Books in the The Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series

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'

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. "e;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."e;- from 'Domestic'