Books published by Nine Arches Press

Out of the doll's house and into the woods, Bunny Girls steps out of the shadows of girlhood and looks at the world with wide eyes. Surreal, spiky, wise and darkly funny, this new collection by Costa-winning author and poet Angela Readman expertly mixes shades of film noir, northern wit, and magic realism. Through the lens of childhood, these poems address autism, anxiety, and darker concerns buried by cultural ideals of femininity.Here in Readman's skilful words are odes to severed heads, angels and Disney villains, Marilyn Monroe's body double, squashed slugs, sexual awakenings, Wendy-houses and snow globes, nosebleeds and blackbirds. Women are both invisible and actively writing themselves into the visible. Where there is isolation and dislocation, its counterbalance is finding breathless, reckless joy in the acts of creation and imagination. At its heart, this enlivening, magnificent book is about darkness and light, the lovely and the frightening, the beautiful and the worrying.

Living by Troubled Waters is the third poetry collection by Roy McFarlane - an extraordinary, uncompromising book exploring slavery, colonialism, and the continued tragedies visited upon Black bodies whilst these legacies remain unresolved. In his close examination of the horror of racialised violence, McFarlane examines how the strong currents of the past and present flow side by side. His poems ask us to think about the Black Mediterranean of today as much as we do about the Windrush scandal and the aftershocks of trans-Atlantic slavery, where Black people are still imprisoned, enslaved and drowned as they flee persecution and poverty.Living by Troubled Waters is innovative, formally experimental and far ranging in scope; erasure & inclusion (to make known) poems interweave and speak to the wider body of the collection. In his use of archival documents as a space for activism and linguistic intervention, McFarlane writes back into history, reclaiming voices and reshaping narratives. His poems also draw strength from themes of place and displacement, social justice, Black motherhood, family, art - and from the power of poetry itself as a witness to troubled times.

There is (still) love here, the compelling new collection of poetry by Dean Atta, is a personal and powerful exploration of relationships, love and loss, encompassing LGBTQ+ and Black history, Greek Cypriot heritage, pride and identity, dislocation and belonging.Atta's tender, precisely-crafted and generous poems seek consolation and affirmation. These are poems as an antidote for challenging times, whether facing prejudice or the challenges of the pandemic, experiencing grief or recovering from heartbreak. Here, we encounter blue feelings and homesickness, things lost in translation and the pressures of the many roles we play in life. We also find the recipes of home, gifts and giving, the togetherness of community and connection to help us to heal. There is still love here - and journeys towards forgiveness, acceptance, queer joy and the power to unapologetically be yourself and fully embrace who you are.

Notes from a Shipwreck, the third collection of poetry by Jessica Mookherjee, is a richly detailed and illuminating voyage of dislocation and longing. By turns evocative, unsettling, and full of 'small acts of magic', Mookherjee simultaneously finds the past, present, and future in the tempestuous, lyrical tides that flow through her poems.Here, seafaring lore and shanties interweave with wreckage and survival, drawn by strong currents of history - where migration, colonialism, pandemics and climate change shape the course we are on. The sea is a territory of grief and transformation, alluring and dangerous, where safe harbours and landfall are not always certain. Mookherjee's enchanting, salt-sharp poetry encompasses the many journeys embarked on - whether seeking refuge, escape, or into exile - and consider not only the deep blue sea and its myriad mythologies, but to understand 'what makes a land and person,' - the keen human instinct to seek belonging.

Ramona Herdman's Glut is a lush, entertaining, and bittersweet collection of poems about how we live together and find meaning through rules and rituals around food, family, alcohol, work, nature, sex and love. These vividly-realised, nimble poems probe at the delicate balancing acts we - our bodies and our minds - perform in life: between power and trust, between convention and rebellion, and between what is enough and what is too much. All the time, Herdman's spry poetry keeps a gimlet eye on our impulse to make sense of it all - of how we live and work together, and what strategies will help us to navigate our way through the tangled undergrowth of negotiation and misunderstanding. Glut is a lustrous, darkly funny, open-hearted book on the distance between people, on satisfying appetites, and on seeking both pleasure and consolation.

Tania Hershman's Still Life With Octopus is an exquisitely-attuned second collection, a philosophical and poetic interrogation of the boundaries of animal and human worlds and the intimate nature of time, being and joy. Exploring the slippage between the life of the mind and the life of the body - in particular, those belonging to women - Hershman wonders what might happen if we let go of our preconceptions of both reality and language, taking nothing for granted and starting again from first principles, with fresh eyes. While trying to fathom our physical and metaphysical existence, Hershman doesn't ignore the other forms of intelligent life we share our planet with; her octopus is envisioned both as a creature within and alongside us and as a way to consider our place as humans within a greater chain of co-existence. Still Life With Octopus is a precisely observed and open-hearted gift of a book.

Peter Raynard's Manland is a bold, brilliant and outspoken new collection of poems that scrutinise men and manhood, mental health, working class lives and disability. Aloud and alive with music, wit, anger and rebellion, this is an accomplished, politically-aware and vital book. Raynard is a skilled observer, and these razor-sharp poems document parenthood through the lens of a stay-at-home dad, attempt to tell the truth about men and depression, study our cultural, social and medical relationships with drugs and drug-taking, and lay bare the realities of life at the sharpest edges of society. By turns frank, painful and bleakly funny, this humane and brilliant book encompasses pride and prejudices, the bonds between lads and dads, the toxic pressures of masculinity and the way illness and poverty irrevocably shape lives.

Space Baby asks difficult questions about the Earth, its beings, and what lies ahead for them; how do we look to the future on a planet that's burning? How do we come to terms with our grief, and what can we believe in? If the human race destroys what we have, where will we go?In this dystopian, searching book, Evans mixes absurdity and wit with speculative, serious themes. Here, artificial intelligence and robots will 'cuddle you to sleep', the melting permafrost will reveal its surprises, and we encoutner the very first human baby born in space. Ultimately, Evans writes to acknowledge our responsibilities and interconnectedness with earth and all its lifeforms, as well as to our future generations. These are vivid, prescient poems of existence, and survival, which ask how we can still find joy on a ruined planet.

Daniel Sluman's third collection, single window is a hybrid memoir of poetry and images. One an amputee with chronic pain, the other suffering from Crohn's Disease and Fibromyalgia, Daniel Sluman and his wife Emily found the year of 2016 almost untenable. Unable to safely navigate the stairs to bed, they spent 24 hours a day together on their sofa, isolated from society except for a single window, where they watched the world moving around them. single window is an incomparable, uncompromising and starkly-realised sequence of poems in the form of a journal, which bear witness to the loneliness and fear experienced by disabled people living in Tory Britain. Through a precise, hyper-confessional fusion of poetry and photography, this book details the realities of disabled lives, exploring intimacy and unconditional love as well as isolation and confinement, and documenting a world that many people otherwise never see.

What motivates poets in the 21st century? How do they find their voice? What themes and subject matters inspire them? How do they cope with set-backs and deal with success? What keeps them writing? Why I Write Poetry, edited by Ian Humphreys, combines lively and thought-provoking essays, along with individual writing prompts to help you create your own new poetry. In this book, twenty-five contemporary poets reflect with insight, wit and wisdom on the writing life. Each offers their distinctive take on what inspires and spurs them on to write poetry. The essays shine a light on everything from performance, dialect, the body and paying attention, to bearing witness, finding your wings and joining the journey of poetry, and encompass the practical, personal, and political. Within these pages, youâEUR(TM)ll discover how a poetâEUR(TM)s background and values can fundamentally shape and inform their work. New voices sit alongside poets with many collections under their belts and youâEUR(TM)ll find encouragement, creative provocations, advice and, above all, reasons to write. Read on, learn and enjoy. With essays by: Romalyn Ante, Khairani Barokka, Hafsah Aneela Bashir, Leo Boix, Vahni Capildeo, Mary Jean Chan, Jo Clement, Sarah Corbett, Jane Commane, Rishi Dastidar, Jonathan Edwards, Rosie Garland, W. N. Herbert, Ian Humphreys, Keith Jarrett, Zaffar Kunial, Rachel Mann, Andrew McMillan, Kim Moore, Pascale Petit, Jacqueline Saphra, Clare Shaw, Daniel Sluman, Jean Sprackland, and Jennifer Wong.

Jane Burn's new poetry collection Be Feared is a captivating reclamation of self, sisterhood and love, encountering everything from the Snow Queen and the morning song of chainsaws to myths, monsters, plagues and infernos. Acknowledging fear, this book embraces discovery, moving from 'beware!' and 'bereft' towards a becoming - a process of translation and transformation, of finding a voice radiant with both curses and psalms. Rebellious, bloody, and encroached upon by violence, Burn's poetry examines survival, abuse and healing. Intensely imaginative, these incantatory poems rework fairy tale and folklore, invoke a divine carnival of sexuality and wild nature, and hold up enchanted mirrors to the everyday truths of being a working-class autistic woman, daring to become, claiming her own magnificent, unstoppable fluency and spell-making power.

Caleb Parkin's debut poetry collection, This Fruiting Body, plunges us into octopus raves and Sega Megadrive oceans, in the company of Saab hermit crabs and ASDA pride gnomes. It's a playful invitation to a queer ecopoetics that permeates our bodies and speech, our gardens, homes, and city suburbs. It reintroduces us to a Nature we've dragged up until it's unrecognisable. Parkin's perceptive poetry sparks with neon visuals, engaged in the joyful, urgent, imagining of alternative realities and new futures. How might we relate queerly and dearly to our environment and its shared conundrums? These adventurous poems delight in human and nonhuman intimacies, teem with life, ponder bug sex and put masculinities under the microscope. This Fruiting Body roves our grandiloquent planet, embracing our kinships with matter, culture, creatures and drag-mother Earth herself.

Shaun Hill's debut poetry collection, warm blooded things is a radical and intimate encounter with boyhood, sexuality, and violence, love, desire and solitude. Wandering the nocturnal city streets, through random encounters, co-opting space and capturing conversations in a multitude of voices, this collection evokes alienation whilst longing for tenderness. Hill's agile poems are alive to fear, loss, danger - and to the possibility of other ways of being, other, better stories that we can write. The poems also explore a uniquely queer archive of time and place, the legacy of AIDS, and draw strength from giving voice to unheard histories. Seeking sanctuary and alternatives to a capitalist reality, these precise, humane poems gesture towards hope, survival and the necessity to be responsible for one another.

One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets by Jacqueline Saphra is a poetic journal that chronicles the personal and political upheavals and tragedies of the Coronavirus pandemic, this sequence of sonnets charts the dislocated, frightening and at times uplifting experience of one hundred days of lockdown. Written as a daily sonnet throughout the first lockdown, from 23rd March 2020, Saphra's candid and revealing sequence is a unique record of strange and unparalleled days.

Khairani Barokka's second poetry collection is an intricate exploration of colonialism and environmental injustice: her acute, interlaced language draws clear connections between colonial exploitation of fellow humans, landscapes, animals, and ecosystems. Amidst the horrifying damage that has resulted for peoples as interlinked with places, there is firm resistance. Resonant and deeply attentive, the lyricism of these poems is juxtaposed with the traumatic circumstances from which they emerge. Through these defiant, potent verses, the body-particularly the disabled body-is centred as an ecosystem in its own right. Barokka's poems are every bit as alarming, urgent and luminous as is necessary in the age of climate catastrophe as outgrowth of colonial violence.

Angela France's distinctive new collection of poems, Terminarchy eloquently considers the troubling terms of existence in an age of climate catastrophe and technological change. How do we negotiate a world where capitalism and greed threaten a fragile earth, where technology seems to promise us connection but might also fuel isolation? Where even finding solace in nature reminds us that the seasons can no longer be trusted? How is human urge and want hastening us towards our own 'endling' - and what might it mean to be the 'last'? In reframing ecopoetics in her own instinctive, radical, lyrical form, France juxtaposes the accelerated, all-consuming speed of contemporary and future times with the 'longtime' and ancient, and considers whether, rather than collison-course, there might be a better way to coexist. Where extinction threatens, these wry, alert poems and their eloquent, earthy voices try to find a way through and look for hope.

Kate Fox's distinctive new collection The Oscillations explores distance and isolation in the age of the pandemic, refracted through the lenses of neurodiversity and trauma in poems that are bold, often frank and funny but also multifarious, dazzling and open-hearted in their self-discoveries. Fox's poetry explores difference and community, silence and communication, danger and belonging - and a world that has been distinctly broken into a 'before' and 'after' by the pandemic. Throughout, a strong voice sings of what it means to be many things at once - autistic, creative, northern, a woman. Fox measures not only distances, social or otherwise, but how we breach them, and what the view might be from beyond them.

Cynthia Miller's debut poetry collection, Honorifics, is an astonishing, adventurous, and innovative exploration of family, Malaysian-Chinese cultural identity, and immigration. From jellyfish blooms to glitch art and distant stars, taking in Greek gods, space shuttles and wedding china along the way, Miller's mesmerizing approach is experimental, luscious, and expansive with longing - "e;My skin hunger could fill a galaxy"e;.

Boy in Various Poses, a debut collection of poems from Lewis Buxton, explores all the different types of boy you can be - tender, awful, thoughtful, vulnerable. Here, a maelstrom of mental health, male bodies, and sexuality is laid bare with wit and curiosity, and the complexity and multiplicity of gender itself is revealed. The boy in question is often shapeshifting, slippery, unreliable, close yet never quite in focus, moving too fast to pause and take a breath - yet Buxton studies these boys, their bodies and behaviours, with a disarming intimacy and precision. These poems are provocative, nuanced and often laugh-out-loud funny, shining with a naked, shameless brilliance.

Peter Kahn's debut collection Little Kings is an astonishing book of astute and deeply humane poetry, one which seeks to find in both teaching and learning a common ground, and between longing and belonging an equilibrium. Intuitive and wise, Kahn's poems remain compelling even when exploring those places where there is "e;no vocabulary for what might happen"e;.Little Kings encompasses stories of the Jewish diaspora and of American life, interweaving narratives of escape and refuge, of yearning and absence. Some of these poems ricochet with the magnitude of loss and violence, with lives interrupted, half-lived, or vanished. Anchoring these poems is their immense grace and lyricism, and Kahn's great skill in tenderly carrying memory and experience into our shared understanding.

Dastidar brings together some of contemporary poetry's most interesting practitioners weighing in on how to get going and why to keep at it. Addresses discussions about poetry's relationship with technology, truth, fabrication and performance.