility and death, in poems that are imbued with a subtle eroticism. There is a serious playfulness at work here too: a carnival stallholder battles with a spider, and a bored vegetarian contemplates life as a fox, while lovers fear death and separation as the gods look on in amusement. This free-wheeling and assured collection is full of dry humour and wisdom, and is by turns poignant, dark and full of zest.

In 1940, a young girl is taken from her home in Eastern Poland to Arkhangelsk, Siberia; in 1942, she boards a train. Seventy years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczyńska. As Kuczyńska’s poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another person’s story without exploiting it? What’s at stake when we try make patterns out of the past, and can we ever leave those patterns behind? Kuczyńska’s poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from ‘the heat of Easter in Tehran’ to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.

Rakhshan Rizwan's debut collection simmers with a poised, driving anger. Drawing on the rich visual and material culture of her home region, Rizwan unpacks and offers critical comment on the vexed issues of class, linguistic and cultural identity – particularly for women – in the context of Pakistan and South Asia. She writes about the hypocrisy of the men who claim to worship women, the nuances of using Urdu or Hindi, and the many contradictions of the city of her birth, Lahore. As well as startling free verse, Rizwan's many accomplished ghazals both explore and demonstrate her fascination with multilingualism, code-switching, displacement and belonging. The poems in Paisley are an unflinchingly feminist assault on received ideas about womanhood which present the reader with often-uncomfortable truths.

This pamphlet speaks, in an urbane and charmingly deadpan voice, to anyone who has ever had both an ‘obsession with luxury resources’ and the nagging feeling ‘you’ve arrived at the counter of a shop / only to be told what you’re carrying isn’t legal tender’. The centrepiece of Priced Out is a tender and wry sequence of sonnets addressed ‘to my mother at my age’ which explores the ‘fat promise’ of the nineties economic bubble and its deflated aftermath. Despite their sharp historical awareness, Conor Cleary’s poems live unmistakably in the twenty-first century, mapping the contours of a world of goofy Vines, flat-pack Christmas trees, and the barely-suppressed terror of economic precarity. Even as Cleary’s speakers agonise over the difficulty of living with others — ‘what if my gums / concealed big steel / fangs ... that were very / much part of me’ — poem after poem reaffirms its commitment to human connection, working towards a calmly bemused acceptance of the dangers and wonders of contemporary existence.

'A warm and snouting thing' dances delicately between the sizzle of nerves brought on by proximity to sex and the ambiguous stability of commitment and family. These poems emphasise the physicality, not only of desire, but of the human and natural worlds which surround and shape it: springing ferns, 'saddle-soap / and saddle-sores,' and a vivid scene in which the speaker's mother boils alive 'two huge crabs, rough as roof-tiles' on a holiday with her husband and his lover. Herdman's voice is always precise, even at moments of the most brazen intimacy, whether staring at the backs of men's necks on the Tube across 'a little inch of shared air' or observing the 'patterned' flesh underneath the buttons of a corset. There are tales of teenage self-confidence ('vest tops in April') and adultery averted – but there is space here, too, for a settled life with a salad spinner, and a long-term lover's belly 'warm in its burrow'. The poet skilfully negotiates the twin pulls of the familiar and the unknown, generating a forceful and compelling charge from the energy of flight resisted.

In a sequence of poems set in the mountainous Deep South of America, Dawn Watson vividly evokes an ominous landscape of gas stations, jackrabbits and drifting hawks, where copperhead snakes fall out of branches and ‘magnolia cones / thum[p] the roofs’ of wooden outhouses. These poems, based on the writer’s time spent in Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, are interwoven with pieces set in the poet’s native Belfast which speak urgently to the raw realities of sexuality, juvenile detention, and the Irish border. Many poems feature speakers driving from place to place, capturing the in-between states in which so much of experience is actually lived. Precise and strange images coalesce into physical and interior landscapes. Alternately surreal and direct, and always joyously inventive, Watson offers a clear and unsettling vision of what is and isn’t there in these anxious, contemporary times.

Vivarium is a collection about connection and alienation, belonging and place. Pärtna explores the uneasy co-existence of the past and the present, on a national and global scale, and looks ahead to the future with anxiety as well as hope. She reflects on the effects of Soviet rule on Estonian society and the national mindset, and on humanity’s treatment of natural habitats. Stories of personal trauma play out against a backdrop of major environmental changes, loss of biodiversity, and global warming. Maarja Pärtna is part of the new generation of young Estonian poets, and this edition has been awarded funding by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Simone Atangana Bekono's poems are vivid and arresting, with the feeling of letters or diary entries. In nine breath-taking streams of consciousness, the poet explore race, gender and sexuality, addressing the social stigmatization of race and gender and invoking empathy and human connection in a voice that is both confident and innovative.

Rehema Njambi unpacks identity, faith, womanhood and – above all – agency, in poems partly inspired by conversations with the Black, mostly African, women around her. Imbued with quiet resistance to patriarchal societies, Njambi's debut collection is an ode to the women who have raised her, and their strength and their ability to hold, sustain, and be rooted in their faith. The poems resound with their idea of home, and belonging they wish to pass on to their daughters.GHOSTS IN THIS HOUSEThere were footsteps in the dark all night,almost every night, and we were scared — but we didn’t say a thing.She called us to prayer in the morning, every morning.With our small hands and smaller faithwe asked the Lord for protection —but He didn’t say a thing.

Valerie Bence’s latest poetry pamphlet is a testament to ordinary lives, and a meditation on grandmothers. Part memoir, part family history, Overlap is a series of vivid vignettes from the poet’s childhood, courtship, motherhood and grandmotherhood, spanning the 20th and 21st centuries.Winifred and Harriet are at the heart of this book: Bence’s grandmothers, whose hardy, steadfast lives she comes to reflect on as she too becomes a grandmother, in very different times. Stranded from her family in the Covid-19 pandemic, the poet conjures up their ghosts, walks in their footsteps and – sometimes – feels herself become them.> We mash tealeaves and bran for the rabbit, > the sweet aroma fogging her glasses, > and every day, for five shillings a week, > she scrubs bloody butcher’s aprons. > We take the clean ones back on the bus, > until the day she faints outside Boots in the rain, > sliding down the wall like in a cartoon, > her wartime hat slipping over her eyes.

Tender, loving and visceral, Ovarium is a pamphlet of poems about a giant ovarian cyst. The poet charts her journey with the cyst, from diagnosis to surgery to recovery, via a landscape of scanner rooms and hospital wards. The poems explore the impact of illness, and the body as a site of disgust and shame but also healing and endurance. Ingham’s poems are forensic as she looks at the disorientating and sometimes patriarchal language of anatomy and medicine, and the way illness can change the relationship we have with our own bodies.I tried to think of you as fruit, growingagainst the sun-warm wall of my gut.Melon-headed, you nudged the leafy organs,dug out a place for yourself in the plot.I never guessed. I was only bloody earthto you, a coldframe full of light.- from 'Cyst'

In Milk Snake, Toby Buckley invites us to look at the world from a slightly different angle, where small things become unsettling if you look closely enough. The poet explores queerness, displacement and trauma through clear-voiced, deceptively gentle poems about fishermen, maggots and bees. bleary from sleep and warmwater and no glassesi spot an uncertain commaslidinghe drags his tail up myshower wall cumbersomeand not unmaggotesque and ican seehis gutsor maybe it’shis dinner- from 'companion'

Acerbic, precise and very funny, Pamela Crowe’s poems explore home life and relationships in a delightfully forthright voice. Secret frustrations and anxieties are aired and private fantasies brought into the light, as odes blur into diatribes and psychodramas become love poems. Woven throughout The Bell Tower is a love of Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Wendy Cope and – above all – Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones. These are fierce, acutely observed poems that give weight to domestic minutiae and put words to helpless howls into the abyss.You, the cloud. Oh look! there you are, blobbing along as if you’re best friends with rain and thunder is your dad. Fuck off.- excerpt from 'Cloudcunt'

Through poems about fossilised fruit seeds and the sofa where Emily Brontë died, Wetton questions how we curate the lives of those living and dead in a pamphlet about looking, processing, and memorialising. Whether considering preserved wedding-cakes, a non-existent art exhibition or a human scream, these poems speak to the impossibility of containment and question our ability to map and categorise.This is a pamphlet of poems about the stories that we tell ourselves, the memories that we construct, and the ways that we value and devalue people, animals and objects alike.

From lips and warmed cheeks to silk and falling leaves, the subjects of Z.R. Ghani’s poems radiate with redness. Sometimes a cloak, often a shining symbol, Ghani’s reds are sacred and dazzling: pomegranates ripening to jewels and perfectly-placed bindis shining like suns.But something darker lurks beneath the ruby depths. A city is held hostage by a heatwave, a flame is lit in a dark room, a ballerina twists inside a jewellery box.As though developing photographs, Ghani shines a deep light over her poems as a tool to slowly make the unseen visible, the unsaid audible. This is a debut book rich with desire, shame, grief, faith, love, and at the forefront of it all: the colour red.

Makeover is a book dripping with nostalgia, cigarette ash and sour cream dip. Lit by too-close TV screens and too-bright calorie counters, Bolger's poems explore growing up, differing bodies and societal expectations.Writing in praise of mums, nans and sisterhood, this is a work bursting with strength, anger, love and, ultimately, hope. In a celebration of girls shaped by swimming baths and Working Men’s Clubs, friendship and family, Makeover contends with what we inherit and what we ought to pass on.

Mother Night is a hallucinogenic journey across a city with too many alleyways and across a life surviving childhood sexual assault. Forming a nocturnal séance, Serge ♆ Neptune resurrects abusive old lovers and ghosts of the queers of the past – conjures men in cars and men in bedrooms – providing them invitation and shelter, or casting them to stormy waves.In a book of many types of darkness – across poems of vulnerability and harm – what persists in Mother Night is its celebration of resilience, what shines brightest is the many ways it reaches for the light.

Centred on a sudden accidental death – its shocking actuality, the aftermath, the admin – Kathy Pimlott’s third pamphlet is an honest, lyrical and nuanced journey through the complexity of bereavement.As the world around her continues on - moths remain attracted to lights, Christmas comes and goes - Pimlott lives with the irreplaceable absence that follows the loss of a partner. Amid the pain and emotion is a streak of wry humour at the mundanity of settling affairs and a powerfully personal trajectory of moving through grief rather than moving on.Across poems that take stock of the things people leave behind and the sometimes-painful memories of a long and textured marriage, After the rites and sandwiches tracks the rollercoaster of grief, guilt and regret without losing sight of the enduring salve of love.

Mate Arias is Lewis Buxton’s love song to his friends, a soaring voice attempting to communicate in a masculine world often punctuated by silence or violence. Muscles are torn, crossword clues are pondered, and pints are lifted as the poet attempts to make sense of his friends and himself, and their often clumsy, physical dances around each other.Under the glares of floodlights and movie screens, with a backdrop of superheroes and zombies, Buxton creates the settings for new versions of male friendships. A poignant and funny exploration of making and maintaining relationships as lives begin to move in different directions, Mate Arias is a unique celebration of the tenderness and love that can be communicated by men.

From John Singer Sargent to Francis Bacon and Keith Haring - covering romantic landscapes and surreal portraits - Masters curates a gallery of writing in response to paintings by queer men.Mark Ward’s voice inks that of the artist, the subject, and the viewer across poems exploring desire, grief, shame, defiance and surrender.Tender and daring, Masters goes in search of a shared queer male history across the past century, and invites us to look more deeply at the worlds beneath and beyond the brushstrokes.

Two brothers wrestle, a bird lies in a young boy’s hand, an entire field lives within the eye of a needle.Noon is a sparkling debut from Birmingham-born poet Zain Rishi, exploring home, family and faith.From the heat of the school relay and his grandmother’s Kashmiri chai to the images of a young man kissing a city goodbye, these poems chart a coming-of-age journey across place, sexuality and family ties.Rich in its interrogation of language and inheritance across generations, Noon announces Zain Rishi as one of the UK’s most exciting new voices.

Steam rises from bowls of noodle soup, tender steaks are seared in butter, sand-roasted chestnuts are shared from a paper bag. Suyin Du Bois's Eating Air is a mouth-watering book of poems about food, belonging and connection.Charting a journey across cuisines and continents, these poems carve into the author’s dual Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage and food’s enduring role in our cultural, familial and personal histories.From the low stools of Penang’s kopitiams to the bright lights of London’s Chinatown, Eating Air is a love song to food and a poignant catalogue of its profound capacity to serve up memory, language, and longing.

A Sudden Stitch. Unfruitful Land. A Fever.In Milk & Moon-water, Milena Williamson uncovers 11 Old English metrical charms - ancient incantations spoken to ward off harm - creatively translating them into magical and medicinal spells for the modern reader.Alongside each reimagining is an original charm poem, a remixed and new telling of an old text. Covering the climate crisis, illness, ageing and fertility, this collection of charms ranges from the incantatory to the unhinged, and reengages with the ancient practice of looking to the land and the body for answers to life’s new and persisting questions.

Rachael Matthews is a working-class poet who paints poetic miniatures of domestic and psychological interiors. Her debut pamphlet, do not be lulled by the dainty starlike blossom, is a playful, dark meditation on the queer body as site of pleasure, connection, fertility, loss and trauma.Matthews finished writing these poems during lockdown, while she was heavily pregnant with her daughter. It was an unwitnessed pregnancy, experienced in isolation from friends and family, and invisible to the psychotherapy patients she was treating virtually when New York City became the global epicentre of the pandemic. Resilience and hope are woven into its DNA.

Step into Pearl’s world and take a tour around her faded seaside town, past the graffiti walls, bus stops and the old mattress factory. Except – with Pearl as our guide – the colours suddenly pop and every tiny detail becomes rich with interest. From the lido to the hair salon, to the Christmas shop in June, the ordinary becomes magical and every bit of wildness, weirdness and tattiness is whisked into the foreground. "Pearl" is an alter ego of the poet: she's a character who observes the minutiae around her and whose thoughts are a pleasure to follow. This pamphlet follows Pearl as she rollicks around, making her way through a townscape similar but not identical to the too-small-to-be-cities of poet Julia Bird's 70s & 80s childhood. from 'Clementine Pearl'The first time was a fluke. Subsequently, Pearl made plans to visit the Christmas shop at the edge of town every twenty-fifth of June; a day when even if it isn’t hot, it’s light, the day most likely the shop’s most empty of people wanting winter or its antimatter to take into their homes.

You never know how things really are in other people’s families, in other people’s homes. There’s the public face and the private truths – the personal griefs and tragedies, whether festering or resting in peace. In her wry, engagingly strange poems, Anne Bailey takes the door off the latch and lets us inside. She shows us loss and disappointment, as well as hardness and resilience, particularly through the eyes of a daughter, wife and mother. We see the domestic sphere in such close-up detail that it becomes bizarre, an uncanny dimension that nonetheless rings horribly, weirdly true. "So you’ve put a picture on the lovely blank wallthat used to go pink in the sun and feel like an ice cream. A wall on which I used to rest my eyes in pleasant contemplation."- from 'Domestic'