New Titles Launched 16 June: Pre-order Now

 We are pleased to announce the publication 

on 16 June of our four new poetry titles for 2023. 

All are available for pre-order now (dispatch date 25 May).  

All four poets will be at the launch reading at the Music Room in London on 16th June (more details will follow).

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

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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

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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

Reading in London 14th March

 

Special Offer for International Women’s Day

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.

New Voices Submission Window Closes 14 February

 

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

Special Offer of Signed Pamphlets

Special Offer: all four 2022 pamphlets in a pack each title individually signed and numbered by the author only £15 instead of £20

Order here now

New Titles (available to purchase here now) Launched in London on 3 October

 

New Titles for 2022 - Available to order now

We are pleased to announce four new Rack Press titles for September 2022 marking our return to post-Covid normality. They can be ordered now from this site post free using the Paypal buttons in the side column or from any bookshop.

The exciting line-up is:

Exposed Staircase by Will Eaves

Grief Dialogue by Eve Grubin

Shreds and Patches by David Ricks

A Conversation with George Seferis by Michael Vince

Will Eaves is a novelist, poet and musician. He has been Arts Editor of the TLS (1997–2011) and Associate Professor in the English department at the University of Warwick. In 2020, his novel Murmur won the Wellcome Book Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Fiction.

“Poetry is a pleaching of language into its most original, convincing and economic shape. Will Eaves has such technical magic at every moment in this collection. Whether semi-concealed narrative, allegorical landscape or literary annotation, each poem in Sound Houses is a pleasure and a satisfaction to encounter.” – Peter Porter on Sound Houses (2011

Eve Grubin’s previous collections are 

Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005), and 

The House of Our First Loving (Rack Press, 2016)

“Her poems hold a deep and unusual charm….The House of Our First Loving left this reader longing for more light-filled, surprising work” – Alison Brackenbury in PN Review.

Ivan Juritz Prize judge, Will Eaves, has written of Grubin's work: 

“These are tender imagistic poems that owe an avowed debt to Emily Dickinson but which also, and more unusually, marry intimate observation with an interest in Jewish heritage and scriptural authority.”

David Ricks taught at King’s College London for more than thirty years and has written on most of the modern Greek poets who matter. His poems have appeared in a range of magazines including Poetry and New England Review. 

This is his first collection.

Michael Vince taught in Italy and the UK before emigrating to Greece in 1977 where he worked in language teaching. Previous collections include:  The Orchard Well (Carcanet, 1978) Mountain, Epic and Dream, (Hunting Raven, 1981) In The New District (Carcanet, 1982) Gaining Definition (R L Barth, 1986) Plain Text, (Mica Press, 2015) and Long Distance (Mica Press, 2020) 

Michael Vince writes: “This is a sequence interrupted, which has a postscript. It is a conversation with the poems of Seferis, rather than with the poet himself, who died in 1971. The poems are as much about me as about him.   It was written in 1992 when I was still living in Greece. The postscript occurs during a visit to Skyros, by which time I had returned to live in London.”

Some of the titles are taken from poems by Seferis, some poems refer to or invent parts of his experience, or refer to his poems – particularly to the sequence Mythistorema, and the poem Thrush. The poems are not what Seferis would have called “a contribution to criticism”.