Lewis Buxton, "Mate Arias"

Lewis Buxton, photo by Rosie A Mills-Smith

Lewis Buxton won the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2020 and has a full-length collection out with Nine Arches Press. He regularly visits schools, delivering workshops and performances to young people, and his theatre shows tour extensively in the UK. He lives in Norfolk.

About Mate Arias, by Lewis Buxton
Mate Arias is Lewis Buxton’s love song to his friends, a soaring voice attempting to communicate in a masculine world often punctuated by silence or violence. Muscles are torn, crossword clues are pondered, and pints are lifted as the poet attempts to make sense of his friends and himself, and their often clumsy, physical dances around each other.

Under the glares of floodlights and movie screens, with a backdrop of superheroes and zombies, Buxton creates the settings for new versions of male friendships. A poignant and funny exploration of making and maintaining relationships as lives begin to move in different directions, Mate Arias is a unique celebration of the tenderness and love that can be communicated by men.

You can read more about Mate Arias on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

Working Out 

We lift until our arms are dead rabbits: 

he would prefer we were sat in awkward 

positions, dumbbells slung across our hips 

thrusting upwards, rather than find a word 

for what we are to each other: Mate? Friend? 

Buddy? Pal? Brother? I don’t even know. 

Now we are fit shadows trying to bend 

our bodies into shape. I wouldn’t go 

if you didn’t come with me, Alex says 

as we knacker ourselves on the treadmills, 

horses eating air, speaking through spittle. 

I often turn up alone but most days 

that feels thick and forlorn. It’s nice you’re here 

mate, friend, buddy, pal, brother, whatever.

Serge ♆ Neptune, "Mother Night"

 

Serge ♆ Neptune, photo by Sofia Falconi

Serge ♆ Neptune has been called "the little merman of British poetry." He is a Faber Academy alumnus and a queer neuro-divergent poet based in London. His first pamphlet, These Queer Merboys, was published with Broken Sleep (2020). His work was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and the Winchester Poetry Competition. Several poems have appeared in The North, Propel, The Rialto, Banshee, Magma, Fourteen Poems, and elsewhere. 

Cover Image ©Kremena Chipilova, "Lost in Reverie"

About Mother Night
Mother Night is a hallucinogenic journey across a city with too many alleyways and across a life surviving childhood sexual assault. Forming a nocturnal séance, Serge ♆ Neptune resurrects abusive old lovers and ghosts of the queers of the past – conjures men in cars and men in bedrooms – providing them invitation and shelter, or casting them to stormy waves.

In a book of many types of darkness – across poems of vulnerability and harm – what persists in Mother Night is its celebration of resilience, what shines brightest is the many ways it reaches for the light.

From Mother Night, by Serge ♆ Neptune

my block of flats on the new cross rd
is now a giant record player. memories
crackle from afar. graffiti from the sides

of houses leave the walls, join
the parade of the reckless. night is a bag
of marbles dropped – each one rolling

over cars & people. i succumb
to their pace & weight, their love-tight gripe,
brace & crumble under the pressure

of the encounter. maybe this city
indulges us because it needs to – mother
swan devouring her cygnets – to keep

its foot on us, to cook us slowly.
gravity trips me, i fall. night drips red-hot
on the brain, lifts visions from its marshes.

i squeeze my body to define
my territory against a hostile world. i believe
in my mistakes. i carry them out proudly

like a pair of eyes on a purple glass dish –
my head, crowned with candles.

Valerie Bence, "Overlap"

 

Valerie Bence finished her doctorate in her mid-fifties and completed a Poetry MA at MMU in 2017. She was shortlisted for the Poetry School/Nine Arches Press Primers 4 in 2018, the Fish Poetry prize in 2019, and longlisted for the Ginkgo Prize in 2019. Her first collection, Falling in Love with a Dead Man, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2019. She is a mum and nonna and lives and works in Buckinghamshire.

About Overlap

Valerie Bence’s debut poetry pamphlet is a testament to ordinary lives, and a meditation on grandmothers. Part memoir, part family history, Overlap is a series of vivid vignettes from the poet’s childhood, courtship, motherhood and grandmotherhood, spanning the 20th and 21st centuries.

Bence’s grandmothers Winifred and Harriet are at the heart of this book. She reflects on their hardy, steadfast lives as she too becomes a grandmother, in very different times. Stranded from her family in the Covid-19 pandemic, the poet conjures up their ghosts, walks in their footsteps and – sometimes – feels herself become them.

You can read more about Overlap on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From Overlap, by Valerie Bence

Collusion
 
From my vantage point under the kitchen table
I watch her knees as she walks by – dimpled,
thick stocking’d in summer and winter,
slippers with holes at the toes,
crossover pinny pockets full of scraps
and peelings for chickens. Grandma Harriet.
 
We mash tealeaves and bran for the rabbit,
the sweet aroma fogging her glasses, and every day
she scrubs bloody butcher’s aprons
for five shillings a week.
We take the clean ones back on the bus,
until the day she faints outside Boots in the rain,
sliding down the wall like in a cartoon,
her wartime hat slipping over her eyes.
 
Thinking she is dead I run into the chemist’s;
a man brings her a glass of water.
Sipping it she squeezes my arm –
Don’t tell him she says, pulling me close.
 
This will not be difficult, as in all my seven years
he has never spoken to me.

Lisabelle Tay, "Pilgrim"

Lisabelle Tay writes poetry and fiction, often with a speculative bent. After completing her studies in English Literature at King’s College London, she returned to Singapore, where she now lives with her husband and son. Her story 'Surat Dari Hantu' recently placed first in the 2020 Dream Foundry short story contest. Pilgrim is her debut poetry pamphlet, and is published by The Emma Press.

About Pilgrim, by Lisabelle Tay

In her debut pamphlet, Lisabelle Tay leads the reader down through the underworlds of illness, motherhood and family histories. Lighting the way with her luminescent poems, the poet draws on Celtic, Classical and Chinese mythologies, appealing to the selkie, Eurydice, and Chang’e in turn as she seeks a path through the darkness – and back to the light.

Pilgrim depicts a journey and a return, moving from the expansive and mythological to the inward and personal. The pilgrim who left is not the pilgrim who returns …

The pamphlet is illustrated by Reena Makwana and printed in monocolour risograph at The Holodeck.

You can see more details about Pilgrim on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Pilgrim

Pilgrim

Last night I dreamed of a garden on the moon
a stone rolled away, an empty tomb
a wall of violets dripping milk
a harvest of joy
Today I will pack my bags and start walking
pregnant Lazarus freshly woken
collecting dew in living gourds
bread falling from the sky
I will kiss my husband before I go
dust sleep from his clean-shaven face
then leave, slippery as an egg  

List of Things Beyond My Bedroom Curtains

A warrior cleaning her sword
beside a running river

Water off the tip of a wing

A cave full of immortals

Boats burning on the water

In the beginning God spoke summoning
to-the-light and to-the-darkness

A half-cracked shell

Morning and evening

White dew on the underside of a leaf

A gasp of air, something forgotten
now remembered

A bare kernel of deathlessness
sown silently at dusk

Julia Bird, "is, thinks Pearl"

 

Julia Bird grew up in Gloucestershire and now lives in London, where she works for the Poetry Society and as an independent literature producer and promoter at Jaybird Live Literature. She has two poetry collections with Salt – Hannah and the Monk (2008) and Twenty-four Seven Blossom (2013) – and Now You Can Look, an illustrated poetry pamphlet, was published by The Emma Press in 2017. 

You can read a review of Now You Can Look on Everybody's Reviewing here. Julia's website is here.

About is, thinks Pearl, by Julia Bird

Step into Pearl’s world and take a tour around her faded seaside town, past the graffiti walls, bus stops and the old mattress factory. Except – with Pearl as our guide – the colours suddenly pop and every tiny detail becomes rich with interest. From the lido to the hair salon, to the Christmas shop in June, the ordinary becomes magical and every bit of wildness, weirdness and tattiness is whisked into the foreground.

“Pearl” is an alter ego of the poet: she’s a character who observes the minutiae around her and whose thoughts are a pleasure to follow. This pamphlet follows Pearl as she rollicks around, making her way through a townscape similar but not identical to the too-small-to-be-cities of poet Julia Bird’s 70s & 80s childhood.

From is, thinks Pearl

Helium Pearl

The man who stands all day in the high street

selling helium balloons is, thinks Pearl,

weighed down by the cumulus of gas and foil

capping low above his head. The drag on him

of a hundred fat cartoons tugging their leads

like young dogs: what if he doesn’t sell out,

what if his mate doesn’t show when he said

he would - how could he herd this tangling

and bumbling stock to a sandwich or a coffee shop?

Pearl knows that even one small silver pup,

its two dimensions startled into three, will not

sit still in the changing room, sit still on the bus:

it only wants to drop and dive back to the sun.

Pearl thinks that, when the time comes, this

is what it might be like to mourn, to tie each

elevating death with a ribbon to your wrist

and feel its unexpected weight every time a door

revolves, or you’re at the cinema in a front seat,

or you’re putting on or you’re taking off your coat.