Bøker utgitt av Broken Sleep Books

THRIFTWOOD is a mixture of personal memoir and cultural and literary criticism, which explores the ideas of the liminal, changing place and liminal, changing body as related.

This is a collection of thresholds along desire lines of otherhood; a prayer against the onslaught of capital's deracination of time itself; an incantation or spell cast out by turning the page into open space of streets populated by protest.

Cai Draper's SPRUNG is an energetic and invigorating joyride through a few months in lockdown, 'a tortoise wrapped in blank verse' where Draper boldly admits 'I want to take MDMA with my mum / & listen to Everything But the Girl '. As fresh as a change of shirt, as bright as a newly polished button, this is poetry completely committed to Frank O'Hara's command to 'go on its nerve'. SPRUNG is an admirably animated pamphlet from an exciting young poet.

How do you explain a mystery? This opaque mythology is something that pervades a lot of the poems here, inspired by the sideways, the askew, the fables of Aphex Twin. This isn't intended to be a discovery of who Aphex is, nor necessarily what he means to the contributors, rather an attempt to introduce the mythos and aura of Richard D. James. You won't get to know Aphex Twin better through these poems, but you will be intrigued, all over again. The most emotional of musicians, this Aphex Twin anthology provides a reminder that brain and heart can get pulled at by the unexpected as much as the nostalgic familiar.

The Broken Sleep Books Anthology showcases the best writing from the press in 2021, featuring extracts from every publication, covering poetry, non-fiction and short fiction. An essential purchase for anyone interested in new writing, or curious about the work of a vibrant, dynamic and award-winning independent press.Authors included:Razielle Aigen, Jeff Alessandrelli, Andre Bagoo, Liam Bates, Simon Barraclough, Zoë Brigley & Kristian Evans, Leia Butler, Rosa Campbell, Richard Capener, Cat Chong, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Briony Collins, Cathleen Allyn Conway, Hannah Copley, Traian T. Cöovei, trans. Adam J. Sorkin & Andreea Iulia Scridon, Lucy Rose Cunningham, Karen Dennison, Jaydn DeWald, Roisin Dunnett, Adrian B. Earle, SJ Fowler, Marlon Hacla, trans. Kristine Ong Muslim, Alyson Hallett & Penelope Shuttle, Emma Hammond, Rosanna Hildyard, Annie Katchinska, Luke Kennard, Aaron Kent, Gregory Leadbetter & Phil Thompson, Dominic Leonard, Scott Manley Hadley, Day Mattar, Alex Mazey, Afric McGlinchey, Stuart McPherson, Lotte Mitchell Reford, Jessica Mookherjee, Annie Muir, Richard O'Brien, Kat Payne Ware, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Martín Rangel, trans. Lawrence Schimel, Peter Scalpello, Morag Smith, David Spittle, Jon Stone, Becky Varley-Winter, U. G. Világos, Jack Warren, Alice Wickenden, Adrienne Wilkinson, David Wheatley

Aurora Town is the hotly anticipated first collection from Eric Gregory Award winner Annie Katchinska. It takes its title from an underground shopping street in Sapporo, a city in the north of Japan where Katchinska lived for two years. The poems are warped, diced up, loosely autobiographical texts built from her notebooks, illuminated by a ceaselessly inventive creative spirit. Aurora Town neatly captures the displacement and loneliness of living far from home, of turning to faith and then losing it, in a style which is completely her own.

sometimes I write poems and sometimes I write poems is a witty, acerbic selection from the Mexican poet Martín Rangel. Rangel keeps an ear pressed to the modern world and its various indignities, his bleak humour is perfectly captured by Schimel, an award winning translator, serving up irreverent, ironic moments like 'I translate to steal' and 'i decay like the year'. This bilingual edition is an amusing and inventive introduction to an essential young poet.

Waterbearer is remarkable and irrepressible like an asteroid tearing through the atmosphere, leaving exit wounds. Haunting and haunted, "like snow / for the beautiful dead"

Dominic Leonard's Dirt is a dark and windswept collection as mysterious as the mist hovering over a mountain. Leonard is a young man with an old soul "Carving his mouth open....To get out all the slush, all the necessary dirt."

hip-hop-o-crit is a close analysis of the low quality hip-hop songs Hadley wrote, recorded and created music videos for during the period of his life when he was frequently making unsuccessful attempts at suicide.

BLOOM is a collection of love stories presented as a mixtape: each of the stories is paired with a song, its soundtrack. The stories explore romantic comedy, eroticism, joy, grief, friendship, and romance through a lens mostly centred on female protagonists. In BLOOM Becky Varley-Winter showcases these stories as colourful blooms, filmic stories inspired by the likes of Andrea Arnold, Tove Jansson, and Elena Ferrante.

Bad Sermons is a loose, anarchic sequence from Forward Prize shortlisted poet Luke Kennard. Described by the author as 'a thriller in 23 parts' Bad Sermons' sunken narrative pushes the poet into strange and surreal places, free from formal constraints, with ample space to admire "the blue glare of the blue glare" and "tiny black marzipan teardrops". Bad Sermons is a curious and compelling work from an essential poet.

The Filipino version of There Are Angels Walking the Fields is Marlon Hacla's first book. It was published in 2010 as part of the Ubod New Authors Series by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in the Philippines. Here Hacla demonstrates his wide and varied poetics through the ekphrastic and the lyrical. Kristine Ong Muslim's translations present these angels as not just ' hovering or passing through' but as still bound to this Earth in the music of Hacla's poetry.

Night with a Pocketful of Stones is the Romanian poet Traian T. Coșovei's first book in English. Coșovei, who died in 2014, was a significant figure in contemporary Romanian poetry. These new translations by Adam J. Sorkin and Andreea Iulia Scridon show an eccentric and original mind rubbing up against the rules and rubric of his day, threshing new colours from the night, lifting a veil, to paraphrase Shelley, from the hidden beauty of the world.

In Monomaniac Liam Bates monopolises the prefix mono, each title beginning there, and though the titles are monomorphic the poems are anything but, always offering acute detail and humour. Bates writes with an eye open for the stranger aspects of modern life, confronting the self, adolescence and mental illness, never monotonous, his is a surrealism completely his own, rooted in the more than real. The central paradox here is: must we be defined by a defining moment? When a fifty-foot monolith appears in the garden, for example. Monomaniac showcases a special talent, writing in full technicolour.

Poetry Ambassadors presents the work of three exceptional new poets from the Solent region. It is the first publication from the Poetry Ambassadors mentoring scheme, a new programme supporting emerging literary talent co-founded by ArtfulScribe, Winchester Poetry Festival, and Will May from the University of Southampton. The work of these three poets takes in everything from Tolstoy to the Supremes, birth certificates to the underworld. Arresting, playful, and compelling, here are poems to challenge, provoke, and inspire.

Andre Bagoo's Writing through Siddartha follows the lead of Writing through Finnegan's Wake, John Cage's sound-poem explorations of Joyce. In Writing through Siddartha Bagoo refashions Herman Hesse's eponymous novel, ripping out lines and phrases using an Oulipo style algorithm, replacing the novel's core with ghost poems, whose parenthood is a heady mix of Bagoo, Hesse and mathematics. Writing through Siddartha is experimental poetry with a spiritual centre, proving that even if the heart of a text is removed, its soul remains.

Morag Smith's Spoil is a rich and earthy pamphlet harvested from the hills of Cornwall. Smith evokes the altered landscape and poverty of her home county, its tin mines and farms, singing of a singularity that mirrors her own singularity. Smith's poetry is informed by her Zen Buddhist practise, always attentive to the world around her, a poet 'swimming harder / trying to touch that impossible line'.

Covid / Corvid by Alyson Hallett & Penelope Shuttle is an uplifting pamphlet of sonnets written in response to the pandemic. Hallett & Shuttle both allude to the natural world, using its vibrancy to contrast to the boredom and rigmarole of lockdown life. Their use of form is playful, tocking and tucking sonnets into various shapes and sizes. Covid / Corvid is an accessible pamphlet full of profound and clear-eyed poetry, unafraid to say "fuck lockdown blues".

After suffering a crisis of creative confidence U. G. Világos went to live in a cottage in the Hungarian countryside, a house he inherited from his great uncle. In the basement he discovered a lost cache of VHS tapes, roughly 150 of them. Világos watched one tape a week and wrote this long poem by composing lines in his head while watching the tapes. He would then send a letter to himself at the end of the week, using the lines he had memorised. When his letter arrived he would put it to one side, adding the new lines at the end of each week. Világos repeated the cycle around 150 times and spending 68407.58 forint on stamps. Who knows what the postman thought of him! By the time the long poem was completed he felt much better and re-entered society a calmer and more philosophical man. "I just got older' he told his friends. The VHS tapes have never been recovered, if they even existed, this poem forms the only evidence we have of what was on those tapes.

Epipremnum aureum, devil's ivy, or (somewhat erroneously) pothos is not special. It is not symbolically useful, it is not rare, it is not hard to grow or care for. But in the aftermath of unexpected death, an impossible-to-kill houseplant might have something to say about keeping going.In Pothos, Campbell traces a polyvocal narrative of loss, absent presence, and queer homemaking through a poetics of attention and an engagement with texts, art, music, and the occasional hologram. Hovering somewhere between memoir, prose poetry and essay, Pothos examines the condition of being alternately infuriated, bored, and overwhelmed by grief - its mutability, its opacity, its refusals. It is a raw and nebulous exploration of mourning, care and domesticity, and the way in which the small background sentience of plants can (maybe) tell us something about our own growth.

Snackbox is a selection of Legitimate Snacks from Broken Sleep Books' seminal handmade imprint. Containing complete works by poets such as J. H. Prynne, Rishi Dastidar, Aaron Kent, Astra Papachristodoulou, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Imogen Cassels, Maria Sledmere, and more, this selection is an absolutely essential introduction to the world of Legitimate Snack.

Richard Capener's non-fiction pamphlet Dance! The Statue Has Fallen! Now His Head is Beneath Our Feet! is an anti-monument to Edward Colston, an exploration of the language used to talk about silence, and of rewriting personal and public narratives. Written as blocks of text examining the protests of the summer of 2020, Capener's book is a demonstration of the power of demonstration.

Simon Barraclough's Iarnród Éireann is a long poem configured around two triangular trips between London, Dublin, and Limerick. Barraclough's words trace a poetic path between the two lands, channelling destiny and predestination, always with a firm grip on the possibilities of passage.

Gregory Leadbetter and Phil Thomson's Balanuve is a sequence of poems about a mythical city, charting its decline to its resurrection. Leadbetter's poetry sings with the sweetly intoxicating music of Yeats and moves like a flag flapping in the wind around a ruined castle. Balanuve is a luxurious, mysterious, and voluptuous pamphlet complemented by the haunting photography of Phil Thomson. A collaboration of the highest order.

Briony Collins' Blame it on Me is an extraordinary collection of poems that focus on the death of her mother, when she was just five years old, and the ensuing family upheaval. Collins' poetry moves mellifluously, sensitive to the sound of words, infused with a delightful music. Collins believes, to quote her favourite poet Jim Morrison: "You should stand up for your right to feel your pain" - in Blame it on Me, that's exactly what Collins does.

repeating mouths by Adrienne Wilkinson is a pamphlet where desire and the body intertwine playfully. In Wilkinson's poetry both the lesbian erotic and the traumatic body are explored under a lens of curiosity, a hunger for new experience. Flirtatious rather than sensuous, Wilkinson is a poet with an appetite for the unexplored avenues of modern love and an original way of describing her experiences.

In Speculum, Hannah Copley considers the difficult history of the female body. Mirroring the title object used for centuries by gynaecologists, the poems uncover the hidden lives behind scientific progress. From the enslaved women exploited in the name of invention to the anonymous residents of mother and baby homes, Copley navigates personal, historical and forgotten legacies with equal exactitude and tenderness. Speculum is not only important as a feminist text, but its poetry is immaculate; a virtuosic first collection.