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If Roy Fisher famously said 'Birmingham's what I think with', Cliff Yates would probably say 'Birmingham's who I eat with'. These lucid and nimble poems effortlessly thread in and out of the quotidian, always alert to the transformative power of the everyday seen clearly. History is here too, but faced lightly, alongside tributes to key influences like Fisher, O'Hara, Raworth, Sheppard. Yates's art is a fully embodied one (look out for the hilarious Tai Chi Sprout Stalk Form!) which moves - exuding a wry, wise vitality entirely his own.- Scott Thurston

Kianush collected and published his poems for children and young adults in eight books, all of which won different awards. He became known as the founder of children's poetry in Iran. But he does not care for this title which he believes to be quite contrary to his real achievement as the messenger of the truth hidden in the heart of perceptible realities which, in occasional blessed moments, reveals itself to him on the horizon of artistic beauty. He says that in Iran, a country where the people, especially the intelligentsia, have since the late nineteenth century been possessed by the politics of freedom and social change, the popularity of a poet depends on his being the artistic mouthpiece and interpreter of the political aspirations of the populace. On the other hand a poet like himself, one of the few poets who have not sacrificed the universal principles of the art of poetry for the pleasure of temporal popularity, is considered difficult, obscure, elitist, philosophical, idealist, and so forth.Poetry for Mahmud Kianush is the language of the childhood of historical man. He believes that the first human beings began to understand themselves, the world around them and the mysteries of the universe by their poetical interpretations of everything they saw and felt, and this is what real poets have always done and will always do. He agrees with the ancient idea that "man is a political animal," but he adds that man must remain faithful to his primordial nature and first be a poet. 

"What a drag it is getting old" was one of the few things that Belmont Thom and his wife Tuppence agreed on. With a nod to Sophocles and to Homer and with a great big genuflecting thanks-for-the-idea to the late Peter Tinniswood (who appears in the piece) Stroll On tells this couple's story. The narrative is a hybrid of two kinds: 'poem-prose' (as opposed to a prose poem) and magic-realism. 'By turns funny, brilliant, sharp, savage, and surprising, this novella in poem-prose is compulsively readable and intellectually sustaining, as well as being a terrific feat of imagination and linguistic legerdemain. In Stroll On James Russell has invented the perfect form for his good-humouredly caustic outlook on things. All human life is there. Even Alma Cogan'. - Ian Patterson'I devoured Stroll On with relish (and a side order of quadrupley-fried sweet potatoes). It's very clever and very funny (Neither/Do orgasms last long but they remain popular). Everyone who's worth it should read it'. - Andy Mayer'All this and his eye for telling details make James Russell a true story teller and a true poet'. - Lee Harwood

An ethnographic bricolage of fragmentary narratives and lost voices from a future tribal culture of survivors following the Second Great Flood, Remnants provides glimpses into the myths, rituals, songs, customs, lifestyles, dream visions and the intertwining personal stories of a post-apocalyptic community existing in the ruined shadows of our own civilisation. Jane Burn and Bob Beagrie weave an unsettling tapestry of possible subjectivities navigating the margins between endurance and extinction in the not too distant future. The collection considers what has been and might yet be. What scraps we remember, what has formed and shaped the poets' memories and minds. Through recalling forgotten dialects and language, Bob and Jane dip in and out of history, religion and ancient myths and rebuild themselves again.

These collaborative sequences were written during the winter months 2015-18. The poets' journeys took them from Hove via Paris to Istanbul, on to Baghdad then across the Steppes and along the Silk Road. They nearly reached the North Pole before landing on the Moon. Returning to England they recorded its savage devastation. Our bedraggled pair were rescued only by discovering in their battered rucksacks a formal austerity as regular and elliptical as the world itself, selflessly announced to the innocent reader with each desperate but conclusive breath.Previous Halsey/Corcoran collaborations include Your Thinking Tracts or Nations (West House 2001) and A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens (Constitutional Information 2015).

Confessions of a Cyclist is utter inspiration from the film Night Mail, where the opening scene is John Grierson reading W. H. Auden's ground-breaking poem. It is experimental journey-poetics, and may also have family resemblance to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and even Derek Jarman's film Blue. A cyclist lends its hands AND FEET to a great deal of intimacy but no connection, pedaling, which in turn, animates. A cyclist is passive, romancing the world through seducing scenes, without the commitment. Getting lost in time, but within the time-frame given for the daily commuter's route. Mine: 40 minutes one way, and 40 minutes back. A cycle is a repetition of a cycle. The scene never wholly changes but changes constantly. Confessions of a Cyclist takes a journalistic approach through poetics, over-hyping observations, dubbing people's conversations, reporting on regular people seen, for instance, the man in the turban who feeds the pigeons every Saturday morning. In places, the work is biographical, in others, memoir, in others, freak-outs, and in some you can see repeated words become chants when cycling at certain speeds: NOW-AND-A-GAIN-MY-HEN-IT'S-A-NEW-GEN-ER-A-TION.

is poetry a fast business? what happens after ghezi park? how many times will bakunin celebrate his 200th birthday? will our zombi find or work out its ideal recipe for human brains? will any of the letters be answered? what is that face really up to? why? & who set it up to it? how do you eat breakfast? you do eat breakfast, right? & that constant question - will the government ever resign?

Mötley Crüe's fourth studio album, Girls, Girls, Girls, was released on my tenth birthday in 1987. It reached number 2 in the US Billboard 200 Chart that year and sold over 4 million copies in the US, and 60,000 in the UK. In it, the band, notorious by that time for their drink-and-drug-fuelled rock n'roll lifestyle, included songs about their drug and stripper-loving lifestyle.This work seeks to restructure the Girls, Girls, Girls album, not to reveal its inherent misogyny - that should be apparent by listening to the lyrics - but to make something of them.As a girl child who would grow up to be a Girl in the Mötley Crüe sense of the word, I received their messaging about what a girl was - a passive sexual object to be desired and abused - along with a raft of variously textured misogyny in TV advertising, film, other music, magazines, print media and the attitudes and assumptions of the adults around me. I took in the Girls, Girls, Girls album as a model of what being a Girl was, in my little town in the west country, far away from the Sunset Strip.I was wrong to do so, of course, but what did I know? I loved metal bands, and thought they were lewd and wild and marvellous. But despite its title, Girls, Girls, Girls was never meant for me: the songs on it, and on most albums in the genre produced and made by men, were made for a male, heterosexual audience. Perhaps no-one - the producers, the marketers, the band themselves - ever thought about their teenage girl fans, unless it was to decide which ones in the crowd they wanted to sleep with at a concert. It was, therefore, a very good thing that the Riot Grrrl movement came along in the 90s, to liberate us girls from male, white, corporate oppression (Sonic Youth, Kool Thing, 1990).Mötley Crüe were by no means alone in perpetuating misogynist attitudes towards women in the 80s and 90s, and on an individual level, it could be said that they were mostly concerned with getting high and having as much sex as humanly possible - and were not actively pursuing personal misogynist agendas (though, some responsibility does of course have to rest on their shoulders).More, they were a hugely successful band making ideological content encouraged by the patriarchal structures that contracted them to do so - the commercial music industry, which, like all capitalist, commercial cultural production industries, aims to uphold and regulate the social norms in which it operates, thereby ensuring continued investment in its business.Girls, Girls, Girls absolutely typifies the apotheosis of misogyny in a variety of ways. First, it looks at women as objects rather than converses with them in a meaningful way. Second, it considers women only as lovers for heterosexual men. Third, it depicts unrealistic, patriarchally-approved female bodies. Fourth, it alludes to sex with underage girls, which is rape. Fifth, in songs like You're All I Need, desire for women is tied up closely with violence towards them, something I explore against the current narrative of the 'incel' movement.To make the poems in this collection I have used a few different approaches, namely cutup with other sources to provide commentary and comment on the original song lyrics, breaking down the songs to component words and rewriting them, and finding recurrent themes, such as that of geographical locations, and using those words as repeating sets to re-render the original meaning. I have also reflected on lyrics as containing overused clichés, and looked at other clichéd and genred language.