Launching Rice & Rain

We're very very delighted to launch Romalyn Ante's Rice & Rain - a poetry pamphlet that 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

A sample poem from the collection may be enjoyed below, along with details of Romalyn Ante's launch readings.

R.R.P. £6.50

NOW OUT OF STOCK (2022)

Chromosomes

My chromosomes got divorced in 2006.

The papers on the narra table parch

with apoptotic blotch. The screams

that fragmentise picture frames

and wine canisters remain free-floating

in the dark cytoplasm of the cellar.

The swearings at each other’s mother

accumulate in the lounge rug.

Even the sword corrodes, its gleam

fading after a saber-arch wedding

many summers ago. Forget about the picnic

in the grove, the colour of sky that day.

Forget about the accidental discovery

of a kingfisher with gun-shot wing.

Forget about the scintillating moment

when XX chromosome, young and dumb,

threw her sandal to the river, certain that

my future father would recover it for her.

Poster by Suriya Chadawong