Books published by Shearsman Books

With a fragmented yet rich lyricism, Shifting Registers crosses borders between lost and rediscovered identity. The voices in the poems may be tentative and vulnerable, regretful and haunting, or playful and provocative, as they relive and re-imagine half-remembered journeys and encounters.

Partly in Riga and other poems is a book in five sections, covering themes of birth (the arrival of a new son), travel in Latvia, in Greece and in Wales, contemporary politics, and the endless of vagaries and mysteries of people. "I like people, though they disturb me sometimes." (Ian Davidson)

The Name of This Intersection is Frost is the second full-length collection by Maryrose Larkin, and consists of two long sequences, Inverse, and Late Winter 30.

A year after her young son's diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes, Patricia Debney spent six weeks writing in a beach hut on the North Kent coast. From the often bleak, always shifting winds and seas, prose poems of loss and love emerged.

Readers will search these pages in vain for coverage of Tbilisi or Ararat, or praise for Georgian wine or Armenian brandy ... although Khachaturian gets an adjective of his own in (all too typically) a piece addressing the post-war architecture of Plymouth.

Susan Connolly is a true original. These poems reach back to Kells, to Durrow, to Lindisfarne, to the holy books of those places, for the ground of their being. On the page, they negotiate visual spaces that can comfortably fit and ritualize the neolithic, contemporary hostage crises and the whammy pedal of a guitar.

Taking its departure from both the Nazi massacre at Kragujevac in former Yugoslavia in 1941, and a moment at the memorial museum in 1985, when a blue butterfly descended onto the author's writing hand, this profound book crafts living poetry out of suffering and tragedy.

In this new collection by David Grubb collisions, wonders, ballyhoo and sudden light signal the way we walk a tightrope between the real and the imagined, the sensate and shadow play.

Gender City is in our skins, in the law, in our names (like Trudi and Terra), in places like the Barbie Doll Museum, in events like falling on the sidewalk, being in prison in a city with buildings made of skin, rupturing murder in language (pure meaning's urge).

Hoffman's narrative explores in considerable depth Oppen's thinking about his own work, his reasonings and judgments on himself and his contemporaries in life, politics and poetry. Throughout, Hoffman supplies a rich contextual background to the Oppens' story, one in which public and private life continually intersect.

erica lewis's murmur in the inventory diagrams "a dislocated cloud." It immerses the reader in residues, resonances, and echoes. A roving, dispersed consciousness haunts relational spaces. The pronouns infuse and inhabit one another: "i'm counting on your lips." A sound-map of changing bodies, it holds true in your mouth. - Eric Baus

This volume brings together the majority of Colin Simms' poems that record his visits to Afghanistan, as a naturalist, during the 1980s. Approximately half of the poems previously appeared in two editions of a volume called In Afghanistan, from Writers Forum (1995 and 2001).

Published to coincide with the poet's eightieth birthday, An Unofficial Roy Fisher is a showcase for the work of this extraordinary contemporary British poet. It includes uncollected work by Roy Fisher, a poet's poets' anthology of works by Fisher's extensive international following, and a group of informal essays on Fisher's work.

This volume, featuring essays by a number of poets and critics, is the first survey of Peter Hughes' poetry, and is published with his Selected Poems. The book features contributions from Andrew Bailey, Riccardo Duranti, John Hall, Simon Howard, David Kennedy, Simon Marsh, Ian McMillan, Peter Riley, Derek Slade, John Welch and Nigel Wheale.

First issued in the USA by Tilt Press, this is the 2nd edition of Shira Dentz's debut chapbook, and makes a fascinating contrast to her first full-length collection, black seeds on a white dish (2010), also available from Shearsman.

"For my money, the best poet of my generation... as indifferent to academic fashions as he is to those of the poetry market."(Clive Wilmer) "Perhaps the most challenging-and one of the most rewarding-poets of his generation." (Robert Archambeau)

Doctor Placebo finds himself at the end of the western intellectual tradition, and on certain mornings feels almost as old. He broods about his patients; he broods about his poems. Sometimes the two intermingle and he can't remember whether he is a doctor moonlighting as a poet, or a poet moonlighting as a doctor.

The poets featured in this volume are Antonio Gamoneda, Olvido Garcia Valdes, Miguel Casado, Marcos Canteli, Sandra Santana, Benito del Pliego, Julia Piera, Ana Gorria, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Esther Ramon.

Ficticia was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of 'Letters to Robinson', and a 'Sky Cycle'. While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole.

This book takes up the experiment of connecting Buddhist practices to an American landscape. In a 2008 interview Perez states, "If Buddhism is to have a role in Cuban life it must be in harmony with the basic ethical and natural values of this land; it must give, so to say, its blood and marrow to the soil."

The work in Beyond the Fire does not conform to any one habitation, nor aesthetic persuasion, nor name. On the contrary, just about every poem invents its own territory and its own terms. Some poems are straightforward narratives, while others repeat spells and castings. Many are figural; some are classical; some even aspire to anonymity.

Angwin's interest, broadly, is in a Zen take on psychogeography, and Bardo is a book of transitions-inner, outer and usually both; a series of journey meditations recorded in prose poems and poetry.

There are those inhabitants of islands who say they "'fraid sea", meaning they have an abiding respect for the restless ocean and for whatever lies unseen past the horizon. 'Sea have no back door' is the phrase they use to indicate the idea of no return, of being swallowed up in the vastness of a world outside the shore that is a natural boundary.

"What a poem must do to justify its existence is to surprise us with its necessary inevitability, which is what these poems do piece by piece, one by one, and together." -Geof Huth

A Neon Tryst is a collection of ekphrastic poems featuring the films L'Eclisse (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni); Seconds (dir. John Frankenheimer); and Wild Strawberries (dir. Ingmar Bergman). Though divided in three separate sections by film, the collection stands as one, cohesive piece.

This poetry unhinges the sensible cultural body - any given order of relations among meanings and encounters - and activates other oscillations of the sensible, which might chime with acts of love and political subjects resuturing what are given to be facts.

A gay, light-hearted type, Ken Bolton cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary landscape, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, lipstick-smudged, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar D-type, El Cid.

Rupert Loydell, along with many others, has long been fascinated by the combination of sea, light, people and painting that constitute St Ives. This anthology deals with these themes, along with tourism & trade, myth and the nature of creativity itself.

Features poems that were written in Cuba in the fiftieth year of the revolution; in India working with dying destitutes and recovering from tuberculosis; and travelling up and down the spine of the Americas and into the heart of Europe on the trail of soldiers, artists and monks.

An anthology of women's poetry from the UK, featuring work by 24 poets who either live and work in the UK or are of British origin. With representation from writers born in the 1930s all the way to writers born in the 1980s, it gives an overview of work that is too frequently consigned by critics to the margins.