Rack Press ever impresses – Poetry Review
The consistently reliable Rack PressTimes Literary Supplement
I have come to hope that a Rack Press pamphlet may be a tiny gift-box of unusually good poems – Alison Brackenbury, PN Review
Rack Press has the courage to be brief and elegant – The Rialto

Friday 22 March 2024

Rack Poets Reading at Lumen 9 April 2024

We are pleased to invite you to a reading at Lumen in Bloomsbury  by four Rack poets: Róisín Tierney, Stephen Capus, Martina Evans, and William Palmer at 6.30 for 7 on Tuesday 9th April. 

Refreshments available

If you would like to order any of the poets’ work you can do so below.

We hope to see you there.








Sunday 18 June 2023

Our New Poets of 2023: order a set now

 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


Friday 28 April 2023

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


*


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




Thursday 2 March 2023

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.