Books published by Wild Pressed Books

The Coconut Girl is a collection of poems containing material that is from the Indian, female point of view with an insight into Punjabi culture. We also follow the author through the hallucinogenic state of the brain following cancer treatment, and back again into her experience of life in multi cultural Britain.The Coconut Girl features poetry of deep imagery, not least in some of the poems exploring the experience of the female body post-operatively, such as in My Womb Is A Park Of Carnage.

Was Donald Trump able to become President because God abandoned us? Are Jews white? Does Hell have better weather than Heaven? In Giveth and Taketh, Rota addresses all of these questions, discussing his own experience and political theology as a Jewish person in the Trump-era while also exploring broader issues of race, mental health and grief.

This collection is earthy and raw, as well as sensitive. The stark but warm environments evoked in an almost painterly manner by Russ Litten, tell of home, of un-belonging, of strife at sea - of a northern city's beating heart, in a mesmeric, stripped-down tone.

Dark Animals: Wild Pressed Young Poets’ Anthology features selected poems from fifteen young poets, all within the age-range of 17 to 33. They explore mental health and ways of being, by way of landscape, nature, history and their own lived experience. This collection offers a glimpse into how young writers think and interact with the world, what affects them and how they express it.The poets in Dark Animals are:Luke Cable, Keilan Colville, Luca Goaten, Andrew Gooch, Elen Griffiths, April Hill, Rebecca Kane, Arun Kapur, Sian Mitchell, Vaishnavi Parihar, Lauren Ranson, Nia Wyn Roberts, Grace Royal, Natasha Rubins, Hester Ullyart.Quotes from Dark Animals:    my snaking Humber, sighing out to sea.     Sunken, its mouth hung open    like a python processing prey    as the tide heaves along the riverbed.    —Luca Goaten, from Weapon-Take     Cut against the sea’s spray    her voice rose with purpose, eyes all ablaze.    “Votes for all. Vote down this government. Brothers     and Sisters of Solva, lend an ear to the women’s cause!”    —Elen Griffiths, from Solva, Sisters     I dream in red velvet,    in cream dusted scarlet,    in shades of warm chocolate,    in the softness of flapjack.    I think of rich tomato    the stretch of mozzarella.    —Grace Royal, from Red Velvet Tomorrow

Born to a Greenlandic mother and English-Explorer father, Malik has always been something of a misfit. Never having known his father and his mother dead from alcoholism, Malik's companion is a guiding spirit no-one else can see. The Seagull's Laughter is an immersive read, intertwined with the nature and magic of Greenlandic folk tales.

All Maya Galen wanted was a happy family, stifling her inner urges to explore the wider world for the sake of being there for her children. But parenting with her husband, Con, wasn't always easy. Their eldest son, Jamie, broke off all contact some years ago and now Joe, the apple of her eye, has done the same after an argument with his parents about his chosen way of life. Maya and Con are left rattling around 'The Cottages' - their enormous home in a Lincolnshire village, wondering what they did wrong.When they are called to Australia to identify the body of a young man, Maya is given her son's journal. After a sleepless night she makes the decision to follow in her youngest son's footsteps and become a vagabond, leaving her husband and daughters to return to the UK without her. From now on she needs to rely on her own physical and emotional strength.Following Joe's hand-drawn maps and journal entries, Maya travels from Australia to Denmark and beyond, meeting many young people like Joe along the way and trying to discover what it means to be alive. As months turn into years she can't bear to go back to the opression of her perfect home. Slowly, she comes to understand that what she is discovering is her most basic human self. Another family crisis, involving one of her twin daughters, eventually forces Maya to return home. As she treads carefully through the wreckage of her marriage, unfinished business is tied up and the family once again becomes complete, but in a different way from before.

A northern coastal city. A sinister, extra-dimensional intelligence is taking hold...Joe Hakim draws the reader into the heart of a disenfranchised community impacted by strange forces beyond its control. A group of friends: separated by time, choices, and circumstance are reunited by their shared encounters with an uncanny presence that looms over their lives. The seeds were sewn in their childhoods, now they must try and understand what is happening, before it is too late.Raw and uncompromising, The Community fuses social commentary with a dose of sci-fi horror, to cast a light on an existence spent in the Void.

Gudbjorg Thorisdottir is born into a happy Icelandic family in 1952, the second child of loving parents and followed by three further siblings. They live upstairs in Mörk, a painted corrugated iron house in Reykjavik that has been in the family for generations. Their home is dominated by Gudgjorg's grandfather, who lives in the ground-floor apartment with her aunt, uncle and cousins. Next door to Mörk is Little-Farm, the original old stone house with a coal cellar that Gudbjorg calls the Black Hole.Gudbjorg is frightened of the Black Hole because horrible things happen down there. She lives with a secret that she can't tell anybody, because Grandpa says that her family will lose their home if she does. Grandpa buys her presents and gives her caramels in a lovely white jug, so that makes him a good person, doesn't it?On the wall above Grandpa's bed is a black and white reproduction of a Madonna and Child that Gudbjorg likes to gaze upon, as it comforts her when Grandpa is making her feel bad.When she has grown into a teenager, and her family has moved away from Mörk, she realises that what has happened throughout her childhood is wrong. But still she takes the blame, and the shame of her experiences upon herself. After all, she seems to be the only girl in the family that this has happened to.Gudbjorg emerges into womanhood accompanied by the ghost of Grandpa's abuse. Every time she wants to say anything, the ghost tightens its hand over her mouth and she remains dumb. It's not until she takes a new job as Principle of a Reykjavik primary school that she accepts she needs to get help.It's Gudbjorg's daughter, Thora Karitas Arnadottir, who has taken her mother's true story and brought it out into the light. Weaving together fact, fiction and poetic prose, her resulting testament bears all the magic of a fairy tale. A fairy tale incorporating endurance and survival, violence and tenderness and the heroism of a character who refuses to be crushed by the monster at the bottom of the Black Hole.Despite the darkness at the heart of Gudbjorg's story, Thora Karitas has created a compelling narrative nonfiction account of life in Iceland from the time of her great-great-grandparents, right into the present. A story full of rural charm and ancestral memories, often encapsulated in the familial objects Gudbjorg has collected around her - each opening a window into the past and placing us in a particular moment - bringing back into sharp focus members of her family and ways of life that have long passed.

In September 2016, Lauren Wilson is travelling by ferry to the Outer Hebrides, about to begin a new job as a children's social worker. She's also struggling to come to terms with the recent drowning of a Sheena, a teenage girl she had deeply cared for.Engrossed in her book, when somebody sits opposite her at a table on the ferry, Lauren refuses to look up, annoyed at having her privacy disturbed. But a hand is pushing a mug of tea across the table, and a livid scar on the back of the hand releases a flood of memories.Lauren studies the hand on the table in front of her, the line of the scar drawing a map of the past in her mind. She was the one who created the scar, not long before her relationship with the love of her life ended almost thirty years ago. Lauren hasn't seen Neil since she walked out of their shared life, unable to forgive either herself or him for a decision he strongly pressured her to make.She's not ready to meet his eyes, not yet. From his scar to his wrist bone, following his arm upwards and across his shoulder to his collarbone, his chin and the lower part of his face; Lauren remembers incidents from their past and tries to work out what caused their life to go so horribly off-track.When she finally meets his eyes and they speak to each other for the first time, Lauren believes she has set her life on a new course. But her gain will result in losses for others. Is this really what she wants to happen?Some people believe in the existence of a parallel universe. Does Lauren have a retrospective choice about the outcome of her terrible recent accident, or is it the bearer of that much older scar who has the power to decide what happens to her life now? The gripping story of Sea Babies is inspired by the vast and raw landscapes of the Outer Hebrides, by the fraught journeys of refugees from one home to the hope of another across the sea, and also by artist Marina Abromovic's 2010 MoMA performance: The Artist is Present, in which she spent sixty seconds staring into the eyes of her former lover.Set mainly in the Outer Hebrides and Edinburgh from the 1980s to the present, Sea Babies is a potent emotional, psychological drama with a poignant twist in the tale. Sea Babies explores the more difficult aspects of relationships, the idea of choices and responsibility, and the refugee in all of us.

Every poem in GHOSTS touches on the theme in some way, whether it be overtly as in the title poem, or more succinctly, as in Dragonfly - in which the poet explores ephemeral elements of his perception of his mother.Nick Conroy's words touch the heart of his subject matter, and the reader's emotions at the same time, involving family, identity - and potential or actual loss.This is a strong, cohesive collection of poems, containing a hard grit which meets a fluid, powerful movement of language to create waves of recognition and understanding. The topics and themes are covered honestly, and with refreshing vulnerability in the language used. In each poem there is something of a journey - involving lostness, a seeking and in the end an acceptance of the events described.Nick Conroy's paged poetry is like the written musical score of his live performance, which has to be seen to be fully appreciated.Nick is currently studying for a Master's in English at the University of Hull. Poetry has always been at the centre of his passion as a writer, and since childhood he's enjoyed spoken word.He moved to Hull in 2014, with an understanding that the city is still revered for its poets. He senses something haunting and intoxicating about Hull, and the community of writing that it holds in high regard.