Changing...NPD, submissions, new titles & more

This Thursday is National Poetry Day with a whole range of readings, poetry sharing and inspirational events taking place across the U.K.

This year's NPD theme is change. Life, poetry and publishing are full of change, particularly in the contemporary high-tech era. At V. Press, we're pleased to celebrate both poetry and change every day, and especially this week, in this blogpost.

V. Press is very very proud of all its authors and their poetry and fiction, making the wheel new, in their own way. On this score, we have some review news and a few more announcements about titles already lined up for next year...

REVIEWS

V. Press is very very happy to share two new reviews, of Michael Loveday's flash fiction novella Three Men on the Edge and Helen Calcutt's debut poetry collection Unable Mother.

"...Three Men on the Edge by Michael Loveday? Not boring...

"The beauty of this book, overall, is its not-neatness, its focus on the out-of-focus, its one minute a story, its next minute a footnote, its edginess, its familiarity, its murkiness, it’s really good."

Jonathan Cardew, Bending Genres, full review here

Sample flashes and more on the novella can be found here. Three Men on the Edge can also be ordered using the Paypal link below. 

Three Men on the Edge (including P&P)

Three Men on the Edge (including P&P for the U.K. only) £12.50 GBP Three Men on the Edge (including P&P for Rest of the World) £17.50 GBP

A new review  and analysis of poems in Helen Calcutt's debut collection Unable Mother by Emma Lee includes:

“The language is precise and allows the poems to build layers of insight...

“The poems are intimate in their offerings of insights and draw from considered experience using precise, spare language to explore vulnerability and to seek clarity. It’s good to see the less-explored side of motherhood expressed with compassion and intelligence.”

Emma Lee, full review here

Sample poems and more on the collection can be found here. Unable Mother can also be ordered using the Paypal link below. 

Unable Mother (including P&P)

Unable Mother (including P&P for the U.K. only) £12.50 GBP Unable Mother (including P&P for Rest of the World) £17.50 GBP

SUBMISSIONS & NEW TITLES

Following on from guest editor selections and other imminent pamphlets and collection news in our blogpost at the end of August, we can now reveal details of a few more new titles.

Lined up for the start of 2019, V. Press has poetry pamphlets Making Waves Albert Einstein: Science & Life by Martin Zarrop and Heroines on the Blue Peninsula by Becky Varley-Winter.

Later in the year we also have debut collections from Nichola Deane and Charles Lauder, as well as a new collection from V. Press designer and talented poet Ruth Stacey!

But these are just some of the poetry titles lined up for next year. V. Press has more to come - including next year's flash fiction titles...There will be more news and announcements on all these over the coming months, as well as new author biographies being added to Our writers/Illustrators page.

On the submissions front, all those authors who had poetry and flash fiction manuscripts shortlisted from the submissions window earlier this year, should now have received an email about their submission.

Final decisions were harder and closer than ever this year - so many more manuscripts V. Press would have taken on with more resources. We wish all shortlisted authors the very best.

Following on more generally from the submissions process, V. Press editor Sarah Leavesley has put together a short (eight A4 pages) guidance sheet on 'Structuring a Pamphlet'. The advice and points to consider are based on Sarah's own experience as a writer putting together her pamphlets and collections, as well as her work as an editor reading and working on other writers' manuscripts. This guidance sheet is mainly intended for those putting together a poetry pamphlet. But some of the points on it may also be useful for flash pamphlets and full collections.

This guide is free, though a voluntary Tip-jar donation of £2 is invited.

For a pdf copy of 'Structuring a Pamphlet', please either email Sarah at vpresspoetry@hotmail.com or click on the paypal Tip-jar donation button below.

FROM NEW TITLES TO NEW FACES

V. Press is also very very delighted to share the news that Kibriya Merhrban will be joining us as a University of Birmingham Post-Graduate Cultural Intern in partnership with Writing West Midlands.  (Our thanks to Writing West Midlands for organising this.) Kibriya will be working with V. Press for a half-day a week from the end of October 2018-February 2019, so look out for more from Kibriya over the coming weeks...

Kibriya Mehrban is a recent graduate of English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham and is working with V. Press as part of her internship with Writing West Midlands. She loves poetry in all its forms and looks forward to working with V. Press and contributing to their continued success. Kibriya’s poetry featured in the anthology This is Not Your Final Form (Emma Press, 2017) and she has also written for the Apples and Snakes website. Twitter: @KibriyaTM 

Happy National Poetry Day (Week) 2018!

Free Verse

September: seasons of mists, mellow fruitfulness - and the London Poetry Book Fair!!!

V. Press is very very delighted to be heading to London for Free Verse, the annual Poetry Book Fair, on Saturday.

This year the fair has been organised by The Poetry Society, and takes place at a new venue: Senate House (William Beveridge Hall), London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, from 11am to 5pm.

Free Verse is an all-day bazaar, market, library, meeting place, performance venue, information resource and more. Celebrating the vitality of contemporary poetry in the UK, publishers and organisations both large and small, both experimental and traditional, display and sell their work direct to the public.

More than 80 publishers and poetry organisations are taking part this year, with the event also offering workshops and daytime readings.

More about this year's fair can be found here. Meanwhile, here at V. Press, we're busy packing and planning special sales offers. It's always so lovely to be able to meet readers in person, so please do stop by and say hello!

Launching Unable Mother

V. Press is very very delighted to launch Helen Calcutt's debut poetry collection Unable Mother.

“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.

R.R.P. £9.99

A sample poem from the collection can be enjoyed below.

BUY Unable Mother now, using the paypal link below. 

Unable Mother (including P&P)

Unable Mother (including P&P for the U.K. only) £12.50 GBP Unable Mother (including P&P for Rest of the World) £17.50 GBP

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.

Unable Mother's cover image ‘Retreat’ by Katherine Sheers (http://www.katherinesheers.com/)

Reviews, new titles and forthcoming teasers...

V. Press is very very pleased to share some new reviews and news of titles out soon.

NEW REVIEWS

"Claire Walker’s Somewhere Between Rose And Black was shortlisted in this year’s Saboteur Awards, and it is easy to see why it is so well loved....

"Walker’s style is poised, trembling on a knife’s edge, eloquent on emotional frailty and unspoken intimacies. We follow the speaker through a whole narrative arc of temptation, infidelity, and the hope for forgiveness. The stag who causes damage to the garden brings trouble, but is, in the end, preferable to a pruned and suppressed landscape, reflecting the speaker’s own ‘untamed’ qualities and her desire for warmth and contact."

Becky Varley-Winter, Sabotage Reviews, full review here

More on the pamphlet and a sample poem may be found here.

BUY Somewhere Between Rose and Black now, using the paypal link below.

Somewhere Between Rose and Black (with P&P options)

Somewhere Between Rose and Black (with P&P for UK delivery only) £7.50 GBP Somewhere Between Rose and Black (with P&P for rest of world) £12.99 GBP

"Written with love, honesty, and a hint of frustration at times, A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache will take you from one end of the emotional spectrum and back again... A brilliant collection and I'm looking forward to more from Charley Barnes in the future!"

Daniel Burton, The Writing Dragon, full review here

More on the pamphlet and a sample poem may be found here.

BUY a copy of A Z-Hearted Guide to Heartache now using the paypal link below.

A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache (including P&P)

A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache (including P&P for the U.K. only) £7.50 GBP A Z-hearted Guide to... (including P&P for Rest of the World) £12.99 GBP

TEASERS...

Last blogpost, we revealed details of our first guest editors and the pamphlets they've selected as forthcoming V. Press publications.

V. Press is also very pleased to share the news of two new pamphlets by existing V. Press poets Alex Reed and Kathy Gee. Kathy Gee's forthcoming Checkout mixes elements of flash fiction, poetry and radio play to create a compelling and characterful poetry narrative. Working in collaboration with photographer Keren Banning,  Alex Reed's These nights at home is a longer pamphlet that both stands alone and continues the narrative from his earlier A Career in Accompaniment.

Early 2019 also sees the publication of John Lawrence's debut collection The boy who couldn't say his name so we're  already looking forward already to another year of very exciting publications!

More on all these titles to follow shortly, and just a reminder that  main decisions on shortlisted submissions from the recent submissions window have not yet been made - so don't worry if you're one of the shortlisted authors and haven't yet had a response.

NEW TITLES, NEW COVERS

Forthcoming this year, we also have Helen Calcutt's debut collection Unable Mother next month and Brenda Read-Brown's collection Like Love in November.

Unable Mother is a collection of poetry by Helen Calcutt that is very revelatory and very achingly poised. A sample poem and more about the collection can be found here.

A copy of the collection can also be ordered with the paypal link below.

Unable Mother (including P&P)

Unable Mother (including P&P for the U.K. only) £12.50 GBP Unable Mother (including P&P for Rest of the World) £17.50 GBP

Meanwhile, Like love by Benda Read-Brown is a poetry collection that is very open and very unpredictable. A sample poem and more about this collection can be found here.

Like love can also be pre-ordered using the paypal link below. [The collection is published in November. Pre-orders are dispatched in the week of publication.] 

Like love (including P&P)

Like love (including P&P for the U.K. only) £13.00 GBP Like love (including P&P for Rest of the World) £18.50 GBP

V. Press also has a new print run of Antony Owen's collection The Nagasaki Elder, complete with a new cover to celebrate his shortlisting in the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2017.

A sample poem and more about this collection can be found here. The Nagsaki Elder can also be ordered using the paypal link below.

We do have a few copies from the original print runs still, so if anyone would particularly prefer the new or old cover, please do request this when ordering.
(NB We will supply the prefered cover version where possible, but stocks are limited so this can't be guaranteed.)

The Nagasaki Elder with packing & postage

The Nagasaki Elder with p&p for the U.K. £11.50 GBP The Nagasaki Elder with p&p for Rest of the World £16.75 GBP

Introducing...

V. Press is delighted to announce its first two Guest Editors along with their choices of manuscripts for publication.

Guest Editor Mary-Jane Holmes has chosen 'The Escapologist' by Jinny Fisher as the manuscript that she'll be editing for V. Press.

Guest Editor Carrie Etter has chosen 'The Protection of Ghosts' by Natalie Linh Bolderston as the manuscript that she'll be editing for V. Press.

More about both poets and guest editors may be found below, along with an update on other submissions.

Photo by Nathalie Marchant

MARY-JANE HOLMES has lived and worked as a teacher, editor and translator in many places including Spain, France and Switzerland. Since 2009, she’s been chief editor of Fish Publishing, Ireland. She is creative director at the Casa-Ana writing retreat in southern Spain and editorial consultant at The Well Review.  Her debut poetry collection, Heliotrope with Matches and Magnifying Glass, is published by Pindrop Press. Irish Poet Dave Lordan has described her as "perhaps the most convincingly rural and at the same time convincingly contemporary English poet since Ted Hughes". Winner of the 2017 Bridport Poetry Prize, the Martin Starkie Poetry Prize, the Bedford International Poetry Prize and the 2014 Dromineer Fiction Prize, her other publication credits include Mslexia, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Prole, The Tishman Review, The Lonely Crowd and The Best Small Fictions Anthology 2016 and 2018. She has a Master of Studies in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford (with distinction). Website: www.mary-janeholmes.com

JINNY FISHER was first a classical violinist, then a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, now a poet full-time. She's a member of Wells Fountain Poets, and her work has appeared in print and online magazines including The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, Domestic Cherry, Tears in the Fence, Prole, The Poetry Shed, Strange Poetry, Amaryllis and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Commended in national competitions, she was runner-up in The Interpreter’s House Competition 2016. She's committed to bringing poetry to a wider audience and takes her Poetry Pram to music festivals for one-to-one readings. Twitter: @MsJinnifer. Her 'The Escapologist' was selected by  V. Press Guest Editor Mary-Jane Holmes.

Photo by Dot & Lucy Photography

CARRIE ETTER grew up in Normal, Illinois, spent thirteen years in southern California, and moved to England in 2001. Her fourth collection of poetry, The Weather in Normal (US: Station Hill; UK: Seren), will be published in autumn 2018; her individual poems have appeared in Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, The New Republic, and many other journals in the US and UK. Her V. Press pamphlet, Hometown, is her first collection of fiction. She is Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and also teaches for The Poetry School and Poetry Swindon. She is guest editor of Natalie Linh Bolderston's 'The Protection of Ghosts' forthcoming with V. Press.

NATALIE LINH BOLDERSTON studied English at the University of Liverpool, where she won the 2016 Felicia Hemans Prize for Lyrical Poetry and the 2017 Miriam Allott Poetry Prize. She now works as an Editorial Assistant. Her work has been featured in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, L'Éphémère Review, Oxford Poetry, Smoke, and The Tangerine. She is a 2018 Creative Future Literary Award recipient. Her 'The Protection of Ghosts' was selected by  V. Press Guest Editor Carrie Etter. 

QUICK UPDATE ON OTHER SUBMISSIONS

The announcement above is the first from V. Press's recent poetry submissions window. Other shortlisted poetry manuscripts are still being considered, with no publication decisions yet made. (Please bear with us in terms of notification as there are a lot of factors involved, so final decisions will take some time.)

The authors of shortlisted flash fiction samples have now been notified, and have a month to send in the full manuscript.

This year, decisions have been harder than ever shortlisting both poetry and flash submissions. There are many writers who didn't make the shortlists this time that we'd be happy to read submissions from in the future.

New Review News

V. Press is very very pleased to share more words of praise for Michael Loveday's Three Men on the Edge.

"An outstanding work of fiction

"Three Men on the Edge is a remarkable first book. Described as flash fiction, it is a series of three stories, each about an isolated man. Michael Loveday presents the different characters with subtle understanding and sensitivity, taking the reader into their heads as they struggle to cope with their feelings and lives in the edge lands of Rickmansworth. The observation is acute and the use of language brilliant, the pared writing offers irony, humour, sadness and lyricism. With its use of compression and striking imagery the book has many of the characteristics of poetry and to me it seems on the borderland between poetry and prose. In Three Men on the Edge Michael Loveday emerges as a fine writer. I look forward to seeing what he produces next."

Myra Schneider, 5-star review on Amazon here.

"an exciting hybrid of poetry and flash-fiction, published by the impressive V Press.

"Three Men on the Edge is an agile and brave book - it blends the finest points of poetry - nuance, the unsaid, and the metaphorical with the sharpest image-making and narrative of very short fiction. The result is a tender yet never sentimental hybrid of a form that I found exciting, compelling and very readable. It is a cliche but I was sorry not to read more. There is something very fresh about Loveday's book and it deserves to reach a wide audience."

Sarah Westcott, The Literary Loper, the full review here.

Three sample flashes from the flash fiction novella can be enjoyed here.

BUY A COPY OF Three Men on the Edge now using the paypal options below.

Three Men on the Edge (including P&P)

Three Men on the Edge (including P&P for the U.K. only) £12.50 GBP Three Men on the Edge (including P&P for Rest of the World) £17.50 GBP

In a flash...

The end of July will be here in a flash, and with it the end of our flash fiction submissions window. But if you're a flash writer and haven't sent your submission in yet, there's still one week to go. Full submission guidelines here.

This summer has been an exciting one already for V. Press, with flash fiction writers Santino Prinzi and Michael Loveday launching their new titles on Sunday in a V. Press showcase at this year's Flash Fiction Festival. 

More on There's Something Macrocosmic About All of This by Santino Prinzi can be found here, while sample flashes from Michael Loveday's Three Men on the Edge flash fiction novella can be found here. 

REVIEWS

V. Press is also delighted to share a new review of Charlie Hill's fiction pamphlet Walking Backwards.

"...Again, I think of Hemingway, and in all of these stories there’s his ‘iceberg’ technique – more below the surface than can be seen above...

"They are all part of a pleasing variety on show here.

"All the best prose writers have a love of poetry. Charlie Hill is a real writer, and a very good one too."

Neil Campbell, Sabotage Reviews, the full review, also focussing on specific stories can be found here.

BUY a copy of Walking Backwards now using the paypal link .

Walking Backwards (with package & posting options)

Walking Backwards (with p&p for delivery in UK) £7.50 GBP Walking Backwards (with p&p for rest of the world) £12.99 GBP

A sample story and more information about Walking Backwards can also be enjoyed here.