Bøker utgitt av Valley Press

Bird, beast or man, we each have the same element at our core: bones. While our forms may change, the bones always remain ¿ and in this thrilling debut, the poet celebrates their beauty and structure though folk tales, philosophy, day dreams and night terrors. Aided by a host of characters including a girl who fell in love with a mountain, a woman who can only ever look at you sideways, and a man made of bees, Caroline Hardaker creates a dozen unforgettable worlds entirely her own.

Sparks is the third collection of passionate, poignant poetry from much-loved Hull-based author Norah Hanson. The fiery wit and hard-won wisdom that characterised her previous collections are here, intact, with a new level of clarity and purpose adding weight to the words - without losing the warmth, wonder, and laugh-out-loud observational skills that have won Norah readers across the world. Now six-times a great-grandmother, the poet's life experience shines through each page. There are no riddles or literary exercises here; Norah's refreshingly (and deceptively) direct language seems to rise from the earth itself.

Before the Second World War, there were around seventy cinemas operating in Leeds. Since 2014, Valley Press poets James Nash and Matthew Hedley Stoppard have been visiting the sites of these abandoned picturehouses and writing about them in verse ¿ as well as covering the topic of cinema-going in general.

Saleem Peeradina is one of the most important Indian poets writing in the English language. Final Cut, his fifth collection, finds his attention turning to new subjects ¿ birds, their migration and intelligence; fruit, as it appears in memories, mythology and reality; objects (shaving brush, stapler, juicer, skillet) and ¿extraordinary ordinary¿ people, all finding their voices and speaking up.

Kelley Swain¿s The Naked Muse is a subtle, fascinating memoir about art ¿ from the object¿s point of view ¿ as well as an extended meditation on travel, painting and what it means to see.Swain describes her first experience disrobing for a group of painters, modelling for international artists over the course of six years, and posing as four saints for the frieze of a chapel in Sicily. Inviting readers into the intensely personal world of life drawing, Swain brings out the light and shade; both on the canvas and within ourselves.

Mr Jolly is the first collection of short stories by Michael Stewart, and contains some of the award-winning novelist¿s most extraordinary writing to date. Each tale offers a unique, utterly compelling insight into the human condition, framed by a mind-bendingly original concept that no other writer working today could ¿ or indeed would ¿ have concocted. Readers will meet a conformity-obsessed league of bald men, breaking into homes for an extended debate about the nature of freedom; discuss the nomenclature of the marshmallow with a man whose single goal in life is to witness them accidentally skewered on stiletto heels; and meet God, in perhaps the most frustrating (yet believable) depiction of the divine being in modern literature.Last phone calls, alien abductions, murders and more are grounded in stories of struggling parents, baffled lovers and lost children (some of who may live permanently onthe number 606 bus). However long you live, and however much you read, yoüll never come across another book quite like this.

In David O¿Hanlon¿s first full-length collection, precise, piercing language illuminates tales from actual, mythical and personal history ¿ making all three seem immediate, contemporary and universal. Readers will hear how ¿four unacquainted deaf men published near-identical essays deconstructing the assumed importance of sound¿, find new ways of reading the stories of Orpheus, Sisypus, Tantalus et al., and learn of a young man¿s twelve-year struggle to paint an authentic picture of the sky.