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الاستماع والقراءة

Z.R. Ghani

From lips and warmed cheeks to silk and falling leaves, the subjects of Z.R. Ghani's poems radiate with redness. Sometimes a cloak, often a shining symbol, Ghani's reds are sacred and dazzling: pomegranates ripening to jewels and perfectly-placed bindis shining like suns.
But something darker lurks beneath the ruby depths. A city is held hostage by a heatwave, a flame is lit in a dark room, a ballerina twists inside a jewellery box.
As though developing photographs, Ghani shines a deep light over her poems as a tool to slowly make the unseen visible, the unsaid audible. This is a debut book rich with desire, shame, grief, faith, love, and at the forefront of it all: the colour red.

The Emma Press

The Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets

In the Name of Red: Poems

Laurie Bolger

Makeover is a book dripping with nostalgia, cigarette ash and sour cream dip. Lit by too-close TV screens and too-bright calorie counters, Bolger's poems explore growing up, differing bodies and societal expectations.
Writing in praise of mums, nans and sisterhood, this is a work bursting with strength, anger, love and, ultimately, hope. In a celebration of girls shaped by swimming baths and Working Men's Clubs, friendship and family, Makeover contends with what we inherit and what we ought to pass on.

Makeover: Poems

Charlotte Wetton

Through poems about fossilised fruit seeds and the sofa where Emily Brontë died, Wetton questions how we curate the lives of those living and dead in a pamphlet about looking, processing, and memorialising. Whether considering preserved wedding-cakes, a non-existent art exhibition or a human scream, these poems speak to the impossibility of containment and question our ability to map and categorise.
This is a pamphlet of poems about the stories that we tell ourselves, the memories that we construct, and the ways that we value and devalue people, animals and objects alike.

Accessioning

Joanna Ingham

Tender, loving and visceral, Ovarium is a pamphlet of poems about a giant ovarian cyst. The poet charts her journey with the cyst, from diagnosis to surgery to recovery, via a landscape of scanner rooms and hospital wards.

The poems explore the impact of illness, and the body as a site of disgust and shame but also healing and endurance. Ingham's poems are forensic as she looks at the disorientating and sometimes patriarchal language of anatomy and medicine, and the way illness can change the relationship we have with our own bodies.
I tried to think of you as fruit, growing
against the sun-warm wall of my gut.
Melon-headed, you nudged the leafy organs,
dug out a place for yourself in the plot.
I never guessed. I was only bloody earth
to you, a coldframe full of light.

- from 'Cyst'

Ovarium: Poems

Pamela Crowe

Acerbic, precise and very funny, Pamela Crowe's poems explore home life and relationships in a delightfully forthright voice. Secret frustrations and anxieties are aired and private fantasies brought into the light, as odes blur into diatribes and psychodramas become love poems.

Woven throughout The Bell Tower is a love of Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Wendy Cope and – above all – Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones. These are fierce, acutely observed poems that give weight to domestic minutiae and put words to helpless howls into the abyss.
You, the cloud.

Oh look! there you are,

blobbing along as if you're best friends with rain

and thunder is your dad. Fuck off.

- excerpt from 'Cloudcunt'

The Bell Tower: Poems

Jack Houston

Playful, formal, satirical and tender, the poems in The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising are wildly wide-ranging. Jack Houston whisks the reader through meditations on family life, the teachings of Lucretius, the sexual potential of Captain Barnacles, and dreams of a socialist utopia, managing to be both deeply weird and touching.
In his debut pamphlet, Houston draws out and scrutinises the mundanities of life, showing how they can form part of something much bigger. His poems aim to awaken the capacity for revolution within us all, even if it only gets us as far as the roundabout in the local playpark.
"In the year 2121, we're all now too aware that a sofa is simply a bench

constructed from the hewn corpse

of a tree, covered in a mesh made from the amniotic fibres

of oppressedly mono-cropped cotton plants

& filled with the plumage

from many a murdered full-grown duck [...]"

- from 'Utopia'

The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising

Anne Bailey

You never know how things really are in other people's families, in other people's homes. There's the public face and the private truths – the personal griefs and tragedies, whether festering or resting in peace. In her wry, engagingly strange poems, Anne Bailey takes the door off the latch and lets us inside.
She shows us loss and disappointment, as well as hardness and resilience, particularly through the eyes of a daughter, wife and mother. We see the domestic sphere in such close-up detail that it becomes bizarre, an uncanny dimension that nonetheless rings horribly, weirdly true.
"So you've put a picture on the lovely blank wall

that used to go pink in the sun

and feel like an ice cream.

A wall on which I used to rest my eyes

in pleasant contemplation."

- from 'Domestic'

What The House Taught Us: Poems

Rehema Njambi

Rehema Njambi unpacks identity, faith, womanhood and – above all – agency, in poems partly inspired by conversations with the Black, mostly African, women around her.

Imbued with quiet resistance to patriarchal societies, Njambi's debut collection is an ode to the women who have raised her, and their strength and their ability to hold, sustain, and be rooted in their faith. The poems resound with their idea of home, and belonging they wish to pass on to their daughters.
GHOSTS IN THIS HOUSE
There were footsteps in the dark all night,

almost every night, and we were scared —

but we didn't say a thing.
She called us to prayer in the morning, every morning.

With our small hands and smaller faith
we asked the Lord for protection —

but He didn't say a thing.

This House: Poems

Rachael Matthews

Rachael Matthews is a working-class poet who paints poetic miniatures of domestic and psychological interiors. Her debut pamphlet, do not be lulled by the dainty starlike blossom, is a playful, dark meditation on the queer body as site of pleasure, connection, fertility, loss and trauma.
Matthews finished writing these poems during lockdown, while she was heavily pregnant with her daughter. It was an unwitnessed pregnancy, experienced in isolation from friends and family, and invisible to the psychotherapy patients she was treating virtually when New York City became the global epicentre of the pandemic. Resilience and hope are woven into its DNA.

do not be lulled by the dainty starlike blossom: Poems

Simone Atangana Bekono

Simone Atangana Bekono's poems are vivid and arresting, with the feeling of letters or diary entries. In nine breath-taking streams of consciousness, the poet explore race, gender and sexuality, addressing the social stigmatization of race and gender and invoking empathy and human connection in a voice that is both confident and innovative.