Derek Healy, "Children in the Window"

 

Derek Healy grew up at the foot of the Cotswolds Hills in Gloucestershire and, before a career in mental health social work, studied English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford University. However, overcoming that impediment, he has gone on to see his poetry appear in many journals, including The Road Not Taken, The Lyric, Ibbetson Street (all USA), Orbis, Snakeskin and The Cannon’s Mouth. His fourth collection of poems, Children in the Window (Graffiti Books), was published very recently (January 2026).  It follows Made Strange by Time (2018), Home (2020) and Uncharted (2022). Now a proud and far-flung member of the Ohio Poetry Association, Derek lives on the Malvern Hills with his wife Candida, where they have no children, no dogs and no cats but make do pretty well with each other and some fine friends. 

About Children in the Window, by Derek Healy

Children in the Window, Derek Healy’s fourth collection (Graffiti Books 2026), ranges far and wide, both in its themes and its styles. Sixteen sonnets are dedicated to his wife. In blank verse and free verse he contemplates the bizarre contradictions of the universe we inhabit. Cinquain stanzas take a tongue-in-cheek look at religion, whilst in 6/5 syllabics he peers into some corners which those closest to us never get to see. There is even a rarely encountered ghazanelle, discussing the fad for lovers’ padlocks weighing down bridges. Poignant, vivid, humorous and meticulously crafted, Children in the Window offers up poems to which a reader can return again and again.

You can read more about Children in the Window on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Children in the Window

Downhill      

At five feet ten he peaked,

but now a full half inch and more

has stooped or crumbled away;

white hair thins around a tonsure,

hands sprout spots like mould,

ears need turning towards every voice,

whilst three pairs of spectacles

mete out his sight

and names jump ship in the dark.

Yet these are the best of times:

up with the early sun

when the world lies silent,

free to fashion what he will

from words arranged on a page,

to look not out but in,

discern within himself

the glint of age-old truths

waiting his discovery;

steer his own course at last,

long years of labour behind him,

sunset ripening ahead.

The Shirtwaist Factory Fire

          (Manhattan Island, March 1911)

All ways out locked

against petty theft

or early slopings off to lovers' arms,

the girls have panicked from the flames

to this one high window

they could muscle open.

So far below

the cold dead street

lies empty for them,

the pavement thronged

as though the carnival

might be half a block away

and coming.

Names meet mid-air for one last time.

Then – as though in a moment

become mothers to each other –

one by one they take the ledge,

scramble a goodbye or prayer,

and drop, eyes heavenwards,

two hundred feet.

One final girl appears,

dark hair streaming in the wind

and swirls of smoke,

helped to the precipice

by the day's young stand-in foreman.

Briefly they fumble

a never-to-be-bettered kiss,

before he hands her out

to all eternity

as though onto a train

bound out of state,

her eyes not leaving his

until she drops.

As he follows her

his trouser legs bulge

in the upwards rushing air;

flame light, like chandeliers,

spangling his proudly polished shoes.

Roger Bygott, "Ginsberg & Manchester"

 

Roger Bygott is a writer and researcher living in Manchester. He was an ordained Buddhist for twenty years and lived in a monastery in the Spanish mountains for three years. He studied Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, which led him to co-found and co-direct Manifest Arts, a biennial arts festival in Manchester that highlighted the city's network of arts studios between 2015 and 2019. His essays have been published in Beat Scene and Dark Mountain.

About Ginsberg & Manchester, by Roger Bygott
Allen Ginsberg visited Manchester twice. He barely figures in the city's history, and Manchester barely figures in his. Yet two brief visits — a summer afternoon in 1973, a Library Theatre reading in 1979 — hold richer stories than the bare facts suggest.

Ginsberg & Manchester brings together several figures whose lives were touched by Ginsberg in different ways: Alan Wise, a charismatic music impresario (manager of Nico, John Cooper Clarke and Donovan) from Salford, whose letters to Ginsberg span fourteen years; Steven Taylor, a guitarist born in Gorton who became Ginsberg's closest musical companion for two decades; Jonathan Williams, the American avant-garde publisher (Jargon Press) who first brought Ginsberg into the city centre; and Jampa Thaye, a Manchester grammar school boy who discovered Buddhism through Kerouac, became an influential Buddhist teacher, and who was Ginsberg's host when he came to the Library Theatre. This is a story about how a great American poet left a faint but enduring mark on an English city that never quite noticed he was there.

The book also features rare and unpublished photos of Ginsberg and his associates.

You can read more about Ginsberg & Manchester on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Ginsberg & Manchester
In one of Allen Ginsberg’s date books, there’s a barely intelligible squiggle across the boxes for 4–6 June 1979. On the sixth day, at the end of the squiggle, is an arrow and the question: ‘Manchester?’ 

What was the story behind that asemic flourish? It had been five years since Ginsberg’s fleeting visit to Manchester in August 1973. There weren’t many reasons for him to return; his connection with the north-west of England was primarily with Liverpool, thanks to his fascination with the Beatles and connection with the Merseybeat poets. 

That arrowhead was inviting enquiry. What was he doing? Who was he travelling with this time? The existing biographies were of little help. Ginsberg could pack his days with meetings, readings, socialising and cultural events, so it’s not surprising that his all-too-brief visits to Manchester get short shrift in his letters and the many biographies of him.

Michael Schumacher, in his biography Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, notes that in 1979, ‘Allen’s European reading tour included visits to Paris, Cambridge, London, Newcastle, Rotterdam and Rome – all in a whirlwind schedule that lasted less than a month.’  Manchester has got lost in the whirlwind. Barry Miles’s biography of Ginsberg mentions neither his 1973 nor his 1979 visit to Manchester. I started to wonder if the question mark in Ginsberg’s date diary might indicate a possible visit that never materialised. 

Then I discovered a June 1979 letter to his friend and fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder, sent from the Netherlands on 14 June 1979: 

After triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe – Genoa, Milan, Spoleto, Paris, Manchester, Cambridge, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam – we’re dragging our weary tongues o’er the sea to Newcastle to visit [Basil] Bunting and last reading there … We brought Steven Taylor to guitar and sing and all turned out funny and energetic like a folkie tour. 

Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist and musical director, is an integral part of the story. He was born to a working-class family in east Manchester, who emigrated to the USA in 1965 when he was ten years old. 

On 5 June, Taylor joined [Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Anne Waldman] on the 12.55 p.m. train from Euston, heading north for a reading at the Manchester Library Theatre ...

Claire Walker, "How to Shape Our Mouths"

 

Claire Walker’s poetry has been nominated for the Forward Prizes, and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her work is published in journals and anthologies including Poetry Wales, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Finished Creatures, Dust, Aesthetica, and Ten Poems about Daughters (Candlestick Press). Her new pamphlet is How to Shape Our Mouths (Black Cat Poetry Press, 2026). Claire is co-editor of Atrium poetry webzine, and is currently studying for a Creative Writing MA at the University of Birmingham.

About How to Shape Our Mouths, by Claire Walker
How to Shape Our Mouths is a consideration of womanhood, exploring experiences of artists, writers, muses, mothers and daughters, often through an ekphrastic lens. 

You can read more about How to Shape Our Mouths on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From How to Shape Our Mouths

In which I am one of Modigliani’s nudes

We share a cigarette at the window, blow smoke out into the evening. This is our 1917 Paris skyline, and you are in full bloom, the exhibition imminent. We’re down to embers, so I remove my robe, the cliched silk slipping easily away. I move to the couch and recline. There is tenderness as you ask if I’m comfortable. Amedeo, here I’m so comfortable I could dream. You lift my head, place another cushion for me to rest on. By now, you have a reputation for drink, though you’re not yet tragic, and I am not yet grieving. The walls of your studio are blush-soft. You take up your brush, mix colours to match my hair, contemplate the correct earthy tone for my skin. My spine uncurls, my neck grows long upon the canvas. Here, we are comrades, the moment both abstract and acute. Let’s take my sadness, your poor health, and let’s make something beautiful. This is not sex, or love. There is a little pigment of my heart that wishes to be seen, and there is your longing for greatness. Come, see you whisper. I notice you have captured the exact shade of my irises, the exact shape of my eyes, not your go-to almond form. You tell me you’ll paint the background warm and red like the soul. Modi, by now, all the good light has gone. We circle back, we share a cigarette, blow smoke out into the Paris night. A night so black we no longer see our breath escaping us.

Unzipped

"It was as if another woman had been waiting inside her all along, ready to slip out" - Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

After I gave birth to my daughter,

I cradled her on the crisp clean sheets.

My body grew a new version of me,

one long exhale, skin unzipped 

and out she slid, quiet and instinctive. 

I knew how to hold the girl, 

was so sure of this fresh employment. 

My baby and I made friends with ourselves 

and those like us. I felt sweet at ease 

teaching how to feed, smile, count on fingers, 

how to shape our mouths into mama.

  

At thirteen, our certainty is delicate 

as sugar work. Those two, who slipped 

knowingly from me, have less to say. 

Still entwined by blood and love,

some days laughter halts in thickened air. 

The bared teeth of that zip pull away, 

come apart. And although we remember 

how to smile, sometimes our mouths cloy 

with stuck apologies. There is a confusion

within us. Those people we once knew —

not quite gone, not quite there either. 

June Wentland, "Factory of Light"

June Wentland would like to be able to say that she has a degree in Cosmology from Samarkand University and now divides her time between Milan and Vienna as a doyen of both dance and fashion but this would not be true. Married with a child by the time she was twenty, she’s an ordinary woman from Hull and now (via Manchester and Bristol) lives in Wiltshire. Her novel, Foolish Heroines (Valley Press), was published in 2021. June has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and her poems have featured widely in literary journals and magazines. Factory of Light (Fox and Star Books) is a limited edition poetry chapbook and her first collection of any kind.

About Factory of Light, by June Wentland
When I was recently asked, in a Poetry Society Stanza group meeting, what I would look for if I ever had the fortune (or misfortune) of judging a high-profile poetry competition, I said I would be hoping for a poem that created a  world which insinuated itself into my literary landscape. Poems which approached the unsayable or were of such clarity that they landed in the very heart of a feeling. A big and intimidating ask! 

I hope that the poems in Factory of Light go a tiny way towards part-achieving some of these aspirations, whether it’s by inviting the reader into a Daphne Du Maurier-loving garden or sharing a Eureka moment in an electric lighting factory when a flat piece of cardboard is conjured, at the flick of a wrist, into an object with volume. The chapbook has been put together with the belief that it’s wonderful to sometimes look beyond the scaffold of our tired perceptions and use words to rediscover the miraculous in everyday things.

You can read more about Factory of Light on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Factory of Light 

Reading Rebecca

Last night my garden dreamt of Manderley. 
I only have myself to blame – 
wandering below the green domes 
of Du Maurier’s prose.

No one told me how impressionable 
foliage is to literature in April – 
its cuticles absorbing words 
with frail spring sun.

The garden listens, sleeps and grows, 
advancing gothic-stemmed through dusk. 
Slugs creep through clumps of sub-plots, 
snails through sage, thyme and tortured love.

The neighbour’s gardens are more formal,
but if they were better-read
they too could dream of Manderley – 
seeding ideas outside the neat edges

of their flower beds. The walls of this house
are a breakwater for surging blooms – 
tides of hyacinths and hydrangeas, 
sagas of azalea and chard. 

Here, you can listen – not to the sea – 
but to the swish of couch grass 
where a woman might falter in a flimsy boat 
and perish on the waves of greenery.


Summer in the factory of light 

          The former Cascade Lighting factory, Radcliffe, Manchester

To the sound of Diana Ross and the Supremes, 
we worked in teams and over the sunny weeks, 
grew close. Fingers filled with washers and threaded-rods, 
we disclosed intimacies – finnicky as circuit wiring – 
the positives and negatives of our lives. 
The other girls were all sixteen 
I was sage-like in my twentieth year 
and as we ate our Friday fish and chips 
I gave them all advice. 

In the packing bay I had my own epiphany. 
Never before had I considered 
the aspirations of cardboard. 
How flatness could flick to volume – pre-
configurations opening in a man’s quick hands – 
futures seeded in papery DNA. 
Panels like corrugated petals, blooming
or geometric creatures unfolding from a pupal state.
Their flaps fledged only for closing – never flying – 
their limits taped in place. 

All through those warm, slow-moving weeks
I thought of boxes. 
Their inclinations and their secret needs. 
I was just nineteen. 
I was a mum, a mortgage-holder, student and a wife – 
I was a sorcerer of cardboard. 
I was an oracle on love and life.

Suyin Du Bois, "Eating Air"

 

Suyin Du Bois is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, living in London with her South African husband. Her poems have been published in Propel, Iamb, Stanzas, Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing, 2023) and Malaysian Places and Spaces (Maya Press, 2024), amongst others. She is a member of the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 2024/25. When not obsessing over word choice, Suyin spends her time building a profit-with-purpose start-up that seeks to ensure 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food for NHS hospital staff. Eating Air is her debut pamphlet.

About Eating Air, by Suyin Du Bois
Steam rises from bowls of noodle soup, tender steaks are seared in butter, sand-roasted chestnuts are shared from a paper bag. Eating Air – the debut pamphlet from Suyin Du Bois – is a mouth-watering collection of poems about food, belonging and connection. 

Charting a journey across cuisines and continents, these poems carve into the author’s dual Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage and food's enduring role in our cultural, familial and personal histories. 

From the low stools of Penang’s kopitiams to the bright lights of London's Chinatown, Eating Air is a love song to food and a poignant catalogue of its profound capacity to serve up memory, language, and longing.

You can read more about Eating Air on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Eating Air

Ode to Kaya

 

Egg jam first on my young tongue: palm sugar 

sweet, coconut milk rich. Thick layers on charred 

toast, salted butter cubes between, melting in Penang 

sweat. My Goh Ee Poh stood for hours stirring you

in that double boiled heat. Exports to be swaddled, 

twisted into pink and green plastic bags, nestled

amongst swimming costumes and sundresses – rituals

to ward off mid-air leaks in the 14 hours from one home

to the other. Back in England your layers thinned, 

our knives more sparing after each spread. 

After Goh Ee Poh grew too frail, aunties and uncles 

gifted us store-bought surrogates. You were labelled Kaya.

Our cupboards filled with your empties, aides-mémoire

of indulgence repurposed to house fragrant rice, Chinese 

mushrooms, our longing for Nyonya flavours.

By the time pandan leaves arrive in Chinatown, I am grown 

up, have my own kitchen where I can stand for hours.

Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed

into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked

regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe.

You are needy, threaten lumps, failure, but I stir and stir

like her until my spoon draws the right depths of lineage.

I lift a heap of you into my mouth, tongue 

your clotted grainy sweetness.

 

Cut Scenes

Dad fusses with his leather school bag / before sitting down to breakfast / by the coal-fired stove / in a 1920s maison de ville I’ve visited from the pavement / my grand-père / who I know from Agfa Billy snaps of walking holidays in the Ardennes / Sunday best studio portraits / has sizzled him a small steak / in a lump of butter / crisped at the edges / deep juicy red in the centre / fried bread on the side / the best way he knows / to sustain his son / on the bundled walk across the tram tracks to school / to protect him / against its respected priests / the wooden blackboard erasers they aim at boys’ heads

 

Dad orders steak in a restaurant / blue / walking to the table / by the excuse-me method of cooking / one part joke / three parts recipe / waiters don’t always get it / my held breath / a kind of grace / I watch for his knife to deliver / deep juicy red / not pink / worse grey / how else / can he see his father again / only when I know / it won’t be sent back / I slice my own / reveal / the fibres that make us 

Milena Williamson, "Milk & Moon-water"

 

Milena Williamson, photo by Stephanie Sy-Quia

Milena Williamson is from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. She has an MA and PhD in poetry, both from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Her debut pamphlet, Charm for Catching a Train, was published with Green Bottle Press in 2022. Her debut collection, Into the Night that Flies So Fast, was published with Dedalus Press in 2024. In 2021, she received the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award. In 2022, she received a support for the individual artists programme grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for work that became Milk & Moon-water.

About Milk & Moon-water

A Sudden Stitch. Unfruitful Land. A Fever. 

In Milk & Moon-water, Milena Williamson uncovers 11 Old English metrical charms – ancient incantations spoken to ward off harm – creatively translating them into magical and medicinal spells for the modern reader. 

Alongside each reimagining is an original charm poem, a remixed and new telling of an old text. Covering the climate crisis, illness, ageing and fertility, this collection of charms ranges from the incantatory to the unhinged, and re-engages with the ancient practice of looking to the land and the body for answers to life’s new and persisting questions.

You can read more about Milk & Moon-water on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Milk & Moon-water

Charm for Unfruitful Land (Remixed)

The good news is the wolves have returned to Europe.

   The bad news is people are killing wolves again. I own no

underwear from this island. There is no purely wild place left

   on this island. I buy wildflower seeds from the dark web.

I walk on the earth while there is still time and sprinkle seeds

   on riverbanks, lawns and graveyards. The smoke pours

across borders and becomes the sky. It’s time to buy an air filter

   and give it a name. I am stuck inside a well and Europe

is the silver bucket framed against the sky. We are living

   in the overlap. We can create clouds from seawater.

We drilled into Antarctica to find the most transparent ice.

   This ice is compressed by other ice so it’s dark down there,

dark enough to see neutrinos belly-flop into light.

 

Journey Charm (Remixed)

With eight lanes on the upper

and six lanes on the lower,

the busiest bridge in the world

is a sonnet. Love, we are suspended

in steel between the river and the sky.

Manhattan and a flood warning

is a good backdrop for listing everything

that has spilled on the GW Bridge –

gas and manure and watermelon

and frozen chicken. Upper or lower?

A man once landed a plane here

and survived. Now there’s a woman

on the median selling fresh oranges.

We see the signs. The lanes divide.

Apryl Skies, "Elements & Angels"

Apryl Skies is a California native, an award-winning author, filmmaker, and founder of Edgar & Lenore's Publishing House. Skies’ writing is highly aesthetic, lyrical and provocative. She now resides among the ancient saguaros, colourful street art and opulent monsoon skies of Tucson AZ.

About Elements & Angels, by Apryl Skies
Elements & Angels is a wildly imaginative collection of poetry by award-winning author, Apryl Skies. Like snapshots capturing memories, past lives, Skies draws a full spectrum of emotion from each sacred moment, moulding them into cinematic poems, dramatic recollections and gritty vignettes. Skies navigates her way through an uncertain world recognizing the magic of the mundane. These poems are time capsules and the messages within overflow with thought-provoking metaphor. Long-awaited and epic in scale this collection reads like a survivor anthem.

From Elements & Angels

Poems inspired by Los Angeles

LosT Angeles

City to cinders
Buried beneath soot and ash
Paradise wounded

Fire at the Midnight Matinee

The entire southern California coast
bursts into flame

Radioactive egos tread water
exploding into a sea of cinder

centerfolds and cardboard cut-outs 
with their manufactured smiles, 
flailing arms, and yoga mats
rush toward a painted 
Hollywood horizon 
scraping the gum from their heels.

Ushers rip perforated tickets,
viewers take their seats
awaiting the next Black Dahlia

Mouths agape
full of popcorn
and imitation butter.

Poems inspired by Tucson

Tucson Landscape

Mai tai sunset sky
Over desert horizon
Coyote and moon


Oracle Starlings

Starlings in flight 
their peculiar formations 
mingle with the ghosts
above the cemetery on Oracle Road

a choreographed birdsong,
a dance with the dead
at twilight

here on Oracle road
the sun sinks
beneath the Tucson landscape
into the shadows of ancient Saguaros

where no one is less alive 
than the living

115 Degrees Fahrenheit 

I tickle Mexico 
to return to you
across desert horizons 
of saguaros and mesquite
miles rippled with heat
trundling onto this tired highway, 
my bridge back home …

And I could not love you more
as I lean heavy into your indifference,
once my soft place to land
now a shattered citadel 
of infinite distances

And those raw truths 
that continue to burn and consume
our existence, and each of these
haunting stars above
revealing all our unremarkable postures

How very foolish we are 
to think any one of us 
worthy of crown.

Cathy Galvin, "Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara"

Congratulations to Cathy Galvin, University of Leicester PhD Creative Writing student, whose poetry collection Ethnology has just been published by Bloodaxe Books!

Cathy Galvin's debut poetry collection, Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, is published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and Ireland. She has published three previous pamphlets of poetry, Black & Blue (2014), Rough Translation (2016) and Walking the Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva (2019). She is widely published as a poet and short story writer and is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Heinrich Böll residency and an Arts Council England DYCP award. As a journalist she has worked as a senior editor for Newsweek and the Sunday Times. She founded the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the short story organisation, the Word Factory. She is the editor of Red, an anthology of new writing published by Waterstones. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester and lives near Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. 

About Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, by Cathy Galvin
Ethnology draws on the mystical cry for the dead of Cathy Galvin's Irish-speaking ancestors. Within an epic narrative she reclaims place, people and language and creates a dialogue with the poets, folklorists and ethnologists who have written about the West of Ireland for their own agenda. Loss, and loss of a mother tongue, are carefully explored. 

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

From Ethnology

Walls

There’s no anvil, brooch, harrow-pin.

The currach’s broken, walls stand without a roof.

All that’s left: a bureau containing bills,

cards, scarves, a Will.

You’re not in view but I can hear a breath

– the well-made dress and phrase.

My made things broke long ago.

They had little purchase on this world.

The creed, letters I do not read.

Solid seem the things that slip away.

Leaving us bone.

We stake a claim, lay foundations,

build and watch it fall.

Within, the comforts that ease survival.

We cut back wilderness, tame, contain

sycamore, birch, bramble, willow, grass.

All return.

Our walls come down, consolations go.

We do not come back. Take away it all

and what is left is who we are.

Our homes are built to go. 

Coventry Carol

You did not sing in Irish or in English.

Never told me what the English did to your people,

were clear you did not want an Irish husband,

someone who might sing sweetly and leave his wife behind,

become a father like yours who did not feed his own children.

When the Irish began bombing Birmingham,

and a shopkeeper refused to serve me in my Catholic

school uniform, your silence filled my mouth.

Cathi Rae, "Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet"

Congratulations to UoL MA and PhD graduate, Cathi Rae, whose new poetry collection has been just been published!

Cathi Rae is a poet, spoken word artist, teacher of creative writing and anti-ageist activist. She has performed throughout the UK and has been described as a "spoken word icon" by Joelle Taylor. Cathi has an MA in Creative Writing and a practice led / creative PhD - both awarded at the University of Leicester. Her new collection is Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet (Coalville CAN Community Publishing, 2026). 

About Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet, by Cathi Rae
Nick Everett writes: "This collection explores the painful but important subject of male suicide in a series of eloquent and sensitive poems, each informed by a true story. Drawing only on information publicly available on social media, these are poems of respectful distance as well as of imaginative sympathy; and they bear moving testimony not only to the distinctive of each commemorated individual but also to the tragically powerful social forces that lead men to suffer in silence rather than share their feelings."  

25% of proceeds from the book will be donated to @andysmanclub - a UK based grassroots charity supporting men's mental health. You can read more about Cathi's work on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet

Tiger Feet

There’s a photo of you   a snapshot    snap-shot

in a kitchen full of the clutter of life with children

a jumble of laundry 

leaning into the door of the washing machine

an endless cycle of

clean and worn and dirty

and is this how you came to feel

worn out    and    dirty

but       there’s this picture

taken for no special reason

except that someone said    smile

and so you did

can of beer 

comfortable in your fist     familiar

I can tell

and you should be wearing Riggers     

or Docks   or even battered baseball boots

smeared with plaster stains and paint

work wear     work-worn    

instead     you’re wearing tiger slippers

you’re wearing tiger feet 

daily everyday wear

seen better days

your suicide almost unnoticed

no social media Greek chorus grief

seven people noticed that you were gone

worn out    and dirty

endless cycle     ceased

and I wonder 

what happened to your tiger feet.

Club 18 to 35

Planning a road trip with a mate    so off his head on pills 

he’s already seeing double before you’ve even left the car park

tyres with tread so thin that only belief 

keeps traction on the road

and a brake light that flickers

On

Off

On 

Off

don’t think about it

pump up the volume

bang out a rhythm on your steering wheel

this is still safer than being a boy aged 18 to 35

or on an off-the-books 

and under the radar building site

you stand on scaffolding

railing at the skies

sans hard hat of course

because you’re hard enough

“Come on God - do you want some?”

this is still safer than being a boy aged 18 to 35

  

be a squaddie

in an army    any army

in a desert    far from home

where the red dust road goes on forever

dropped into a landscape you can’t read 

not fluent in foreign

scarcely fluent in your mother tongue 

this is still safer than being a boy aged 18 to 35

be a superhero 

on a media friendly tower

acrid smell of sweat and fear

homemade banner     Rights for absent fathers

the S scrunched up too small

looked so much easier when you planned it on the web

this is still safer than being a boy aged 18 to 35

 

blamed for every act of violence

held responsible    even when you weren’t

finally formulated this efficient use 

of guns and ropes and pills

rubber tubing snaking from exhausts to driver’s seat

this tidying up of all loose ends

 

finally in touch with your feelings

too late

 

when a room’s on fire 

sometimes a leap into nothing

feels the safest thing.

Andrew Button, "Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza"

 

Born in Nottingham in 1965, Andrew Button grew up there before leaving for university and currently lives in Leicestershire. He works as a librarian for Warwickshire County Council. Andrew has had many poems placed in magazines and anthologies and a pamphlet, Dry Days in Wet Towns, was published in 2016. To date, he has had three collections published by erbacce press: The Melted Cheese on the Cosmic Pizza (2017), Music for Empty Car Parks (2019) and Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza (2023).

As a performing poet, he has headlined and performed at various open mics and in libraries (and online) mainly across the Midlands, including Coventry’s Fire & Dust, Coventry Central Library, Nottingham’s Crossed Words, Derby’s Wordwise, Chesterfield’s Spire Writes, Leicester’s now-defunct Shindig, Birmingham’s Poetry Bites, Lichfield’s Poetry Alight, Leamington’s Script Stuff and PureGoodandRight and several Warwickshire libraries, to name but a few. In April 2025, he started his own open mic, Can of Words, in Coalville.

Andrew's poetic influences range from Ian MacMillan, Simon Armitage, Phillip Larkin, Lavinia Greenlaw, Roger McGough to Ray Bradbury, the lyrics of 10cc and Mary Chapin Carpenter, music in general and Yorkshire tea (lots of it)! His poetry is observational, anecdotal and ironic. He likens himself to a poetic eavesdropper and is a keen observer of eccentric and obsessive behaviour. 

About Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza, by Andrew Button
Many of the poems in Andrew’s latest collection were written in Lockdown and shortly afterwards. As a result, there are a raft of poems that reflect the state of physical and mental confinement that we faced, but at the same time, they are looking for the light of better times. This is juxtaposed with poems about space (including the title piece), the irony of which was never more evident than during the COVID crisis. 

At other moments, the book is interspersed with quirky poetical observations on everything from pensioners riding in pelotons, the President of the UK Roundabout Appreciation Society, to toilet paper engineers and the eccentric habits of the Swiss on Sundays.

Above all, this collection reveals Andrew’s certifiable optimism and roving poetic eye that takes in a smorgasbord of subjects and themes.

You can read more about Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza

Space

Floating in our tiny orbits,
satellites of the sofa,
the world has shrunk.
If it wasn’t for the gravity
of the situation,
we’d be free to roam,
untethered, beyond these rooms.

Housebound, the supermarket mission
is one small step of any kind
and our ground control
is Marcus Rashford and Sir Captain Tom.

Distance from loved ones
feels like galaxies
as parts of families
have become detached
from their docking stations.

Like astronauts
and the Kinks
on Waterloo Sunset,
every day, we look at the world
from our windows,
real and televisual
and fasten ourselves in
to the sentiments of Mr Blue Sky.

Keep telling ourselves,
as Tim Peake must have done
when falling to earth,
re-entry won’t be long.

Static in the Wires

We surge through the years
from babbling babies
to vibrant young adults.
From confident thirty somethings
to anchored middle age
and venerable seniority.
Industrious as ants,
we accumulate memories
and experiences
storing them on the grid
of our minds
ready to be discharged
when required. 
If we’re lucky,
in life we’ll rub off
on our children, relatives
and friends
and in death,
remain an invisible force
of energy
like static in the wires.

Anne Caldwell, "The Language of Now"

 

Anne Caldwell is a poet, editor and arts collaborator based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. She lectures in Creative Writing for the Open University. She has been described as one of "fifty-one world class prose poets" in the international anthology, Dreaming Awake: Prose Poetry from Australia, the USA and United Kingdom (Madhat Press, 2022). She has gained a national and international reputation for this genre. She has four previous collections of poetry, including Neither Here nor There (SurVision), which won a James Tait Prize. 2024. Anne’s work is featured in The Book of Bogs (Little Toller Press, 2025). She had an Arts Council Award in 2024 to write about peatlands in West Yorkshire and Finland with filmmaker Lewis Landini and Dance Artist Inari Hulkkonnen. Her website is here. 

About The Language of Now, by Anne Caldwell
The Language of Now is a prose poetry collection firmly rooted in a northern sense of place and eco-poetics, as well as an exploration of the turbulence of illness and climate change. Prose poetry is brilliant at holding contradictions and juxtapositions: qualities that are exploited in a search for an intimate relationship with the natural world. Caldwell explores childhood memories, the fragility of landscapes both rural and urban, and the impact of the pandemic, where our connection to each other was fragmented and stretched. The prose poems combine the real and the fairytale, memoir and myth, where humans transform into birds and language is lost and found. She sees poems as small acts of resistance. As the title poem suggests, "The language of now is short and full of gaps." Here is darkness, but also a sense of playfulness in the writing, as the poems interweave the down-to-earth cadences of prose and the musical intensity of poetry. 

You can read more about The Language of Now on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample prose poems from the book. 

From The Language of Now

Wasp’s Nest 

I wanted to be a goat when I was young. Agile and cloven-hooved. My days were spent poking cowpats with a stick, sending clouds of bluebottles into the hot sky as the hay meadows chirped with crickets and grasshoppers. One evening there was an empty wasp's nest in Nana Clarke’s attic. Paper whorls, like a handmade balloon. I went and sat with it, amongst trunks of musty linen and love letters, the regrets and hopes of her thrifty, wartime generation. I'd always thought of Nana as a good witch, full of herbal remedies and canny wisdom. Neighbours had her down as a complete and utter crackpot. What would she have made of Brexit, Long Covid, Climate Catastrophe? Would these words have been barbs in her throat, as she pursed her lips and searched for marshmallow and lemon verbena? Perhaps the wasps were still swarming out there, looking for a place to shelter. I listen for the thrumming of wings, the ragged edges of our lives. 

Widdop Gate, High Summer

Mowing weather and a blue tractor races across Shakleton, fields striped with drying grass. The moor is rectangles of heather burnt or shorn, year after year. I’m trying to forge a path through the bog, King Common Rough below me and the sparkle of Graining Water. It’s a hot day up on the tops. Meadow browns flit between sedge and rushes, bracken carpets the valley sides. The wind sings, no turbines, this land is egg-shell delicate.

Goldfinch break cover, crickets chirp, lambs bleat for mothers. I think of my boy gone to the Far East looking for adventure, seeking out the last scraps of Sumatran rainforest, searching for Orangutan before they’re all gone.

Here, the bog’s pleasures are quieter. If we healed its wounds, peat would soothe our over-heating earth like honey. Moss feathers boulders, bilberry nestles in crevices. I discover lichen circles blooming on stone — a map of the whole world in miniature.

Zoe Brooks, "Something in Nothing"

 

After many years working with disadvantaged communities in London and Oxford, Zoe Brooks returned to her native Gloucestershire and her first love of writing and performing poetry. Zoe’s long poem for multiple voices Fool’s Paradise won the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition award for best poetry ebook 2013. Her first collection was Owl Unbound (Indigo Dreams Publishing 2020), and Fool’s Paradise (Black Eyes Publishing) was published as a print book in 2022. Something in Nothing was published by Indigo Dreams in Feb 2026. Zoe is director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s Online Programme and assists with the annual In-Cheltenham Festival. She set up and runs the Poetry Events in UK & Ireland Facebook group.

About Something in Nothing, by Zoe Brooks
Something in Nothing is a verse novel, which weaves together the lives of various fairytale characters in a contemporary setting to explore universal issues, in particular the denial of evil – the "something in nothing" of the collection’s title. 

At the heart of the sequence is the story of Bluebeard and the Luminous Girl. Both are based on real individuals. 

Whether it is state terror or the individual evil of a misogynist serial killer, most of us are in denial. It couldn’t happen to us. The man we pass on the street cannot be a murderer. Worse still, we see the danger in the wrong places, fearing those who are different (the stranger), rather than people who are like us.

And if we do see it, how can we speak of it? In order to speak of the unspeakable, this sequence uses fairytale characters:

• Bluebeard is a serial killer of young women, whom he buries in his cellar. 
• The Luminous Girl is a collector of angels and lover of life. A traditional fairytale heroine maybe, but also a modern one.
• The Woman at Number 5 - effectively a fairy godmother to the Luminous Girl without the magic. As a refugee from a totalitarian regime, she recognises the evil that is lurking in plain sight.  
• Baba Yaga - the ubiquitous witch of Slavic folktales with an insatiable appetite for human flesh, which she cooks in an oven from which smoke always rises. A former goddess of death, Baba Yaga is a mass murderer.
• Bluebeard’s wife. True to the original folktale, she is an innocent young woman and likely victim. 
• Beast, another outsider, an elderly monster who is not a monster, Beast is married to Beauty. Beast sees through Bluebeard’s jack-the-lad persona.
• Beauty - Beast’s wife, who unlike the fairytale character is past her prime. She grieves for the child she could not have.
• The young man – an angel out of place and useless in this world of fairytale monsters and characters. He cannot save or even warn the Luminous Girl.  

By using fairy tales, the poems allow us a safe place to peer into the darkness. The poems are elemental and yet personal, out of time and yet terribly current. We are not part of Bluebeard’s and Baba Yaga’s world, but we could be. 

Zoe blogs about her poetry and fairy tales on her website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Something in Nothing

Happy Ever After - A Catechism

What do fairytales teach us? 

That the most dangerous animal is the huntsman. 
That you should never trust strangers.
That you should never trust stepmothers,
(or fathers, or sisters, or grandmothers).

When midnight strikes hurry home.
When a shoe does not fit cut off your toe.
When you cross a bridge do so quickly. 

Don’t rely on breadcrumbs.
Don’t go into the forest.
Don’t eat gingerbread or apples. 

That monsters can be princes in disguise.
That monsters can be monsters. 
That men can be monsters. 
That some men keep their dead wives in the cellar. 

That stories tell the truth.

Apart from at the end. 

 
Bluebeard Likes to Entertain 

Bluebeard likes to entertain
waifs and strays like puppies 
that need drowning.
The sort of women 
that no one will miss –
looking for a sofa or a home
or a man who will listen.

 
Bluebeard charms them
with his culinary skills,
his smile like a trapdoor.

No one notices them in café or street.
They are storm water in the gutter.
Easy come, easy gone, these girls.

But Bluebeard notices.

Karuna Mistry, "You-me-verse-all Hueman"

Karuna Mistry is a British writer of Indian ethnicity and works at the University of Leicester. He has published over 100 individual poems in more than 70 anthologies. Between his two poetry book releases, Karuna has been a poetry editor for an online magazine. As well as poetry, his creativity includes blogging and drawing – his illustrations appear in both of his books. You can connect with Karuna via his website or Facebook / Instagram: @karunamistrypoetry. You can read about his previous book, Sojourn, written with Pratibha Savani, on Creative at Leicester here. 

About You-me-verse-all Hueman, by Karuna Mistry
You-me-verse-all Hueman captures humanity in its plurality – age, gender, race, sexuality, sociality and spirituality. Follow humanity’s pursuit of happiness through past, present and future in this epic journey. A variety of themes and recurring subtleties build through the chapters, culminating in a sublime climax. The book contains 120 poems across time and space, 40 digital images, 30 illustrations, as well as 4 essays. You can read more about the book here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From You-me-verse-all Hueman