MATERIALS

Gabrielle Daniels - Something Else Again: Poetry and Prose, 1975-2019

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GABRIELLE DANIELS – SOMETHING ELSE AGAIN: POETRY AND PROSE, 1975-2019
Published November 2020
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Associated with the New Narrative movement and published in the ground-breaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back, Gabrielle Daniels’ work spans essays, fiction, poetry and novels. This book, Daniels’ first full-length collection, collects poems and prose from the 1970s to the present, including the complete text of Daniels’ now-impossibly rare chapbook A Movement in Eleven Days, a retrospective essay on New Narrative, and excerpts from her in-progress novel Sugar Wars.

From poems inspired by films, music, revolutionary figures, and recent political disasters, to prose pieces on neglected African-American women writers, and urban and wilderness environments, Daniels’ subject matter and media are vast. As Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian write in the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much:

“Daniels’ talents spin in every conceivable direction. Her writing continues to investigate and illumine corners of the world often neglected by the white capitalistic structures of patriarchy that shapes our lives from birth to death. Daniels’ work reveals a history, a legacy, a plan of action for the future. These are stories and poems with the punch of a novel in miniature.”

Something Else Again reveals a major voice in American literature.

GABRIELLE DANIELS was born in New Orleans in 1954 and moved to California at the age of seven. Her grandmother, the late Rev. Ruth Matthews Taylor, was a Spiritualist Minister. Daniels’ essays, stories and poems have appeared in the print and online magazines Big Scream, Equinox: Writing for a New Culture, Kenyon Review, Love You Madly, Mango, Open Space, Poets Reading the News, Rigorous, San Jose Studies, Silver Birch Press, Sinister Wisdom, and Soup, and the anthologies This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cheríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Sister Fire: Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry, edited by Charlotte Watson Sherman, Another Wilderness: New Outdoor Writing by Women, edited by Susan Fox Rogers, and Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997, edited by Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian. Her reviews have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, American Book Review, Off Our Backs and Women’s Book Review.

A5, perfect-bound, 233pp.

As featured on Dennis Cooper’s blog.

Tongo Eisen-Martin - Waiting Behind Tornados For Food

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TONGO EISEN-MARTIN – WAITING BEHIND TORNADOS FOR FOOD
Published November 2020
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“I am trying to figure out the ruling class. How they raise their replacements…”

In this collection of poems and of five recent essays, his first to be published in the UK, Tongo Eisen-Martin reflects on poetry’s role in the tornado-like devastation of current political conjunctures: white supremacist street lynchings, the naked abuse of state power, the classed and racialised effects of a global pandemic. Eisen-Martin’s work crackles, investigates, worries, riffs, insists, explodes, presenting an empire in slow eclipse through the lenses of double consciousness, poems, poisons, prisons, “dry-Leninism”. This work is animated by the spark of individual phrases, turns of phrase, refrains: common sense and senses from the commons. Aphorisms, maxims, dispatches from “the hell / of where we are” (Joseph Jarman), Eisen Martin’s words are imbued with music which strains the edge of music and strains the edge of the poem; a chorus of voices filtered, refracted and remixed through the completely singular voice of its poet. Their architecture ranges across the page like that of the city—San Francisco—and its correlates whose interstices they rigorously trace, attentive to the spaces of daily life—tower blocks, vacant lots, streets, porches, bars, rooms, roads, cars—and the realities of power that cluster in and around them.

With the nation collapsing around the corner, these texts inhabit “psychology of the mask”; “half distracted (half suicidal)”, they rest and rove by the “hard residing” of the porch, by the “kitchen table that likes to talk”, by “working class windows”, by walls with eyes and ears; then venture out in search of “socialist breakthroughs”, of revolution’s “amazing grace”. In this “cotton gothic society”, a “strange fruit theatre” where capitalism walks on water and people play dead “so they could be part of the miracle”, it can be hard to tell if you’re “alive” or “differently alive”. But Eisen-Martin knows that sometimes, it’s ghosts who write poems, and that there’s a criminality buried in art: “like introducing Gabriel Prosser to Thelonious Monk”. “World history has a proletariat when the lights come back on”.

TONGO EISEN-MARTIN is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015) and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017). He is an educator and organizer whose work centres on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights, and includes a curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black People, “We Charge Genocide Again!”, which has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout America. He lives in San Francisco.

A5, perfect-bound, 80pp.

Review by Jennifer Soong here.

John DeWitt - 20 20 Pretzels

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JOHN DEWITT – 20 20 PRETZELS
Published November 2020
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Can I have a water?
And and or or
A bowl of oceanic feelings bungled and split?

Perhaps the first set of poems to ever emerge from the twinned influences of Etel Adnan and DJ Screw, John DeWitt’s set of entwined pretzel-stanzas presents 2020 vision for 2020. Versed in psychoanalytic word-scapes, DeWitt’s poems slither, swim, crawl, sputter and stutter with wit, alarm, concision and “puns out of your league”. Here are oceanic feelings, sea creatures, cruel depths, drums, dreams, “the wordical odor of thing at odds with my anecdotes”, variables, being born into speech, being lost for words, skullduggery, apologies, work, failure, assholes in cars, the letter o, dogs, swine, “the afterlife strike”, a Yamaha in the basement, summer, a dice rolling by itself, grammar, “method kink”, the river of poetry, the house of language, a large dose of pain, digging into the wound, 5AM fries, screen memories, origins, lemons, watermelons, ten penny nails, the ghost of dead people, wrinkle theory, puns, potatoes. “You don’t know what you is / and you don’t know what you ain’t either.”

JOHN DEWITT was born in Mexico City, later moved to Nashville, and now lives in Paris. He is the author of Ends (Tipped Press, 2011), Visceral Apocrypha (Shit Valley, 2013) and The Neckless Spokesperson of the Garden of Earthly Delights (Face Press, 2019), and (as ‘Bill Ding’), co-wrote Buildings with Rosa van Hesnbergen (Tipped Press, 2012).

A5, 52 pp, saddle-stitch.

David Grundy - Local Apocalypse

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DAVID GRUNDY-LOCAL APOCALYPSE
Published November 2020
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Four poems with a coda written in London between November 2019 and November 2020.

There’s a bird in the hand
A bird in the eye
Across the table
Across the afternoon
Clouds Clouds Clouds
Across the sky
May silence help you you

DAVID GRUNDY edits MATERIALS and is the author of Relief Efforts (Barque Press, 2018), To the Reader (Shit Valley, 2016), The Problem, The Questions, The Poem (Tipped Press, 2015) and Whatever You Think the Good Home (Punch Press, 2014).

A5, 52pp, saddle-stitch.

Laurel Uziell - T

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LAUREL UZIELL – T

March 2020

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T is a long poem in multiple parts and its author's second book. “The two genders are YES and NO, so you stutter or else shut up forever”. From the Afterword:

Between 2017-2018 I was involved in a trial with a group of TERFs after a scuffle emerged during a counter protest against a ‘debate’ about sex-based rights in light of proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act which would have made trans people’s lives marginally easier. Luckily I wasn’t actually in the dock, but I appeared to give evidence, and for everyone involved it was a humiliating ordeal as we were doxxed, harrassed online and in real life, while the relentless media campaign which ensued took a toll on the entire trans community. The caricaturesque reduction of a complex interrelation of political positions, epistemologies, traumas and personal grievances into two ‘sides’ ultimately worked to further the persecution of trans people, but nevertheless highlighted a social logic on whose terms the so called debate was forced to appear: sex was pitted against gender (or more revealingly ‘gender identity’), objective biology against subjective ‘self-identification’, nature against culture, or perhaps, first nature against second nature.

What does a poet say (what does anyone say), when placed on the stand, how answer the binary logics forced like a cage in the legally-grounded violence which splittingly interrogates solidarity, the splitting invocation of law? In answer, T spreads across the page as if desperately finding a form for speech acts forced into a garrotted tick-box, a witness stand, video evidence, Nature’s originary disguise as history or vice versa, wrapped inside ‘common sense’ as a pronominal shroud, in the policing of body, speech, and every fungible fibre of being. The author writes: “I want the whole text to be a kind of horrific inorganic body with awkward parts, both to replay at the level of form some of the critiques of organicist thinking with reference to nature that the poem tries to articulate, and also, more glibly, to be somewhat like a trans body, awkwardly fitting together with some parts undercutting others”. An extended enquiry into Materialism and its material (fleshed) stakes, driven through the heart and to the heart of things, T sees lyric poem shudder to line-broken essay to fragment of play to citational drop; in tight compression sprawling, a poem whose argument is necessary and necessarily incomplete, poetry can do thinking, this thinking we do outside and within it, sprung trap, open and closing door.

A5, 56pp, saddle-stitch.

Tom Betteridge - Dressings

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TOM BETTERIDGE – DRESSINGS
November 2019
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“Care is not organic”, begins Tom Betteridge’s Dressings, tracing this “tech/nology”, “all sorts”, a “chorus”, the care work done on and with the body. Gnarly and knotty, “its bruising / settlement” rarely settles for long, or without damage; yet damage has its attendant processes: those of suture for those of rupture, stitch for cut: “so each grain promises / to bind to an other another time”. Examining language and that thing we call a self in all its fleshly materiality, Dressings also analyses their mutual collapse, boundaries and leakage; “the matter of cut / time” in which poetry might figure both as wound and cure, poet as both doctor and patient, patiently touching on the diagnostic yet always turning-off road, shows us the new, troubling, surprising vistas that lie just round the corner.

the time left what’s left to hold harried
tense cycle hemmed in speech scrutiny
bedside duress grey light adore you

Colour covers in gross-out pink; A5, saddle-stapled, 46 pages.

Tom Betteridge is the author of the poetry pamphlets Pedicure (Sine Wave Peak, 2017) and Body Work (Sad Press, 2018) and a critical book, Badiou, Poem and Subject (Bloomsbury, 2019). With Ellen Dillon he co-edited a feature on the poet Peter Manson for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. He lives in London.

Review by Alice Hill-Woods here.

Anne Boyer - Money City Sick as Fuck

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ANNE BOYER – MONEY CITY SICK AS FUCK

Published May 2019

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Selected from a sequence of 100 poems written on a long day in the summer of 2013, Anne Boyer's Money City Sick as Fuck imagines writing a poem "in a confederacy of exception [...] called 'wages for tenderness and nothing else'". Situated between Pompeii and Olympus, at "Texaco in ruins" or the amusement park, in a bar called Lethe, at the saddest prom in history, taking "every odd route", these poems passionately survey and survive the streets and jails of the modern-day polis,"sunbathing in Atlantis", oracles IRL.

The peak consequence —
this port
of pleasure —
we will
or will not
realize —

Manson and Mendoza - Windsuckers and Onsetters

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MANSON & MENDOZA – WINDSUCKERS & ONSETTERS: SONNOTS for Griffiths
Published August 2018

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WINDSUCKERS & ONSETTERS: SONNOTS for Griffiths is a collaborative project between Peter Manson & Mendoza in commemoration of Bill Griffiths (August 20, 1948 – September 13, 2007). The assemblage of ‘niners’ (nine sets of nine lines with nine syllables per line) uses, or responds to, text found in Fishing and Folk: Life and Dialect on the North Sea Coast (2008) & Pitmatic: Talk of the North East Coal Field (2007) compiled by Bill Griffiths.

Blue card covers, 48 pages, side-stapled.

Bill Griffiths was born in Middlesex and settled in Seaham, Co. Durham. Mendoza was born in Northumberland and settled in London. Peter Manson was born in Glasgow and settled in Glasgow.

You lose your light. spend all of your lives.

“endless doubtlessness, land-full / surprised-

ness”. unintelligible language.

eye-acute. “look at the sun rising...

unspeaking and becoming” light-like

sun-froth unGod. sun-needle gaze-blaze

erase death, and in-turn re-birth. this

land is gold. this coal is gold. this clan-

ship of miners is gold is gold is

SOLD OUT.

Below is a recording of Manson & Mendoza reading from the book.
Recording: Mendoza. Production: Manson. Glasgow, August 2018.

Lisa Jeschke - The Anthology of Poems By Drunk Women

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LISA JESCHKE – THE ANTHOLOGY OF POEMS BY DRUNK WOMEN

Published April 2018

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With its characteristic combination of total rigour and complete obscenity, this Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women is deeply attentive to the history of language, the complicities and complexities of poetic figuration, the extreme moral impurity of a fierce and funny and vital ethical commitment. A smiley face sits next to a guillotine, a German word next to an English one, should I or should I not marry Donald Trump, where is Chelsea Manning, Caster Semenya is the greatest 800m runner of the current era, fuck the AfD.

“Guillotine!”

Lisa Jeschke completed a Ph.D in England, and now lives in Munich. She is co-editor of MATERIALS and MATERIALIEN, and the author of Dead Cheap (Face Press, 2014), and, with Lucy Beynon, David Cameron: A Theatre of Knife Songs (Shit Valley, 2015) and The Tragedy of Theresa May (Tipped Press, forthcoming). Poems and critical writing have appeared in Botch, Datableed, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, Materials, No Prizes, Tripwire, &c.

Read Danny Hayward's piece on the book, 'World History's Teenage Diaries', here.
Read Sam Rowe's Chicago Review review of the Anthology, alongside Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon's The Tragedy of Theresa May and David Cameron: A Theatre of Knife Songs, here.

Sarah Hayden - sitevisit

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SARAH HAYDEN – SITEVISIT

Published March 2018

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Sitevisit: sprawl, poem, overgrowth, cartography, demand: ‘There will be cocktails for everyone or there will be no cocktails at all.’ (Langer, Thießen and Scott, artiCHOKE 10).

<slit my tongue

let me love your loggia>

Sarah Hayden’s chapbooks to date are Turnpikes (Sad Press), System Without Issue (Oystercatcher) and Exteroceptive (Wild Honey). Her writing has appeared in Blackbox Manifold, Golden Handcuffs Review, Tripwire, datableed and elsewhere, with new lecture-poems on the way in para·text and Hix Eros. She is the author of Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (University of New Mexico Press) and co-author, with Paul Hegarty, of Peter Roehr—Field Pulsations (Snoeck).

Sean Bonney - Ghosts

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SEAN BONNEY – GHOSTS

Published October 2017

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Poems written in Berlin between September 2015 and the Summer of 2017. This pamphlet contains selected work from the pamphlet Cancer: Poems after Katerina Gogou, previously published in a limited edition, and an ongoing sequence entitled Our Death, as well as other pieces from the period. These are poems haunted by catastrophe, light, fires, the sun, violence and love. As Bonney writes: “We were talking about prophecy, about defeat and war, about how nobody knows what those words really mean, and what they will come to mean”. Drawing on writers like Baudelaire, Artaud, Anita Berber and Hölderlin like “marks on a calendar”, “a kind of cacophony”, or “the beginnings of a map”, these poems are vital indices of where we are.

“These days everyone is writing their final book. Whatever. I’ve lost everything as well. My body is made up of three needles, several coins, a system of nitrates and something wankers would call ‘a philosophy’. I see in the dark and like to smash mirrors. For many other people things are far worse.”

Sean Bonney’s previous books include Letters Against the Firmament (2015), Happiness (2011), The Commons (2011), Document (2008), Baudelaire in English (2007) and Blade Pitch Control Unit (2005). He currently lives in Berlin, where he is conducting postdoctoral research at the Freie Universität.

D.S. Marriott - Duppies

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D.S MARRIOTT – DUPPIES
Published October 2017
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Duppies is a book in three parts which, in the author’s words, pays “deliberate attention to the debased – and misunderstood – aspects of black and white working class grime culture in London; an attempt at a kind of grime prosody, whether imagined though Eski beats, multicultural London English (MLE), cockney rhyming, or sino techno formal experimentation.”

From the Preface:

“Grime is late shift, zero hour, it makes a beeline for bare life, but what it lays bare leaves everyone cold.

Grime is the thread that links afro-pessimism to afro-futurism, but its role proceeds without ties or duplicity.

Grime is post-work and post-brexit, its riddims respond to the necessity in which I exist – see these wheels, they may be brand spanking new, but under the bonnet there is fever and anguish. [...]

Grime is payback for n-words and down-lows. It has dominion but no license for each dissolve is charged with an asbo. It makes music from a manor that is not-me, but what it gives has neither use-value nor beauty.

Grime is a medium of the unknown, it refuses everything but possibility: its violence is one without immunity, but its real is dispossession, and is inconsolable without knowing it.”

D.S. Marriott was born in Nottingham in 1963 of Jamaican parentage and was educated at the University of Sussex. He has taught there and now teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has written many articles on poetics and is the author of On Black Men, published in 2000 by the University Presses of Edinburgh and Columbia, New York, and Haunted Life, published in 2007 by the University Press of Rutgers, New Jersey. His previous collections of poems were Incognegro (Salt Publishing, 2005), Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman Books, 2008) and The Bloods (Shearsman, 2011).

Listed in The Guardian's 2018 Books of the Year by Sandeep Parmar.
Review by Dan Hancox at The Poetry Foundation.
Review in Poetry London's Spring 2018 issue by Robert Kiely.
'Revicule' by Colin Lee Marshall.

OUT OF PRINT.

J.H. Prynne - Of · The · Abyss

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J.H. PRYNNE -- OF · THE · ABYSS

Published April 2017

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A sequence of ten poems; in separated continuance, an outcry that ventriloquises and manifests languages of exclusion and yet with dogged persistence protests them.

“Oh strike the light, float the boat, for
sake of common peril they are fallen away
as gathered up in sight of lamentable in-
difference and will go down against us”.

Review by Ian Brinton here.

Essay by Luke Roberts on J.H. Prynne's recent work, including Of · The · Abyss at Chicago Review.

Gizem Okulu - Too Sliced for Landing

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GIZEM OKULU– TOO SLICED FOR LANDING

Published January 2017 -- Second printing April 2018

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Gizem Okulu’s first book is a sequence of 31 poems which, in broken and extended lines, explore the terrifying possibility of lack of speech, of blocked communication: a poetry written between languages and countries which both bridges and attests to the gap, the chasm that “opens / up / isolated / and / frightened”. These are poems about wandering, fleeing, fogs and rivers, conditions of distance and danger, marked at times by flashes of biting humour and throughout by intense commitment.

“I do not belong here nor there I say but here I want to make you a house from the memories of every woman you ever had before like the resistance of senses meeting for one last time in the mirror we slept between the rivers and smokes in earthquake lights all day and night in the cities against the sun.”

Gizem Okulu is a poet who has published poems in Botch, Datableed, Intercapillary Space, &c. and is studying for a Ph.D at Royal Holloway. She lives in London.

Stuart Calton - Wimpy and André

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STUART CALTON – WIMPY AND ANDRÉ

Published January 2017

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A poem in ten sections, setting forth the interrelations between protagonists Wimpy, Climpy, Sandy and André, in a potentially infinite selection of mixed scenarios. Amongst other sounds, the poem includes the sounds of a car alarm, the thin barking of a radically rationalised trick poultice, a shout, a voice, silence, static, galloping and The Lark Ascending played triple-speed nine octaves up like rain on a steel bin-lid over a rave synth line. You need to read it.

“Just too big. Firstly way too big. And then just right.”

Stuart Calton is the author of the following books: Blepharospasms (2016), Live at Late Dilated Ileum (2015), The Torn Instructions for No Trebuchet (2013), Three Reveries (2010), The Corn Mother (2006), The Bench Graft (2004), United Snap Up (2004), and Sheep Walk Cut (2003). As a musician, he is the incomparable dictophonist TFH Drenching.

34 pp, card covers (pink), side-stapled.

Listen! to Stuart reading a footnote to the book (“In the air above the abyss…” -- The First Manifesto of Inter-Subjective Bureaucratic Pointillism, an unintegrated footnote to Wimpy & André (Calton, S. (2016). Wimpy & André. Cambridge: Materials Press). Your foot.): HERE.

Read! a review of Live at Late Dilated Ileum: HERE.

OUT OF PRINT.

Christina Chalmers - Willingness

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CHRISTINA CHALMERS – WILLINGNESS

Published January 2017

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A collection of work written between 2013 and 2015, this is Christina Chalmers’ second book, and her first since Work Songs (2013). Divided into three sections, and containing poems such as ‘The International’, ‘The Arms Left Over’ and ‘Dragonfly Abattoir’.

“My German is

bad. My bed is a beautiful green lido. I drink

to municipal menthol. I grow more

sad.”

Christina Chalmers was born in Edinburgh, studied in Cambridge, lived in London, and has recently relocated to New York. Her poetry has been published widely in such on- and off-line venues as: Datableed, Materials, Sundial, and Rivet.

38pp, covers in gold paper, side stapled.

Naomi Weber - Very Lonely Animals

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NAOMI WEBER – VERY LONELY ANIMALS

Published November 2016

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Naomi Weber’s lyric sequence Very Lonely Animals sprawls across its pages in slabs of delicate observation, working through the condition of innerness and outerness, fragmentation and totality. The locations of these poem are wide open, seas and coasts, rooms in which people nestle and seek protection, but from which they pereptually seem to be on the verge of leaving: the line ripens in sounds unfolding within and across the break, lulling or obscuring. This is poetry that sings it own song, almost to itself, from just off-centre.

“This world we love and keep our love in keeps
Tearing our hands
The shreds around nails dragging behind
Looking around for gazes to meet
Digging bone to neighbourly flesh
God help me I am trying to be kind
But what other worlds have you given us
To serve, says a secret prayer”

Naomi Weber is a poet who has published poems in Datableed, No Money, &c. She has another new book forthcoming from Tim Thornton and Verity Spott’s The Winter Olympics Press.

14pp, card covers (purple), side-stapled.

PUBLICATIONS

[2020]

Gabrielle Daniels - Something Else Again: Poetry and Prose, 1975-2019

Tongo Eisen-Martin - Waiting Behind Tornados For Food

John DeWitt - 20 20 Pretzels

David Grundy - Local Apocalypse

Heike Fröhlich / Ricarda Kiel - Outfits [Materialien]

Robert Creeley / Susanne Darabas (Übers.) - Histoire de Florida [Materialien]

Laurel Uziell - T

[2019]

Adelaide Ivánova / Christiane Quandt (Übers.) - Der Hammer [Materialien]

Tom Betteridge - Dressings [Out of Print]

Lotta Thießen - Fragments of Baby [Materialien]

Ayna Steigerwald - tagslichtdosen [Materialien]

Anne Boyer - Money City Sick as Fuck

Marty Hiatt - paraphrenia [Materialien]

[2018]

[Collective (Students and Asylum Seekers) - Poetry Collection / Gedichtband - publ. in cooperation] [Materialien]

Lisa Jeschke - The Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women

Sarah Hayden - Sitevist

Manson & Mendoza - Windsuckers & Onsetters [Sonnots for Griffiths] [Out of Print]

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