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 2018 titles and celebrate a few extra delights from that year (for pamphlets published the previous year)!
Romalyn Ante's Rice & Rain winner of Saboteur Awards 2018 Best Poetry Pamphlet!
Claire Walker's Somewhere Between Rose and Black shortlisted!
How to Parallel Park -- James Davey -- 30 January 2018
"These poems by James Davey are vivid, articulate and entertaining. They evoke the peculiar intensity of childhood fears, the angst of adolescence, the tremors of first loves. Davey has a gift for clear-eyed dramatic presentation, as well as an often-humorous take on human condition and a true empathy for the various characters he comes across, be they ‘pyroman’ a down-and-out who accumulates trash to burn, the terrified child taken on a hunting trip, or the lover discovering the ‘colours’ of a girlfriend. This is a promising and well-wrought debut." Amy Wack
"Davey’s work is confident, crafted, elegant in its simplicity. The poems are full of moments of recognition for the reader, subtle emotive power balancing understated humour. I trust him to show me something worth seeing with no fluff around the substance." Anna Freeman
Set in England and Italy, the poems of How to Parallel Park are very emotive, very molto a pelle.
A sample poem can be found below. More information and ordering for How to Parallel Park can be found here.
Hand-puppets
I am ten, slouched on a kitchen chair,
staring through a television set
on which the presenter is talking to hand-puppets.
Sitting on the back step, Dad pulls a dead rabbit
from a plastic bag, calls me over. Watch carefully,
he says. He cuts a surgical incision in its belly,
spoons out its viscera with his fingers.
Intestines slip from its gut. I shiver.
A delicacy, says Dad, smacking his lips.
The carcass lolls over his hand – eyes enamel.
He splays it on the stone step, severs
its head, legs, presses down on his blade,
cracking the pelvis in two –
a sound like splitting wood.
He rips free the pelt, presents it to me.
I hold it in open hands.
Against the Pull of Time -- Jenna Plewes -- 12 April 2018
“In tender, beautiful and unsentimental language Jenna Plewes takes us on a journey, walking barefoot on wet sand, sitting in a ruined nunnery, musing on the shoreline 'handcuffed to the sea'. it is a long time since I have read a collection that moved me so. One line somehow says it all: 'so many things are precious in the leaving and the letting go'. This is a collection I want to read over and over – also rare these days.” Roselle Angwin
Against the Pull of Time is very very deep-rooted and seamlessly woven.
A sample poem from the pamphlet may be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Against the Pull of Time can be found here.
A Thin Place
A hand-span measure where time dissolves
in a turquoise sea.
A cell where your mind squeezes through bars,
spirals the thermals.
Here, ideas hatch like midges in sunlight.
Wind indifferent to everything but itself
will temper you, silence will free you from explanations
and excuses. The chill of rippled sand
will teach your naked feet to walk with tenderness
across the thin-skinned earth.
This place is a heart-squeeze of finding and losing,
where you will walk the machair,
try to snare a singing bird, cage it and learn its song,
where you must set it free.
There's Something Macrocosmic About All of This -- Santino Prinzi -- 1 June 2018
The short fiction in There’s Something Macrocosmic About All of This by Santino Prinzi is very human and very heart-provoking.
“Hilarious, playful, profound and fierce, these stories ring with wonder at the messy world of sex and love. Prinzi's fiction is addictive because of their unflinching sensuality and sharp attention to emotional detail.” Meg Pokrass
“In There's Something Macrocosmic About All of This, Santino Prinzi looks for the big truths in everyday moments. From coming out to falling out, each of these stories is a nuanced study of human nature – full of insight and wit.” Christopher Allen
Succulent
The succulent is growing from a white porcelain pot on the kitchen windowsill. Its colouring varies in the light, from an almost neon that dazzles to a deep pine reminiscent of Christmas.
Jenni is sitting at the kitchen table. She’s reading Finnegan’s Wake. This is the only type of literature she’ll read. Real literature. Literature by dead people. This frustrates Kate. Though she can tolerate wet towels left on the bed, Kate wishes that Jenni would accept that contemporary fiction isn’t all Fifty Shades of Grey, poorly written crime thrillers, or some Frankenstein’s monster of the two. The monster novel exists in a bookcase or on a laptop somewhere in the world, of that Kate is certain, but not in this house.
Kate places a black coffee in front of Jenni and her white coffee on the other side of the table. She takes a seat and removes her bookmark from White Teeth. The bookmark is a metal letter ‘K’ that slightly tears the page if Kate isn’t careful. They both have a sip of coffee, not quite in unison, then Jenni reaches for the sugar. She struggles, her fingertips skimming the edge of the sugar pot. Kate pretends not to notice; her eyes are fixed on the word ‘memory’. She can’t help but watch Jenni in her periphery vision. Any other person may snigger, then offer to help. Kate just sits. Because it isn’t only the literature or the wet towels dampening the bed sheets; it’s everything that is and everything that isn’t. Everything that was. Everything that could be so much more than this.
Beneath the succulent’s healthy leaves that hang over the pot’s brim, dead leaves have shrivelled into soil that has become too dry. They are slowly decomposing, one on top of the other, out of sight. A bigger pot is needed if it is going to continue to grow.
Three Men on the Edge -- Michael Loveday -- 30 June 2018
The story of the three men – Gus, Denholm and Martyn – is narrated in three distinctive sections: Denholm – Cause for Alarm; Gus – The Invisible World; Martyn – Chewing Glass.
“A beautifully crafted novella-in-flash, small and perfect slices of life written with skill and heart.” Kit de Waal
“In his debut novella Michael Loveday sketches with a delicate brush the colourful lives of three troubled men living on the edge of London. With poetic language and emotional precision, Loveday writes like a cartographer about the wilderness we call ‘the human heart’.” Meg Pokrass
“This is a novella full of the aches and bruises left by loneliness. It's written in fragments, like a bottle smashed during a solitary boozing session, but it coheres around the vividly captured edgeland that haunts the three men. This a heart-felt book, but its prose is controlled by a steely intelligence. It's funny, too – and moving and scary. Michael Loveday is a name to watch. He's writing a new kind of fiction.” David Swann
Three Men on the Edge is very richly shaded and very unconventional.
Shortlisted in Saboteur Awards 2019 Best Novella category!!!
From (I) Denholm – Cause for Alarm
i. Lost Object
(Where are the fragranced pillows, where are the flying horses) Denholm balances the square box on his palm, lifts the purple lid, and inside, instead of hazelnut whirls and lemon crunches, resting in the depressions of the plastic tray, are the fifteen pairs of keys which used to open Gorgeous Gifts, no longer a going concern (where are the Union Jack beard trimmers, where are the tiger-print purses), he closes his eyes, fingers the keys, they rattle in his brain, fifty years trading on Rickmansworth High Street, Watford, Chorleywood, Bushey, St. Albans, places where mother’s business dug into Hertfordshire soil (find us the faux-diamond ballerinas, find us the Spitfire key-rings); how he cherished helping buyers turn panic to inspiration, and he drifts back to the Rickmansworth storeroom, clambering through stuffed cardboard boxes, the one-chair staffroom with its grown-up magazines (go find the Hertfordshire egg-timers, go find the invisible inks), and the smell of Grandma’s daily gammon rolls, how the shop became a home, how he memorised those cluttered shelves (go get the coin-box skulls, go get the footballing pigs), and how much he loathed the family party-trick, the loss of light as they put the blindfold in place.
[First published in Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine]
From (II) Gus – The Invisible World
ix. Town Ditch, September
Five corpses float at the surface. Carried in the water is a dark sludge that seems to be silt: when he dips his hand, the sludge smells only of earth.
The next day many more litter the ditch. He gives up counting. They bob in the slow current, spinning as they snag against branches and leaves.
He looks closer, sees others, alive, rising to the surface, their gills beating for breath amid the black silt. Chubs, bullheads, minnows, roaches. Glinting silver scales, sandy-yellow blotches, flecks of gold, orange. The dead ones float flat on their sides.
He shivers. The bare eyes stare up, gawping blindly at him.
xxxi.
Sometimes Anja praises Martyn so highly she makes him feel like Superman. He has the Superman dream always the same way: not the caped crusader saving the civilised world, but Clark Kent the reporter wearing preppy spectacles and befuddled by Lois Lane—except Lois is Anja—and Anja’s nipples are made of kryptonite. But this is a dream and Lois-Anja is also somehow Lex Luthor at one and the same time—looking like Gene Hackman with his big-collared 1970s shirt—and Lois-Anja Hackman takes off Clark Kent’s glasses, kisses his brow sadly, then draws his head closer to her deadly, trembling chest.
[First published in Funny Bone: Flashing for Comic Relief]
A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache -- Charley Barnes -- 11 July 2018
“The poems in A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache will make you re-think your relationship with pizza, garlic bread and your mobile phone. These sharp, sad and wry observations – on the reality of living with mental illness and disability, the heartbreak of the everyday, and perseverance despite everything – capture what it is to be twenty-something, in love, and healing through food. This is an exciting debut pamphlet from a new and honest voice.” Jenna Clake“In her debut pamphlet, Charley Barnes examines the reality of heartbreak and its different forms, highlighting how aspects of modern society can play – often brutally – on our insecurities: the wish to be prettier, more popular, more lovable. These poems deftly explore the bitter, lasting sting of loss and how it shapes us. Yet there is also the tenderness of possibility at play – a sweetness to offset the sharpness encountered by a young woman trying to navigate her way; a knowing, self-deprecating humour that shines through, even in dark experiences. There is a wisdom of the importance of nurturing here, accompanied by the will that, whatever happens, ‘you have to keep going, don’t you?’ ('The lie my mum told me').” Claire Walker
A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache is very quirky yet very full-blooded.
My therapist says...
I tell my therapist that I don’t want to be
the sort of person who prefixes sentences with:
“My therapist says...”
My therapist says that’s an irrational concern.
My therapist tells me that you’ve told her that I’m writing
on the walls again: hurried hieroglyphics
scribbled around the house. I tell my therapist
how telling the assumption is that if you can’t
understand something it must be foreign.
This worsens your ignorance; it doesn’t excuse it.
I tell my therapist that when I’m talking to you, I start
sentences with ‘My therapist says’ to legitimise my claims.
My therapist asks whether I think that’s a sensible thing
to be doing to my partner. And I tell my therapist that it is
ambiguous, but also the only way I can get anything done.
When my therapist asks why I’m writing on the walls again,
I tell my therapist in a level tone:
“There are important things that I need to write down.”
Unable Mother -- Helen Calcutt -- 4 September 2018
“This work challenges our abstract and cosy notions of motherhood with a brutal and vulnerable delve into the psyche. Calcutt grapples, sometimes violently, sometimes with aching tenderness, each hard-won line ‘like squeezing / flesh and fruit from the bone, / this terrible love’. Yet these poems reach even further, into the rent world, and the remarkable kinds of beauty to which poetry alone can allude. This is an intimate book, the kind that comes in close to your ear to whisper dark secrets and unavoidable truths. These poems are spare, careful, insistent--and devastatingly good.” Robert Peake
“Helen Calcutt’s poems are full of surprising and intricate moments - they unfold like origami, deftly packing and unpacking themselves into new forms and presenting the reader with confidences, secrets and insight, the tender words for the things that are hard to say. In their explorations of motherhood, loss and discovery, Calcutt’s poetry is steeled with precise language, always finding clarity forged in the heart of experience. These are intimate poems which are felt in the body, and written with a keen physicality – ‘love is meant to live on in the body’ writes Calcutt, ‘My flesh making heaven of it.’ In their makings and re-makings, each poem here reveals this to be a remarkable and potent debut.” Jane Commane
Unable Mother is very revelatory and very achingly poised.
A sample poem from the full-length collection can be enjoyed below. More information, ordering and Unable Mother's cover image ‘Retreat’ by Katherine Sheers (http://www.katherinesheers.com/) can be found here.
The listening tree
I don’t know when this began. I have an ear
for the beautiful/terrible
sounds, soaked with rain.
With my hearing in such leaves,
I can bear the worst of human music.
I’ve gone so very far, listening
without moving. My roots are bound
by ribbons in the earth
which lengthen into my back
and I sway, as it happens
in these roots from my back. I listen,
and sleep between the dark
and the dark
where my hearing is suspended.
And between this and my skull,
it’s all dark matter,
where earth and her sweetness
have darkened to gather each
bone to a bone,
every coil to a chord.
I sing, though you wouldn’t know it.
My mouth is sunk in a pool
of old life,
it glitters and tries
to sing of its light,
and cries owl-cries
for a secret way out. Still, I bend
my thick spine
to bare my neck, and touch you.
You could almost be a stranger
who's found me by a road,
you hold out your arms
as if you hold the great world,
you place your hands
on my body and hair. Your tears
catch on the quiet in the air,
and shake and glitter with the shakings
of your hair;
something in your shape
is like a tree, like me. I barely brush you
and your mouth comes alive on my light,
I barely sigh I am a temple, I am
soaking you with light.
If I could birth myself a second time,
I’d have your soul.
You rock and sigh ‘oh I’m done, Mother,
I’m done.’ But the young, my love,
are free, or didn’t you know? There’s no
god in this world.
The closest thing to prayer is
a child who says she hurts.
Like love -- Brenda Read-Brown-- 7 November 2018
“The poems in Like love are uncluttered. They are simple, profound, and immensely touching. There is great empathy at work here, an empathy without which no real poems can exist. Read-Brown deserves a far wider readership than hitherto, and one hopes with this collection she will find it.” Brian Patten
“These approachable poems are full of humour and life experience. Like love faces up to ageing, loss and injustice with an eye for contradiction and detail. Poems about clearing out a child’s bedroom after they have left home, about angels, first love and sunbathing topless exude unquenchable enthusiasm for living! A collection to relish from a seasoned and generous poet.” Chloe Garner, Artistic Director, Ledbury Poetry Festival
“The most prolific slam winner the UK has ever had; a joy of a performer with a huge range of material that varies in style and content.” Steve Larkin
“These poems remind me of the tingles. I’m so happy to feel them. This collection makes me want to run outside, kiss, fall in leaves and then write.” Hollie McNish
“The most prolific slam winner the UK has ever had; a joy of a performer with a huge range of material that varies in style and content.” Steve Larkin
“These poems remind me of the tingles. I’m so happy to feel them. This collection makes me want to run outside, kiss, fall in leaves and then write.” Hollie McNish
Like love is very open and very unpredictable.
Poetry has no learning objective
Words are winds
that ruffle thoughts
and blow down structures
we thought solid.
The man with a cobra
tattooed across his forehead
might be a gentle vegan.
Some people spend their spare time
painting angels.
The kid “you’ll need to watch for”
will give me images
fresh as mermaids.
Rhyme can hurt,
and metaphor disturb.
Hugs and cake
are both important.
Words are winds on water,
and water is what we’re made of.
These nights at home -- a pamphlet of poems by Alex Reed with images from photographer Keren Banning.
These nights at home, which follows on from Alex Reed’s earlier V. Press pamphlet A Career in Accompaniment, is very personal, and yet very familiar. This longer pamphlet voices the loneliness and isolation that follow bereavement, and the predicament of trying to begin anew. Moments of tenderness, flashback, longing and love flicker through the mind and heart as the months pass. The poems are accompanied by Keren Banning’s striking series of photographic images that are simultaneously abstract and intimate, drawing the reader further into this fragmented landscape.
“The most striking feature of Alex Reed’s poems in These nights at home is their clarity – a transparency that allows the reader in to the emotions and experience they explore. This lucid quality allows complex and deep feelings to be expressed vividly. Being able to approach the most difficult human experience so directly and honestly makes the poems moving and compelling. Specific concrete details convey loss and grief, loneliness, the pull of memory. Recurring motifs – empty rooms, hallways, doors – suggest the slow and repetitive process of grieving. There is nothing spare in the poems. Every word earns its place. The voice is quiet, restrained, attentive. The poems are not sombre. There are flashes of humour and a range of tone is created through the different poetic forms – prose poems building unsettling extended metaphors, experimental layouts suggesting a shifting sense of memory and perception. The pamphlet shows the reader what it means to be living with loss, conveying the process of grief with its ‘pacing hours’, and just a hint of a tentative way forward. It reminds us how, in the right hands, the economy of poetry can communicate the most complex of emotions.” Cynthia Fuller
“Less fraught than A Career in Accompaniment, more a slow immersive haunting, the poems in These nights at home enter a different unknown – the oceanic space of loss and absence. Tentative minimalism provides the key to open up distances, far and near. Here, less is more – reflective territory exquisitely distilled in Keren Banning’s spectral photographs.” Linda France
A sample poem and a sample image from this longer pamphlet can be found below. More information and ordering for These nights at home can be found here.
SAMPLE POEM & PHOTO from THESE NIGHTS AT HOME
deep river
These nights at home -- Alex Reed & Keren Banning -- 30 November 2018
These nights at home, which follows on from Alex Reed’s earlier V. Press pamphlet A Career in Accompaniment, is very personal, and yet very familiar. This longer pamphlet voices the loneliness and isolation that follow bereavement, and the predicament of trying to begin anew. Moments of tenderness, flashback, longing and love flicker through the mind and heart as the months pass. The poems are accompanied by Keren Banning’s striking series of photographic images that are simultaneously abstract and intimate, drawing the reader further into this fragmented landscape.
“The most striking feature of Alex Reed’s poems in These nights at home is their clarity – a transparency that allows the reader in to the emotions and experience they explore. This lucid quality allows complex and deep feelings to be expressed vividly. Being able to approach the most difficult human experience so directly and honestly makes the poems moving and compelling. Specific concrete details convey loss and grief, loneliness, the pull of memory. Recurring motifs – empty rooms, hallways, doors – suggest the slow and repetitive process of grieving. There is nothing spare in the poems. Every word earns its place. The voice is quiet, restrained, attentive. The poems are not sombre. There are flashes of humour and a range of tone is created through the different poetic forms – prose poems building unsettling extended metaphors, experimental layouts suggesting a shifting sense of memory and perception. The pamphlet shows the reader what it means to be living with loss, conveying the process of grief with its ‘pacing hours’, and just a hint of a tentative way forward. It reminds us how, in the right hands, the economy of poetry can communicate the most complex of emotions.” Cynthia Fuller
“Less fraught than A Career in Accompaniment, more a slow immersive haunting, the poems in These nights at home enter a different unknown – the oceanic space of loss and absence. Tentative minimalism provides the key to open up distances, far and near. Here, less is more – reflective territory exquisitely distilled in Keren Banning’s spectral photographs.” Linda France
SAMPLE POEM & PHOTO from THESE NIGHTS AT HOME
deep river
friends say it’s early yet
your picture on the fireplace, smiling
it takes a year
your reading specs on the table
it takes two years
folded clothes still on the shelves
it takes four years
faint trace of you from the wool
there is a river that runs within –
vast, uncharted, rising
