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A deep-dive into the human relationship with trees and how trees have shaped folklore and literature. Sparked by a campaign to save the ancient forest of Penrhos, an SSSI on Ynys Môn, from being turned into a holiday camp, Ness explores Welsh folklore of trees and her own love for and engagement with the trees and other wild aspects of her home, as well as more common garden flowers, which should be treated with respect (Daffodils are Dangerous). Ness has an ongoing conversation with her native language and some poems are presented bilingually: there is a link to be made between the disregarding of native language and the disregarding of native habitat. Far more than a book of nature poems there is a simmering frustration at the casual way we despoil our environment without any concern for what is destroyed or the ongoing impact of that destruction. No trees harmed in the making of this book, which is printed on woodfree paper.

Arachne Press has long been a champion of LGBTQ+ writers, but we've never before published an anthology of LGBTQ+ poetry. These are joyful poems that celebrate all that is best about our community/ies and lives. This is not an 'explain it to the straights' book, this is for us. LGBTQ+ readers can open this book at random and find a moment of poetic queer joy for themselves, however big or small.

Short fiction and poetry inspired by walking and the places you can only reach by walking. Join our authors in the urban lives of alleyways, the secret ways between hedgerows and the well trodden paths to the local shops.

what if / I actually - am - a bird / my cupped hands / opening to release me... Phil Barnett's relationship with birds is so close that his poetry blurs the distinctions between himself and the birds - a kind of ornimorphology where rather than giving the birds human characteristics, the reverse happens, and he imagines himself as a bird.

The City-State of Tligol is ruled by dictators, holds monthly public executions but by and large the inhabitants are content, and the food is amazing. The perfect place for a city break, just as long as you don't want to leave. Ever.

Is the menopause really all about hot flushes, empty nests and HRT? Forty-three writers challenge the clichés in poetry and short fiction.

Poetry of myth and mothers - when does 'mother' cross the line from myth to monster?

At the core of this debut collection is a question - what is worth holding onto?Through poetic experiments that blend the academic and the artistic, Rhiya Pau queries complex characters and tender landscapes. Routes journeys from Ba's kitchen in Sonia Gardens to Independence hour in Delhi, across the pink shores of Nakuru, to meet a painter on Lee High Road. Celebrating fifty years since her community arrived in the UK, Pau chronicles the migratory histories of her ancestors and simultaneously lays bare the conflicts of identity that arise from being a member of the East African-Indian diaspora. In this multilingual discourse exhibiting vast formal range, Pau wrestles with language, narrative and memory, daring to navigate their collective fallibilities to architect her own identity.'[Routes]...holds up to the light the wisdom of the past, and asks what else is passed down along with it...a work of humane intelligence, formal experiment and linguistic verve' - Sarah Howe, Judge of Eric Gregory Awards 2022

How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager) explores, exploits, and sometimes downright twists the major arcana and the meanings they have accumulated, in the order in which the many hundreds of tarot decks now travelling the world present them. The Star, connoting hope, exists simultaneously as metaphor and feral dog; the rebirth nestled inside the Death card becomes female friendship and escape from patriarchal binds.

Poems that arise from Claire Booker's relationship to the East Sussex coastal, downlands and urban environments. Encounters on buses, streets, scarp slopes, sea shore, town, village, fishing boats and dream-scapes with an ecological edge.

On a wasted island in perpetual sun, the Father practices magic, laments his lost kingdom and commands a ragtag army of three: the passionate and damaged Daughter, the winged Spirit and an indigenous being known only as C. Behind their uniforms - white suits and full-face paper masks - the soldiers seethe with rebellion. The arrival of the Boy, a hapless prince, and the Brother, the Father's rival, unleashes desire, betrayal, insanity and revenge - all of it witnessed by an irate sea.Paper Crusade is a bold reinvention of Shakespeare's play, The Tempest. Michelle Penn's vivid imagery and startling, sensual language create an unforgettable dystopia for our own time.

London 1988: Agata grew up in post-war Prague and believes that her mother was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust.But not everyone died. Agata's search for her 'lost' family, set against the background of revolutions in Eastern Europe, threatens to tear apart not only the family she already has, but her own identity.

Fifty poems by Welsh poets celebrating the A470. Originaly written in Welsh or English, every poem has been translated into the other language and set out side by side as we travel the length of the country.

Stories and poems that respond to the floods and droughts and fires all around the globe caused by climate change with tenderness, compassion, fear, grief and rage. Gaia is represented in all ther power and glory, and butterflies and plants sow seeds of hope.

Poems, short fiction and scripts from UK Deaf, deaf and hard of hearing writers. Our theme is movement. Edited by Liosa Kelly co-editor of Magma 69, The Deaf Issue; co-Chair of Magma Poetry, and |Sophie Stone (RADA trained actor, Writer: Paine¿s Plough, The Bunker, BBC Radio 3 and Co-founder of DH Ensemble theatre Co) and with a preface from Raymond Antrobus.

UK authors from the Black and Asian ( and Chinese and Malay, and Latinx and Arab) communities give their responses to maps, and mapping. Stories and poems of finding oneself and getting lost, colonialism and diaspora, childhood exploration and adult homecoming.

Set in Cornwall, coastal errosion and flooding take on a near mythical power as the short stories in this collection weave in and out of the recent past and near future, as lives and relationships ebb and flow with the tide. From one maritime tragedy to another, the community, and three generations of women from the same family, struggle with their over-close affinity for the sea.

When Rob Walton went into lockdown, he didn't know that he would also go into mourning. Here he writes about the life and death of his dad, and how sadness seeped into various aspects of his life. He also manages to find cheap laughs, digs at the government, celebrations of the young and old, unashamed sentimentality and suddenly disarming moments of tenderness.

A man carries his girlfriend in the left-hand breast pocket of his shirt. During World War II, a young soldier searches the houses and barns of the families with whom he grew up. An astronaut wonders whether she can adapt to life back on earth. In her second collection of short fiction, 100neHundred, Laura Besley explores a kaleidoscope of emotions through 100 stories of exactly 100 words.

"e;You have to understand,"e; says the woman, "e;an incorcism is nothing like its counterpart. No bells and whistles, no drama. All it takes is willingness, which you already have in spades."e; Strange stories about strange things for strange people. Tales of possession and obsession. Of destruction and restoration. Of the demons we hold inside us, and those we leave behind in others. An odd apocalypse freezes a supermarket on Mother's Day, a vanished village holds an ancient curse, an abandoned ice cream van tears a street apart. Rival rainbow setters, the woman who sowed a crop of elephants in her garden, and what happens if you keep on turning the clocks back. Perhaps you had a demon then lost it. Do you miss it? Our time here is brief and so are these curious fables. But the smallest of splinters are the hardest to dig out. Come and be snagged. Come, be unsettled. To be strange is to be human.

For Solstice Shorts Festival 2020, Writers respond or react to, or are inspired by, a sixteenth century poem: Robert Southwell's Tymes Goe by Turnes.

For the Eighth Anniversary of Arachne Press, poems and stories that celebrate the spider in all her mythological and actual glory.

Zed and her family move unwillingly form London to Cornwall to support her mother's mental health. Gradually the family falls apart and it is only when Zed realises the local Cormorants have something to do with the disasters that consume them, and that they are attempting to right an ancient wrong, that she and her sister Amy start working together to find a solution and call a truce.

Stories and poems of immigration/emigration, making a living on and beside the water with an historical slant.

Arachne Press's 'official' #WomenVote100 publication, in collaboration with Liars' League.A celebration of the centenary of women in the UK getting the vote. Stories by women, and mostly about women, which have been performed at one of Liars' League's events in London, Hong Kong, or New York. Everything from fantasy and historical through magic realism to SF and humour.Edited by Cherry Potts and Katy Darby.Featuring Liars' League alumnae: Arike Oke, Carolyn Eden, Cherry Potts, Elizabeth Hopkinson, Elisabeth Simon, Elizabeth Stott, Fiona Salter, Ilora Choudhury, J. A. Hopper, Julia Kent, Jennifer Rickard, Jenny Ramsay, Joanne L. M. Williams, Katy Darby, Lucy Ribchester, Peng Shepherd, Rosalind Stopps, Swati Khurana, and Uschi Gatward.

As part of our celebrations of the centenary of some British Women getting the vote, a showcase for five authors Arachne Press has published previously in anthologies, giving a wider perspective on their writing with five stories each. The collection as a whole has a tendency towards fantasy and magical realism, with unforgiving reality tempered with warmth in Guatemala in Cassandra Passarelli's (Liberty Tales) stories of overweight truckers, pregnant teenagers, pilgrimages, stolen children and stolen toys.Katy Darby's (London Lies, Stations, Shortest Day, Longest Night) SF and historical stories - future where hygiene is everything, an historical murder, a spectacularly disturbing bedtime story, an inconvenient 'miracle' and an illicit meeting.Joan Taylor-Rowan's (London Lies, Lover's Lies, Stations) acid humour and modern desperation as characters make new lives 'Down From London', or as stowaways in a central London Department store.Sarah James' (Longest Day, Shortest Night; Vindication) elliptical poet's sensibility of Elegant twists and restraint brought to flash fiction.Helen Morris' (Liberty Tales, Solstice Shorts) ability to get to the heart of a story, with wide-ranging emotional rollercoasters of trolls outwitted, drunken boat trips, world domination and the heart ripped out of a family to make you laugh out loud or weep inconsolably.Each of these writers has featured in Arachne Press anthologies. We liked their work so much we asked them to send more. This is the result.