Bøker utgitt av Penned in the Margins

An invisible mountain rises above the streets of London. At over 1,400 metres it's Britain's highest peak. This ingenious book is an account of the ascent of Mount London by writers, poets and urban cartographers, each scaling a smaller urban mountain - from Crystal Palace to Parliament Hill. Mount London is a visionary record of the vertical city.

Improvised Explosive Device is a startlingly innovative exploration of extremism, hate crime and violence by poet Arji Manuelpillai. In this powerful and unsettling first collection, Manuelpillai presents a vision of the contemporary haunted by Melville's image of the whale - the terror beneath the surface of the sea. His uncompromising focus on violence is laced with gallows humour and the surreal, framed against the mundane detritus of modern life: two boys playing Mortal Kombat; a field of old trainers; the lonely glare of laptop light; a suspicious looking package in the back seat of a van.The poems in Improvised Explosive Device emerged through research and interviews with academics, sociologists, and former members of extremist groups and their families - from the English Defence League and the National Front to ISIS and the Tamil Tigers. These complex, unnerving texts ask a series of important questions. What drives a person to commit a radical act of violence? How is that violence mediated through screens and social media? And how does the British government police marginalised groups? Improvised Explosive Device is a brave, surprising and risk-taking book; it will change the way you look at the world."e;Refusing glib analysis and easy answers, Improvised Explosive Device is a work of radical empathy, fuelled by honesty and compassion, both for those stirred to violence against minorities, and those who suffer from it."e; Rishi Dastidar"e;The project of Arji Manuelpillai's Improvised Explosive Device leans into the mighty disciplines of poetry, sociology, and reportage to formulate an arresting debut which contests the ways we're conditioned to internalise notions of terrorism, nationalism and belonging...a bold and startling new work."e; Anthony Anaxagorou

Set in the urban pastoral of an East London postcode, Feral Borough asks what it means to call a place home, and how best to share that home with its non-human inhabitants. Meryl Pugh reimagines the wild as 'feral', recording the fauna and flora of Leytonstone in prose as incisive as it is lyrical. Here, on the edge of the city, red kite and parakeets thrive alongside bluebell and yarrow, a muntjac deer is glimpsed in the undergrowth, and an escaped boa constrictor appears on the High Road. In this subtle, captivating book - part herbarium, part bestiary and part memoir - Pugh explores the effects of loss, and lockdown, on human well-being, conjuring the local urban environment as a site for healing and connection.'A subtle, heartfelt and affecting book about home, the city and the self -- Pugh reminds us that nowhere, however urban, is without nature; that wherever we go, the intricate web of life continues to shape and change us.' Rebecca Tamas

Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place.From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things.'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut...The language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' - Luke Kennard'Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut...With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.' - Martha Sprackland'Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.' - Nick Jensen'Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard-to-pin-down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects' international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.' - Will Burns

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST SINGLE POEM*From the mercurial mind of award-winning poet John McCullough comes his darkest and most experimental book to date. Panic Response puts personal and cultural anxiety under the microscope. It is full of things that shimmer, quiver and fizz: plankton glowing at low tide; brain tissue turning to glass; a basketball emerging from the waves, covered in barnacles. These are poems of uncertainty but also of hope, which move beyond the breathlessness of panic towards luminescence and solidarity.

In Heavy Time psychogeographer Sonia Overall takes to the old pilgrim roads, navigating a route from Canterbury to Walsingham via London and her home town of Ely. Vivid in her evocation of a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall's secular pilgrimage elevates the ordinary, collecting roadside objects - feathers, a bingo card, a worn penny - as relics. Facing injury and interruption, she takes the path of the lone woman walker, seeking out 'thin places' where past and present collide, and where new ways of living might begin. 'It is a talisman of a book. Heavy Time doesn't just describe a pilgrimage, it becomes one, for both writer and reader. It is an invitation to resist 'busyness', to think of ourselves as explorers, to seek out 'the everyday divine'. It has sent me out looking for 'thin places: pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through.' Beautiful and essential.'- Helen Mortn Heavy Time psychogeographer Sonia Overall takes to the old pilgrim roads, navigating a route from Canterbury to Walsingham via London and her home town of Ely. Vivid in her evocation of a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall's secular pilgrimage elevates the ordinary, collecting roadside objects - feathers, a bingo card, a worn penny - as relics. Facing injury and interruption, she takes the path of the lone woman walker, seeking out 'thin places' where past and present collide, and where new ways of living might begin. 'It is a talisman of a book. Heavy Time doesn't just describe a pilgrimage, it becomes one, for both writer and reader. It is an invitation to resist 'busyness', to think of ourselves as explorers, to seek out 'the everyday divine'. It has sent me out looking for 'thin places: pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through.' Beautiful and essential.'- Helen Mort

A Poetry Book Society RecommendationLuke Kennard recasts Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party. A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar. Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard's affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse. 'Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "e;aren't knives fascinating... and hearts, my god!"e; whilst everything slowly goes black.'- Caroline Bird

A remarkable new book in praise of marine fauna. Of Sea takes the form of a poetic bestiary of creatures living beneath, beside and above the water: in wetlands, salt marshes and the intertidal zone. In a sequence of 46 poems, Burnett captures the world of cockles and clams, rare moths and the humble earwig (to name a few) with a precise and dynamic lyric that seems always on the verge of music. 'Burnett is one of the UK's most original poets of the nonhuman world, and of our environmental moment. Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance.'- Rebecca Tams

Stranger in the Mask of a Deer conjures an elemental, dreamlike narrative ranging from the present to the Late-Upper Palaeolithic, when the British peninsula was gradually reoccupied by humans and animals returning from the greater continent after the Ice Age. Richard Skelton began this book-length poem many years ago with the intention of exploring the history of Britain's landscape, only for the text to transform into a kind of literary seance, involving both human and other-than-human voices. Its transforming power lies in the accumulative magic of the word as ritual. Skelton's is a mesmeric lyric, probing the edges of consciousness towards a place where 'there are always presences / always inherences / things beyond sight.''An incredibly moving, essential meditation on where we have come from, where we are, and where we are headed.'Kerri n Dochartaigh

Visceral and analytic at turns, Hopkins' startling collection probes at the undergrowth of English culture; a white-hot debut by a poet of singular vision.

The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. This startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life.

Divorced, and perhaps a little bruised, Luke Wright journeys off the sunken roads of southern England and into himself, pursued by murderous swans, empty car seats, and his father's skeleton clocks.

An Archive of Happiness is set in the Scottish Highlands over the course of one day during the Avens family's annual get-together. It's the summer solstice and theirs is a fractured family, broken by arguments, by things said and not said, by a mother who has left and a father who was left behind.

Shortlisted for the Costa 2019 Poetry Award. Surreal, joyful, political and queer, Reckless Paper Birds is a collection to treasure by Polari Prize-winning poet John McCullough, ranging across birdlife, Grindr and My Little Pony while also addressing social issues from homelessness to homophobia.

Plastiglomerate finds our world in the midst of environmental disaster: from plastic pollution and wrecked shipping to fires in the Amazon rainforest. It completes a trilogy of poetry books that examines mankind's impact on the earth.

In this breathtaking first novel, Khaled Nurul Hakim chronicles the hero's struggle for redemption through the backstreets and motorway service stations of modern Britain to the desert and mountains of a fictional borderland.

A young woman spends a month taking the waters at a thermal water-based rehabilitation facility in Budapest. On her return to London, she attempts to continue her recovery using an 80 pound inflatable blue bathtub.

Midland tells the story of three women as they fight to find their feet amid the rubble of the twentieth century. From the bombsites of the 1940s to the construction sites of the 1960s and decaying tower blocks of the 1980s, Honor Gavin has created an ingenious narrative of one Midlands family that's also a startling, anarchic history of a city.

The threat of violence is never far away in Anthony Anaxagorou's breakthrough collection After the Formalities. Technically achieved, emotionally transformative and razor-sharp, these are poems that confront and contradict; poems in which the scholarly synthesises with the streetwise, and global histories are told through the lens of one family.

The debut full collection from celebrated British-Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus.

Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain.

Step through the iron gates of one of London's most spectacular Victorian cemeteries on the hunt for the lost poets of Nunhead.

The Toll combines the elegaic with the anarchic, placing uproarious satire cheek-by-jowl with wild experiments in form and touching poems of parenthood. In this mature follow-up to his best-selling debut, Mondeo Man, Luke Wright captures the strain of austerity Britain, speaking truth to power and registering the toll it takes on us all.

Spacecraft navigates white space of the page and distances between people. Margins, edges and coastlines abound in McCullough's tender explorations of contemporary life and love. From lichen to lava lamps, from etymology to Brighton's gay scene, Spacecraft is a humane and spellbinding collection from the winner of the 2012 Polari First Book Prize.

The Sun is our neighbourhood star, igniting the imagination and setting the template for divinity. But in reality, it is crawling with sunspots of differing shapes, sizes, and power. Simon Barraclough is your guide to the Sun in this ambitious and energetic new collection of poems, fusing science and literature.