Here are our four new poets of 2023 launched in London on 16th June and seen here at the Music Room in Bloomsbury.
You can order here special packs of all four pamphlets in a set, each individually signed and numbered by the author, for £20 post-free.
Highly recommended.
 |
| Tuesday Shannon, Steve Griffiths, Michele Hutchison and William Palmer |
 |
Titles can be ordered here using Paypal.
A Twist in the Stairs by Steve Griffiths
978-1-8382303-5-7.
Steve Griffiths was born and raised in Anglesey.
He has published eight collections of poems, most recently Weathereye: Selected Poems (2019) as well as a pamphlet, Updrafts, (2020). He is one of a hundred twentieth-century Welsh poets writing in English featured in The Library of Wales’ Poetry 1900-2000 (2007). His poems have appeared in many anthologies, including the NHS anthology These Are the Hands.
“A subtle and deeply intelligent writer who can address human concerns like the intimate recall of childhood or the challenges of middle age without sentimentality; he can move between abstract thought and concrete particularities with such ease that sometimes the join is invisible.” – Philip Gross
The poems of A Twist in the Stairs respond to a time of political, psychological and climate crisis, criss-crossing and interrogating threads of optimism, certainty and error, wonder, defeat, resignation – and resilience
*
The North Wind by Michele Hutchison
978-1-8382303-7-1
Michele Hutchison was born near Birmingham and grew up in Lincolnshire. She is a literary translator and writer based in Amsterdam. In 2020 she was co-winner of the International Booker Prize with Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and also won the Vondel Translation Prize. This is her first collection.
“Her lines are like diary notes, deceptively plain, as they open a window on a life. Emotional intensity is conveyed by understatement. This is a quiet voice, that says things as they are, so that when something is described – hurt or happiness, loneliness or sensual intensity – you feel with her. The poems
lodge in your mind and stay there – economy of phrasing is the technique.” – Donald Gardner
*
At First Light by William Palmer
978-1-8382303-6-4
William Palmer’s book of poems, The Island Rescue, was awarded the First Collection Prize at the Listowel Writers’ Festival in 2006. His work has appeared in many journals including The Dark Horse, London Magazine, New Walk, Poetry Review, Rialto, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is also the author of six novels and a collection of short stories.
His latest work is In Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers, published in 2021.
Rack Press has published two earlier pamphlets, An Instruction from Madame S. and
The Paradise Commissionaire, and a full-length collection of poems The Water Steps in 2017.
Praise for The Paradise Commissionaire:
“These shapely, profound poems...It is hard not to love a poetry whose rhythms seem to finger the pulse of the world outside and the beat of its time.” – Alison Brackenbury
*
The Rough Guide to Ilkeston by Tuesday Shannon
978-1-8382303-8-8.
Tuesday Shannon grew up, and still lives, in Ilkeston, Derbyshire. She has a Midlands4Cities-funded PhD from Nottingham Trent University, on poetry and the post-industrial north of England.
This is her first collection.
“In this, her moving first pamphlet, Tuesday Shannon invites us to see the universal in the particular and to perceive the shared experiences of joy and grief through a language which is at once inventive and precise. Her preoccupation with place and identity makes for a telling undercurrent to this impressive debut from a young poet with a clear, distinctive voice.” – Ian Parks
“Tuesday Shannon’s often tender, always multifaceted poems belong to a long tradition, but approach and leave it at angles that are entirely her own.” – Rory Waterman
To celebrate International Women’s Day on 8th March we are making available for only £2.00 our special pamphlet of four women poets first issued for IWD in 2019. Order here, postage free.
 |
Update: Please note that the deadline for current submissions has passed. We will let you know as soon as possible about your submission.
We are pleased to announce a New Voices Submission window for poets who have not yet published a collection, either book or pamphlet. Rack Press has since its inception published debut collections alongside work by established names and we are currently looking for submissions from poets of any age who may have published individual poems in magazines or in online poetry magazines but not so far brought out a collection.
To submit no later than midnight on 14 February 2023 send us a PDF of no more than ten poems suitable for a 12 page, A5 pamphlet (10 pages of poems). They can be a group of poems, a short sequence or a single long poem. Any submissions not observing these guidelines will be rejected automatically. Because of the expected level of submissions we won’t be able to reply individually and you will receive only a simple yes or no email but we promise to let you know before early March so that you can send work elsewhere.
We look forward to reading your work.
Send to rackpress@nicholasmurray.co.uk
Rack Press Poetry is an award-winning Welsh poetry pamphlet press founded in 2005. After nearly twenty years we are currently having a shor...
