Based in Birmingham, England, Hem Press is a small independent publisher with a diverse catalogue that includes visual poetry, experimental memoir, narrative verse and radical translation. As part of my on-going series of editor interviews I spoke to Richard Capener, who founded Hem Press in 2022.
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‘Everyone is invited’ – An Interview with Anthony Etherin of Penteract Press
Readers of formal and constrained poetry will, like me, have been saddened by Penteract Press’s recent announcement that it will cease publishing new titles after 2024. As part of my on-going series of interviews with editors of small independent presses, I spoke to Penteract’s editor Anthony Etherin about the press, its ethos, and the reasons behind the decision to close. Anthony also shares two poems from his new collection The Robots of Babylon, which will be published on the 21st of October and is now available for pre-order.
Continue readingWhat poetry do we as poets read?
Last month Tesserae: A mosaic of poems by Zimbabwean women, was released into the world. Working on this book with Samantha Vazhure, founder and editor of Carnelian Heart Publishing, and the wonderful poets whose voices are featured within its pages, has been an immensely rewarding experience.
Continue readingPoem by Poem: An interview with Annick Yerem, Editor at Sídhe Press
At a time when many small poetry presses are going on indefinite hiatus or closing down altogether, it’s heartening to welcome a relative newcomer to the field. Sídhe Press published its first book in February of this year – Our Own Coordinates, an anthology of poems about dementia that is profound, tender, unflinching and courageous. This has been followed by Sarah Connor’s fine collection The Crow Gods and a second anthology, Glisk and Glimmer, on the theme of Light. Annick Yerem, the Editor-in-Chief of Sídhe Press, is a gifted poet in her own right, whose work has been widely published both online and in print. Annick’s chapbook, St Eisenberg and the Sunshine Bus, was published in 2022 by Hedgehog Press. I was delighted when she agreed to an interview with me.
Continue readingRock, Paper, Scissors: Shape and Surface as Constraint
Messages from the past take many forms: ancient structures, buildings, and artefacts; burial sites; rituals and symbolism; stories, poems and songs shared through generations; sculptures, paintings, works of art.
Continue readingSeasons and Landscapes: A fortune teller origami poem
When I was a child, my friends and I enjoyed crafting and playing with paper fortune-tellers, a form of origami made with square paper folded in a sequence of triangles.
The illustration below is of my fortune teller poem Seasons and Landscapes in two dimensions. You can download a PDF version to print out and fold into shape here. Folding instructions are given here (or here if you prefer a video version).
Review: Jump Search by Lori Wike
Recently I’ve been reading Super–Infinite, Katherine Rundell’s excellent biography of John Donne, and this in turn has led me to revisit Donne’s poetry. I recall vividly the thrill of discovery when I first read him as a teenager, delighting in his clever conceits and his command of metre, rhyme and form, as I sought to understand his meanings.
Triangles
Triangles, my new poetry collection, is now available to purchase directly from Penteract Press, who ship all over the world.
Billy Mills has generously written a review, which you can read here: https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2023/10/26/recent-reading-october-2023/
You can order a copy at this link: https://penteractpress.com/store/triangles
The Poetry and Mathematics of Crochet
There may be poets who can sit in front of their computer or notebook and spontaneously compose a poem, but I am not one of them. Generally, my poems have a long gestation. I tend to mull them over while doing other things: gardening, walking, cleaning the bathrooms. Crocheting.
Continue readingWhich comes first – the chicken or the egg?
How does the formulation of a poem begin? With an idea, an image, a phrase, a subject, a feeling, a memory, a structure?
I’ve been thinking about this question in relation to my own writing. Unsurprisingly, there is no single answer. On rare occasions a poem plops almost fully formed into my head (inconveniently, this tends to happen in the middle of the night). The trick then is to capture it, to write it down before it flits off and disappears like a migrating bird.
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