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