Lots of news!

A big post today including Substack and editor news, and a round-up of this year's V. Press Prize for Poetry, reviews, new releases, events and coming soon...

V. Press Editor Sarah James/Leavesley has a new collection, Darling Blue, out with Indigo Dreams Publishing later this month. More info is below and you can also find details and a link in the V. Press bookshop. Historically, Sarah hasn't shared much about her own work through V. Press, but with the increasing time, energy and financial demands of running a small press in the current climate, it's becoming hard to do both without sometimes combining the two.. .

DARLING BLUE

 Joint Winner Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2024

Darling Blue interweaves ekphrastic poems with a book-length fictional poetry narrative of love, lust and letting go. The poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite artworks include QR codes, which readers can scan to view the pieces after or alongside their reading. Blue here is more than a colour or inspiration; it is desire, secrecy and sorrow – the essence of ‘feeling / really alive’, yet ‘distance’s illusion’.

“A fascinating creative hybrid weaving ekphrasis and cohesive narrative, Darling Blue deftly balances its fictional speaker’s personal response to various Pre-Raphaelite artworks, with rich descriptive hints that resonate way beyond the mere visual. Exploring the complex tensions between the public sphere and private activities, this collection is a gallery tour of the narrator’s unfulfilling relationship with an unattainable partner, through to the ultimate redemption of self-worth and new love. James’s finely crafted and intelligently controlled poems brim with vivid imagery and lush sensory detail, reminding the reader ‘how brightly sunlight shines through // when freed from a cracked mirror’.” Sarah Doyle, Pre-Raphaelite Society Poet-in-Residence

“James uses the lyric and ekphrasis to create a profound and moving collection on the cost of love; what endures and how we survive its wake. As vivid and emotive as its pre-Raphaelite sources, Darling Blue is also startlingly direct, eloquent and consoling on the things we find hardest to put into words. An unmissable collection.” Luke Kennard

ISBN: 978-1-912876-97-6                                                                   
58 pages
R.R.P. £9.50

The collection is available to pre-order from Indigo Dreams here, with more information available on Sarah's personal website here or through her new Substack.

New Substack

Sarah has recently set up a Substack, reedlike: whispering through wind & water. This is very much in its early stages and is likely to develop and change as she sees what is and isn't possible and what readers want from it.

At the moment, this is very much a space she's using as a writer herself with content aimed primarily at other readers/writers, along with some pieces that may be of interest to walkers, nature-lovers, photographers and artists.

This already includes experience-led writer-life posts and prompts but will hopefully develop to also encompass how-to pieces, reader discussion and poem analysis pieces and more academic style articles.

This is a work-in-progress and not one that she can also do separately for V. Press, as it's becoming increasingly difficult to maintain multiple personal and V. Press accounts on different platforms. (Sarah and V. Press's current social media accounts on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and X, amongst others will remain separate, for the time being at least.) 

With Substack, if this 'trial' proves productive, goes well and subscriber numbers grow, she may then extend this profile to share more about V. Press's work and publications too.

If you're already on Substack, Sarah's handle there is @moresarah and you can view the page here.

You can also subscribe to it by filling in the form below.

2025-26 V. Press Prize for Poetry

V. Press is very very delighted to share that the winner of this year's V. Press Prize for Poetry is Eleni Brooks! 

This year's V. Press Prize for Poetry shortlist of three manuscripts picked by the University of Worcester was wide-ranging in terms of contents, form, language awareness and experimentation.

V. Press editor Sarah Leavesley enjoyed the poems, which effectively encompassed themes of coming of age, modern life, love, trauma, self-discovery, politics and more. The three shortlisted selections also successfully maintained a distinctive style and approach across the experiences, shapes on the page and/or uses of form contained within each manuscript.

In the end, she chose ‘grown girl’ as the winner of this year’s prize for its confident voice, striking lines, unusual images and light touch, all working together to create an interesting and insightful read.

Sarah is already working with Eleni on the chapbook and looking forward to publishing grown girl in 2026.

OUT NOW

Palmer

“These poems offer what feels like a privileged insight into the poet's intense and sensitive spirituality, and his view of the world around him. Personal yet ambitious in its spiritual reach, this poetry captivates the reader with its close attention to detail and language. It reminds us of the natural relationship between religion and poetry, and is a compelling poetic experience.” Sally Read

“R. M. Francis’ Palmer is a vestry where the choral chanting of sainthood echoes off the walls. His poems are burning votive candles to sacred spaces and experiences while wearing the vestments of humanity; the body, attention, parenthood. These poems are lovingly put together and are ultimately ‘kissing in the presence of’ the divine, saints and being human.” Roy McFarlane

Palmer is very wandering and very wondering.

ISBN: 978-1-0682701-0-9                

36 pages

R.R.P. £7.50

A sample poem from Palmer may be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Palmer can be found here.

Epitaphios

Mother cradles head in the laying down
and salted drops of sorrow slip across skin.
The others hold back with pensive frown –
the night is dark; the air is thin.

Salted drops of sorrow slipping over skin,
Joseph lifts lifeless hand to lips.
The night is dark; the air is thin.
Not just a kiss but a pleading,

Joseph lifts lifeless hand. We’re lipped
in the presence of beings in portal.
Not just a kiss but a pleading
in John’s placing of hollowed feet.

We’re present here, amongst portals,
that bridge terra with firmament.
John lowers those hallowed feet,
covers them in linen –

another bridge between earth and air,
another sail, another astrolabe
covers us in the linen
of slave, bride and king.

Another sail, another astrolabe
returned to soil. We rerun too.
And learn to step as slave, bride, king.
That pieta marks each seer.

Return to soil, and rerun too.
I sit still, even as palmer,
as pieta’s mark widens eyes
with salted drops of sorrow.

REVIEW NEWS

The Price of Happiness

“The pamphlet moves, with a discerning grip on implication, from dating, marriage and divorce to the eventual reclamation of her life in a straightforward tone. […] she evidently has an attuned sense of the symbolic: ‘packets of Vesta’ reveal a lie, divorce proceedings are a ‘game of chess’. In the same way, Robson returns to the violence of a previous image and reclaims it: ‘the hammer’ of her abuser’s ‘voice’ reappears as a symbol of empowerment as in ‘Forging’ a jeweller friend hands over ‘a hammer’ to let her ‘forge curves in [the] beaten metal’ of her wedding rings.”

Godelieve de Bree, The Poetry Review, Autumn 2025.

"Nikki Robson’s debut pamphlet charts the journey of a failed marriage. [..] Memory cannot recreate past emotions once they’re reframed by history, and it can take years to leave an abusive relationship*, but perhaps the line that sums up the price of happiness for the speaker is when her husband leaves: ‘all sounds of you dissolved and/ the vacuum, finally, was wonderful.’ (‘sequence’)." 

*https://www.womensaid.org.uk/information-support/what-is-domestic-abuse/myths/

Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon, full review in issue 16.

More information, a sample and ordering for The Price of Happiness can 

be found here.

sum of her PARTS

"In sum of her PARTS, Laura Besley provides us with a beautiful series of briefly illuminated windows - vignettes that offer glimpses into the moments of intimacy that make up a life. [...]

"In just thirty-four pages, Besley draws us into a network of bodies, thoughts, and conversations, always, as flash necessitates, with scant context. Yet the brief nature of each piece illuminates just how interconnected we all are, each jagged edge implicating a matching edge that may yet lie beside it. The sum of the collection's parts is a moving and sharply observed portrayal of the complexities of embodied life, where one must place gentle intimacies right alongside painful metamorphosis and absurd possibilities." 

Nina Walker, Everybody's Reviewing, full review here.

"“Sum of her PARTS” is a hybrid collection of flash fiction and poems that explore the intimacies of girl and womanhood in a series of small, momentary stories that work like Sylvia Plath’s assertion that “poems are moments’ monuments” (from her journals). Brevity does not equate to a lack of depth and, at times, one image can represent a whole relationship. [..]

"In “Sum of her PARTS” Besley successfully uses the brevity of form, whether poetry or flash fiction, to create images and guide the reader into scenarios of unintended consequences and inadvertent harm from those, partners, mothers or friends, whom the narrators would normally expect to love and trust."

Emma Lee, full review here.

More information, a sample and ordering for sum of her PARTS can 

be found here.

Dreaming Backward

"In Dreaming Backward, Reed both alleviates and anguishes his readers with casually devastating bouts of nostalgia, cemented by the use of almost melancholic monochrome photographs of Reed in his youth. He longs for the tender, mellow Newcastle he once knew, and resents ageing, yearning for dodgems and “faraway places” that now seem out of reach. Reed expertly replicates the feeling of child-like wonder through harmless astonishment and innocent memories which seamlessly blend into unfamiliarity."

Isobel Dillon, Poetry Book Society Autumn Bulletin 2025, copies here.

More information, a sample and ordering for Dreaming Backward can 

be found here and see below for a live-event launch.

DREAMING BACKWARD AUTUMN BOOK LAUNCH

Alex Reed will be having a Book Launch for Dreaming Backward, with Keren Banning & Steve Nash, in Newcastle on Thursday, 16 October 2025.

Venue: Gallowgate Room (Top Floor), Tyneside Irish Centre, Newcastle NE1 4SG (Bar on Ground Floor)

Time: 7-30pm.

COMING SOON

Rust Canyon

“In Rust Canyon the Big Sky blazes as bright as ever, but in the hands of Lauren Mason the light is also a thing of terror, an agent of neglect and even violence, as the powerful compaction of the style makes it at once a vast landscape and a trembling domestic space. Force and fragility battle in this realm – how should I call for love? is the cry from its soul – as humans, animals, plants and stones share their common losses and desires and despairing thirst, and ‘All the ways I couldn’t leave/led here…’ This is a powerful, plangent and deeply moving collection.”

Glyn Maxwell

“Like the painter Georgia O’Keeffe (a presiding spirit in these poems), Lauren Mason tracks beauty and peril in the vast landscapes of canyon, desert, river, and transposes these terrains to the contour of bodies in passion, in rest, in (re)birth. Such locations – actual and known, but also taken from the world of dream – are vividly rendered in Mason’s assured voice. These poems are diamond-like in their brilliance and multifaceted reflections, but they are also sharp and tough. It is always exciting to encounter a debut pamphlet, but this is one I am particularly excited to see in the world.”

Tamar Yoseloff

Rust Canyon is very ecological and very unflinching.

ISBN: 978-1-7394122-9-6
36 pages

R.R.P. £7.50

A sample poem from Rust Canyon may be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for Rust Canyon can be found here.

Vacation

we drove the desert for ten days

through monsoon season 

the canyons smelt of ozone  

roadside deer were pixellations

my mother bought pottery 

painted the colour of bruises

in pastel motels we watched true-crime shows 

where men stalked women with buck knives 

all those wives’ and daughters’

voices distorting into white noise

down the emergency line and we did not 

look at each other           often I wouldn’t sleep 

the lightning quick and expected as a fist 

splitting the already swollen sky