poetry & flash fiction that is very very

Monday, 14 February 2022

Love, love...love our special offers!

Whatever else you're doing today, we hope you'll have time to love some poetry and flash fiction. Our Valentine's sample of work from some of our back catalogue can be found here, and a sample poem, more information and ordering of sk grout's recent poetry chapbook What love would smell like here.

V. Press has also put together two special offers that run until the end of March 2022.*

'Dashing Duets' offer - any two of the eligible full poetry collections for £17.50 including UK delivery only, eligible titles are: knots, tangles, fankles, A Woven Rope, A Bluebottle in Late October, The boy who couldn't say his name, The Aesthetics of Breath, Like love, Unable Mother, Blink , The Nagasaki Elder and Bolt Down This Earth. Please make sure you enter the titles of the two eligible collections you'd prefer in the paypal text boxes when you purchase. Otherwise, you will be sent two picked out by V. Press.

'Pocket some flash' offer - choose any one of the eligible flash pamphlets (print versions only) for £7.99 (including p&p for UK-only delivery) and get a copy of a pocket novella (Always Another Twist or Kaleidoscope) included for no extra cost, eligible flash pamphlets are (print copies only): Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, Midnight Laughter, There's Something Macrocosmic About All of This or Hometown. Please make sure you enter the title of the eligible flash pamphlet you'd prefer in the paypal text box when you purchase. Otherwise, you will be sent one picked out by V. Press.

* Both these offers run until the end of March 2022 (unless stock runs out sooner) and are intended for UK delivery only. For delivery elsewhere, V, Press would advise checking the titles' individual prices, as these may be a cheaper option for international customers. NB Any international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.

NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER

V. Press is delighted to share details of our next poetry collection, You'll need an umbrella for this by Victoria Richards, which is now available for pre-order.

“The title isn’t messing about: these poems soak the page with language that is visceral, immediate and sharp. An exciting debut full of vitality, pain and joy.” Luke Wright

“In this gorgeous debut, Victoria Richards asks ‘What are girls made of?’ And the poems answer: cans of Strongbow; ballpoint tattoos; dirty jokes; ghost bikes tied to lampposts; Ingrid Bergman’s eyeballs. All of the above and so much more is contained in this collection. A world of mothers, journalists, children and girlhoods are all drowned or on fire in You’ll need an umbrella for this. Richards tells us these stories with love, humour, lyricism and the sort of eye for detail which leaves an impression on the heart. I will read these poems for years, pass them onto friends: part secret, part gossip, part gift.” Lewis Buxton

“Victoria Richards’s remarkable debut, You’ll need an umbrella for this, is more than a book of poems, it is a best friend. These poems will be there for you in the middle of the night when you are lovesick or broken hearted; they will glance you a knowing look when you need one most and make you laugh even when you think you’ve forgotten how. In these poems, without reserve, expectation or apology, Richards is offering us her heart. Accept it and she will make a fire out of beauty and pain, pour vodka on the flames and dance with you in the light.” Amelia Loulli

You’ll need an umbrella for this is very wild and very windswept.

ISBN: 978-1-8380488-8-4

74 pages

R.R.P. £10.99

A sample poem and pre-ordering for the collection is available here.

REVIEWS

What love would smell like

"It’s this same mix of the personal and the profound that resounds throughout SK Grout’s collection, along with sounds, sights, and sensory language that brings them evocatively to life. [...] The sensual and the stellar therefore come together in this collection; and as the “rowr” of the bear intimates there’s a refreshing, original style to the writing, too, making this, to quote from the book, “an endless pool of innovation” [...]"

Mab Jones, Buzz, full review here.

A sample, poem, more information and ordering for What love would smell like can be found here.

A Woven Rope

"I very much enjoyed this collection. Written in three parts, it covers the span of a human life. The first part deals with birth and childhood, the second part comprises a more diverse set of poems and the third part focuses on the ageing and loss of a parent. The title for the collection comes from a line in the poem ‘Self’:

The rim of the world’s a woven rope

you’ll wrap around your wrist to keep you safe.

This couplet seems to me to an excellent example of how Plewes uses simple language in a powerful way. Her visual images are very evocative; they draw the reader in. [...]"

Sue Wallace-Shaddad, London Grip, full review here.

A sample, poem, more information and ordering for A Woven Rope can be found here.

knots, tangles, fankles

“knots, tangles, fankles is a highly ambitious and original collection where Reed takes the complex and detailed research of Sanity, Madness and the Family and transforms it into a multi-vocal poetic sequence which not only engages with its radical theoretical ideas but also speaks to the human distress and pain experienced by some individuals and their families.”

Jeremy Kearney, The Polophony, full review here.

A sample poem, more information and ordering for knots, tangles, fankles can be found here.

SPRING LAUNCH OF knots, tangles, fankles

Book Launch: knots, tangles fankles by Alex Reed

Friday, 4 March 2022 at 7pm-8-15pm

Venue: Newcastle Recovery College, Newcastle NE1 6UF.

Please join us at this launch event which will include poetry from Alex’s publications plus some musical setting of his poems by Keren Banning.

Admission is free. Donations to the Recovery College (ReCoCo)are welcome.

ReCoCo is an innovative peer-led mental health facility which runs a variety of creative, educational and support-based activities.

For further information contact Alex at: areedhexham@gmail.com

SUBMISSIONS UPDATE

V. Press would like to say a big thank you to everyone who submitted their poetry chapbook samples in the January submissions window.

Editor Sarah Leavesley is looking forward to reading them over the coming weeks, and anticipating some tough decisions!

TO RECEIVE NEWS LIKE THIS DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER USING THE MAILCHIMP SIGN-UP ON THE RIGHT-HAND SIDE OF THE HOMEPAGE.

Monday, 3 January 2022

Starting the new year with some news!

We hope all our authors, readers and supporters have had a good festive period and a healthy start to 2022!

SUBMISSIONS

V. Press will be open early in 2022 (see the dates below) for poetry pamphlet/chapbook submissions from writers who have previously received the V. Press ‘Structuring a Pamphlet’ and used this advice for their pamphlet. Those submitting should have received the ‘Structuring a Pamphlet’ pdf before 9 January 2022.

In addition to following the submission guidelines on the submissions page, please include in the body of your email the date when you received the ‘Structuring a Pamphlet’ pdf and the email address that it was sent to. (So that we can check you meet the criteria for this submission window). Your initial submission sample (as detailed in the guidelines on the submissions page) should be emailed to V. Press (on the email address given in the submissions guidelines) between 24 January 2022 and 31 January 2022.

REVIEWS

What love would smell like

The new year always follows on from the old, and V. Press was very very delighted to see What love would smell like by sk grout feature in the Poetry School's Poetry Books on the Year 2021.

The full books of the year list can be found here, and more information, a sample poem and ordering What love would smell like is available here.

Set a Crow to Catch a Crow

"[...] The characters are sympathetically drawn. Mary-Jane Holmes knows how to give a reader sufficient detail to understand a character’s motives but also trusting readers to build their own pictures of who the characters are and their relationships to each other. With minimal sketches each story is fleshed out to not only convey the characters’ lives but also their histories and their futures. The stories explore complex issues, poverty, keeping a family together, keeping relationships going or fresh starts and the fear of beginning again. The decoys are dispatched effectively: some characters are lying to themselves: believing they know what the problem is and not willing to listen and understand the actual problem. Sometimes the decoys lure the character to acknowledge and resolve their problem. The stories in “Set a Crow to Catch a Crow” reward re-reading."

Emma Lee, full review here.

For more information about Set a Crow to Catch a Crow, a sample flash or to order a copy, please click here.

knots, tangles, fankles

“[…] Reed stretches form to allow these multiple voices to shift, in style and font. This skillfully creates a disorientating effect while offering their different experiences and perspectives. Changes in metre and pace increase this effect. To say it is intense is to underestimate its readability […] this absorbing collection is a fine example of how poetry can showcase important uncomfortable issues.” Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon, full review on page 94 here.

A sample poem, more information and ordering for knots, tangles, fankles can be found here.

Less than three months old, the collection is already onto a new print run - get a copy while you can!

V. PRESS EDITOR'S NEW BOOK

V. Press is delighted to share the news that our editor's new collection Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic is now available for pre-order over on the Verve Poetry Press site here, and more information about the collection can be found below.

WINNER OF THE CP AWARE AWARD PRIZE FOR POETRY 2021

Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic is award-winning poet Sarah James’s exploration of 40 years living with type one diabetes, a life-threatening autoimmune condition that is now treatable, but remains incurable. The collection tracks her personal journey from diagnosis, age six, to adulthood, including the high and the low points, as well as the further long-term health risks lurking in the background. These are poems of pain, but also of love and beauty, taking in motherhood, aging and establishing self-identity in a constantly updating world. The route to some kind of acceptance and belonging may be troubled by 'trying to escape' but it also 'holds | more light than your eye | will ever know'.

"Sarah James’s fine poems are wonderfully abundant in experiment, energy, and expression. She has a remarkable sense for how the self-discipline of illness—like art—can release and shape the language of wonder, wisdom, and love."

David Morley

"Sarah James' Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic compellingly conveys the journey of a life pervaded by type one diabetes and the myriad struggles of that hidden disability. It's a world of sunlit fields and night sweats, 'doorstep birdsong' and pricked fingertips, at once arduous and munificent. Always engaging and often moving, James' poems deftly immerse as well as inform, urging a deep appreciation of life's plenty, 'breath[ing] in the sky'." Carrie Etter

"These poems speak with such urgency and humanity that we take the deeply researched science (and magic) in our stride, then get pulled up short by its failure to ‘make sense of unfairness’. It’s an exhilarating, poignant collection combining raw honesty with impressive craft. The way ‘the world shrinks’ in personal hardship and the sheer and constant work it takes to open it up again. I feel more awake and alive for reading it." Luke Kennard

PRE-ORDER FROM VERVE POETRY PRESS HERE NOW

Friday, 17 December 2021

Festive greetings!

Thursday, 2 December 2021

Launching What love would smell like

V. Press is very very proud to announce the publication of SK Grout's poetry chapbook What love would smell like.

“In SK Grout's debut pamphlet, romantic love between women is both sensual and spiritual. These atmospheric, compelling poems evoke a richly felt and observed sensibility, an experience to relish again and again, ‘bright full of starwild’.”

Carrie Etter

“What love would smell like expertly zeroes in on the sensual and vibrant rhythms of the body. Porches, couches, cafés and twilit streets are reinvented as poignant sites of intimacy and want. Savouring colour, light, and the ‘sweet, blistered pleasure’ of scent, SK Grout has created an enchanting ‘poetry of simmering’.”
Natalie Linh Bolderston

What love would smell like is very beautiful and very beguiling.

ISBN: 978-1-8380488-7-7

34 pages

R.R.P. £6.50

A sample poem from What love would smell like can be enjoyed below.

To Katerina

even in another time

I will buy too many books

and you will get tattoos of

the eclipse of the moon

etched into the skin beneath

your wrist bones;

I will drink coffee, I will drink tea

and you will bathe in the

first light of the winter sun

spread across the living room floor

like an eagle cradling flight;

I will respond to all emails,

“Sorry it’s late”; and you will

collect juniper berries, periwinkle shells,

cry over oxidised lava rocks burnt black,

press cornflower petals into books

you will never read;

I will stay home, you will tree-pose;

I will listen to Chopin’s polonaises,

you will dream ferocious big,

think jazz blue,

lap in an endless pool of innovation;

someone, I tell you,

will remember us – you nod: the Internet,

credit history and our names in the sand

first published in Banshee Lit

LAUNCH EVENT

SK Grout will be launching What love would smell like with a free online event on Friday, 3 Dec 2021 at 7.30pm. Book for the event on Eventbrite here.

Friday, 22 October 2021

Prize news, and more!

2021 V. Press Prize for Poetry

V. Press is very very delighted to announce that the winner of the 2021 V. Press Prize for Poetry is ‘Creature without building’ by Ray Vincent-Mills, with ‘MIROH’ by Talis Johnson as a runner-up.

A shortlist of four anonymous manuscripts was sent over for this year’s prize by the University of Worcester creative writing team.

V. Press editor Sarah Leavesley said: “I really enjoyed reading this year’s shortlisted manuscripts for the V. Press Prize for Poetry, my congratulations to the writers on their work and crafting.

“My winner is ‘Creature without building’, a strongly themed, hard-hitting and urgent selection of powerful poems, which don’t shy away from tackling difficult experiences. There is pain and there is violence, but there is also beauty. Striking lines, vibrant imagery, linguistic play and crafting make this an important portfolio that continues to resonate long after reading.

“MIROH also stood out to me as the runner-up because of its admirable range of form, combining recognisable contemporary dilemmas with folklore elements to create new narratives with haunting rhythms. A moving and thought-provoking selection.”

OTHER PRIZE NEWS

V. Press would like to congratulate V. Press poet Natalie Linh Bolderston for her shortlisting for this year's Forward Prize for Best Single Poem with her ‘Middle Name with Diacritics’ (National Poetry Competition).

We wish her luck for the awards ceremony and winner's announcement this weekend.

Details of her V. Press poetry pamphlet, The Protection of Ghosts, can be found here.

V. Press is also to delighted to see several V. Press poets included in Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry 2011-2020.

Congratulations to V. Press poets Nichola Deane and Sarah Doyle, and V. Press editor, Sarah James, who all have previously Forward Prize highly commended poems included in this anthology.

REVIEWS

May We All Be Artefacts

"Chloe Hanks creates strong rhythms in her pamphlet through the repetition of words and sounds as well as her use of form and rhyme. She uses these means to capture atmosphere, and I found it particularly interesting how these enhanced her ekphrastic poems."

Sue Wallace-Shaddad, Sphinx, full review here.

More on the chapbook, a sample poem and ordering for May We All Be Artefacts can be found here.

To Boldly Go

"[...] This pamphlet grabs my imagination. [...] Martin Zarrop both records mankind’s achievements and connects them to the human spirit with witty observations and surreal imagery."

Maggie Mackay, Sphinx, full review here.

More on the chapbook, a sample poem and ordering for To Boldly Go can be found here.

Something so wild and new in this feeling

"[...]“Something so wild and new in this feeling”" takes Wordsworth’s words shared in private in her journal and brings them to life. [...] Doyle has done a successful job in selecting the phrases that demonstrate Wordsworth’s poetic sensibilities and crafting them into poems that work like a seam of light silvering the birches."

Emma Lee, full review here.

More on the chapbook, a sample poem and ordering for Something so wild and new in this feeling can be found here.

Monday, 18 October 2021

Launching knots, tangles, fankles

V. Press is very very delighted to announce the publication of Alex Reed's debut full collection, knots, tangles, fankles.

“Re-imagining the research of Laing and Esterson, Alex Reed’s multi-vocal knots, tangles, fankles asks important questions about sanity, madness and the family in a time before the digital became part of the story. This story revolves around Hazel, a young working class girl with the odds stacked against her, and it is both everyday and appalling. A shifting constellation of voices, overheard from behind closed doors, animates an insightful and sensitive collection of poems to think, learn and feel with. Carefully choreographed, all the protagonists earn our sympathy. They hold up a mirror to the human predicament – in black and white, compelling and filmic, concealing as much as they reveal, getting under your skin and staying with you long after reading the last page.” Linda France

“Alex Reed’s debut poetry collection knots, tangles, fankles tells the powerful, heart-breaking story of Hazel, sixteen years old and diagnosed as schizophrenic. Demonstrating a deft, versatile, and compassionate hand, Reed unveils Hazel’s true plight, not only through the surreal imagery of her thoughts, but also through the voices of those both hindering and healing her: from alarmed and hyper-protective parents, to institutionalised hospital staff, to the grounding, reassuring, real-life Dr Aaron Esterson, who along with R. D. Laing sought to uncover the source of mental illness in families using unconventional theories and methods. Though this is Hazel’s journey, each of Reed’s characters is undergoing their own personal struggle and anguish. In a setting similar to Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and based on true cases, Esterson enables Hazel ‘but for the first time to hear [her] own voice’. It speaks to Reed’s ability as a poet that such a moment is so keenly felt and quietly celebrated by the reader, especially in the light of what follows.” Charles G Lauder Jr

Knots, tangles, fankles is a very poignant and very penetrating poetic sequence in multiple voices.

ISBN: 978-1-8380488-3-9

84 pages

R.R.P. £10.99

A sample poem from the collection can be found below.

woodentop

clackety-clack rattity-tat
fast as my clockwork legs can take me

past the room where the nurses drink tea
a voice on the telly is talking about me

this is a story about the woodentops
mummy & daddy woodentop

their woodentop girl whose name was hazel
& the biggest spotty dog you ever did see

one day daddy came home for his dinner
mummy was busy in the kitchen

little hazel was nowhere to be seen
that girl was always disappearing

mummy woodentop said to daddy woodentop
the girl’s not right, we’ll have her mended

let’s call for the woodentop doctor
he’ll saw her head open, hack out the rot

paint her fresh eyes & a pretty red mouth
fix her with glue just like new

clackety-clack rattity-tat
down the corridor to meet the doctor

but dr esterson didn’t have a saw
never did much, just sat in his room

smiled when she came through the door
then lit up his pipe & winked as he asked

did you ever wish to be real
not made of wood?

Also available from V. Press: These nights at home by Alex Reed, with photos by Keren Banning.

Thursday, 7 October 2021

Happy National Poetry Day 2021!

V. Press is very very delighted to celebrate this year's National Poetry Day, with its theme of 'choice'.

As ever, we have lots of poetry titles for readers to choose from, either by browsing our online bookshop or our thematic listings and author articles in The Reading Room.

We're also delighted to share some recent review news, details of a forthcoming collection out shortly and the biographies of two new V. Press poets.

REVIEWS

Something so wild and new in this feeling

"Drawn from the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth [...] The contemporary poet brings these selected snippets together with all the care and consideration of a professional florist – or expert in Ikebana – resulting in marvellously original pieces that are a sheer joy to read. The poem about walking, which also manages to rhyme, the rhythm of the lines strolling along as you journey through it and alongside the I of the poem, was a particular favourite." Mab Jones, buzz, full review here.

Although it was only published in March, Something so wild and new in this feeling is already onto its third print run! For a sample poem, more information and to order a copy of Something so wild and new in this feeling please click here.

COMING SOON

Knots, tangles, fankles is a very poignant and very penetrating poetic sequence in multiple voices.

ISBN: 978-1-8380488-3-9 84 pages R.R.P. £10.99

A sample poem can be enjoyed below and the collection pre-ordered here.