10 Years of Publications -- looking forwards

For this 10th anniversary post, V. Press is delighted to announce a new section of the website featuring Hybrid Work.

As part of our looking backwards to move forwards, we're especially pleased to announce two new hybrid titles that we will be publishing this year.

Dreaming Backward

Dreaming Backward by Alex Reed reflects on personal and collective experiences of Butlin’s, and the significance of holidays camps as sites of play, adventure and increased independence for young people who were coming of age in the pre-digital era.

The chapbook is a hybrid of brief passages which move between memoir, quotation, citation, mini-essay, prose poem, imaginary conversation and dream fragment. These shifts create a disco ball effect, as multiple images and reflections about pop culture, family life, social class, intoxication, first love and the heightened aliveness of the teenage years are brought into view.

The different passages are numbered backwards to highlight significant themes of retrospection, nostalgia, and related existential questions about time and the self which are raised in the process of looking back over a life.

Alex already has two pamphlets, A Career in Accompaniment (now sold out!) and These nights at home,  as well as a full collection with us, knots, tangles, fankles. It feels especially fitting to celebrate our anniversary year with a new title from him in a new dedicated area for V. Press, hybrid form!

A teasing glimpse of what's come in Dreaming Backward

sum of her PARTS

V. Press is also very very delighted to welcome Laura Besley to the family with her hybrid poetry and flash chapbook sum of her PARTS, which explores the roles of women in society and relationships, notably the parts of their bodies that are used and abused by those around them.

She said, "It consists of 30 x 50-word pieces, some of which are prose, whereas others use poetry devices such as lineation, slashes and black out. This has been done intuitively, and in some cases purposefully when it was right for the piece and allowed extra emphasis. V. Press, with its extensive list of prose and poetry publications, felt like a very good fit for a pamphlet nestled in the liminal space between prose and poetry." 

Watch this space for more new title news to come...

10 Years of Publications -- 2017

2025 marks ten years of V. Press publishing solo-authored titles and, as part of our celebrations, we're sharing our year-by-year publications over that period.

The press was originally launched at Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2013 with a one-off poetry chapbook anthology before moving on to solo-authored poetry pamphlets in 2015.

Our first solo-authored poetry collection and our first flash fiction pamphlet came out in 2016. There have been illustrated poetry pamphlets, a dual-authored poetry pamphlet and a full-length flash fiction title along the way.

Today, we highlight our 2017 titles and some extra delights from that year!

V. Press Shortlisted for The Michael Marks Publishers' Award 2017

Antony Owen's The Nagasaki Elder shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2017

Scare Stories -- David Clarke -- 27 March 2017

“The poems in Scare Stories offer us exactly that: a series of richly populated narratives that show the contemporary moment as a grotesque and fearful nightmare. This is a world of war and refugees, high politics and helicopters, sex and suffering as entertainment. Somewhere at the root of things is money. It’s all delivered in sharp quatrains whose flamboyant rhyming makes it more brutal, not less. It’s a vision, in the Hieronymus Bosch sense, funny and horrifying, but it’s redeemed at last by our futile wishing for redemption. Scare Stories would have had Gottfried Benn cheering wildly, and if that's not a troubling idea I don't know what is.” Tony Williams

“David Clarke conjures up post-apocalyptic visions that are uncomfortably close to our present. All of humanity is played out here, from gamers to generals, the whole bitingly observed. Scare Stories is a frightening mirror, but it’s also compelling and hypnotic, I dare you to look away.” Claire Trévien

Scare Stories is a sequence of poems that is very unusual and very unsettling.

LONGLISTED for Best Poetry Pamphlet in Saboteur Awards 2017.

A sample from the pamphlet can be found below. More information and ordering for Scare Stories can be found here.

From Scare Stories...

We buzz our personal shopper in –

            her face glitched on a tiny screen.

            In this, the cocktail hour, we sheen

our gums with bitters and sapphire gin,

recline as the video wall dilates

            with shots of ocean swell, segues

            into copper sundowns. Displayed

across the coffee table, the latest

linens, white, but piped with clay

         or teal, moccasins in ivory

         suede. Our personal shopper’s very

much on the money. We wave her away.

Bolt Down This Earth -- Gram Joel Davies -- 

31 March 2017

Bolt Down This Earth pulses with energy. These poems hang between ambition and loss; they span survival in the home and on hilltops, stretch over break-ups and break-downs. Gram Joel Davies strips back the boards of existence to look at the wires—searching for human voices where the breeze hums though cable or branch. Adolescent ritual turns to a “lightbulb crushed into light.” His imagery is electrifying. Harmony and dissonance cause unexpected meanings to crackle and spark, while scenes and relationships fuse, so that a “power station is an ice cube / across the mica flats / and cider stymies us.” Bolt Down This Earth is very vital and very charged.

“Linguistically bold and alive to the thisness of its moments, Bolt Down This Earth is a debut collection of lyric energy and inventiveness, full-throated and confident in its own power to convince. An arrival to be celebrated.” 
Martin Malone

“Gram Joel Davies’s first collection slips deftly between a West Country past and the present. The poems are full of taut observation and meticulous attention to detail. And though there is an urban feel to many of them, the collection is brimful of nature. The poems are often peopled with the troubled or misunderstood, and the worlds they move in are shadowy and uncomfortable versions of those we know – almost dystopian at times. There is often a sense of the narrator or central character being the outsider (a boy almost drowning, two teenagers exploring a derelict hospital, a father too fond of his drink) and there is a disquieting and almost violent sensuality too. The complexity of the worlds these people move in is echoed by the complexity of the way Davies puts words together – sometimes joining two words together to create new words; weaving something rich and new that casts its melancholy spell over the reader, but never excludes them. In these poems the uncomfortable tinnitus of the past encroaches on the very real tinnitus of the present. This is compounded in the powerful Tinnitus sequence that is dotted throughout the collection − like a central column that the other poems hang on. The cumulative effect of the layering of numerous and various language is both troubling and stunning. These are poems whose subtle inventiveness works its way into your subconsciousness, poems that you will want to revisit time and again.” 
Julia Webb

A sample poem from the full-length collection can be found below. More information and ordering for Bolt Down This Earth can be found here.

Coming Up For Air

She makes him taste of tarragon,

olive oil, black pepper.

He does not rinse his beard.

He wants to wear it

into the warm street like a lit flume.

People gull around his wake,

scenting his beard

comb the line of hers.

A man with rolled sleeves

sniffs and wants to plunge

his tongue

but, through a window, a cab driver

draws breath, tasting

how he waited on

her nipple.

In the foyer, a clerk’s hand

floats over keys,

watching lift-numbers

kiss up her ribs, back down.

The lift fills with pepper

and tarragon. He parts the way,

his beard glowing like her olive

glow, he licks spiced lips

and remembers: goes in.

Tell Mistakes I Love Them  -- Stephen Daniels --
5 June 2017

Tell Mistakes I Love Them is a poetry pamphlet by Stephen Daniels, who sadly passed away at the end of 2024.

“In poems at once energetic, tense, and original, Stephen Daniels' first pamphlet compellingly explores everyday experiences. By turns funny and poignant, Tell Mistakes I Love Them is a refreshing debut.” Carrie Etter

“What Stephen Daniels does here is to lead us with wit and wisecrack absurdities over to the other side of the looking-glass and then leave us there staring at our scary selves, unable to put back together the uneven pieces of our daily eruptions and catastrophes. This is humanity caught botching it through life, but Stephen’s choice is to float over the nausea and master the downwards flying that is our constant falling.” Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton

“Stephen Daniels’ poems deal with the difficulty of growing in an uncomfortable world. These poems are structured to be as uncomfortable as the stories they reveal, they are awkward and honest, show the true damage of childhood shame rising into adulthood – they take unexpected turns: human trauma in a real twisted, surreal reality. A striking first pamphlet!” Hilda Sheehan

“Stephen Daniels takes the ordinary, the everyday and makes it strange and sinister – revealing how ordinary life is, in fact, rooted in strangeness. Daniels takes us on a journey through childhood and modern family life. But these are not happy or sentimental poems; they don’t shy away from the more difficult aspects of domestic life – often exploring ideas of miscommunication, regret and how families are casually cruel to one another. Daniels is a master recreating the implied sense of threat that often lurks behind the everyday. The language of the poems is deceptively light and playful, which make them a joy to read: “we stole a real imaginary lorry/that smelled of circus” (Grounded), but the real power of these poems is in the way he uses surreal and sometimes disjointed language in the spinning of his tales. The effect is not unlike finding yourself in a dream where everything is slightly off kilter. This wrong-footing made me want to revisit the poems again and again – and on each reading I discovered something new and exciting. Daniels is definitely a poet worth watching.” Julia Webb

Tell Mistakes I Love Them exposes social nerves and pokes at the wounds with poems that are very vulnerable and very poignant.

A sample poem from the pamphlet may be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Tell Mistakes I Love Them can be found here.

Grounded

Yesterday, when we were nine,

we stole a real imaginary lorry

that smelled of circus.

It had an elephant engine

with a flame-juggler sound.

It had unicycle seats

and lion-tamer windows

which we stole together

but stopped before the trapeze started.

Then we saw the shadow runners.

A tightrope chase caught us

with one leg over the fence

and the other not.

An ankle-drag pull

and we’re chained to the big-top prison

waiting for acrobats to take us home,

made to place our heads

into the roaring mouth of our lion-angry mum.

Our punishment, a ringmaster ear-clip

and a bedroom full of sad clown faces.

The Chemist's House -- Jude Higgins -- 

16 June 2017

“A collection that pokes softly at the spaces between people: sister, brother, father, mother, neighbour, friend. Higgins’ stories reveal moments where small truths, and lies, dwell. Understated and quiet, these small fictions paint lives gently, but oh so colourfully.” Michelle Elvy

“In interconnected, finely wrought flash fiction stories, Jude Higgins creates a  coming-of-age tapestry — of family love and conflict; and of a girl’s passage into womanhood. Higgins' flash pieces blend into one masterly and moving whole: poignant, loving, and profound in emotional impact.” Meg Pokrass

A sample story from this flash fiction pamphlet, which is also available as a kindle eBook, can be found below. More information and ordering for The Chemist's House can be found here.

Out of bounds

That day, my brother dared me to put pennies on the railway track. I lay on the bank waiting for the train to steam by, close enough to hear the crunch as the pennies flattened out. Because I didn't have my sweet money anymore, my brother dared me to nick liquorice and sherbet lemons from the sweet shop while the slow old lady fumbled out the back. I scooped two handfuls from the open jars and refused to share them with him. So we had a fight and he prised open my fingers and snatched away most of the liquorice.

At home, our parents were busy in the pharmacy so we went into my brother’s bedroom to drop marbles on people walking down the street. We were already in trouble after our father came out of the shop and shouted that we could kill someone doing that. But my brother dared me to go into the attic when everyone was asleep. The attic was out of bounds because that’s where Mr Perkins, the previous chemist, had stored arsenic for sheep-dip.  It was still there, in cardboard boxes. My father didn’t know what to do with it, now it was banned. My brother said I had to stay in the attic for an hour even though he knew Mr Perkins’ ghost came roaming at night. And while I was up there I had to taste the arsenic. If I didn't do that, he’d say I stole the sweets.

That night, I crept up the stairs while my brother watched from the doorway of his bedroom, timing me with his new watch. Even though I tiptoed very softly, the floorboards in the attic room swayed and creaked like my grandfather’s dentures. The room smelled of dust and something sweeter, like gone-off cherries. Moonlight filtered through the cobwebbed skylight and lit up the staring eyes of the toy lamb used for window displays. I thought I saw a shape in the corner of the room, heard a rustle and froze. But it was only my brother coming in to watch. He pointed to the boxes of arsenic.

                “You’ve got to tell me what it tastes like,” he whispered. “Then you can have the last piece.” He dangled a string of liquorice in front of me. “I'll tell on you, if you don’t.”  

             

I poked the tip of my finger into the white powder and licked up a few specks.

                “It doesn’t taste of anything.”

                “It won’t hurt you, then.”

When I’d gone downstairs, eaten the liquorice and swilled out my mouth under the cold tap, I looked in the mirror and opened wide as if I were at the doctor’s. My tongue was still black, like the inside of an oak tree struck by lightning.

I wanted to show my brother, but when I opened his bedroom door, he was already asleep.

Walking Backwards -- Charlie Hill -- 30 June 2017

The short fiction in Walking Backwards is very human and very distinctive.

"With Walking Backwards Charlie Hill gives us dense fragments of closely-observed lives, obsessive interiors and broken, unspoken loves. The result is touching, funny, melancholy.”  AL Kennedy

“Charlie Hill dissects the solitary, dignified struggles of day to day life with great tenderness – his stories are beautiful and moving, a balance of cool observation and tenderness. A brilliant collection.” Catherine O'Flynn

“Charlie Hill writes artfully about the gaps between people, of those caught out by love or hushed by pain, or others seeking order within chaos, solace in the face of change.” Catherine McNamara

This title is now out of stock. But more information about it can be found here.


Rice & Rain -- Romalyn Ante -- 7 August 2017

Rice & Rain is very rich and very distinct.

“Romalyn Ante's poems are exquisitely detailed and a real feast for the senses. She has an instinctive talent for crafting precise and finely-tuned poetry that captures the exact sensations –  potent, close to home and as incisive and accurate as a scalpel's 
first cut. Whether it is the sun's rays that ‘infiltrated your bones, filling them with gold’, or the heart which breaks open like a pomegranate, ‘the seeds, / rusty-red like rivets, / contour a constellation’, life's preciousness is measured here carefully in its proximity to death. These poems are gracefully poised and balanced perfectly, alive with their own irresistible songs of love and longing.” Jane Commane 

“Rice & Rain is an impressive first collection of poems that take us from the Philippines to Cannock Chase. The poems are confidently written – Romalyn Ante’s surprising and original imagery shows us how to fatten a boy with the boiled water from rice-rinsing; a handbag mirror made from solidified gin; cornflake sunsets.

“Her poems explore sickness and separation – the longing for the sour-sweet taste of home – but there is also emphasis on nurturing and nourishment. With many references to food from ‘sheen pieces of bullet tuna wrapped in banana leaves’ to ‘luggage stuffed with sun-dried squid’ it is a book you feel you could almost eat.” Jane Seabourne

WINNER of Saboteur Awards 2018 Best Poetry Pamphlet!!!

One of Vogue's '9 Poets to Know for World Poetry Day', March 2018!!!

Also 1 of '10 Poets Bound to Shift UK Poetry', fourhubs, March 2018

This title is now out of stock. But more information about it can be found here.

The Nagasaki Elder -- Antony Owen -- 

1 September 2017

"Antony Owen closely examines the human toll and the indiscriminate effects of chemical warfare in this new and affecting collection.  Owen’s exploration is both tender and melancholic, and his imagery of flesh transmuted is as beautiful as it is horrific.  This book sings and weeps of loss; it is a testimony to the survivors and the wounds that they carry; to the dead and the shadows they leave on the earth.” Helen Ivory

 “Antony Owen is the bravest British poet of his generation. He goes to places poetry doesn't visit and lingering there, crafts acts of testimony and tribute. He does what art is supposed to; raising us the highest so that we can see the deepest. The Nagasaki Elder in its stunning evocation of human suffering is simply his best work yet.” Joe Horgan

“The Nagasaki Elder is a beautiful and harrowing account of a journey through the bombed cities of Japan.  Unlike most poets who hold forth about atrocities, Antony Owen has been there.  He has spoken in depth to the Hibakusha and transformed their voices into some extraordinary poems.  And we must listen, if we don't want our world to end as theirs did.” Merryn Williams

The Nagasaki Elder is very very hard-hitting yet very tender.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE TED HUGHES AWARD FOR NEW WORK IN POETRY 2017!

A sample poem from this full-length collection may be enjoyed below. More about The Nagasaki Elder and ordering can be found here.

To feed a Nagasaki starling

She said don’t go to the shadows without water –

I have tried to erase him for sixty-four years

and my wrists are tired;

I have scrubbed the darkness of my son

so he could be buried at last in sunlight.

Don’t go to my son without removing your shoes –

I have tried to bathe him with prayers and carbolic

but he only gets blacker;

I have lived for ninety-nine years

and starlings are beginning to land by my feet.

Don’t wind the paralysed clock,

it is rebuilding the world with seared hands –

I have tried to turn back time

but God will not allow it in Nagasaki;

I had tried to make another child but gave birth to pink curd.

Don’t tell them my name,

and look me in the face when you see him –

I have tried to understand

why ink is only spilled by vaporised kin;

I have tried to write a haiku

for the willow which strokes my son.

Don’t disturb my son

when the raven plays in the shape of his spectre –

I have tried to shoo it away and it quarrels with my broomstick;

I have tried to tell my son that he was ten yards from living.

I have tried to feed a Nagasaki starling

when it drank the black rain;

I have tried to get it to sing so this wraith could be comforted –

 don’t disturb my grave and desecrate me

with twitching shadows.

Blink -- Jacqui Rowe -- 16 October 2017

“Jacqui Rowe’sBlink shares extraordinary visions of personhood and place, giving voice to the many voiceless figures in her finely tuned ekphrasis and emotive allegorical poems inspired by the likes of Apollinaire, Verlaine, and Lorca. Combined with plaintive elegies for both loved ones and her heartland, this is syntactically refreshing poetry that serves to move and inspire.” Robert Harper

“Sometimes a poetry collection won’t let you put it down. This is one such collection. In Blink, Jacqui Rowe has transcended the mere act of description, lifting the poems from the page with a lyrical palette knife, painting each scene with an intelligent, witty and moving style. This is how to write poetry. I will return to these poems again and again.” Wendy Pratt  

Blink is very very vibrant and mercurial.

A sample poem from this full-length collection may be enjoyed below. More about Blink and ordering can be found here.

Life in a Day

Our day was daffodils. I opened my eyes

in equinoctial dawn, shaped by winds

and cloud, saw buds crack

that would be fruit for our descendants.

No gloom until an evening star

told me I was ageing.

Night born, sun

starved, he was forged

in darkness, swaddled himself

in blindness to sleep, sometimes woke

frozen in memories of the sickle moon.

Yellow afternoon we met and wed,

he showed me chronicles of the asparagus

years, epochs of oysters, powdery

engravings of ancient snow

and something he called roses.

Somewhere Between Rose and Black --

Claire Walker -- 1 December 2017

“There is a disquiet that moves through these poems. Walker explores what it means to create a sense of home, and how the people within it build our longings around us. Beautiful work by a rising star in poetry. These are words that linger after the last page.” Angela Readman

“Claire Walker’s quiet, almost still, narrative through these poems could reflect their rural setting or the sadness within the protagonist, yet that quietness is deceptive. There are passions here amid the juxtaposition of man and stag.  These poems will have you checking your fingernails for soil, seeing antlers in your peripheral vision.” Brett Evans

Somewhere Between Rose and Black is very earthy and very enigmatic.

A sample poem from the collection may be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Somewhere Between Rose and Black can be found here.

Shortlisted in Saboteur Awards 2018 Best Poetry Pamphlet category!!!

Presence

I give up watching for antlers 

through the dark. Lying awake, 

I know their presence:

the gnaw of teeth against the night.

I’ve begun to identify with them. Come dawn,

I slip my feet inside the print of hooves,

touch their bite marks with my fingers, 

taste early shoots on my tongue. 

I plant for deer now; 

sow peas to feed hungry nights, 

realise nothing can grow to full height, 

accept the elegant destruction.