Books published by Broken Sleep Books

Liam Bates poetry is cynical and louche, his pamphlet Working Animals explores how fauna, typically pests: spiders, wasps, gnats and maggots are all present, intersect unhelpfully with a world we believe to be our own but is not our own. Liam Bates is a fresh and frequently delightful poet of the anthropocene, whose words crawl under your skin and, when you're least expecting, bite.

infra·structure is a collaborative work shaped over a year of correspondence between Katy Lewis Hood and Maria Sledmere. The pamphlet was written following an Association of Literature and Environment conference on the Orkney islands, a wind battered archipelago north of the Scottish mainland. The poems respond to this distinct setting and share a dichotomous relationship where each ‘complete’ poem is mirrored by an ‘incomplete’ sister poem. Katy Lewis Hood and Maria Sledmere’s innovative dismantling of language echoes the destructive energy of the natural world. infra·structure is a highly original, must read pamphlet.

Robin Purves’ Three Spiders Fucking is a heartbroken and mournful suite of poems heavy with loss. Purves’ poetry bears the influence of two of the UK’s most celebrated alternative voices, J. H. Prynne and Denise Riley. The opening section pivots around the discovery of a man “hanging from a bough in a clearing”. The following sections mostly concern the aftermath. Purves’ language is drenched in natural world, fractured and thoughtful, hinting at the deeper questions which underpin this remarkable pamphlet.

Barney Ashton-Bullock’s Café Kaput! is an exuberant, sexed-up pamphlet laced with enough innuendo to sink an armada. An exploration of the physical side of queer desire, the poems take delight in their own irreverence, singing the body electric full of bravado and Ashton-Bullock’s often outrageous flair. You won’t read another pamphlet like it.