Launching A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache

V. Press is very very delighted to launch A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache, a poetry pamphlet by Charley Barnes.

“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.

ISBN: 978-1-9998444-4-8
36 pages

R.R.P. £6.50

A sample poem can be enjoyed below.

PRE-ORDER a copy of A Z-Hearted Guide to Heartache now using the paypal link below. [The pamphlet is published in July. Pre-orders are dispatched in the week of publication.]

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

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.”