Bøker utgitt av Broken Sleep Books

As queer people we are forced to find representation in villains, seek surrogate parents in divas, daddies and pop stars. We construct alternative histories, cosmologies, and spiritualities from those handed down to us. We become our own icons, ascribing 'iconic' status. We trouble and disrupt the established order, and so we must write narratives alternative to the ones we are erased from. Queer Bodies: Queer Icons explores multiple associations with the word 'icon', from the symbolic & sacred, to fetishism & celebrity. This anthology is a queer body of potential for what it means to be an icon here and now.

Poems for Pete Davidson by Ella Sadie Guthrie reveals an electrifying new voice in poetry, a hypnotic joy ride with all the swagger of Zelda Fitzgerald at her debutant ball. The poems show the thrills and perils of obsessive fandom coupled with a heavily romanticised version of the self, which at one point becomes so heavily romanticised she dreams of herself as Hera Lindsay Bird. "i have gone too far this time", writes Guthrie, paying ironic tribute to the troubled male muse, by this point, the reader knows Guthrie is the brighter star.

Don't Panic: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Panicking is a user manual for dealing with panic attacks, as written by a writer who has been having them for a long time. Caleb Nichols describes their own experience of panic, and what they've learned is happening neurologically, while sharing the methods that have helped them navigate living with panic disorder.

In Waste Extractions, the brilliant fiction pamphlet from Andrea Mason, we are asked to consider waste, nature, and what determines value, in a variety of interesting and diverse forms. Mason's work is experimental and vivid, evoking what happens when 'in becoming like everyone else' we become banished from society, from ourselves.

Cornish Modern Poetries edited by Ella Frears and Aaron Kent brings the editors' electric luminosity and bruised tenderness into play as guides. This ground-breaking anthology celebrates the blossoming of contemporary Cornish poetry, featuring luminaries such as Pascale Petit, Jennifer Edgecombe, John Wedgwood Clarke, and Penelope Shuttle alongside many more. Cornish Modern Poetries captures a duality which has made Cornwall an ice-cream famous tourist destination while housing some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Western Europe. The anthology features poems in English and Kernewek, keeping the Cornish flame burning, into an uncertain future.

Lugubriations is a literary substack that publishes irregular and experimental essays, poetry, and fiction by artists and writers with a shared sense of despair and inanity. Edited by Roisin Agnew. Featuring work by Andrew Key, Lizzie Homersham, Susu Laroche, Ebun Sodipo, Ed Luker, Alan Fielden, Roisin Agnew, Paige Murphy, D Mortimer, Tim MacGabhann, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Kandace Siobhan Walker.

The island of Borneo was once the most heavily wooded in the world, and its people have always carved wood beautifully. In KILLERNOVA, grappling with his heritage, Omar Musa remixes this ancient art form with fiery poetry forged in the stars. With equal parts swagger, humour and vulnerability, Musa charts a journey through the colonial history of South-East Asia, environmental destruction, oceans, bushfires, race, the isolation and addiction of COVID lockdown, family, lost love and, ultimately, recovery. Relentlessly on beat, visually captivating and deceptively intimate, this is a collection of words and art that burns blindingly bright.

Moving across poem, play, essay - chipping away at their distinctions - Robert Kiely's ROB explores song, grading, vaccines, change, sound, and natural history. What do you remember, and why? How much of your life is determined by biology? Acknowledgments are terminally incomplete, they always must be. So, what can words hold? What if there is not distinction between inside and outside? Who do you love, who do you write to, who do you collaborate with? Kiely's answers are only ROB's. When you read this you'll have to write your own.

An intriguing and idiosyncratic book, RE:VERB energetically recreates Rimbaud's terrestrial adventures: from the Hooligan Poet and Seer in bohemian Paris, through the years as tough merchant and gun-runner in Africa, to end with his death aged thirty-seven in a Marseilles hospital. Cliff Forshaw's verse narrative allows us to glimpse Rimbaud's life, travels and the diverse characters he dealt with through the disillusioned poet's own eyes, offset by the reports and asides of those who knew and observed him.

Human Townsperson, the debut collection by Liam Bates, centres around a heroic quest. The hero? Somebody. The quest's objective? Unsure. Utilising Bates' engaging and absurd poetics, Human Townsperson follows the journey of a poet leaving town bearing gear and supplies: a pack full of fantastic weaponry, potions and prescription medication. The work will be precarious and the costs grave, but out in the wilderness for long enough, maybe we'll remember why we're here.

Obligate Carnivore is an immaculate introduction to Stuart McPherson's poetry. Painted in the jagged brushstrokes of wounded masculinity and childhood trauma, McPherson excavates new darkness. The haunted images - wolves, corpses, moons and abattoirs - are not only vessels for McPherson's poems, but form part of an internal nightmare logic, creatures of the hell McPherson is trying to escape from. Writing, which as Barthes wrote: "is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin."

Interval: House, Lover, Slippages is the first collection from Lucy Rose Cunningham. The poems find Cunningham in contemplative mode, seeking to understand: "the year 2020 and the years that follow". The poems are neatly observed, paying close attention to melody, with a love of beauty reminiscent of the artists she references. Interval: House, Lover, Slippages is a collection which overflows with imaginative, intoxicating images and sounds.

Complete Sentences is a poetry pamphlet of & about teaching, owing its existence to the break room, the blackboard, the brilliance of students, and the bell at the end of the school day. Tom Snarsky has created a pamphlet of briliant poetry, constructed at a time when there are a million things to do that aren't wrting poetry.

A Terrific Uproar is a dedicated and exuberant collection from Scout Tzofiya Bolton. The poems juxtapose her mental health struggles with her love for her boyfriend, Vaslav Nijinsky, and the birth of modernism. Nijinsky represents the imaginary ideal, a ballet dancer who pushed himself to the top of the world and then over the edge with a lethal combination of talent and instability. Bolton's poetry soars through Nijinsky, through mesmeric scenes at The Ballet Russes, a life that is both 'communal and depersonalised.' A Terrific Uproar is an outstanding collection, when the dust settles, it feels like victory.

In of work Nóra Blascsók writes about office life, celebrating little rebellions and rare moments of joy found in the mundane, buried in "1,048,576 rows in a spreadsheet".

The Erection Specialist is poetry-by-adventure, a throwback to literature that put the reader at the heart of the story. Niall Bourke's poetry centres the transformation of the characters within its labyrinthian structure.