EXCITING NEWS
"Visceral, beautifully textured poetry throbbing with energy and creative purpose. Hope is drawn to the dark heart of nature: the ‘bared bones’ of lost woods, beneath the ‘pinched face’ of an ‘unforgiving moon’ where hunters dine on carrion, ‘flesh clinging to their teeth’. While the language is dense with description, it never draws undue attention to itself, focusing on the tactile experience of life in sensuous detail. It’s a realm of compelling weirdness, of magic and mythology, of ‘faerie trees’ and witches: a surreal world where lovers become rats, ‘sharp teeth on my breast’. [...]"
Rubery Book Award, full review here.
“Lauren Mason’s Rust Canyon employs a desert landscape to explore the relationship between the human and the ecological, proposing an almost mystic interconnectivity […] her environmentalist intentions appear in the experimental flair of ‘River Strikethrough’ as the interrupted flow of language mimics the interrupted flow of the river […] at its best Rust Canyon is melodious and sensual […]”
“As the title suggests, these poems are dark and chthonic – they get their hands mucky in the soil, pulling out all the blind, wriggling things to show us. Darkness here is a thing that attracts, intrigues and repels in one breath. […]
Rubery Book Award, full review here.
Big congratulations to Jenny and to all the writers shortlisted in this year's awards, which span across multiple categories.
A sample poem, more information and ordering for Wild Boar can be found here.
REVIEWS
Godelieve de Bree, The Poetry Review, volume 116: 2 Summer 2026.
“Not having encountered Lauren Mason’s poems before, I was delighted to discover this collection, and have enjoyed it more with each re-reading. Incantation, anaphora, ‘aphoristic mutterings’, combined with sure-footed word music and lineation, make Rust Canyon an exhilarating read. This is eco-poetry at its most effective: poems to waken and alert the reader, at each turn linking personal survival to environmental politics. With what amounts in the end to love, Mason focuses on a particular story set in a damaged river valley, and in doing so lays bare the risks we face across the planet.”
Alex Josephy, London Grip, full review here.
A sample poem, more information and ordering for Rust Canyon can be found here.
“As the title suggests, these poems are dark and chthonic – they get their hands mucky in the soil, pulling out all the blind, wriggling things to show us. Darkness here is a thing that attracts, intrigues and repels in one breath. […]
“As with all of Catherine’s work, I admire the tactility and closeness to the female body.”
Victoria Spires, These Expectant Rooms, full review here.
A sample poem, more information and ordering for Some Dark God can be found here.
“I really enjoyed spending time with this pamphlet, both for its craft and its exquisite storytelling.”
Victoria Spires, These Expectant Rooms, full review here.
A sample poem, more information and ordering for can be found here.
COMING SOON
“Nikki Dudley never fails to deliver. In My Body is a Stranger, she sheds light on women and society, and women in society, in a collection that deftly blends personal and universal. These poems are deeply moving and beautifully arranged and ultimately – in a world that so desperately needs it – hopeful.”
Laura Besley“In My Body is a Stranger, Nikki Dudley writes with raw honesty, wit and tenderness about perimenopause and its ill-gotten, unwanted bedfellows: sleeplessness, anxiety, rage, memory loss, and medical dismissal. She leads the reader on a journey from discovery to acceptance, brilliantly capturing the shock of feeling alien inside one’s own body.
“This is a fierce and compassionate collection of poems, one that explores women’s health, societal experience and survival. It is both an intimate opening of the door to individual pain, grief and confusion, as well as a collective, rallying cry for understanding, solidarity, and, ultimately, resilience.”
JP SeabrightMy Body is a Stranger is very visceral and very hopeful.
ISBN: 978-1-0682701-7-8
36 pages
R.R.P. £7.50
Out on National Poetry Day (1 Oct), My Body is a Stranger is now available for pre-order. More information, a sample poem and pre-ordering here.
“Having contracted pneumonia twice, I was immediately back in the liminal space of the ward that Claire Booker conjures in this fine collection. Doctors, nurses and patients swim in and out of view. But for all the watery imagery, Booker’s poems are remarkable for their control and precision, and it is this duality that gives them such power. Underlying the paradox of being confined in one place for ten days is a sense of great movement and shifts in perspective. Memories of Booker’s mother add a tender current, and create new understandings and empathies, acknowledging the truth of her poem ‘We little paper boats’, ‘with our cargo of life / spinning in the maelstrom, / steered by the brave’. Tenderness, humour, compassion and survival all swim in this gorgeous aquarium.” Lisa Kelly
“If the role of poetry is to show us what it is to be intensely alive, Claire Booker’s Twenty Tides is the survivor’s guide. She leads us with courage, candour and humour through her treatment for pneumonia into recovery, where she is visited in dream or hallucination by her mother in various guises: from comforting presence to a terrifying apparition who ‘holds me as a mirror, / her hurt written in its mist’. This dreamscape is balanced with deep empathy for the real patients, like glamorous Giselle who demands duck-blue socks instead of the ‘kek-brown’ standard issue because ‘Femininity is her superpower, her weapon against death’. Booker ends with characteristic optimism, ‘no longer a pearl diver / suspended in a paucity of gases’, as she moves towards the exit through ‘an ebb tide of undiscovered bays / its littoral of lives laid bare’.” Mark Fiddes
Twenty Tides is very elemental and very pithy.
ISBN: 978-1-0682701-5-4
36 pages
R.R.P. £7.50
Out in the Autumn, Twenty Tides is now available for pre-order. More information, a sample poem and pre-ordering here.
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