Books in the Flap Series series

In 'Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads', aliens and time machines, Lambrusco and apocalyptic first kisses, broken relationships and breast-shaped mountains are perfect companions for a delicate dance through Hill Valley, Wagamama and potato fields in Nepal. The language, open-hearted and burlesque, is lifted from hypnotherapy podcasts, ad agency jargon, the fine distillate of the worst things we think about ourselves. These are poems alive with tingling histamines and humming generators. They slip between lines of conversation, sneak into your bedroom at night, haunt your dreams.

The poems in Katie Hale's Breaking the Surface are populated with totems of our wild, essential truths- from the raven bearing witness to death, to the wolf's dark appetite. Hale interrogates desire in its different forms and unpicks the seams of myths, folktales and fairy stories, offering them up with new life. A self-assured debut.

The Sideways for It is a tour de force of poetic invention. Crafted to read as the eye leads, the poems are experienced both as commentary and personal engagement. Ian's work draws us into 'the silence of space,' urges us to observe the bridge cupping its shadow 'like a lover,' and the 'delicate proboscis of the moth'.

Grammar of Passage details a German family's quiet lives as they are pulled into the gathering maelstrom of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Monika Cassel's attention to detail in this debut, tempered with a deep empathy brings individual moments to vivid life, deftly demonstrates how poetry can excavate and reinvigorate history.

In Say, Sarala Estruch explores the limits of language in the face of overwhelming loss and attempts to forge a language with which to probe subjects that still remain largely taboo. In doing so, Say casts a slant light on the scars our ancestors carry, both those we inherit and those we choose to leave behind.