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 10th-anniversary-year titles: 2025!
The Price of Happiness -- Nikki Robson --
5 February 2025
“The Price of Ηappiness neither holds back nor wastes a word in its tale of a marriage from unsettling omens (‘Goodness, I’m weeping said Mum’) to full-blown violent coerciveness (‘the sore in the wall/where the dinner was thrown’) and out through the numbness and the decree absolute to the glimmers of a new life (‘it crackled like fireworks,/illegal for so long’). You barely take a breath before you’re holding it in shock at the damage we do each other in the altogether too close up of a dysfunctional relationship. It is a tribute to Nikki Robson’s skill that this is accomplished without sentiment, catching our attention and our compassion entirely through telling detail and command of phrasing – these poems are constantly quotable in their exactitude – ‘my label of a husband’; ‘my mummy-smile’; ‘this Vitruvian boy’ – and are nowhere more moving than in their grasp of the impact on the children: ‘[I] tried to describe the end of her world/as the beginning of another’.” W. N. Herbert
“‘The divorced cannot/bury their dead.’ Nikki Robson scours that truth, asks where it leads. We are used to graphic detonations of trauma, but here, the poet, well able to apply her ‘mummy-smile’, layers words, finds metaphor, draws deeply on sources and places. Unfolding her narrative, she never neglects a poet's first responsibility: to language. These poems haunt as mere shock cannot.” Beth McDonough
The Price of Happiness is very visceral and very contemplative.
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-4-1
34 pages
R.R.P. £6.99
A sample poem from The Price of Happiness can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for The Price of Happiness can be found here.
Signature dish
We ended the conversation laughing –
weren’t we meant for each other,
making curry on both sides of the Irish Sea?
I’d ground the aromatics and rubbed the lamb,
marinaded it overnight in wine and thyme.
Now low and slow on the hob, it bubbled
up intermittently, splatted spice on steel.
Coriander clung to the sharp blade,
dough bedded in the warming drawer.
Three months later I opened the cupboards
to join my kitchen with his.
Rows of packets of Vesta.
The furthest island -- Cherine -- 14 May 2025
“What a pleasure to discover Cherine El-Bash’s poems. Like swallows, they soar and dip between lands and languages, homes, losses, old and new loves. These are poems of depth and complexity, which urge us to think, feel and return again and again to them.”
Liz Berry
“Cherine El-Bash's poems seek the right words and story when different cultural experiences and languages are family inheritance. Silence is a character here, next to fulsome, lyrical expression. A fresh, exciting voice – one to watch.”
Ruth Stacey
“The furthest island brings together multiple strands and influences to give us poems that cast life and the surrounding world in a new light. Here, experiences are simultaneously familiar and strange, with unusual imagery and language used to powerful narrative and emotional effect. An unforgettable read.”
Sarah Leavesley, V. Press Prize judge
The furthest island is very nomadic and very rooted.
Winner of the V. Press Prize for Poetry 2024-25
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-5-8
32 pages
R.R.P. £6.99
On the day we moved to Finland
My mother was picking lice from my scalp
placing them one by one on my auntie’s kitchen table.
They tried to limp away but my sister was counting
forty-three and squeezing them
between her eight-year-old fingers and the sixties wood.
It would be just us for three months.
I never thanked my cousin for the parasites –
to know my mother’s hands in my hair
her laughter in her mother’s tongue so close
to my own ears. She spoke words I’d forgotten
and she heard each one of mine.
sum of her PARTS -- Laura Besley -- 6 June 2025
“Laura Besley’s tiny, enormous, sharp, dark, witty, surreal, moving, brave, joyous hybrid pieces will slip and slice into your heart, your mind, your softest parts and leave you feeling as if you have been deliciously dissected, seen, heard and put back together. Here is pain, here is insight, here is redemption.”
Tania Hershman
“Laura Besley's sum of her PARTS is satisfying and jarring. I love the sparsity of her language and her ability to bring so much to the page. Her words are surprising, absurd at times, but also full of the contradictory feelings many women have on a day-to-day basis. It's easy to see parts of you in these pages; it's both beautiful and unnerving.”
Nikki Dudley
Sum of her PARTS is very tiny and very fierce.
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-8-9
36 pages
R.R.P. £7.50
unrequited
Last month, I was in love with the security guard at Sainsbury’s; the month before, the butcher. Now, every Thursday, when the dustbin man waves, I imagine him emptying himself inside me. My lips pulsate, long for the sweet ache of poison-apple kisses. I wave back, mouth cold and colour-drained.
Dreaming Backward -- Alex Reed -- 20 June 2025
“Who would have thought forty-nine short pieces about Butlin’s holiday camps could be so touching? A kaleidoscopic look at the past, Dreaming Backward is an enchantment – together all the vivid, intense parts create strange patterns, catching the light of memory. Reading it, reality shifts and we are taken by surprise, travelling in time, nearer the tumble and drift where we forget we live.”
Linda France
“In this exhilarating poetic documentary, Alex Reed transports us to the ‘brightly hued reality’ of Butlin’s holiday camps with the All-Star Redcoats’ Show and the Lovely Legs competition. Dreaming Backward is a compelling social history of a pre-digital era. But it is also a musing on perceptions of time, how we choose to fill our leisure hours, and how that might be judged by others. In its playful hybrid form, reminiscent of the Japanese zuihitsu tradition, incorporating myriad sources and using fragments, collage techniques, and occasional tracts of white space that provide interpretative space for the reader, Reed’s movement on the page echoes the shifting, fragmented nature of memory. This startling mosaic of 49 passages numbered backwards will leave you interrogating your personal history– choices not taken, lives that might have been, and decisions yet to be played out.” Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-7-2
36 pages
R.R.P. £7.50
11.
When we got home, I came down with a bug which kept me off school for the rest of the week. Lying in bed sweating and woozy, transistor radio on the pillow beside me, yearning to catch the song they’d played at the disco, ‘Behind a Painted Smile’, with its stately flute intro before the drums crash into action commanding your body to pay attention, then the rush and release of that soaring chorus, half-euphoria, half-desperation, the loveliest sound I’d ever heard piercing my restless, hormonal heart.
Palmer -- R.M. Francis -- 19 September 2025
“These poems offer what feels like a privileged insight into the poet's intense and sensitive spirituality, and his view of the world around him. Personal yet ambitious in its spiritual reach, this poetry captivates the reader with its close attention to detail and language. It reminds us of the natural relationship between religion and poetry, and is a compelling poetic experience.” Sally Read
“R. M. Francis’ Palmer is a vestry where the choral chanting of sainthood echoes off the walls. His poems are burning votive candles to sacred spaces and experiences while wearing the vestments of humanity; the body, attention, parenthood. These poems are lovingly put together and are ultimately ‘kissing in the presence of’ the divine, saints and being human.” Roy McFarlane
Palmer is very wandering and very wondering.
ISBN: 978-1-0682701-0-9
36 pages
R.R.P. £7.50
A sample poem from
Palmer may be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for
Palmer can be found
here.
Epitaphios
Mother cradles head in the laying down
and salted drops of sorrow slip across skin.
The others hold back with pensive frown –
the night is dark; the air is thin.
Salted drops of sorrow slipping over skin,
Joseph lifts lifeless hand to lips.
The night is dark; the air is thin.
Not just a kiss but a pleading,
Joseph lifts lifeless hand. We’re lipped
in the presence of beings in portal.
Not just a kiss but a pleading
in John’s placing of hollowed feet.
We’re present here, amongst portals,
that bridge terra with firmament.
John lowers those hallowed feet,
covers them in linen –
another bridge between earth and air,
another sail, another astrolabe
covers us in the linen
of slave, bride and king.
Another sail, another astrolabe
returned to soil. We rerun too.
And learn to step as slave, bride, king.
That pieta marks each seer.
Return to soil, and rerun too.
I sit still, even as palmer,
as pieta’s mark widens eyes
with salted drops of sorrow.
Rust Canyon -- Lauren Mason -- 22 October 2025
“In Rust Canyon the Big Sky blazes as bright as ever, but in the hands of Lauren Mason the light is also a thing of terror, an agent of neglect and even violence, as the powerful compaction of the style makes it at once a vast landscape and a trembling domestic space. Force and fragility battle in this realm –
how should I call for love? is the cry from its soul – as humans, animals, plants and stones share their common losses and desires and despairing thirst, and ‘All the ways I couldn’t leave/led here…’ This is a powerful, plangent and deeply moving collection.”
Glyn Maxwell
“Like the painter Georgia O’Keeffe (a presiding spirit in these poems), Lauren Mason tracks beauty and peril in the vast landscapes of canyon, desert, river, and transposes these terrains to the contour of bodies in passion, in rest, in (re)birth. Such locations – actual and known, but also taken from the world of dream – are vividly rendered in Mason’s assured voice. These poems are diamond-like in their brilliance and multifaceted reflections, but they are also sharp and tough. It is always exciting to encounter a debut pamphlet, but this is one I am particularly excited to see in the world.”
Tamar Yoseloff
Rust Canyon is very ecological and very unflinching.
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-9-6
36 pages
R.R.P. £7.50
Vacation
we drove the desert for ten days
through monsoon season
the canyons smelt of ozone
roadside deer were pixellations
my mother bought pottery
painted the colour of bruises
in pastel motels we watched true-crime shows
where men stalked women with buck knives
all those wives’ and daughters’
voices distorting into white noise
down the emergency line and we did not
look at each other often I wouldn’t sleep
the lightning quick and expected as a fist
splitting the already swollen sky
