Flap Pamphlet Series – serie

Candy-Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars is a document of transformations: the possibilities that walk the fine line between the real and the surreal, the mundane and the extraordinary. Contemporary culture clashes with mythology as Bruce Lee angles for space alongside Prometheus on pages where twin towers burn and yellow hues bleed into London sunsets. Yet is is also a text of conversations: the commerce of possibilities, the transformations that memory can inflict on the present, the clear light that today can cast on yesterdays. And through it all there is music - both references to music and musicians and a music of language that Inua Ellams seems to be exploring, testing, riffing on.

Feeling a way through the electric, breathless experiences of young adulthood, 'Every Single One' is the debut pamphlet from Nina Bahadur. From New Year's Eve to the stretches of summer, dealing with prickly relationships and an exhaustive search for identity, these poems are an honest and unabashed exploration of youth, intimacy, and growth. Born in London in 1990, Nina Bahadur is a recent graduate of Princeton University, and an assistant editor at The Huffington Post. She has been writing poetry since childhood, and her work has been featured in Magma, Pomegranate Poetry, and Yes, Poetry. Her interests include photography, travel, singing, and summer nights

In his debut pamphlet, Max Wallis traces the year-long course of a love affair and all its constituent parts: sex and sensuality, longing and loneliness, desire and disappointment, heady beginnings and inevitable endings; in a world dominated by high street brands, text messaging and social media. Featuring trademark acrobatics with language to in an attempt to grapple with this fast, feisty world, Modern Love recasts love in a sincere, vivacious voice. "Max Wallis is inventive, playful and moving by turns, and unflinchingly honest in his writing. Language is both a toy and a knife to him. Modern Love takes the reader through a love affair and does so beautifully, tellingly and adventurously. There is so much here to identify with and to praise." - Angela Topping "Max Wallis shows that modern love is the same as love ever was. The heart beats in the same way, the silences, kisses and stillnesses shared by lovers are as they ever were, ever will be."- Helen Ivory "Modern Love - originally the title of George Meredith's 1862 book of 16-line sonnets, thenceforth known as Meredithian sonnets - looks to trace the year-long course of a passion as echoed through contemporary manners and languages such as texting and Facebook. The subject may, of course, equally be filed under desire, need, obsession, ecstasy, insecurity and fear, but then these are the chapters of the discourse of love. Inventive and intense at best, the discourse here has an urgency that refuses to settle." - George Szirtes Widely published in anthologies, magazines and journals, including Popshot, Cadaverine and Soul Feathers (alongside Carol Ann Duffy and Leonard Cohen), Max Wallis has found recognition early. Between October 2010 and March 2011 he took part in the Barbican Centre's prestigious Young Poet Scheme and proved himself as agile on stage as his work is on the page. Max is currently studying for a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester where he is working on a debut novel and a full collection of poetry.He also runs the project somethingeveryday which brings award-winning authors, poets and artists together to challenge their craft through a daily discipline. At twenty-one, Max Wallis has been described by David Hoyle as the future of poetry. Modern Love, his debut pamphlet, gives weight to that claim.

'Inklings' demonstrates Sarah Westcott's adaptability, her willingness to extend her voice to subjects as diverse as death, sex, the environment and trust it to retain its essential quality of sharply-tuned narrative and nuanced leaps of discovery. That she succeeds is testament to a poet who has found comfort in her quirky, unsettling register. Nevertheless, that comfort never slides into complacency; 'Inklings' is a pamphlet that retains significant emotional ballast, the occasional direct line cutting hard to jolt the reader into recognition of new truths. The contrast between the easy narrative lyric and the brutal chiselled lines is the tension that drives this striking debut. 'Sarah Westcott's poetry is exuberant, generous and edgy. The poems in this pamphlet offer a brilliant introduction to a talented writer'. - David Morley 'A high level of craft and finely nuanced language. The emotion in poems like 'Vegetable' is raw and should, reach many.' - Nathalie Teitler Sarah Westcott grew up in north Devon and lives in Kent with her family.Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, most recently Magma, Poetry Wales and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London and a science degree. Sarah has been commended in competitions including the Mslexia Poetry Competition in 2008 and 2010 and she won the inaugural Awel Aman Tawe Climate Change poetry competition in 2011. After a spell teaching English abroad, she has worked as a newspaper journalist for many years. An excerpt from 'Inklings', her debut poetry pamphlet, was runner up in the Venture Award for poetry.

'The Courtesans Reply' is a long poem sequence in the voices of Indian courtesans - women famed for their skills in music, dancing, storytelling and the art of love. Playing on historical findings, and drawing inspiration from the monologue plays of the Caturbhani and The Complete Kama Sutra, these poems give voice once again to the courtesans - and the men they loved - after centuries of silence. Shazea Quraishi was born in Pakistan and lived in Canada and Spain before moving to London. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and journals in the UK and US including Ten (Bloodaxe), The Financial Times, Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and PN Review. In 2008 she was one of ten poets selected for The Complete Works, a two-year professional development programme for Black and Asian poets. Since 2010, Shazea has worked with English PEN's Readers & Writers programme as a creative writing tutor in refugee centres and prisons. She also teaches Improving English through Creativity - a programme she developed - at a refuge for South Asian women. 'The Courtesans Reply', is being adapted as a play.

Miriam Nash's debut, 'Small Change', is a document of transition; taking in geographical shifts from farmland to metropolis, the changing shape of family, the seeping of global into personal, and a hunger for self-definition. In writing that is at once rural, urban, shocking and gentle, Miriam weaves a world that is instantly recognisable but refreshingly complex, evoking celebration, sorrow and redemption with the same clear voice. / Miriam Nash spent her early years living on an island off the west coast of Scotland. Her poetry has taken her to the USA, Singapore and across the UK, where she has been published in Magma, Brand and Generations Magazine and performed at Tate Britain, Singapore's Esplanade and Chicago's Green Mill. She has been an active part of the UK and Singapore poetry scenes, leading workshops in schools and producing large-scale poetry projects for young people. In 2012 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. 'Small Change' is her debut pamphlet.

'Batman's Hill, South Staffs' is non-linear sequence of poems set largely in Staffordshire, between 1961 and 1972. Quietly contemplative and playful with language, the poems derive their energy from the dialogue between memory and hindsight, the moments where the present - physically, or through lived experience - throws a clear unrelenting light on the past, 'coming for you in the dark'.

Winner of the inaugural Venture Award (2012)

Pigeon Party celebrates urban life, hardship and raving. From the young, low-trousered boy selling packets on the corner, to the working-class holiday in Skegness and a Dancehall rave in the back of a Carribbean food shop. This collection cannot help but uncover colour and spice where usually we assume only dirt or dust.

A Suburb of Heaven is a collection built from observation and speculation. Based on artist Stanley Spencer's work in the first section and the part-imagined life of Anna O, patient zero of psychoanalysis, in the second, it is a feast for the senses. Spencer's predilection for using Biblical scenes in a rural context carries a narrative impetus that Pnina Shinebourne builds on to create revelatory poetic highs, "half-way between drunkenness and reverie". These moments of altered reality perhaps lead inevitably to the sequence on Anna O, which starts with the curiously apt line, "Transference, said Freud". From that opening, Pnina invents Anna O's history, complete with music notes and linguistic asides. The imagery here is soft against what was sold as hard science; a struggling patient's emotions set against the speculating notes of ambitious men.

A Warning to the House That Holds Me builds on the milestones and mythology of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo to perform a deeply personal act of reclaiming power. Fully aware of the political significance of rejecting the dominant, Amina weaves together a series of poems that pay homage to her home country and lineage - exploring displacement, dual nationality and Somali history. Drawing on a long tradition of Somali storytelling, these poems achieve the complex balance of being as conversational as they are crafted. Brimming in them is a sense of longing for escape, yet accepting the inescapable reality of generational trauma and the ever present grip of a mother's embrace.

Written originally in Me'phaa, First Rain is a selection of poems that emerged from the poet responding to the death of his grandmother who declared to him in 2005: I will die in the days when the first rains come. The work mourns both the loss of a grandmother, and the fading away (like her sight in later life) of a culture and language that hold so much history and pride. In this way, they address social, racial and gender inequalities, environmental abuses and injustices faced by native peoples in Latin America - issues that have resonance globally. As the poet recounts: In the face of the wind, grab the stones that are falling upon us, one of his grandmother's phrases, refers to people standing up to injustice. This collection, Hubert Matiuwaa's first ever in English, is a gathering of stones.

After over a decade working as a musician under the name Kae Sun, Kwaku Darko-Mensah Jnr. makes a full-blooded return to the bones of his craft – poetic exploration and wordplay. His début pamphlet, Flood Season, begins with seeds of perennial flooding, a phenomenon as familiar to residents of Accra as it is to residents of Assam, and blossoms into an exploration of diasporic belonging, the tensions between who we are and the clichés that surround our nation states. Ultimately, the poems hint that we might all be routinely, “caught in the delicate act of restraining/ Home in clasped hands/ Held to the ear, listening for a way back”. Flood Season carries the weight of its musings with an ease akin to water uprooting a misplaced house, and fizzes with the joy of a burst dam.

Don’t Speak Easy is Tom Jameson’s debut pamphlet. Its scope ranges from a childhood spent in the immediate wake of the Second World War to a projected future where death provides the opportunity to spin back to the very beginning of life at breakneck speed. Jameson’s skill as a poet and storyteller never loses sight of the fine grain of human experience that interlaces the thick boughs of history. The uneasy speech of the title doesn’t just refer to the difficulty of recollecting one’s own experiences, it also refers to the varying pressures that accost us for trying to speak in our true voice, especially that of his Northern dialect in Big Gob. Despite the serious subject matter of some of the poems, Jameson’s wry sense of humour is always present, never losing sight of the funny side of his recollections, be it his awkward early loves or coffee addiction.

If listening is a form of attention, and attention is a form of love, Bella Cox's Sikiliza presents itself as both an imperative and a promise for exploration of the bonds that tie the constituent elements of a self together. A self woven from voices rooted in different continents. A self both defined by and defying notions of what it means to be woman, sister, daughter, lover, loved, queer. A self versed in the languages of scalpels and flowers. A self that howls, soothes and sings off-key. A self that's unapologetically here, wherever here may be.

As evidenced by a section called "for" in the middle of this début pamphlet, Akila Richards is a poet in conversation with the world - a world that discriminates, a world that marginalises. The poems in that section make visible the quiet dignity of folk who rarely make the headlines. Versatile in tone, the impassioned protest of A Lived Life sits alongside the silent despair of Deliverance. Elsewhere, Akila celebrates her heritage in The Givers, eschews the cult of shame in Amoral Deity, and recasts Soyinka's A Telephone Conversation at a German border entry in A Crossing Conversation. Throughout her often experimental work, the quality of witnessing and the ability to extract beauty from the mundane is remarkable, making Ritual for a Mango both celebration and dirge, a true reflection of human existence.

For no particular reason, and at no-one else's behest, Niall O'Sullivan set about writing a sonnet a day during the month of September 2010. Never missing his daily deadline, Niall published first drafts with accompanying videos on his website www.niallosullivan.co.uk. The resulting body of work went to places that few sonnets have gone to before: searching for snow leopards on the mountains of Afghanistan; finding erotic links between lycanthropy and botany; joining the final Neanderthal on his last night on Earth; justifying the clown costume bomb disposal scene in Octopussy. Months after the project finished, the poems can now be read for the first time in their finished forms. The Sonnet Hack pamphlet marks the completion of an ambitious project that sought to link formal poetry more intimately to our social condition and our time.

Martin De Mello is a poet capable of dazzling with the familiar. Under his gaze, images, well-known from urban landscapes, become cultural exhibits that demand full attention. The modes of language that we scan through every day - from agendas and instruction sheets to texted missives and slang - become poems in their own right, leading us to question the boundaries we place between the inspired and the mundane. All the while, if our love stays above the waist is shot through with wry humour and moments of serenity without diluting an ounce of its realism and intensity.