Friday 30 November 2018

Launching These nights at home

V. Press is very very delighted to launch These nights at home - a pamphlet of poems by Alex Reed with images from photographer Keren Banning.

These nights at home, which follows on from Alex Reed’s earlier V. Press pamphlet A Career in Accompaniment, is very personal, and yet very familiar. This longer pamphlet voices the loneliness and isolation that follow bereavement, and the predicament of trying to begin anew. Moments of tenderness, flashback, longing and love flicker through the mind and heart as the months pass. The poems are accompanied by Keren Banning’s striking series of photographic images that are simultaneously abstract and intimate, drawing the reader further into this fragmented landscape.


“The most striking feature of Alex Reed’s poems in These nights at home is their clarity – a transparency that allows the reader in to the emotions and experience they explore. This lucid quality allows complex and deep feelings to be expressed vividly. Being able to approach the most difficult human experience so directly and honestly makes the poems moving and compelling. Specific concrete details convey loss and grief, loneliness, the pull of memory. Recurring motifs – empty rooms, hallways, doors – suggest the slow and repetitive process of grieving. There is nothing spare in the poems. Every word earns its place. The voice is quiet, restrained, attentive. The poems are not sombre. There are flashes of humour and a range of tone is created through the different poetic forms – prose poems building unsettling extended metaphors, experimental layouts suggesting a shifting sense of memory and perception. The pamphlet shows the reader what it means to be living with loss, conveying the process of grief with its ‘pacing hours’, and just a hint of a tentative way forward. It reminds us how, in the right hands, the economy of poetry can communicate the most complex of emotions.” Cynthia Fuller

“Less fraught than A Career in Accompaniment, more a slow immersive haunting, the poems in These nights at home enter a different unknown – the oceanic space of loss and absence.  Tentative minimalism provides the key to open up distances, far and near.  Here, less is more – reflective territory exquisitely distilled in Keren Banning’s spectral photographs.” Linda France

A sample poem and a sample image from this longer pamphlet can be found below.

44 pages
ISBN: 978-1-9998444-6-2
R.R.P. £7.50

BUY These nights at home now using the paypal link below.


These nights at home (including P&P)


LIMITED BUNDLE OFFER for U.K. delivery only, buy a copy of These nights at home together with a copy of Alex Reed's A Career in Accompaniment for just £14, including U.K. postage and packing.





SAMPLE POEM & PHOTO from THESE NIGHTS AT HOME

deep river

friends say it’s early yet
your picture on the fireplace, smiling

it takes a year
your reading specs on the table

it takes two years
folded clothes still on the shelves

it takes four years
faint trace of you from the wool

there is a river that runs within –
vast, uncharted, rising



Thursday 22 November 2018

BBC FLASH TREATS, IN THE SPOTLIGHT & REVIEW NEWS



BBC RADIO FLASH TREATS & FLASH INTERVIEW

Jude Higgins read ‘It Tastes Good’, a story with World War One references, from her V. Press pamphlet, The Chemist’s House, on Upload with Adam Crowther on November 12. For a limited period only, her flash and talk about flash fiction generally can be found at 1.38.03 mins into the show here.


Santino Prinzi's reading from his V. Press pamphlet There's Something Macrocosmic About All of This was on Upload with Adam Crowther on November 14. This can currently be enjoyed here (around 1 hr 40 mins in).

IN THE SPOTLIGHT...

V. Press flash fiction author Carrie Etter  talks to Speaking of Marvels about writing, cats and her pamphlet Hometown. The interview can be found here.

And V. Press poet Romalyn Ante is featured in God is in the TV is online culture fanzine, with three poems including 'Last Offices' from her V. Press pamphlet Rice & Rain, which won the 2018 Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet The feature can be read here and more about Rice & Rain here.

REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

'Reviewing Helen Calcutt’s glorious collection, Unable Mother, feels a little like reading the diary of a close friend, a letter to myself, or the delicate and kaleidoscopic thoughts of the many women I’ve walked, talked and cried with since we were bonded by one single, cataclysmic event – birth…

'The imagery is rich and complex throughout, filled with its own totems: birds crash-land, lotus flowers bloom in the shadows, grief burns bright and painful as the sun. Boats rock, unsteady. Horses are either stabled or walk on “like women through fire”…'

Victoria Richards, A Restricted View From Under The Hedge


For a sample poem, more about Unable Mother, or to buy a copy of the collection, please click here

Thursday 8 November 2018

Announcing the V. Press Prize for Poetry... & more!

THE V. PRESS PRIZE FOR POETRY

V. Press is very very proud to announce the inaugural V. Press Prize for Poetry offered in conjunction with the University of Worcester.

The award is for a graduating student at the University of Worcester whose work demonstrates an outstanding achievement in the writing of poetry. Eligible portfolios are shortlisted by the university, with V. Press editor and director S.A. Leavesley choosing the winner.

The inaugural 2018 prize has been awarded to Margaret Adkins for her portfolio ‘Mingled Space’. She will now be working with V. Press guest editor Ruth Stacey on her V. Press Prize for Poetry pamphlet, to be published by V. Press in 2019.

Announcing the 2018 V. Press Prize for Poetry winner, Sarah Leavesley said: “In ‘Mingled Space’, Margaret Adkins weaves together striking imagery, evocative speech and a variety of form and techniques to create a wide-ranging and beguiling look at family, society and life. This is a vivid selection of poems that I can see, taste, feel – a worthy winner of the inaugural V. Press Prize for Poetry.”

Information about studying Creative Writing at Worcester University can be found here.


REVIEWS & OTHER NEWS

"As a debut poetry pamphlet Charley Barnes’s A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache does what so many other collections and pamphlets fail to do: Barnes does an amazing job of creating flow from one poem to the next. In doing so, she takes us on a journey as the voice behind the poems first breaks down and then makes sense of various sources of heartache..."

Steph Mantle, Neon Books, full review here

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


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

"Brenda Read-Brown’s poems are empathetic and welcoming...

"It reminds us all of the power that words have to connect and communicate. Their conversational tone makes these poems easy to read aloud and their layers of empathy reward re-reading."

Emma Lee, full review with analysis of some of the poems here 

BUY a copy of Like love now using the paypal button below.


Like love (including P&P)


Meanwhile, a new interview with American poet and V. Press flash fiction author Carrie Etter can be found here. A sample flash and more on her V. Press flash fiction pamphlet Hometown here.

V. Press flash fiction author Michael Loveday has a workshop on writing about urban-rural environments at the National Association of Writers in Education conference in York. His 'Edgelands' workshop is on Sunday, November 11. More information about this here, and more about his flash fiction novella set in the 'edgelands' Three Men on the Edge here.

Wednesday 7 November 2018

Launching Like love


V. Press is very very delighted to announce the launch of Brenda Read-Brown's poetry collection Like love.

“The poems in Like love are uncluttered. They are simple, profound, and immensely touching. There is great empathy at work here, an empathy without which no real poems can exist. Read-Brown deserves a far wider readership than hitherto, and one hopes with this collection she will find it.” Brian Patten

“These approachable poems are full of humour and life experience. Like love faces up to ageing, loss and injustice with an eye for contradiction and detail. Poems about clearing out a child’s bedroom after they have left home, about angels, first love and sunbathing topless exude unquenchable enthusiasm for living! A collection to relish from a seasoned and generous poet.” Chloe Garner, Artistic Director, Ledbury Poetry Festival

“The most prolific slam winner the UK has ever had; a joy of a performer with a huge range of material that varies in style and content.” Steve Larkin

“These poems remind me of the tingles. I’m so happy to feel them. This collection makes me want to run outside, kiss, fall in leaves and then write.” Hollie McNish

Like love is very open and very unpredictable.

ISBN: 978-1-9998444-3-1
76 pages
R.R.P. £10.99

A sample poem from Like love can be enjoyed below.

BUY Like love now using the paypal button.


Like love (including P&P)


Poetry has no learning objective

Words are winds
that ruffle thoughts
and blow down structures
we thought solid.
The man with a cobra
tattooed across his forehead
might be a gentle vegan.
Some people spend their spare time
painting angels.
The kid “you’ll need to watch for”
will give me images
fresh as mermaids.
Rhyme can hurt,
and metaphor disturb.
Hugs and cake
are both important.
Words are winds on water,
and water is what we’re made of.

READINGS

3 Nov 2018: Stourbridge library, at 11 am

15 Nov 2018: Raise the Bar, Arnolfini, Bristol, supporting Zena Edwards


22 Nov 2018: Dear Listener, Worcester

25 Nov 2018: Shrewsbury Festival, Stop Café, Shrewsbury

25 Nov 2018: Ooh Shehive (special edition of Ooh Beehive), Swindon

Jan 2019: Wolverhampton Literature Festival

12 Feb 2019: City Voices, Wolverhampton