Neil Campbell, "Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents"

 

Neil Campbell's new collection of short stories Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents is out now. From Manchester, England, he has appeared four times in the annual anthology of Best British Short Stories. He has published three novels, six collections of short stories, two poetry chapbooks and a poetry collection, as well as appearing in numerous magazines and anthologies. His website is here. 

About Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents, by Neil Campbell

Campbell gives voice to the extraordinary (never ordinary) men and women of Manchester. He goes beyond the King's English and formulaic approaches to short stories to capture, in print, how people really talk. Think James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, but Mancunian. Funny and heartfelt, this book is a romp to whizz through with pleasure. Forget mad for it Madchester, this is the Manchester of now, where Hacienda clichés turn into corporate nightmares and the only art is in marketing.

Read more about Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an except from the collection. 

From Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents

Job and Knock 

Chris does the nightshift because no other fucker wants to do it. So he deserves the better money and the fact that they can usually get the job done early doors. It’s what they call job and knock.

Most of the lads are on the iPlayer all night, catching up on the football or Line of Duty or whatever. But they’ve been getting away with it so long they’re even getting bored of the iPlayer.

Why don’t we just go to the boozer for a bit, says Chris, to Phil, the lad he’s on the job with. Phil can’t come up with a reason not to.

Nobody ever mentions management. They’re a joke anyway. Most of these nightshift lads said could have got management jobs if they’d wanted but they couldn’t be arsed with the hassle of going to meetings and all that, they just wanted to crack on with the job.

They started the nightshift at six bells and by eight they went to the boozer. It was only about a thirty-yard walk from the exchange. Months they’d been dragging this job out, on and off.

They went in the pub and it wasn’t like they remembered. Instead of cosy corners and comfy seats it was full of tables and families sat there having meals. Screaming kids all over the place. Both Chris and Phil had enough of that at home. Part of the reason Chris did the nightshift was that he got more kip on the hammock in the back of the van than he did in his own bed.

The pints cost a fortune and of course you had to go outside with your fags as well. Just wasn’t the same. It was like they were deliberately trying to get rid of pubs for the drinker. They were just restaurants that sold the occasional lager now. This boozer didn’t even do Guinness anymore. They always used to have great nights on the Guinness in there.

On the way back to the exchange they stopped at an off licence and picked up a four pack of Foster’s and some fags. Back in the exchange Chris turned on all the lights and they flicked on one after another. They sat there at the tables and then Phil asked if Chris knew the way onto the roof.

Yeah, think so.

Better than being stuck in here. Let’s have a wander up there.

They trailed up the stairs carrying the beer with them and went out through the fire escape and onto the roof. The bright lights of the big city stretched out before them.

Phil went back down and brought a couple of chairs back up and they sat there on the roof smoking and drinking.

This is fucking quality, said Phil.

 

Nice and cool on here as well. Boiling in that exchange.

Better get these beers down us.

Save a couple until tomorrow mate. No sense driving home pissed. One’s enough anyway. It’s like the fucking Shawshank Redemption up here.

Julian Stannard, "New and Selected Poems"

Julian Stannard has written nine volumes of poetry including Sottoripa: Genoese Poems (a bilingual publication, Canneto, 2018). His last single collection was Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother (Salt, 2023). In January 2025  Salt brought out New and Selected Poems. He has been awarded the International Troubadour Prize for Poetry and nominated various times for the Forward and the Pushcart. In 2024 he was awarded the Lerici Shelley Prize for his contribution to  Ligurian/Italian culture. He has written critical studies of Fleur Adcock, Basil Bunting, Donald Davie, Charles Tomlinson and Leonard Cohen. He co-edited The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB editions, 2013). In 2024 Sagging Meniscus Press (USA) brought out a campus novel called The University of Bliss.

About New and Selected Poems, by Julian Stannard
This new book brings together some twenty-five years of writing. Julian Stannard moved  to Italy in 1984 and worked  at the University of Genoa  for many years. He started teaching at the University of Winchester in 2005. Many of these poems draw on his experiences of living in Genoa / Liguria, though he also writes extensively about contemporary Britain and further afield. New poems represented here have appeared in The Spectator, The Dark Horse, Bad Lilies, Wild Court and AN Editions.

You can read more about New and Selected Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.  

From New and Selected Poems

The Pool

The chief leaf man rises early.
A breeze in the banyan tree.
The water laps.
Skink lizard on the prowl.
 
Perfection. Blue. Perfection.
No leaves on the water.
Miles Davis - his ghost -
becoming the banyan tree.
 
Chief leaf man sees a leaf
in the corner of the pool
and shouts in Vietnamese.
Leaf man number two crouches, 
picks it out.
 
The apprentice leaf boy,
conical hat,
takes a broom from the storeroom.
Sweeps.
 
The hotel dog – a Saigon mongrel - watches.
 
Eternal – mythological – war of leaves.
The frangipani quickens.
 
I watch its petals drop upon the water.
 
A stiffening breeze from Saigon River.
The palm trees writhe and thrash.
 
 
Gigi Picetti

Actor, Genoese Activist, Molotov Cocktail 

1939-2022

I lived in the caruggi, lived in the Sottoripa
the streets pushing deeper and deeper.
 
I lived in the vicoli:
lamentation, catastrophe, chicory.
 
Ubiquitous Gigi would come and go.
He once knew Dario Fo.
 
I seem to remember Gigi Picetti
had a machete.
 
The day – in question - was hot and hazy.
He swirled it about
 
to frighten the piccolo borghese.
 

Kerry Hadley-Pryce, "Lie of the Land"

 

Kerry Hadley-Pryce has had four novels published by Salt Publishing: The Black Country (Michael Schmidt Prize); Gamble (shortlisted for The Encore Award); God’s Country, and her fourth novel Lie of the Land (January 2025). She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University, teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wolverhampton, and has contributed to Palgrave’s Smell, Memory & Literature in the Black Country anthology. She has had short stories published in Best British Short Stories 2023 and Best British Short Stories 2024, Takahe Magazine, Fictive Dream and The Incubator and read by Brum Radio. 

About Lie of the Land, by Kerry Hadley-Pryce
Lie of the Land is a dark, domestic literary thriller set in the Black Country in the Midlands, UK.

When Rory and Jemma meet, Rory already has a girlfriend, but that doesn’t stop them getting together and, much sooner than Jemma would like, they’re buying their first house together in the heart of the grimy Midlands.

"The Rocks" is a run-down, "doer-upper" and right from the off, Jemma is reluctant and unhappy, far from ready for commitment. But there is something about the house that is both compelling and sinister, and the situation takes a darker turn when a terrible accident happens involving their new next door neighbours, forcing both Jemma and Rory to tackle their inner demons.

Themes of toxic relationships, secrets and deceit are intensified by a judgmental narrative voice which propels the plot to its even darker resolution.

You can read more about Lie of the Land on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Lie of the Land
There is, she’ll say, a certain type of bird – she’s not sure which – nesting in the oak tree in the garden. It keeps repeating the same three notes. It must do this, this repetition, hundreds of times a day. Maybe it’s a blackbird, or a fieldfare, it’s that kind of shrill, persistent sound. She’ll admit she’s haunted by it, the sound of it. She hears it coming, the sound – she feels it coming – and it’s like a torture, and she’s formed the habit of stroking the palm of her right hand, stroking the broken life-line there, for comfort. There are eyes everywhere – to her, there is – and she’ll tell how she’s taken to standing in the new conservatory, the one they had built, looking out over the back garden. She’ll concede that Rory did a competent job of making it good, the garden. The plants have taken rooted well; there’s clematis starting to creep up the wall and wisteria against the fence, and the new turf is bedding in. She’ll say she can smell it, all that greenery. The concrete, the rocks, the mess, they’ve all gone. All cleaned up. But the secrets aren’t buried, she’ll say she knows this, they’re still there, somewhere. The oak tree, they thought about removing, is a feature now, and anyway, it seems there might be a family of those birds in there, and everyone, everything needs a home. Standing there, looking out, even with the feverish, constant three-note chorus going on and on, she’ll say she’s not sure she could bear to take the tree down now, not with the nest in there. She’ll say she’s not sure she could bear to destroy it. She’ll say this now.

But, see, people are strange, they’re capable of surprising us. And we’re talking about Jemma Crawford here. And we all know she’s destroyed enough already.

David Briggs, "The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems"

David Briggs has published four collections with Salt Publishing. The Method Men (2010) was shortlisted for the London Festival Poetry Prize, and Rain Rider (2013) was a winter selection of the Poetry Book Society. His third book, Cracked Skull Cinema (2019), was a Poetry Wales pick of the year. David received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and since then his work has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies from The Poetry Review to the generational anthology edited by Roddy Lumsden, Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010). A teacher of English in Bristol since 2005, David founded and currently chairs the Writers' Examination Board, which offers the Apprentice of Fine Arts (AFA) in Creative Writing - a post-16 qualification that is currently live in twelve UK schools. David has been poet-in-residence at Bristol University, and from 2019-2023 he was co-editor of the Bristol-based poetry journal Raceme. In 2023 he completed his practice-based PhD research, The Odyssey Complex: Reading and Writing Midlife Poetics and Middle Style at the University of Exeter.

About The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems
David’s fourth collection, The Odyssey Complex and Other Stories (Salt, 2024), offers a midlife counterpart to the poetics of both youth and late style, exploring themes of family ties, nostalgia and retreat, ageing and mortality, acts of memorial and the impulse towards hospitality. 

You can read more about The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Odyssey Complex and Other Poems, by David Briggs

Cointreau

 
          in memoriam Avril Henry 
 
I love its boozy citrus hit,  
how in licking my lips post-sip  
it sharpens that extra-temporal bit  
of self that’s able to taste  
the past in the present,  
taste two moments co-eval 
in its sweetness. 
          And it puts me in mind of Avril 
placing a bottle of Harpic, and Marigolds,  
on the shelf to the side of her bathtub – 
ever considerate of others,  
of those who might find her  
many days after – 
and climbing in carefully  
in her best purple kaftan; 
diluting the poison  
in a brandy-glass measure  
of blood-orange Cointreau  
to smother its foulness.  
           And I like to imagine  
that she had a book, 
perhaps her translation  
of Guillaume de Deguileville’s  
Pilgrimage of the Life of the Manhode, 
from which I also imagine her  
reading aloud while Death inched closer, 
put one cold hand on her heart. 
          There’s just enough of the past 
swilling around in the present, 
like just enough barbiturate  
in a terminal glass of Cointreau;  
like there’s just enough barbiturate  
for the task, in a vial  
she’d hidden so presciently 
beneath floorboards,  
fearful of interventions, 
of untimely police raids,  
of cold-calling journalists.  
She taught me so much I’m grateful to know. 
           Each year, on this day,  
I pour for myself 
a chilled, double rocks glass  
           of Cointreau. 

Living with the Douglasses
  
Michael Douglas is renting our spare room 
again. It’s just temporary, till work picks up  
 
and/or Catherine takes him back.  
He’s an early riser, and on bright mornings  
 
we’ll find him out in the garden with  
black coffee and a Thai stick, looking  
 
so much like Sandy Kominsky/Grady Tripp  
we wonder how much acting was involved  
 
in these recent projects. But it’s still work I rate –  
notwithstanding the acclaimed roles he played  
 
in the 80s and 90s – since it feels  
as though he’s comfortable enough now  
 
in his accomplishments to take himself 
a little less seriously; as though he no longer needs  
 
some Nietzschean hero narrative to flatter  
an entitled sense of celebrity and is enjoying  
 
the opportunity to play gently botched characters  
with the (often unfulfilled) potential for redemption.  
 
As though he’s embraced his inner clown.  
Sometimes, I wonder if it really is Michael Douglas  
 
who’s living with us, and my wife’ll say, “Well,  
if he’s not Michael Douglas then who the hell is he?”  
 
And I’ll laugh and say: “You’re right. I’m ridiculous.  
Of course he’s Michael Douglas,” before knocking  
 
to see if he wants a cup of joe. I like the way  
he’s arranged his flamboyant neck scarves  
 
on his tailor’s dummy and, sometimes, I think  
Should I grow my hair out like Michael Douglas?  

Whenever I encounter a crisis of self-doubt,  
I’ll give myself a pep talk, saying things like 
 
“Michael Douglas may be going through  
a tough patch right now, but he’s got chutzpah 
 
and is a pretty good style model for the older man.” 
But then I’ll recall that much of his swagger,  
 
the élan that enables him to carry off that look, 
comes from years of Hollywood stardom  
 
and a foot-locker of great anecdotes featuring  
some of the world’s most glamorous people.  
 
And I’ll realise with a sigh that my three books  
with a small press and that time I shared the bill  
 
with Don Paterson don’t really compare,  
that I’m probably kidding myself.  
 
But then I say: “Fuck it. I’m Spartacus!” And laugh.  
And my wife says, “That was Kirk Douglas, knucklehead.” 

Pascale Petit, "My Hummingbird Father"

 

Pascale Petit, photo by Derrick Kakembo

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. Her eighth poetry collection, Tiger Girl, from Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and for Wales Book of the Year. A poem from the book won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Her seventh poetry collection Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017, won the inaugural Laurel Prize in 2020, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2018, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize, and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, she spent the first part of her life as a visual artist. My Hummingbird Father is her first novel, published by Salt in 2024. Her website is here. 

About My Hummingbird Father
When artist Dominique receives a letter from her dying father, a reckoning with repressed memories and a pull for romantic and familial love sends shock waves through her life, as she journeys to Paris to face the places and events of her early years.

Balanced with visits to the Venezuelan Amazon, where Dominique explores a spiritual and loving longing (meeting a young guide, Juan), a raw and tender unfolding of this love story is a parallel to the uncovering of the shocking truth of Dominique’s birth, and her parents’ relationship.

Pascale Petit’s My Hummingbird Father is a beautifully lyrical debut novel in dialogue with Pascale’s Ondaatje and Laurel Prize-winning poetry collection, Mama Amazonica.

You can read more about My Hummingbird Father on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel.  

From My Hummingbird Father, by Pascale Petit
The letter trembles in Dominique’s hand as if she’s holding Angel Falls – a kilometre-long cataract shrunk to the size of a page. She folds the letter and it’s like trying to hold an archangel’s wing in her palm. She unfolds it and it fills the room. She’s creased it so many times that one line of Father’s address is faint. What if her tears blur his phone number? 

Now she’s dressing, no time for breakfast. She’s running for the tube to the French Consulate, which closes for emergencies at noon. They must renew her passport; she’ll make them do it. 

Now she has her passport and she’s running back home, to the phone, to let him know she’s coming. 

A week ago, she dreamt of him: she was back in Venezuela, at the base of Angel Falls. His face appeared titanic in the tumbling comets. She looked into the vapour as his face dissolved and reformed. First, she saw the lace of a wedding-veil, shreds of skin behind a veil, then his face turned towards her, and she saw her father. 

Dominique dials the number and listens to his phone ringing, and in the pause as she waits for him to answer there is this sound – far away and very near, as if she’s also got the Amazon on the line. A series of low grunts inside her ear, then an icy roar – deeper and longer than a jaguar’s. Howler monkeys swing through the space between them while time drops in light-year-long arrows. And she can wait. She has already waited thirty years. She is not afraid. Then a voice – French, formal, familiar, from the slash-and-burn past: 

‘I have thought of you every day,’ he says. It’s in French, so she has to check she’s heard right. He repeats, ‘I have thought of you every day, chérie.’ 

Dominique tries to absorb this word as he asks, ‘What time will you arrive?’ 

‘I’m catching the Eurostar tomorrow at ten,’ she says.

‘Can’t you come this evening?’ he asks.

‘I have to pack!’ she explains. And she has to tint her hair and wash and dry her best clothes. And there is a mask she has to conjure, to hide her hunting-face. 

Chris Parker, "Nameless Lake"

Chris Parker is a screenwriter who has written for shows ranging from EastEnders and Coronation Street to Bedlam, a Sky TV drama series he co-created for Red Production Company. He is also a prolific animation writer,  with credits including Peppa Pig and Shaun the Sheep. He was born in South Wales and lives in Cambridge.

About Nameless Lake, by Chris Parker

Nameless Lake is about the unspoken pressures of gender and desire, told through the shifting dynamics of a lifelong friendship. Emma and Madryn grow up with dreams of escaping their seaside hometown, sustained by an obsession with photography and secret acts of vandalism. But adulthood brings its own limitations, and Emma yearns for connection beyond the constraints of her family. Drawn deeper into Madryn’s private life, Emma feels new possibilities awakening within herself, but when Madryn faces a backlash from her controlling partner, Emma must finally break out of her role as passive observer.

You can read more about Nameless Lake on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Nameless Lake

When we carried out our next act, which was to break the arcade window, we were excited by the tiny slice of time we had given ourselves to carry it out – I had agreed to go with you to collect a textbook from a friend’s house, a round trip of no more than twenty minutes. I allowed myself only a few mouthfuls of the cider you carried in your bag so that I was affected less by the alcohol than the alien taste of orchard rot in my nose and throat. I was happy to stretch the swimming pool wristband across two of the seafront railing spikes because it meant the next job must be yours – to pull back the ball bearing you had found in your father’s toolbox until the royal-blue rubber turned pale and we had compressed thought and action into one sharp moment, not of decision, but of simply letting go, giving way to something inevitable so that the rubber band itself became the real culprit. 

Afterwards we threw ourselves down the concrete steps to the beach and scudded along the rocks until we were almost at the harbour, where the waves threatened to come and come without ever arriving, and I thought of a horse I had seen on the common when I was very small, a glorious and terrifying creature with a chestnut shine that appeared just at the moment when I happened to be thinking about horses, and I felt certain it had been made by the force of my own wishes

Julian Stannard, "Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother"

Julian Stannard has written nine books of poetry including Sottoripa: Genoese Poems (a bilingual publication, Canneto, 2018). His most recent collection is Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother (Salt, 2023). He teaches at the University of Winchester, having spent many years working at the University of Genoa. He has been awarded the International Troubadour Prize for Poetry and nominated various times for the Forward. He has written critical studies of Fleur Adcock, Basil Bunting, Donal Davie, Charles Tomlinson and Leonard Cohen. He co-edited The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB editions, 2013). He reviews for Poetry Review and TLS.

About Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother

Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of my Brother is an extended elegy for a brother lost some twenty years ago. The title poem is part of a sequence which is mindful of the war in Ukraine and conflict in general. The poet’s brother was a soldier. The elegiac vein considers the loss of friends and the painful years of the pandemic. Yet the collection is never overly solemn.  Strangeness drives the work forward in a number of ways. The work is both international in scope and alludes, on various occasions, to Gogol’s Dead Souls.

You can read more about Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother, by Julian Stannard

Please Don’t Bomb The Ghost of my Brother 

He’s riding a white horse.
I was going to say he was riding into the forest. 
It’s more like a wood, a large wood 
with sycamore trees and silver birch 
and if you look you can see a Weeping Willow.
There are deer in the undergrowth 
watching carefully 
and there are a lot of small animals.
He’s talking to the horse and patting its neck. 
There’s no one else around
and the wood has a beguiling music.
 
The horse breaks into a canter. 
Rabbits listen and twitch. 
An oyster catcher flies overhead. 
And coming into view a long-winged buzzard. 

 
The horse slows and steps into the river - 
He’s a good horse, my brother’s a good horseman.
Now they’re getting out on the other side 
where there are fewer trees. 
The ghost of my brother finds a glade. 
There must be a score of white horses.
There’s sun light and there’s a breeze. 
The horses drink from the water. 
And the ghosts, soldiers like my brother,
strip off and throw themselves into the lake.
Some lie on their backs. 

My brother has slipped from view.
I bet you he’s taken a big breath 
kicked his legs and plunged down deep.
The horses stand under a tree.
My brother’s horse is whinnying.

Zoom Time  

1

One of the most wretched things about lockdown 
was being zoomed into hundreds of well-lit
middle class homes whose impeccable taste    
made me feel down at heel, even shitty, 
as if I were Edward Lear sitting at the table of Lord Stanley 
trying to make the soup not trickle into my beard 
and called upon at any moment to entertain (a singular fellow.) 

There was an Old Person of Cromer who stood on one leg  
reading Homer … 

2

Artfully arranged bookshelves frame the background 
of every Zoomer, the libraries of the baby boomer -
Sometimes I catch the titles on the spines: Proudhon
The 120 Days of Sodom, Plato’s critique of humour.  

3

The undoubted advantage of a Zoom conference, 
as far as I can tell, is that no one 
has banned smoking although I have to admit 
that when I took out a cigarette which I did 
without thinking, I am after all sitting in my room, 
not book-lined but nevertheless containing
an impressive collection of revolving ashtrays,  
so as to lift the familiar stick to my wanting lips, 
I understood I was smoking in the face  
of a global plague and suddenly I was afraid.  

4

The don from Cambridge is explaining that the poem 
he is about to read, I fear it won’t be short, 
required the reading of one thousand five hundred books. 
I suspect that behind him in that donnish room 
we can see the one thousand five hundred books. 

5

Oh fellow Zoomers
how much lovelier to think of a theatre 
playing THE SHOW CAN’T GO ON!
An empty stage with blood-red seats  
and balconies with strips of gold. 
A man walks across the stage  
and stops and turns and smiles – 
Very old school, Ja, he says.
You think life disappointing? 
We have no troubles here! Here life is beautiful.
The girls are beautiful. the orchestra is beautiful.
And for a tantalising moment we can see the girls 
and we can hear the orchestra 
like the shadow of a coachman outside a hermitage. 

Death (please) thou shalt die.

6

There’s a young couple in one of the boxes 
sitting entwined in comfortable repose.
The man’s hand is on the woman’s knee
and I’m wondering what would happen 
if, in the comfort of their sitting room, 
they forget that in panoptic mode 
fifty pairs of eyes can see how 
knee touching leads to greater acts
of intimacy; their caresses more ardent, 
more urgent – O Corinna, Corona!
Someone has turned up the wattage, 
some unexpected Zoomer frottage …
  
7

I notice the professor from St Petersburg  
has left his chair and I lean forward to see 
if I can make out titles in that august language.   
He has several shelves of Gogol 
(for a fleeting moment I thought he had the tales 
of Nikolai Vasilyevich Google) 
which brings me a sudden unbridled joy. 
I too will leave my place, if only to return,
like Banquo at the feast of Zoom - 
and let the viewers admire my wall of nothing.

                                                         I saw the shadow of a coachman 
                                                         who with the shadow of a brush
                                                         did clean the shadow of a coach 

Ken Evans, "To An Occupier Burning Holes"

Ken Evans’s poems appear in Poetry Scotland, Magma, Under the Radar, Envoi, 14, The High Window, and IS&T. He won the Leeds Peace Prize in 2019; the Kent & Sussex Poetry Competition (2018); and Battered Moons (2016). He has twice been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition (2015 and 2020). His second collection, To An Occupier Burning Holes, was launched by Salt in October. 

About To An Occupier Burning Holes, by Ken Evans

The poems in To An Occupier Burning Holes observe and dissect the minutiae of ordinary relationships and happenings, ranging across daily life, as well as attempting to tackle a larger canvas, of contemporary climate collapse, plagues and war. There’s an interest in historical incident as a comparator, attempting to ‘fix’ and focus a current event or idea in a longer-range view and context.

At times, they play and twist form (there are sonnets, a ghazal, a villanelle) as well as try to update styles largely out of vogue – there’s an eclogue and invocation, for example.

The tone is restless - often dark, surreal, absurd, and sardonic, as well as playful, metaphoric and sometimes downright funny, tackling topics as diverse as lost hearing-aids, AI, funeral invoices, the life of fruit flies, migration, bins, love, family and travel.

You can see more details about To An Occupier Burning Holes on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three sample poems from the collection. 

From To An Occupier Burning Holes

To an Occupier Burning Holes

Orders to bring our middle names to the Square
on a scrap of paper and throw it on their bonfire:

a ritual purge, our lives crumpled, shorn
in a black smoke of scribble.

A middle name is a second language, a suit
dressed in plastic at the back of a wardrobe,

for weddings and funerals, yet I loathe mine
and am teased for it, so throw it to the fire

without shame, but for others, their names
came down from patriachs, or else starchy

from mothers, family history. Which is the point,
of course. Erasure of ties with the past, but not so

we are made blank, more a reminder of what we
lack, what the regime will provide – revisions.

Those without second names make one up, to leave
scarves up a sleeve, a white rabbit, in hiding. Some

hitch it to their last: Celeste-Smith; Anna-Evans; Andriy-
Brown, Sasha Roberts, the hyphen, a knife cut through

a fraction, divided, yet double-barrelled, twice 
as strong. Others hide it in their first: Bodhan becomes

Bo, Viktoria, Vika – their cut-out centres worn on the out-
side like a smile, with two fingers up, at lapel height.


Bacchanale

The invader sends wine to sweeten us,
our fighters in a street in green fatigues. 

They wave and stagger till they fall over, 
red wine pouring from their throats.

Our defenders offer to match an invaders’
rounds, but they refuse, ‘No, this is on us,

drink up. You’re welcome.’ In hospital, 
drunk songs yell from booze-sodden beds.

The invaders largesse knows no bounds: 
fiery vodka, cognac, brandy, Jäger bombs. 

Women jig crazily by open crater-holes, 
children bewildering in the red spills. 

A few appear in a blaze of fancy-dress,
crimson mask for a face, unrecognisable,

fleshy accessories worn on the outside 
like big silver fish burst forth from nets.

One group, all crashed out, smoke  
in the venue. This is not permissable.

No, children should not be given drink,
they chuck it everywhere, singed carpets,

glassy family photos, on the door handles
of blown-out of entrances, too off-their-face

to answer their phones, our emojis calling,
frantic, ‘Kristina, I have aspirin, I have water.’


Anaesthetising Flies in the Lab

Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly

in their glass dungeon, music, sweet and sad, 
can help these young babies with folded wings 
like swaddling bands, settle to their exoskeletons, 
and lull them toward the entrancement of sleep.

You have a god-like half-hour in the fly nursery 
as they rest, for they rise quickly on feeling warm,
and like all newborns, wake hungry for nipagin-
ethanol solution and bio-agar, plus a little water.

Pull the front legs off as they sleep to see 
how they preen. They are spotless, contrary 
to expectation, and polish each body part 
in order, the eyes, antennae, then head. 

Front legs torn off, they adapt in forty-eight hours, 
or eight years in human life and start to clean 
with their middle legs. This learning, beyond all 
my easy metaphor.

Alison Moore, "The Retreat"

Alison Moore, photograph by Beth Walsh Photography

Alison Moore’s short stories have been published in various magazines, journals and anthologies, including Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror, and broadcast on BBC Radio. The title story of her first collection, 'The Pre-War House,' won the New Writer Novella Prize. Her debut novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. She recently published her fifth novel, The Retreat, and a trilogy for children, beginning with Sunny and the Ghosts. Her website is here, and she's on Twitter @alimooreauthor  

About The Retreat, by Alison Moore

Sandra Peters once dreamed of going to art college. Now in her forties, she is working as a receptionist but still harbours artistic ambitions. At a drop-in artists’ group, she sees an advert for a two-week artists’ retreat on Lieloh, a previously private island - home to a reclusive silent-film star - which has intrigued her since childhood. She signs up for the retreat, delighted by the idea of living ‘in Valerie Swanson’s house, among artists, in a little community. She imagines them supporting and inspiring one another.’ Sandra’s story develops alongside a second narrative focusing on a writer called Carol who’s been trying and failing to write a fantasy novel, and hopes to finally manage it secluded on an island.

Below, you can read a short extract from the novel. 

From The Retreat

Liel was an in-between place. Lying one hundred miles from the English coast, the island resembled Sandra’s known world but it had its own currency and its own system of car number plates; its post boxes were blue and its telephone boxes were yellow. It was not far from France but was not French. The island had its own distinctive language but Sandra had only heard English spoken there, though in a foreign accent. Some of the street signs and house names were in English and some were in French, or at least it looked like French. She did not, when she first holidayed there, know much French. At school, she learnt to say Je suis une fille unique, which sounded better than it was, and J’ai un cochon d’Inde, although she did not have one. Later still, she learnt phrases from a book: Good morning and Good afternoon, and I must go now and Go away! She could say A table for one please and I didn’t order this and Can I have a refund? She could say Can you help me? and I’m really sorry and I don’t understand. She imagined herself stranded with these phrases, hoping she would be all right.