Wishing all our readers, writers and supporters a wonderful festive period and a great start to 2025! Thank you for being with us this year -- and here's to many more to come!
In the New Year...
2025 marks ten years since V. Press started publishing solo-authored pamphlets and collections.
V. Press is very very delighted to be starting this anniversary year with the publication of The Price of Happiness by Nikki Robson.
The Price of Ηappiness
“The Price of Ηappiness neither holds back nor wastes a word in its tale of a marriage from unsettling omens (‘Goodness, I’m weeping said Mum’) to full-blown violent coerciveness (‘the sore in the wall/where the dinner was thrown’) and out through the numbness and the decree absolute to the glimmers of a new life (‘it crackled like fireworks,/illegal for so long’). You barely take a breath before you’re holding it in shock at the damage we do each other in the altogether too close up of a dysfunctional relationship. It is a tribute to Nikki Robson’s skill that this is accomplished without sentiment, catching our attention and our compassion entirely through telling detail and command of phrasing – these poems are constantly quotable in their exactitude – ‘my label of a husband’; ‘my mummy-smile’; ‘this Vitruvian boy’ – and are nowhere more moving than in their grasp of the impact on the children: ‘[I] tried to describe the end of her world/as the beginning of another’.” W. N. Herbert
“‘The divorced cannot/bury their dead.’ Nikki Robson scours that truth, asks where it leads. We are used to graphic detonations of trauma, but here, the poet, well able to apply her ‘mummy-smile’, layers words, finds metaphor, draws deeply on sources and places. Unfolding her narrative, she never neglects a poet's first responsibility: to language. These poems haunt as mere shock cannot.” Beth McDonough
The Price of Happiness is very visceral and very contemplative.
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-4-1
34 pages
R.R.R.P. £6.99
A sample poem from The Price of Happiness, which is now also available for pre-ordering, can be enjoyed here.
The Festive Period
If you're still looking for Christmas presents -- for yourself or others! -- then here's a few to consider or check out our Bookshop for all our titles.*
This autumn saw another new print run of Michael Loveday's Three Men on the Edge, which was shortlisted for the Saboteur Awards 2019 Best Novella.
Many of our titles do go on to new print runs, with some also selling out entirely. So, if you're after a particular title, please do order quickly!
2024 titles: The Trajectory of Ghosts (flash fiction chapbook) by Tom Vowler; Robins, Feathers, Pearls (poetry chapbook) by Ella-Louise Fisher, The Love Trio (LT) Bundle, The Mothering Trio (MT) Bundle, The Narrative Poetry Duo (NPD) Bundle, The Narrative Poetry Trio (NPT) Bundle, The V. Press Prize for Poetry Trio (VPPPT) Bundle, Fire and Bees (poetry chapbook) by Bethan Rees
