We are very pleased to announce that Rack Press has finally emerged from its two-year Covid-induced sleep and will be re-opening on 1 March which is St David’s Day here in Wales – the national day of Wales. We have also changed our address – still in the heart of Radnorshire – to The Old Manse, Broad Street, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2AD, six miles from our previous base. All other electronic contacts remain the same.
The story so far is that back in March 2020 we were forced to cancel at the last minute because of imminent lockdown the launch of four new pamphlets: Field Trips in the Anthropocene by A.C.Bevan, 24 Hours by Stephen Capus, A Dovetail of Breath by Fiona Larkin, and the bilingual Dy Galon Ofalus/Your Careful Heart by Elinor Wyn Reynolds. This was an excellent quartet of titles and we are pleased to say that copies of all of them are still available and can be ordered directly here.
Unfortunately, we were also forced to cancel all our planned 15th birthday celebratory events including a reading with live music at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre. We would have been marking 15 years of independent publication of 50 poets.
We are very grateful, however, to The Poetry Pharmacy who invited some of our Wales and Marches poets to read in November, our only public event since lockdown and a great success.
Because small presses like ours, without any grants or subsidies, or extensive sales and marketing resources, depend on events and readings to sell what we publish, we took the decision to defer our annual launches of new titles until readings were once again a possibility. Fortunately, we had two other titles in the pipeline and these appeared in December 2020 (A Quartet in Winter by Nicholas Murray: still available) and March 2021(Homeland: Eighteen Bitter Songs (Yannis Ritsos) by David Harsent which is now sold out).
This means that our “closed for submissions” sign on the door has been turned back to “open" but we must stress that capacity this year is extremely limited as we have some work already in the pipeline. If you are considering submitting please read our guidelines VERY carefully. We regret that we do not have the resources to comment on work or offer anything other than a simple Yes or No but at least we promise to do our best not to keep you waiting any longer than is necessary.
Our plan, if possible, is to launch our new 2022 titles later in the year and this will be announced when they are ready.
In the meantime we would be very grateful if you chose to order some of our titles from this site now, some of which you will see are on special offer.
Thank you
Nick and Sue Murray
Rack Press
