Artful, Joyful, And Radical

Independent publisher Nine Arches Press unveils 2024 Poetry List

Wide-ranging poetry list showcases emerging

 talent and new work from established voices in contemporary poetry

(Top:  l-r Jenny Pagdin, Khairani Barokka, Harry Man, Tamar Yoseloff, Roz Goddard

Bottom: l-r Jane Burn, Wendy Pratt, Tim Tim Cheng, Caleb Parkin and Amaan Hyder)

Announcement reveals list of ten new poetry collections to be published in 2024.

Debut collections and new poetry books by acclaimed and established authors make for a lively mix of new titles for 2024 from midlands-based independent poetry publisher Nine Arches Press. Themes range from birth through to rebirth, family and class, climate change, activism and landscapes, to trauma, illness and recovery. These books also explore resistance and survival along the way, and the immense solace and joy that art, culture, literature, and self-expression afford us in challenging and turbulent times.

2024 launches with publication of three new poetry collections for spring. February will see publication of Norwich-based Jenny Pagdin’s powerful, sensitive and stark debut poetry collection The Snow Globe. Described by Liz Berry as “beautiful and important”, this book details a first-hand experience of postpartum psychosis in extraordinary and courageous poems that illuminate, settle and unsettle in equal measure. 

In March 2024, writer, translator, and artist Khairani Barokka will publish her third collection, amuk, with Nine Arches Press, following Ultimatum Orangutan, which was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize in 2022. amuk sheds light on the devastating and ongoing effects of a single word's mistranslation, and emphasises what exists in opposition to such hostile histories and presents: hope, resistance, and joy.

April will see publication of a highly inventive debut from poet, teacher and translator Harry Man, winner of the Stephen Spender Prize and a Northern Writers Award, and previously shortlisted for a Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Popular Song makes us tap our feet to the rhythms of nostalgia, life on Mars, science fiction, lyric odyssey, humour and a fondness for the spirit-catching cassette tape.

From popular culture to modern art – Cholmondeley Award-winning poet Tamar Yoseloff's seventh collection, Belief Systems is due in June 2024. These poems act as a call to make something worthwhile from the wreckage of our world, in the spirit of the radical artists she evokes, such as John Latham, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg – visionaries who located power and beauty in what is forgotten.

Birmingham-based poet and finalist for the Moth Poetry Prize 2022, Roz Goddard, will return to Nine Arches Press to publish a new collection in July. Small Moon Curve is an intimate poetry memoir exploring what it means to ease open to the restorative powers of love, faith and literature – where following diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer, the narrator discovers a surprising and powerful affinity with Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Poet and artist Jane Burn publishes The Apothecary of Flight in July – a heady flight into the art of poetry itself and its vital importance as a tool for expression, for understanding and translating the self, and articulates the sheer force and joy of poetry. The book also explores the way in which, for a person with autism, poetry can hold, identify and celebrate both the smallest and weightiest of life's experiences and concepts.

Wendy Pratt, an author and creative writing facilitator based on the North Yorkshire coast and winner of the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet competition, will publish a new collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, in September 2024. Wendy is the founder and editor in chief of Spelt magazine, and these poems are a bold exploration of place within nature, through themes of rural working-class identity and the female body, alongside explorations of loss and the nature of time.   

Tim Tim Cheng, an Ignite fellow (Scottish Book Trust), member of Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 2022/23, and a mentee under the Roddy Lumsden Memorial Mentorship scheme, will publish The Tattoo Collector in October 2024. Ranging between Hong Kong, Scotland, and London, this powerful debut collection explores the intertwined relationship between the body, ecology and class.

Laurel Prize-longlistee and former Bristol City Poet Caleb Parkin will return to Nine Arches to publish a second collection of poems in October to follow up on his 2021 debut This Fruiting Body. Dark and mischievous, Mingle exposes the copious toxicities in landscapes and bodies, through poems bubbling with the intoxications of hyper-wealth and climate nationalism.

November 2024 will see publication of a second poetry collection by the Clore Prize winner and Ledbury Poetry critic Amaan Hyder. Weaving familial and queer traditions and archives, and stretching across generational perspectives, Self-Portrait With Family is an autobiographical collection about coming out to family and coming out into a gay community defined by whiteness.

As well as ten single-author collections, Nine Arches Press will also publish two further titles in 2024; Primers: Volume Seven will feature three exciting new voices in contemporary poetry – selected and mentored by poet and novelist Katie Hale and chosen from the entries received for the bi-annual Primers mentoring and publication scheme. The featured emerging poets will be announced in November 2023. Autumn 2024 will also see poet Jessica Mookherjee’s first poetry collection, Flood, reissued in a new edition after Nine Arches Press acquired the rights to her previous work.

Nine Arches Press, a regional shortlistee for The British Book Awards’ Small Press of the Year 2019, achieved Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) status as part of 2023-36 NPO funding programme. As well as publishing poetry, Nine Arches Press run two poetry mentoring schemes (Primers and Dynamo), regular poetry workshops and live events. They are represented for trade sales and marketing by Inpress Books and their distribution is handled by BookSource UK.

Jane Commane, Editor and Director at Nine Arches Press, commented:

“We are thrilled to be publishing these compelling, vital books next year. Each one has something unique to show us; they contain poems alive with life-force of songs and art and literature – and all the transformative power words have to illuminate our world and make connection with readers and audiences. What a privilege to work with each of these poets, and to showcase their immense talent and imagination. None of this would be possible of course without the continued investment in our activity by Arts Council England through National Portfolio Organisation funding 2023-26, and we remain grateful for their support.”

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