Seren Books – serie

The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America is a new and much-needed bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry featuring 90 Spanish-speaking poets from Latin and South America. Translator Richard Gwyn has selected from post-war poets from Cuba to Argentina, and from established names like Fondebrider to new voices like Carolina Davila.

It’s the 1970s, and a mysterious woman has a cache of letters to sell. They claim to tell the story of the death of Fanny Imlay, half-sister of Mary Shelley and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Did Fanny really commit suicide in an inn in Swansea in 1816, as historians thought? The letters instead suggest a faked death and an escape from Fanny’s fraught family life. It could have been an independence of which Fanny’s mother would have been proud. But the letters also suggest the re-born Fanny remained misunderstood, mis-used and rejected, in the manner of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster.The women’s intertwining narratives begin to reflect each other as the mysteries multiply and resolve. Gothic body-swaps, dark mansions and unexpected deaths merge with 70s politics and feminism in this tour-de-force by Jerwood Prize-winning author Jo Mazelis.

In her collection The Weather in Normal, Carrie Etter laments the loss of her hometown of Normal, Illinois through the death of her parents, the sale of the family home, and the effects of climate change on Illinois’ landscape and lives. The author’s restlessly inventive use of multiple tones, shifting line lengths, and fresh turns of phrase are as much a means of conveying complex and paradoxical emotions as they are a determined formal strategy to avoid cliché. Shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for her last collection, Imagined Sons, Etter has built a following based on her highly original and deeply emotive poetry.

Dark Land, Darks Skies subverts conventional astronomy by repopulating the night sky with myths from oral traditions which were overtaken by the classical naming of constellations and planets as astronomy developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Astronomer Martin Griffiths includes star charts and other helpful materials for star-gazing.

After surviving a terrifying avalanche on the slopes of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), Matthew Myerscough took up a new hobby: fossil hunting. Since then, he has become well-known in the fossil hunting community for finding spectacular marine reptile fossils on the beaches near his home.Recounting his journey from novice to expert, In Search of Sea Dragons sees him venturing to a variety of places, including lesser-known sites in South Wales, Somerset and North Yorkshire, where he makes exciting discoveries and searches for his dream find – a complete ichthyosaur. His story is one of personal growth and maturing into adulthood as well as a practical guide for aspiring fossil hunters. As his months-long search for the second half of an ichthyosaur draws to a close, he considers what’s more rewarding? The discovery or the things you find along the way.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Wales Book of the YearShortlisted for the 2010 TS Eliot PrizeBook of the Year, The ObserverWhat the Water Gave Me contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo's work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words. More than just a verse biography, this collection explores how Kahlo transformed trauma into art after the artist’s near-fatal bus accident. Petit, with her vivid style, her feel for nature and her understanding of pain and redemption, fully inhabits Kahlo’s world. Each poem is an evocation of ‘how art works on the pain spectrum’, laced with splashes of ferocious colour.