Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets
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This House
Poems
by Rehema Njambi
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
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.
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Accessioning
by Charlotte Wetton
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
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.
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How the First Sparks Became Visible
Poems
by Simone Atangana Bekono
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
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.
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The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising
by Jack Houston
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
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'
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The Stack of Owls Is Getting Higher
by Dawn Watson
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
In a sequence of poems set in the mountainous Deep South of America, Dawn Watson vividly evokes an ominous landscape of gas stations, jackrabbits and drifting hawks, where copperhead snakes fall out of branches and 'magnolia cones / thum[p] the roofs' of wooden outhouses.
These poems, based on the writer's time spent in Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, are interwoven with pieces set in the poet's native Belfast which speak urgently to the raw realities of sexuality, juvenile detention, and the Irish border. Many poems feature speakers driving from place to place, capturing the in-between states in which so much of experience is actually lived. Precise and strange images coalesce into physical and interior landscapes.
Alternately surreal and direct, and always joyously inventive, Watson offers a clear and unsettling vision of what is and isn't there in these anxious, contemporary times.
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Oils
by Stephen Sexton
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
Oils is a gorgeous, beguiling collection of poems where the poise of the delivery belies the emotional, existential turmoil within.
Through his portraits of an atheist, a pickpocket and a spinach-loving sailor (among others), Stephen Sexton evokes a strange kind of melancholy as he strives to reconcile passion with detachment and profound self-doubt with unwavering love.
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Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real
by Padraig Regan
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
Padraig Regan's poems delight in the sensual and the visual: this pamphlet is alive with the textures of paint, sweat, sugar and overripe fruit. Regan riffs on art history in a way which is playful and inquisitive – Johann Zoffany drinks mojitos with David Hockney; Caravaggio outrages and compels; Queen Elizabeth I is effortfully glorious. Many poems focus on the representation of the human body, discovering alternative histories in responses to paintings where the gaze of the male artist is directed towards the male figure in queerly erotic ways.
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What the House Taught Us
Poems
by Anne Bailey
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
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'
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Dear Friend(s)
by Jeffery Sugarman
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
Animated by many different types of kinship, the poems in Dear Friend(s) explore webs of experience that wind between parents, extended families and friends. They will take readers back to powerful, often early influences, which result from relations of likeness and empathy as well as blood.
The long title poem is an elegy – to a specific Dear Friend, dead from AIDS in its earliest years. It's also an elegy for the loss of innocence and freedom of sexual expression that flowed generously in the 1970s and 80s, in the UK and in the US.
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Dragonish
by Emma Simon
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
Loss, love and various severed body parts are scattered throughout Dragonish. The poems are rooted in family, friends and home while also reaching into other worlds: the circus of possibilities, an earth-bound heavenly host, London's dryads and a nineteenth-century French brothel. Infused with a warm humour, tinged with darkness, the poems tempt the reader to peep beneath the surface of things.
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Do Not Be Lulled by the Dainty Starlike Blossom
Poems
by Rachael Matthews
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
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.
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Paisley
Poems
by Rakhshan Rizwan
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
Rakhshan Rizwan's debut collection simmers with a poised, driving anger. Drawing on the rich visual and material culture of her home region, Rizwan unpacks and offers critical comment on the vexed issues of class, linguistic and cultural identity – particularly for women – in the context of Pakistan and South Asia. She writes about the hypocrisy of the men who claim to worship women, the nuances of using Urdu or Hindi, and the many contradictions of the city of her birth, Lahore. As well as startling free verse, Rizwan's many accomplished ghazals both explore and demonstrate her fascination with multilingualism, code-switching, displacement and belonging. The poems in Paisley are an unflinchingly feminist assault on received ideas about womanhood which present the reader with often-uncomfortable truths.
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A warm and snouting thing
Poems
by Ramona Herdman
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
A warm and snouting thing' dances delicately between the sizzle of nerves brought on by proximity to sex and the ambiguous stability of commitment and family. These poems emphasise the physicality, not only of desire, but of the human and natural worlds which surround and shape it: springing ferns, 'saddle-soap / and saddle-sores,' and a vivid scene in which the speaker's mother boils alive 'two huge crabs, rough as roof-tiles' on a holiday with her husband and his lover. Herdman's voice is always precise, even at moments of the most brazen intimacy, whether staring at the backs of men's necks on the Tube across 'a little inch of shared air' or observing the 'patterned' flesh underneath the buttons of a corset. There are tales of teenage self-confidence ('vest tops in April') and adultery averted – but there is space here, too, for a settled life with a salad spinner, and a long-term lover's belly 'warm in its burrow'. The poet skilfully negotiates the twin pulls of the familiar and the unknown, generating a forceful and compelling charge from the energy of flight resisted.
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The Bell Tower
Poems
by Pamela Crowe
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
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'
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Pisanki
by Zosia Kuczyńska
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
In 1940, a young girl is taken from her home in Eastern Poland to Arkhangelsk, Siberia; in 1942, she boards a train. Seventy years later, that journey is reimagined by her granddaughter, Zosia Kuczyńska. As Kuczyńska's poems tell the story of her babcia, her maternal grandmother, coming to England, she confronts some of the big questions of art and history: how do you tell another person's story without exploiting it? What's at stake when we try make patterns out of the past, and can we ever leave those patterns behind?
Kuczyńska's poems are both richly narrative and sharply attentive to the complexities of home and culture. They capture human endurance through the redrawing of political maps, from 'the heat of Easter in Tehran' to the powdered eggs and stocking shortages of the London Blitz.
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The Whimsy of Dank Ju-Ju
Poems
by Sascha Aurora Akhtar
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
The Whimsy of Dank Ju-Ju is a collection of colourful, energetic poems which revel in language. Using experimental forms and punctuation, with snippets of lines exploded across the page, Akhtar drags the reader into a world of magic, heat, life and... whimsy.
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Poacher
by Lenni Sanders
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
Follow Lenni Sanders into the queasy and nocturnal world of Poacher, and be transformed.
Here horror imagery and romantic lyricism combine to construct a new gothic world. These poems are eerie, thoughtful, bodily. They explore sexuality, and dreams and nightmares. They are full of devouring creatures.
By turns tender and disgusting, Poacher creates and examines different, dynamic ways of wanting and longing. Influenced by magical realism and contemporary art, often wryly funny, the poems in Poacher place strange characters in mundane places – and are alive to the changes such friction and intimacy can cause.
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Priced Out
by Conor Cleary
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
This pamphlet speaks, in an urbane and charmingly deadpan voice, to anyone who has ever had both an 'obsession with luxury resources' and the nagging feeling 'you've arrived at the counter of a shop / only to be told what you're carrying isn't legal tender'.
The centrepiece of Priced Out is a tender and wry sequence of sonnets addressed 'to my mother at my age' which explores the 'fat promise' of the nineties economic bubble and its deflated aftermath. Despite their sharp historical awareness, Conor Cleary's poems live unmistakably in the twenty-first century, mapping the contours of a world of goofy Vines, flat-pack Christmas trees, and the barely-suppressed terror of economic precarity. Even as Cleary's speakers agonise over the difficulty of living with others - 'what if my gums / concealed big steel / fangs ... that were very / much part of me' - poem after poem reaffirms its commitment to human connection, working towards a calmly bemused acceptance of the dangers and wonders of contemporary existence.
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Myrtle
by Ruth Wiggins
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
In her heady, debut pamphlet Myrtle, Ruth Wiggins celebrates the primal forces of nature and the human heart. Interweaving the ancient with the modern world, she explores fertility and death, in poems that are imbued with a subtle eroticism. There is a serious playfulness at work here too: a carnival stallholder battles with a spider, and a bored vegetarian contemplates life as a fox, while lovers fear death and separation as the gods look on in amusement. This free-wheeling and assured collection is full of dry humour and wisdom, and is by turns poignant, dark and full of zest.
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Ikhda, by Ikhda
by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
A mind-blowing collection of poems about love, life, and a long-overdue introduction to the unique worldview of Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi. Ikhda captures the intensity and wildness of love, sex, motherhood and family ties through her heady and sensual poems and character sketches. She flexes and chivvies the English language into hitherto undreamt-of places, dipping occasionally into French and Italian, and presents it all back to the reader in compelling, undeniably truthful nuggets, with exquisite tenderness and humanity.
Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi has worked in television, advertising and as a scriptwriter on a sitcom in Indonesia. She performed her poetry for the first time in 2011, at Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. She now lives in Naples, where she is enjoying her new role as mother to her little boy Corentin.
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Makeover
Poems
by Laurie Bolger
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
“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.
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Ovarium
Poems
by Joanna Ingham
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
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'
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Elastic Glue
by Kathy Pimlott
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
Here you'll find revellers, developers and dealers circling the city's glitzy heart, Lenin inspecting Swedish allotments, and people hanging on to housing as the city tries to squeeze them out in the search for ever more profit. Elastic Glue is a pamphlet rooted in place, looking critically at the intersections of who and what we share our spaces with, and what that means. This follow-up to Goose Fair Night examines the ways we own and are owned by land – how we both make and are made by the places we inhabit. Kathy Pimlott explores this through poetry which is sharp, lyrical, always political, and sometimes just exasperated.
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In the Name of Red
Poems
by Z. R. Ghani
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
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.
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Milk Snake
Poems
by Toby Buckley
Part of the Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets series
In Milk Snake, Toby Buckley invites us to look at the world from a slightly different angle, where small things become unsettling if you look closely enough. The poet explores queerness, displacement and trauma through clear-voiced, deceptively gentle poems about fishermen, maggots and bees.
bleary
from sleep and warm
water and no glasses
i spot an uncertain comma
sliding
he drags his tail up my
shower wall cumbersome
and not unmaggotesque and i
can see
his guts
or maybe it's
his dinner
- from 'companion'
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