Books published by Broken Sleep Books

Light Glyphs is a series of interviews with filmmakers on poetry, and poets on film. Featuring interviewees such as John Ashbery, Iain Sinclair, Lisa Samuels, and Guy Maddin, this intriguing set of interviews delves into the connections and shared interests of creatives behind the camera, and holding the pen. Light Glyphs seeks to explore 'ways of thinking, writing and seeing opened to new and changing possibilities [...] or in where the light escapes and how it obscures, in what is missing from the frame or smudging the lens.'

In Valour Emma Hammond explores how modern life obstructs who we are and the challenges we go through which separate or unite us, in the fight against conformity. Hammond keeps her kookiness close to her chest, constructing levels of invisible resistance. Valour is a poetry collection which silences labels in search of the peace that exists outside of regulated space.

The poems in Annie Muir's New Year's Eve reverberate with rawness and truth, familiar themes of love, family relations and loneliness are reexamined by Muir, creating poems of a lived intensity and sparkling freshness. Muir is a poet who insists on never growing old, instead she 'just keeps starting again from scratch', so that each poem is a new dawn, a new year, a chance to be reborn.

Collected Pamphlets collects together 10 published pamphlets, and 2 previously unpublished pamphlets by working-class writer Aaron Kent. The book demonstrates the range of his poetics through experimental, lyrical, and political pamphlets. Collected Pamphlets showcases why JH Prynne called Kent's poetry 'unicorn flavoured.'

To say that SJ Fowler's Come and See the Songs of Strange Days is a poetic encyclopaedia of film would be right but falls short of describing its true nature. From an authorship marked by poetic skill and genius insanity, this book covers a range of avantgarde methodology without parallel in the British literary tradition. At times aberrant, at times playful, it overlaps cinema and language, combining lyricism with abstract visual commentary, and thriving on that which defies description. The films include American blockbusters and European arthouse, obscure documentary and all-time classics. It is a book that offers much, whether or not you like film, and whether or not you like poetry

Stravaig: A fiction for voices is a rewrite of Samuel Beckett's great radio play All That Fall, set in rural Aberdeenshire. Where Beckett's text is about two old people and the spectre of death, David Wheatley's text inverts the source material, centering it on two parents with young children. Stravaig, in remarkable style, presents certain obscurities to the reader, such as words or sentences in Scots, and discussion of matters Gaelic. This is a gem of a playscript and a truly sublime book.

Cathleen Allyn Conway's American Ingénue is a pamphlet of found poems cut from Bret Easton Ellis novels and Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley High series. Conway transforms her unlikely source material into giddy, irreverent and violent episodes which centre around a 'damaged party girl' wandering 'the wreckage of New York'. American Ingénue is a dazzling and delightful pamphlet which takes the found poem to new, vertiginous heights.

Lucy Harvest Clarke's poems move subtly between the world at hand and her own secret world. Armed with a mix of delicate rhythms and arresting variations, each poem feels mysterious, like an unexplained magic trick, always keeping the audience guessing. A Light Worker is a compelling, enigmatic collection which rewards repeated reading.

Ed Luker's Other Life is an acerbic and intelligent collection with heaps of personality. Luker's poems show an interest in the inner riddles of poetic form coupled with desperate attempts to navigate the insane demands of modern life, including £3 pound sausage rolls, yoga and the plains of Calabria. These complicated pressures push Luker into riotous protest. Other Life pushes against a certain shyness in contemporary poetry, replacing it with megalomaniac verve and sparkle.

Karen Dennison's Of Hearts opens with a poem about Point Nemo, the 'spacecraft graveyard' and furthest place from land in the ocean. The poem sets the tone for a pamphlet which explores our tiny place in a vast, overwhelming universe. It is full of crisp, lucent, technically agile and clever poems of cosmic longing. Of Hearts is a deeply enjoyable pamphlet from a poet with her eyes pressed to a telescope, searching until 'the stars switch off'.

Lucy Rose Cunningham''s For Mary, Marie, Maria places melody at its forefront, through its five sections the speaker meditates on romantic moments, loss, and displacement, crafting mellifluous soundscapes as she goes. For Mary, Marie, Maria is an arresting and composed pamphlet, a lyrical soliloquy with the poet''s heartbeat at its centre.

The poems in Gorge Ttoouli's from Animal Illicit have an extraordinary immediacy and playfulness, they are artfully composed, informed as always by Ttoouli's inquisitive probing of language. Collecting parts from two poetic series about ecology and the climate crisis, Ttoouli's work is heavily invested in the natural world. His passion for the various landscapes are preserved for the moment in this sublime collection in which he attempts to deconstruct, recycle, salvage and mutate a way of seeing and being.

This pamphlet features new translations of Medieval Welsh poet, Gwerful Mechain, renowned for her proto-feminist and erotic poetry. Altogether, the translations and original poems channel Gwerful's audacious spirit. They question why in the twenty-first century, women are still policed and discouraged in talking about sex, desire, and the body. They ask what might happen if women were set free.

Living in Disneyland is a short - yet urgent - tour de force exploration of late-stage capitalism, told through the lens of a Baudrillardian perspective. Through an aphoristic and epigrammatic style, Alex Mazey delves into the absurd (hyper)realities of contemporary living, attempting to decipher and understand ''what it means to observe surrealism in the 21st Century, to feel as if you must be dreaming.''

Until he died, Sara Coleridge barely knew her father, but as editor of his estate she found him and presented her Coleridge to the world. My Coleridge responds to Sara Coleridge''s diaries, essays and poems, exploring her experience of motherhood and addiction. But this book tells the author''s story too, because like Anne Carson writes, ''Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky.''

the pleasure of regret is a collection of mixed form texts that explore class and the ways it impacts upon ambition and education. Using essayistic prose, stream-of-consciousness and a little bit of poetry, Scott Manley Hadley writes about class displacement, toxic relationships, chronic ill health, money, awkward teenage sex and being diagnosed with a personality disorder. Scott was ''Highly Commended'' in the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2019.

Ganda the rhinoceros was a celebrity when he arrived in Europe in the sixteenth century. Kings and popes were intrigued, while poets and artists raced to depict the rhinoceros regardless of whether they had seen him with their own eyes. Most notable among them was Albrecht D├╝rer, whose celebrated woodcut is held in the British Museum. Rhinoceros is a playful fragmented reflection on the life of Ganda and the position he assumed as representative of his species, layered with expectations from millennia of wonky natural histories, bestiaries and etymologies. It looks at the rhinoceros as a spectacle, tracing a literary journey from Diodorus and Pliny the Elder to Babar the Elephant and Disney, via unicorns, YouTube, Ionesco and the Medicis. 

Gathering together shards of autobiography, poetry, and critical commentary on music and writing, Sheets of Sound evokes DeWald's experiences as a musician and poet, father and teacher, movie-lover and teenage skater. This debut collection of essays-by turns lyric and philosophic-reflects on jazz improvisation, poetic constraints, writing pedagogy, and the "queer art of failure" (Jack Halberstam), offering fresh perspectives on artists as various as Ellen Douglas, Nicole Mitchell, and Tomoka Shibasaki.

Natural Sugars is a pamphlet dripping with desire, in which Lady Red Ego''s poems luxuriate over tongues, rotting teeth and "ripe, round fruit", addressing lust in subversive, unsettling and erotic ways. Natural Sugars reclaims the body from a culture always hungry to commodify it. An essential pamphlet from a thrilling new voice in contemporary poetry, one who doesn''t "know how to garden, only to blossom".