Books | International Women's Day 2021 / March 8, 2021 by Out Spoken

For International Women’s Day this year, we asked a few of our favourite poets and writers to spotlight some favourite works by women.

Salena Godden, Alice Frecknall, Harry Josephine Giles, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Fran Lock and Lisa Luxx share some books they love — from M. NourbeSe Philip, Sylvia Pankhurst and Zora Neale Hurston, to Patricia Smith, Jos Charles and Caroline Bird; firmly situated in history, in protest, in joy and in craft, we hope you find something you need here:

Lisa Luxx

Two of my favourite collections include Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's Water & Salt (Red Hen Press. UK stockist: Blackwells) which so sensitively writes of grief, ritual, war and the identity of meal time from the perspective of the Arab diaspora. Writing from the position of displacement is always tricky and uneasy to navigate, but Lena does so in such a moving and powerful voice; every line is bone clean, every word impeccable. It is potently political in its softest moments.

The other I would like to celebrate is Keisha Thompson's Lunar (Commonword Books) which explores the Black British experience, masculinity and mental health in the language of maths. This book taught me the absolute boundlessness of poetry - how poems really are our best way to forge new languages. On international women's day I think it's important to recognize we have that capacity to forge our own symbols, that liberation is a code we're writing in our own tongue.

Fran Lock

My militant feminist reading list currently includes Smokestack Books' Writ on Cold Slate: poems by Sylvia Pankhurst, with photographs by Norah Smyth. Sylvia Pankhurst's literary fate is metonymic for any struggle with working-class solidarity as its object. History has preferred to focus on her mother and sister, and on the activities of WSPU, who – lest we forget – were solely interested in gaining the vote for middle, upper-class, and property owning women. The poems in this collection, in print for the first time since 1922! attest to Pankhurst's unrelenting activism, her deep sense of socialist solidarity, and her incredible empathetic reach. They're also good, combining the heightened lyric style of Christina Rossetti with an unflinching documentary witness to the brutality of prison life.

I've also been obsessed with Kenning Editions' Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini (transl. Anne Boyer & Cassandra Gillig) (UK stockists: Blackwells) since it first appeared in 2019. Often insultingly miscategorised as the 'Venezuelan Sylvia Plath', death doesn't so much haunt as commands Vestrini's poems. These are poems without catharsis or accommodation, of hilarious, dark, and gloriously untempered discontent.

I was given the gift of reading alongside Nicole Sealey in February this year. Her work was previously unknown to me, but wow! I ordered Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017) off the strength of that reading, and I'm still being knocked sideways by it. This is a poet who uses every possible poetic resource to stage a bravura engagement with both trauma, and with tenderness.

Harry Josephine Giles

Feeld by Joe Charles (Milkweed)

Feeld takes the English language apart and puts it back together in a way that speaks and sings and mourns and hopes. It gave me melodies for writing towards myself, and a language to be in community with. Extract: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/90970/from-feeld

of sirens, body & faultlines by Nat Raha (Boiler House Press)

A book of prophecy and resistance, a writing through of years of struggle -- both struggle against and struggle for, struggle as life and for life. The words make noises and tears around the page; when I read them I can hear Nat's sonically furious and beautiful performances.
Extract: https://eoagh.com/nat-raha/

The Stone Age by Jen Hadfield (Picador)

I feel deep kinship with the stones Jen writes about and the voice she writes in and for: they are northern stones we both know and love. When I read these poems I cried in recognition, aloud, and for being a voice trying to find voice with the islands.

Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa

Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip (Wesleyan Poetry)

Whenever I feel haunted by historical narratives pertaining to my ancestors I often look to Zong! for guidance and a spiritual hug. M. NourbeSe Philip composed form to masterfully reveal the laments, curses and chants of the 150 Africans murdered on the Zong in 1781. The orchestration of the language is genius and as someone who is obsessed with making words dance on the page I admire the tenacity of this masterpiece.

(Silver Press published a UK edition in 2020, but it looks hard to get hold of now — it seems to be available via Blackwells)

Voyage of the Sable Venus and other poems by Robin Coste Lewis (Knopf)

When aliens invade Earth or we must flee to Mars due to an asteroid, etc this is one of the collections I will pack before I pack a pair of socks. This collection is proof that Black women existed were present throughout history, by excavating Black women in art work from ancient civilisations (including Greek) to the present. The poetry is astonishing, every single line is perfection. Other poetry collections were staring at me rudely in heaps of dust because I refused to put Lewis’ work down.

Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith (Bloodaxe)

A masterclass in form and writing with great eloquence to provoke compassion and empathy. This collection focuses on the horrors inflicted on the black community and the murder of Emmett Till. The collection challenged my writing about trauma and inspired me to keep questioning the narrative seeing the event from different angles. I love collections which are constantly teaching in that you never read the same thing twice, like a performance.

Salena Godden

The Sound Mirror by Heidi James (Bluemoose Books)

Such a powerful and profoundly moving novel spanning three generations of women and choice and courage.

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by Zora Neale Hurston (HQ / Harper Collins)

A great new collection of short stories for a new generation of Hurston fans! Iconic!

Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan (Penguin. On bookshop.org.uk here)

Deliciously dark and haunting, the feelings and images stick in your head forever. It is also a love letter to Edinburgh, which I adore.

Alice Frecknall

I haven’t found reading easy this year. When the first lockdown hit, my brain just didn’t seem able to do it anymore. I would pick up a novel I was halfway through, turn the pages, follow the text, and when it came to closing the book, I wouldn’t recall any of it. But where prose seemed to leave me, poetry stayed. I’ve taken joy and comfort in discovering new poems or revisiting old favourites to sit with them some more. There have been many incredible collections by women poets published in the last couple of years alone. Picking just three is no easy task, but for their emotional power, playfulness, and vulnerability, these are the ones I’ve read more than any over the last twelve months. And I know I’ll continue to read them for many years to come:

Flèche by Mary Jean Chan (Faber & Faber)
On first reading Flèche, I described it as a ‘gift for the soul’, which may sound hyperbolic but the poems in this collection really do feel like openings into rooms of honest emotion. (available here)

The Air Year by Caroline Bird (Carcanet)
A wonderful fusion of playfulness and pain, in their surrealism each poem cuts right to the truth of feeling and delivers a powerful gut-punch when you least expect (in the best possible way!)

Shine, Darling by Ella Frears (Offord Road Books)
This collection feels like an intimate conversation. The poems layer profound, at times unsettling, revelations with moments of quiet mundanity; each one existing in full colour.

A note on book-buying: All titles above are linked to purchase direct from publishers (in parentheses), where these publishers are non-UK-based we’ve included a link to Bookshop.org.uk (where we are not affiliates and receive no click-through income) or, failing that, an alternative UK-based stockist.

If you’d like to support your local independent bookshop directly, that would be fantastic and where they don’t stock a title they can usually order it in for you. There’s a fantastic resource here with a map of indie bookshops near you.

Out-Spoken Press shortlisted for Small Press of the Year / February 28, 2021 by Out Spoken

In a little bit of good news after a rough year, we’re delighted that, for the second year running, Out-Spoken Press has been named a London Regional Finalist for the Small Press of the Year at this year’s British Book Awards.

Read the full shortlists on The Bookseller here.

Seder by Adam Kammerling — National Jewish Book Award finalist / January 28, 2021 by Out Spoken

Seder, the debut poetry collection by Adam Kammerling, has been named a finalist in the National Jewish Book Awards.

The Jewish Book Council has announced the winners and finalists of the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards and we are delighted that Adam Kammerling’s Seder has been selected as one of the four finalists in poetry. Seder joins the ranks of the hundreds of well-respected, classic Jewish books that have been National Jewish Book Award finalists.

Described by Ilya Kaminsky as “a beautiful lyric collection”, Seder is an archival and deft account of a person reckoning with their heritage and family history. Hybrid, dexterous and informed, Kammerling retraces his Jewish ancestry as poems fluctuate through time and space, leaving us with a forbidding sense that what has changed over recent decades is not enough.

Inaugurated in 1950, The National Jewish Book Awards, now in its 70th year, is the longest-running North American awards program of its kind and is recognized as the most prestigious. The Awards are intended to recognize authors, and encourage reading, of outstanding English-language books of Jewish interest.

Seder is available now in paperback here.

For review copies, sales enquiries or further information please contact Patricia Ferguson on press@outspokenldn.com

Year | Books / December 11, 2020 by Out Spoken

It’s December and we’ve almost made it, so we asked a few of our favourite poets and writers to look back at their 2020 reading and share with us their three top recommendations from this year.

Their picks are varied and personal and idiosyncratic — encompassing new poetry, 90s baseball, memoir, books in and on translation, pamphlets and indie publishers. A window into some of the reading that spoke to them and, hopefully, shining a little light on titles that might have passed you by in the maelstrom of all this 2020:

Andrew McMillan

Ok , so a confession, I’ve drank so much wine in lockdown that I think my memory is playing up. Another confession, I’ve been judging a couple of things this year, one of which doesn’t operate by the calendar year and one which does, so my sense of what was published when is a seesaw, like that time I took the dog for a walk at 2am to try and sober up. A final confession, my concentration for tasks beyond the necessary has been intermittent.

I greatly enjoyed If I had Your Face, by Frances Cha (Penguin, 2020), whose prose transported me to Seoul when I spent the year grounded in Manchester; a darkly comic and disturbing novel which has stayed with me long after finishing.

Just Us, by Claudia Rankine (Penguin), felt like essential reading and I left its pages with a long reading list of articles and monographs that I needed to seek out. The conversational directness of Rankine’s words, mixed with the weight of what they say, is a thrilling and implicating mix to encounter.

A lot of poetry I enjoyed has been noted already, by prize lists or the PBS, but I’d like to mention one book which moved me to tears, Return by Minor Road, by Heidi Williamson (Bloodaxe): a stunning and heart-breaking look at the Dunblane massacre, the way grief can infuse a place, and what the aftermath (in the literal sense of the beginnings of a new growth) of such an event feels like in such a close-knit community.

Is there an extra category for publisher of the year? I’d raise that glass to Broken Sleep Books, who continue to publish exciting and innovative poetry and prose, and introducing us to exciting new voices.

Rachael Allen

Three of my favourite pamphlet / chapbooks of the year! I have chapbook-lust over all of Ugly Duckling Presse's 2020 Pamphlet Series. Half sweet blush pink half duck-egg blue, they are beautifully made mini-collections of essays, poems, treatises. A favourite was Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode by Don Mee Choi (Ugly Duckling Presse), what and how different languages are upheld via mothers, Kim Hyesoon's poems and Ingmar Bergman.

Caren Beilin's Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books. UK stockists: Good Press, Foyles, ) does what it says on the tin. Bringing what Blackfish did for SeaWorld to women's contraceptive, Beilin attempts to burn down the house of the outdated material we're expected to ingest and host in the name of not getting pregnant.

Finally, ecologically networked, complex poems of animal and memory are in Pratyusha's bulbul calling (Bitter Melon), a gorgeous rumination on language and relationships.

Rishi Dastidar

The book that has most profoundly moved me this year is Poor by Caleb Femi (Penguin). The more I read it, the more brilliant I think it is.

The book that most surprised me, in that I had no expectations that I would enjoy its evocation of a lost England as much as I did, was Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon (Faber & Faber).

The book that I used to escape from the world the most (and think about the infinite while doing so) was Bottom of the 33rd by Dan Barry (Harper Collins. UK stockist: Blackwells), an account of the longest game ever played in baseball.

Maya C. Popa

My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems by Yi Lei; Translated from the Chinese by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi (Graywolf Press). I was unfamiliar with Yi Lei's stunning work (this, despite the fact that she is one of China's most influential contemporary poets) prior to reading Tracy K. Smith's compilation. These sly, sensual poems are masterfully crafted.

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, Edited by Kevin Young (Library of America). It's hard to overstate Young's contribution with this groundbreaking anthology, which is part act of historical preservation and re-animation, part celebration of Black American voices from the colonial period to present.

The Lost Spells by Robert MacFarlane (Author), Jackie Morris (Illustrator) (Penguin). This stunningly illustrated large format book features summoning spells (often in the form of acrostic poems) to flora and fauna, movingly capturing the verve and rhythms of the natural world.

Arji Manuelpillai

Poor by Caleb Femi (Penguin) — This book is like looking out the window for me. I’ve lived in SE London for so many years and I can’t remember seeing it so well reflected in a book of poems. The poems are accessible and quite easy to process but have layers like a double decker chocolate bar. It really is something to celebrate, it takes the concrete mundanity of everyday life and elevates it to what it should be, something which has all the sadness, joy and tragedy of life.

How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil (Pavilion Poetry) — Bhanu’s book is kind of like walking into a kaleidoscope of heritage. I love everything she does now, having found this book i have gone through it countless times. It’s not like other books this year, subtle, nuanced and in the astro-plane only really wild poets get into. If the book was in a pub it would be the lady with the trolley full of black bags, you always wondered what was in them and now you can find out. Go on, go have a peek, let the words wash over you, let them roll through you and when you come out you will have the stench of something new and precious.

Love Minus Love by Wayne Holloway-Smith (Bloodaxe) — This book is cool as hell. So cool it throws titles into the gutter, it sticks words together, it swings narratives round its little finger and it jumps on any preconception you have about poetry. This book runs like a comic strip, turning you on every page leading you up a path and then throwing you over a fence. Wayne is the don at the unexpected and I feel this trumps Alarum in its ability to speak things under the surface. Let me make a recommendation, read the book in one sit in, with some neat whiskey and a cig, do it when everybody is out, have it inside you and you will come out someone new.

Seán Hewitt

When Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (Tramp Press) arrived, it transported me. A beautiful work of autofiction, essay, and translation, it calls on the ghost, the echo, of the 18th century Irish poet Eibhlin Dubh Ní Chonaill. Its exploration of motherhood and erasure almost becomes a detective novel, working through the archive to find a voice, and to see if that voice will speak back.

Danez Smith’s Homie (Chatto) was published early in year, and I worry that in the disorientation of 2020 those pre-pandemic books have been a little overlooked, seeming to belong to a different year altogether. Still, Smith’s collection is dazzling, energetic, and makes a blaze of elegy. I like best their sonnet sequence ‘for a dead homie’: ‘aren’t you all of it now? i call for God. / i call for God but out comes your name.’

I’d also love to give a shout to fourteen poems, an anthology series that started this year. Each issue collects 14 new poems by queer writers. Each time an issue has arrived, I’ve discovered new names, and names I’m certain will be at the vanguard of the form in the coming years. There’s no better way to get an insight into the diversity, bravery, and experiment of queer poetry today.

Joelle Taylor

It’s been a very weird year for me with regard to reading. It’s all been archival texts, and the books I’m working on. These are my favourite poetry collections that I’ve read this year so far:

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Faber & Faber).

I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975 - 2014, by Eileen Myles (Serpent’s Tail).

The Actual by Inua Ellams (Penned in the Margins).

A note on book-buying: All titles above are linked to UK Bookshop.org where possible. We are not affiliates and don’t make anything on the clickthrough. Where titles aren’t available on Bookshop.org we’ve included links to non-A*azon UK stockists. We’ve also included links to purchase direct from publishers (in parentheses).

Seder | Artworks — Vanessa Kisuule | Acceptable Nomad / December 11, 2020 by Out Spoken

{a series of artworks produced in conversation with Adam Kammerling’s Seder }

As part of Adam Kammerling’s development of Seder, he asked artists in various disciplines to create works in response to themes of the collection — we’re delighted to share this video piece by stellar poet and performer Vanessa Kisuule. Vanessa says:

Inspired by the element of unleavened bread in the Passover meal, I decided to ask my mother how chappatis, a popular Indian flatbread, became a staple of Ugandan cuisine. It's a long and complicated history involving the use of a burgeoning Indian community in East Africa as a violent tool of British imperial power. This video follows me as I attempt to make chapattis for the first time and explores how food is a potent symbol for the movement of people throughout history

You can join us for the online launch of Seder (live-streaming from New River Studios, 7pm Friday 11 December) for a performance specially developed for the digital stage by Adam together with multifaceted musical talent and former World Beatboxing Champion, Bellatrix and jazz drum poetry extraordinaire Antosh Wojcik, and you can see illustrator Will Redgrove’s Seder-inspired artwork here.

Seder is available for purchase in our webshop here.

Seder | Artworks — Will Redgrove / December 4, 2020 by Out Spoken

{ Sharing the first in a series of artworks produced in conversation with Adam Kammerling’s Seder }

“There is a cathartic element to creating any art from trauma where it becomes a celebration of our resilience and survival. To continue that process with other artists, to extend the celebration of Seder, is a great privilege”

Adam says:

The poetry collection Seder was created mostly as a solo mission, but the most fruitful stages of the process after the initial research were collaborative. With it being such a key element of my practice, I wanted to create a collaborative digital space into which the book could be launched. So I enlisted the help of some wonderful artists, asking them to respond to the themes of the poems.

The first was Will Redgrove, a mural artist and leader of amazing community arts projects with ASYMBAL. He created these images using the texts from Seder, and some visual elements from my research, namely the illustrations in the book, Songs of the Ghetto.

Songs of the Ghetto features highly detailed woodblock illustrations depicting the struggles of Jews throughout the ages. It is a beautiful book with a desperately sad story, and Will drew from these images to find the forms of his paintings.

Songs of the Ghetto — from Adam Kammerling’s personal collection — *Songs of the Ghetto* — from Adam Kammerling’s personal collection

There is a cathartic element to creating any art from trauma where it becomes a celebration of our resilience and survival. To continue that process with other artists, to extend the celebration of Seder, is a great privilege, and one I have to thank Out-Spoken Press and Arts Council England for facilitating.

Introducing our 2021 Publishing Programme / September 1, 2020 by Out Spoken

After a tumultuous year which saw recognition for our authors by prestigious literary awards and the Press on the London shortlist for the British Book Awards Small Publisher of the Year, followed by the upheaval and uncertainty that have faced us all over the last few months, we’re excited to look ahead to our 2021 publishing programme.

Joelle Taylor will be commencing her one-year tenure as Editor and we’re delighted to announce the five poets who will form her all-women 2021 list. Joelle says:

I want to use my tenure as editor to elevate new voices, unearth buried narratives, look at new ways of conjuring form, of story, and exploring how a community of women can help one another develop as writers and as thinkers. I am delighted to be developing books with 5 poets whose collective work addresses a range of political and personal issues, centring the female experience in the 21st century.

We’ll be publishing books from Lisa Luxx, Leung Rachel Ka Yin, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Alice Frecknall and Sarah Fletcher. Check out the shiny brochure above to read a little more about each of them.

It’s an honour to publish these poets and we can’t wait to bring you their work.

Epiphaneia by Richard Georges Winner of 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature / May 3, 2020 by Out Spoken

Epiphaneia, the third poetry collection by BVI poet Richard Georges, has been announced as overall winner of the prestigious 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Georges’ Epiphaneia won out over fiction and non-fiction category winners by Edwidge Danticat and Tessa McWatt, to take home the leading literary award for Caribbean writers and US$10,000 prize. Epiphaneia is the third poetry book to have won the overall prize in the award’s ten year history.

Set in the immediate aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Irma, the most catastrophic storm to strike the British Virgin Islands, Richard Georges’ Epiphaneia is a collection of rich, transcendental verse. Described by Kaveh Akbar as “astonishing, largely unprecedented … a truly living text”, beyond the loss and devastation that natural disaster brings, Georges’ ideas span beyond the physical world, asking us to consider the ways in which families and communities come together amidst such tragedy.

On announcement of his win, Richard said “it’s a beautiful and humbling honour that I will treasure”. Earl Lovelace, chair of the judges, commented:

“Responses to catastrophe frequently take in evasion or cynicism: despair or glib resolution. Often they confine themselves in the familiar shapes of narrative, lamentation, or outrage. These poems take no such predictable shapes. It is as if each verse-form were a different lens for viewing the storm and the life in its aftermath. What makes these offerings so poignant is that many of them are lit with the brilliant light of the day-after. That epiphanic light of discovery is Richard Georges’s gift to us. We are delighted to acknowledge this accomplishment by one of the region’s phenomenal generation of younger poets.”

Georges’ Epiphaneia was announced as the Poetry category winner in April 2020 (other shortlisted poetry titles were Honeyfish, by Lauren K. Alleyne (Peepal Tree Press) and Skin Can Hold, by Vahni Capildeo (Carcanet Press) and the judges wrote: “In the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, Epiphaneia takes a deep breath and presents us with poems that outlast the storm, but sound the depths of survival and resilience, rather than being content to take refuge in them. Here we are enabled to comprehend disaster with an alertness to complexity that carries us beyond the usual triad of narrative, lamentation, and outrage. Everywhere there is sinuous rhythmic and semantic syncopation . . . in service of a poetic with urgent and palpable stakes.”

Richard Georges is the founding editor of Moko Magazine. His poetry has appeared in The Poetry Review, The White Review, decomP, WILDNESS, Wasafiri, and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry collections Make Us All Islands (Shearsman, 2017) and Giant (Platypus, 2018). In 2016 he won the Marvin Williams Literary Prize from The Caribbean Writer and has since been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry. Richard was born in Trinidad and raised in the British Virgin Islands where he lives and works today.

The OCM Bocas Prize is a major international award for literary writing by Caribbean authors. Books are judged in three categories: poetry; fiction and literary non-fiction. The three category winners are then judged by a panel of four judges — consisting of the chairs of the category panels and the prize chair — who determine the overall winner. The overall winner receives a prize of US$10,000. 2020 is the tenth year of the OCM Bocas Prize. Previous winners include Jennifer Rahim for her short story collection Curfew Chronicles (2018); Kei Miller for the novel Augustown (2017); Olive Senior for the short fiction collection The Pain Tree (2016); Vladimir Lucien for the debut poetry collection Sounding Ground (2015); Robert Antoni for the novel As Flies to Whatless Boys (2014); Monique Roffey for the novel Archipelago (2013); and Earl Lovelace for the novel Is Just a Movie (2012). The late Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott was winner of the inaugural prize in 2011, for the poetry collection White Egrets.

Epiphaneia is available now in paperback at £10

For review copies, sales enquiries or further information, please contact Patricia Ferguson at press@outspokenldn.com