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Cover of Hopelessness

the87press

Hopelessness

Verity Spott

€13.00

"The brilliant Verity Spott has a new book out, called Hopelessness and published by the 87 Press. The work defies categorisation: Verity is a poet, and this book is certainly poetry, but large parts are in prose form and towards the end it even takes on the structure of an absurdist play. There seems to be a loose narrative, and even recurring character voices, so I’m tempted to call it a short experimental novel, in the vein of Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal Of Albion Moonlight (a personal favourite). Ultimately though I’d just call it a book; one full of words that are profound, moving, silly, sad, challenging and beautiful in equal measure. Even though it’s still a boldly experimental piece, in some ways Hopelessness feels like the most accessible thing Verity’s done. Without wanting to sound condescending, it’s also the most mature. You don’t get much more universal than death, love and loss, and these seem to be the main themes explored here. Another is language itself, the way it defines and limits our experience, and the way that we’re constantly at the mercy of words and phrases as they’re deployed by the authorities, the media, and eventually our own thought processes. Dissenting voices continually talk over one another throughout Hopelessness, often sampled from outside sources, or parodies thereof: Sappho, MR James, traditional hymns and folk songs, Hollywood movies, talk radio, tabloid newspapers, dreams and demagogues. Through it all there’s a painful lesson about how loss can make us bitter and hard, and how by refusing to move forward we become empty caricatures mouthing meaningless clichés to wound and hurt. But grief and loss can also teach us about love, if we let them, and there is so much grief and love in this book. Verity continually rearranges reality (that is, language) as if searching desperately for a way out, but in the end, as always, there is just life, love, and death. Hopelessness is a bravura performance, wholeheartedly recommended." — Ben Graham

Verity Spott is a poet from Brighton. Verity is the author of several books including Hopelessness (the 87 Press), Click Away Close Door Say (Contraband Books), We Will Bury You (Veer Books) and Poems of Sappho (in translation, Face Press). From 2018 to 2019 Verity was Poet in Residence at the University of Surrey. Verity teaches poetry in Brighton with The Creative Writing Programme and (alongside Kat Addis) with the Hollingdean Wednesdays project where they hold a poetry reading and writing group in Hollingdean Community Centre. Verity's poems have been translated into Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and German and their book Hopelessness has been translated into French and published by Même pas l'hiver. Verity plays cello in the improvised tune duo Benzo Fury and the free jazz trio In Threads. Since 2006 Verity has run the monthly poetry, performance and music event Horseplay.

recommendations

Cover of On Feminist Films

the87press

On Feminist Films

Stuart Bell

Essays €18.00

This collection of essays celebrates the work of international feminist filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, filmmakers, essayists and activists, On Feminist Films is the second volume in the South London Cultural Review series. Contributors include: Stuart Bell, Catherine Grant, So Mayer, Louisa Wei, Emma Wilson.

Cover of Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip

the87press

Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip

James Goodwin

Poetry €13.00

This major new work is thought, spirit and sense (in every sense) ‘fleshed out’ in ‘all the corners’ by being unmade – as poetry, as music, as (black and white) images, and as attention to the interconnected circuitries the One has with the social, historical and environmental ‘to / link us outside’. These elements are no sooner embodied than they slip, shift, carousel and spin away. As Goodwin puts it: ‘no longer a bodily reference to an individual subject’s presence; not obliterated but made into an element, air or breath, as black poetry’s condition of im/possibility for, and refusal of subjecthood.’ Hence it is that this poetry achieves ‘flightacross precipitous intransigence’ (Will Alexander), perhaps flights of manifestations of spirit, ‘ghostly crowned / apogees’, like duppies, which is to say, sacred. Hence too the work’s urgent task to avoid ‘thingification’: the conscription and exploitation of thought &/or body for neo-colonialist, which is to say, neo-liberal ends. Goodwin eschews identity politics for a phenomenology that is more properly radical in both the etymological sense of the term – rooted and vital to life – as well as situated within a history of experimental black thought which, simultaneously, rejects normative traditions of meaning, signification and value. Both meanings are central to the anti-racist core of this important work – ‘when i don’t know you but you must know who i am’ – in a poetry that’s as breath-taking as it is breath-making. ‘Inexpressibly full with what words can do’.

— Emily Critchley, author of Home (London: Protoype, 2021), Arrangements (Shearsman Books, 2018) and Ten Thousand Things (UEA: Boiler House Press, 2017)

James Goodwin is a poet doing a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on the blacksociopoetics of marronage, breath, sacrality and emanation. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we’re in: composition for friends, was published by Face Press; and his debut book, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip, is forthcoming with the87press. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

Cover of The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989

the87press

The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989

Julie R. Enszer

Non-fiction €18.00

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidence through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and videotapes.

The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this unique correspondence in which Lorde and Parker discuss their work as writers as well as the intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. These letters are a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.

Cover of Prayers Manifestos Bravery

Pilot Press

Prayers Manifestos Bravery

Verity Spott

Essays €14.00

First published in 2018, Prayers Manifestos Bravery is a collection of Verity Spott’s “Trans* Manifestos”. Written from 2011 and originally published on her blog, the book’s content ranges from concrete poetry to long-form dispatches, confessions and manifestos touching on questions of identity, gender, justice and society. 

“This is a collection of attempted manifestos whose composition began in 2011. It does not pretend to be completed and any life it has is in its capacity for change, movement and instability. These manifestos are described as such because at the time of their composition they felt like attempts of preservation; of life and of the capacity to struggle against life. They are all improvisations. They have not been heavily edited, and they are untidy. We're unsure what we are." — preface by the author

Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England. She is the author of the books Gideon, Click Away Close Door Say, We Will Bury You, The Mutiny Aboard the RV Felicity, Prayers Manifestos Bravery, Poems of Sappho (in translation), Hopelessness, Coronelles Set 1 and 70 Sonnets. Verity's poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek. 

Cover of The North Road Songbook

Pilot Press

The North Road Songbook

Verity Spott

Poetry €16.00

The North Road Songbook collects together eight sequences of poems, most of which were composed between 2019 and 2024. The title sequence is a set of lyrics written around North Road in Brighton, originally a mediaeval field boundary, now a chaotic thoroughfare filled with ghosts, sirens and songs.

Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England, whose books include Hopelessness (the 87press), Poems of Sappho (in translation) and Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press). Verity’s poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek. 

Paperback
252pp
ISBN: 9781739364977

Cover of The Mirror of Simple Souls

Winter Editions

The Mirror of Simple Souls

Leah Flax Barber

Poetry €20.00

In her first book of poems, Leah Flax Barber revives an actress figure of the commedia dell'arte to consider her own destiny as a soon-to-be historical subject. Taking its title from Marguerite Porete's fourteenth-century Beguine classic, The Mirror of Simple Souls embodies the metaphysical thorniness of the book-as-object through sources as wide-ranging as Renaissance theater, Low German and Old French mystical texts, Kate Bush lyrics, and the melancholy dialectics of Walter Benjamin. In Flax Barber's stark, brutally compressed poems, the performance of writing is charged with the eros and anxiety of coming after: "Will it all be destroyed? / Definitely / I will hear it on my radio / In the 22nd century."

The Mirror of Simple Souls, a series of repeated beginnings and endings, is a form of speech act which, through a Freudian Durcharbeiten, or working through, brings about a new beginning. And, in its movement from this Freudian "working through" to a Hegelian Aufhebung, lets us begin, again, at the beginning, at the end. —CYNTHIA CRUZ

The spare poems of The Mirror of Simple Souls evoke and then draw back into shimmer. Herein, a performance that suffuses the horizon with beautiful absurdity: a shirt sewn with mirrors that reflect a strange and evanescing world-at-large, “an I where the nay was.” Drawing from film, mystical texts, commedia dell'arte, the reader finds that there “is paraphernalia of life / all over.” This paraphernalia is a kind of “segue music” for the endlessly indeterminate. The old adage claims that we can’t step into the same river twice, but Leah Flax Barber creates an evocative, provocative current through which each step is at once past, present, and future. —ELIZABETH ROBINSON

Leah Flax Barber is a daring and brilliant new poet. Her voice is restless and coiled and sprung as we discover "The demonic finalist / Of material culture / Is love / There is paraphernalia of life / All over / A woman.” There is also a take-no-prisoners attitude throughout this startling and powerful book. These poems are vital and necessary and perform “The wounded chance / To think in public.” This book will move you, scare you, and blow you away. —PETER GIZZI

Leah Flax Barber's first book reads like a journey, a kind of anabasis, passing back through the myth and history which are its own antecedents. It manifests, in the encounter, a saturnalian world: ludic, dark and sensuous, strange and vibrant with thought. I was delighted to travel with it. —CLAIRE DeVOOGD

Cover of Plans for Sentences

Wave Books

Plans for Sentences

Renee Gladman

Poetry €30.00

"These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut." So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. 

If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

Cover of Apparitions: (Nines)

Nightboat Books

Apparitions: (Nines)

Nat Raha

Poetry €18.00

Injecting the disruptive potential of collective action into the body of the poem, Nat Raha's invigorating experiment resuscitates Anglophone poetry.

Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha's apparitions (nines) in its "charred golden minidress," ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of "niners," a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.

"These poems are eccentric in the most literal sense, Raha’s writing pushing at the edges of the mainstream of poetry, presenting a punk, transfeminist revision of poetic norms. . . apparitions (nines) deserves to be read—for its insights and newness, and the studs of pleasure it doles out." - Lou Selfridge, Frieze

“Welcome the poems that split us open, ‘frequencies/ to be removed from the air.’ Nat Raha has sharpened the lines, their serrated letters leaving us marked, poems to touch again on the skin, feel our doom undo its direction for enduring solidarity; the best love.” - CAConrad

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (2018), countersonnets (2013), and Octet (2010). Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems (2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018), on Poem-a-Day, and in South Atlantic Quarterly, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Transgender Marxism,and Wasafiri Magazin. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.