Poetry Bundle

Eat or We Both Starve by Victoria Kennefick

Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it

The men I keep under my bed by Alvy Carragher

A young woman wakes feeling raw and tender after a one-night stand. She leaves a strange man sleeping in her bed and goes running. Marked by the anxiety of living in a city that does not feel like home, she must face the memories and men kept under her bed.

Unsafe by Geraldine O’Kane

Geraldine O’Kane’s anticipated first collection is an impactful introduction to a voice that is compassionate, vivid and courageous. The poems weave between spaces, timelines and identities bearing witness, most often personal, to the encroachment of violence, loss and traumatic events on places and relationships — home, mother, lover, community — that we rely on as our source of safety, while exploring the impact of this on the fine balance between good and poor mental health and how that effects everyday forays into new situations. Whether micro or sustained, Geraldine’s work showcases the power of poetry and art to enter as-yet-uncertain places and breath. - Olive Broderick

How We Arrive in Winter by Liz Quarke

Quirke’s second collection is as sharp, intense and piercing as these slivers of glass, as well as being as true, clear and translucent—letting all the light pass through. It is an unflinching exploration and excavation of love, loss, parenthood and survival that I couldn’t put down. A profound, mature and moving collection from a poet of great integrity and power, How We Arrive In Winter is a career-defining achievement. - Victoria Kennefick

Some Integrity by Padraig Regan

Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021. The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.

The Last Weather Observer by Matthew Rice

Matthew Rice can take a single memory, carve it out of the infinitely re-configurable past, then light and shoot it so that it resembles heaven or hell. The pause at the red light, the school canteen, those we lose, those we keep, then lose; the connections which might arise from a song or a video game. Transporting stuff…” – Luke Kennard

Home is Neither Here Nor There by Nandi Jola

Home is Neither Here Nor There, the debut poetry collection by Nandi Jola, explores the themes of Home, migration and the fragile relationships between human, animals and morals. As a translingual, Nandi weaves between Xhosa and English.

In Her Jaws

Rosamund Taylor dares us across thresholds and invites us to glimpse the world as we’ve never seen it before. She boldly charts a journey of survival and transformation with poems on history reimagined, astronomy, sorcery, wild landscapes, talismanic creatures, and queer love. Taylor explores what it means to live in a female body that is not defined by lack, or want, or perpetual suffering, but is possessed by a real and defined sense of erotic autonomy. These poems burn from the inside out with possibility, and there is magic, mystery and reclamation at every turn. In Her Jaws is a landmark debut that extends and deepens the Irish tradition of writing the female perspective, while also breaking new ground.

Breeze Block by Jake Hawkey

“Breeze Block is a striking collection, asking its reader to engage with its electrifying juxtapositions of a multitude of realities. As much as Breeze Block is rooted in urban realities, taking us on many London roads and landscapes, evoking a sense of growing up in ‘a city where you cannot leave but you cannot stay’; it is a testimony on how we grapple with grief in these times bereft of hope.”

Last night, the mountain by Manuela Moser

Manuela Moser’s Last night, the mountain is a breathless game of contradictions: part dream, part discourse; yearning and sardonic; halting and cascading. Its terrain is an Escheresque tapestry of grey skies, crushed velvet mountains, rescue helicopters, sex tapes and sad swimming pools. Full of notes and examples that frame and reframe experience, this pamphlet hones in on the ways we assimilate phenomena, cumulatively asking of what, if anything, we can be sure.

The Speculations of Country People by Majella Kelly

In The Speculations of Country People, her hauntingly lyrical debut collection, Majella Kelly traces the journeys of women in our own day, from controlling relationships to sexual reawakening and new happiness. The speculations of the title are in part those of gossip, the chatter of small communities everywhere; but they are also those of a local, very Irish mythos, in which pagan and Christian - and truth and legend - blend and blur.

Let the Dead by Dylan Brennan

Beautiful and disturbing by turns, these reflections on Ireland and Mexico’s shared colonial past invoke topographies both real and imagined, where ‘things in the ground have a tendency to grow.’ Let the Dead reminds us of the power of art to shape our perception of history, and of the artist’s responsibility in a time of violence.

We Play Here by Dawn Watson

We Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a background of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspectives of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, the girls inhabit an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect. This is a lyrical and graceful evocation of working-class girlhood.

ISDAL by Susannah Dickey

The much-anticipated debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Susannah Dickey, on the subject of our cultural obsession with true crime. ISDAL is a timely interrogation of the true crime genre.

Gub by Scott McKendry

Demons, geese, The Laughing Cow, marching bands, LSD and pistols smuggled home from the USSR. You'll find all these in Scott McKendry's GUB. Rooted in the language of working-class Belfast, and slipping between eras and time zones, closing the gap between the real and the fantastical, the academic and the everyday, the parish and the polis, McKendry's exhilarating debut collection comes to terms with generational trauma, social decay and the rituals of a place with a fraught history and an uncertain future.

Pretend Cartoon Strength by Alicia Byrne Keane

Alicia Byrne Keane’s Pretend Cartoon Strength is a meditation on coastlines, migration, spatial theory, and desire among apocalyptic times. Meandering through confined communal living spaces and ethereal winter shores, these poems are both unnerving and poignant, and bear witness to the quiet terrors of being alive. Byrne Keane presents a restless and evolving consciousness fixated on the uncertainties of modern existence, while also referencing Dublin's housing woes, Nokia games, and 2016 makeup trends. This is a book that asks for a place in our homes and our bodies, and one that offers many.

Into the Night That Flies So Fast by Milena Williamson

Into the Night that Flies So Fast is the debut collection of poems from Belfast-based Milena Williamson, investigating the life and death of Bridget Cleary, in 1895 burned to death by her family on suspicion of being a fairy changeling. Fusing docupoetry and true crime, travelogue and drama, the book introduces a compelling cast of characters as the ill-fated Bridget, her family and members of her community all come onstage to give their versions of events.

Devotion by Mícheál McCann

At the heart of Mícheál McCann’s eagerly awaited first collection is ‘Keen for A— ’, a reimagining of Eileen O’Connell’s heartrending Lament for Art O’Leary. In Devotion the poet transports the original tragedy in time and place. Echoing the 18th-century Irish, it lives now in contemporary Belfast where a young man’s male lover is murdered. The sequence charts from premonition, in filmic scenes, the first encounter, the news, denial, rage (and an oath of vengeance) to the funeral and A—’s family’s chilling silence afterward. Other poems range from memories of childhood and relationships with parents to the author’s own imaginary child. There is a wry poem on animal homosexuality, others on sea swimming and the satisfactions of a shared meal, while an elegiac poem recreates the final joy of an RUC Constable in a gay bar before he’s shot by a member of the INLA.

dismantle by Anne Tannam

dismantle is a reimagining, a re-examining of what it means to be human. Here is the arc of a life, from first cell to last breath and beyond. Pulsating with emotional energy, these poems ask difficult questions with uncertain answers: what is it to be a child, a daughter, a woman, a man? And what's more, what is it to be? Imbued with the fierce energy of the crone, dismantle reclaims our connection to our true wild nature and the deep earth. This is a dismantling in the truest sense—of time and memory, of the ideas we inherit, of the self.

High Jump as Icarus Story by Gustav Parker Hibbett

In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lens of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports - the high jump. Formally inventive, these poems speak in a capacious voice which can be vulnerable, fragmented, and rapturous; exhorting us to imagine and reimagine our possible selves while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters.

Whales and Whales : Baleas e Baleas by Luisa Castro

The first English translation of one of the most pivotal collections in contemporary Galician poetry, Whales and Whales navigates the urgent, playful, shapeshifting journey of a young woman affirming her place in the world. Caught between a father toiling far away in the icy waters of the Atlantic, and a mother who works in a canning factory, Luisa Castro’s ‘daughter of the sea’ casts her voice from her home on the North Galician coast. Throwing the romantic clichés of love, labour, girlhood and rural living overboard, Castro’s subtle sleight-of-hand — fluidly sung into English by Keith Payne — brings the innocent, irreverent desires of her emboldened protagonist to life.

All the Good Things You Deserve by Elaine Feeney

How do we love, trust and create in the aftermath of trauma? How do we name and speak that love? In this powerful new collection from acclaimed poet and novelist Elaine Feeney, images and memory circle and recur, and the journey from pain towards a place of greater safety is far from linear. All the Good Things You Deserve juxtaposes violence, hurt and the tyranny of shame with love, beauty and the transformative possibilities of art.

They Wish They Had What We Have, Kid by Alanna Offield

“Alanna Offield reflects on her heritage while suspecting the future may not be able to contain her. She writes confidently with a simple yet exciting aesthetic which never betrays the complexity of the ‘basic’ and never denies the subject its integrity or its dreams, whether those dreams come to pass or not.” – Jake Hawkey, author of Breeze Block