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”. 

Closed now for submissions

Thank you to all those who submitted work for consideration since we re-opened on 1 March. We are sorry to have disappointed so many of you but, as we warned, space was very limited and the pandemic set us back considerably. 

We will announce again when we are next open for submissions and watch this space for an announcement of the new titles for autumn 2022 when they are ready.