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TWELVE NEW POETRY BOOKS EXAMINE MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH

– WITH CARNIVALS, GLITTER, AND RADICAL KINDNESS IN BETWEEN

 

West Midlands Independent publisher and Arts Council England NPO

Nine Arches Press announces 2025 poetry list



(Top: l-r James McDermott, Tom Sastry, Laurie Bolger, Erica Hesketh, Rosie Garland, Julia Webb.

Bottom: l-r Nina Mingya Powles, Gregory Leadbetter, Chris McCabe, Caroline Smith, Troy Cabida and Jennifer Wong)

 

Announcement reveals list of twelve new poetry collections to be published in 2025.

 

Debut collections and new poetry books by emerging and established authors make for a thought-provoking poetry list for 2025 from independent poetry publisher Nine Arches Press. Major themes of life and death, birth and rebirth sing from the pages of many of these books, with powerful explorations of the relationships between people and their world, as well as of vital elements of human creativity, resilience and frailty, joy and daring interwoven throughout these collections.  

 

February 2025 will see publication of Norfolk-based poet and playwright James McDermott’s Father Myself. Described by Joelle Taylor as “Lyrical, haunting and exquisitely rendered”, this second collection explores his father’s complex illness and death from COVID after three weeks in intensive care, and how as a queer boy then a bereaved son, McDermott had to learn to father himself.

 

In March, Seamus Heaney Prize-shortlisted poet Tom Sastry, described as “A magician of deadpan” by Hera Lindsay Bird, publishes a third collection with Nine Arches Press. Life expectancy begins to fall is a book about how it feels to normalise an apocalypse, examining the weight we all carry in an age of perma-crisis – it is uncompromisingly curious, emotional and authentic – and often darkly funny. 

 

A first full collection by Laurie Bolger - a widely anthologised poet and performer who has featured at Glastonbury, TATE, Sky Arts and BBC Global News – is forthcoming in April. Lady, praised by Andrew McMillan as “Dazzling, moving, witty and insightful”, follows the arc of a chick flick, playing the parts of housewife, fitness instructor, landlady, hen, sister, mother and many others in poems celebrating the resilience of working-class women, autonomy & love.

 

Japanese-Danish poet Erica Hesketh, a Winchester Poetry Prize winner and Southbank Centre New Poets Collective alumna, will launch her vivid and formally inventive debut collection in May. In the Lily Room traces a new mother’s journey through mental illness, her relationships with her body, her baby and other people, against a backdrop of a changing and uncertain world.

 

Novelist and lead singer with The March Violets, Rosie Garland’s book, This is How I Fight is due in June. Interrogating gods, beasts and monsters through a queer perspective, poems shift between human and other, looking to where we might find courage and proposing kindness as a radical act. Garland was named as one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK and made a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

 

Women Poet's Prize and Nan Shepherd Prize winner Nina Mingya Powles publishes a much-anticipated second collection in July – In the Hollow of the Wave examines Orientalism, art and artmaking in a time of ecological crisis in distinctive poems that are elemental and tactile, shaped by memory and landscapes of the body. Powles’ debut poetry collection, Magnolia, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Ondaatje Prize.

 

July will also see Julia Webb, a neurodiverse writer, artist, editor and tutor based in Norwich who has been twice highly-commended by the Forward Prizes for Poetry, returning with a fourth collection, Grey Time. Part elegy, part lament, part love song, Webb’s multi-faceted poetry is a powerful examination of what it is to love and lose, of our relationship with both grief and those we have grieved.

 

Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University and BBC Radio commissioned writer and critic Gregory Leadbetter will publish The Infernal Garden in August 2025. This third collection explores the point at which the seen and the unseen, the wild and the made, meet and fuse in poems that address psychic renewal, death and rebirth, and our relation to the more-than-human world.

 

Chris McCabe, whose work spans artforms and genres and has been previously shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, will publish Hedonism with Nine Arches in September. Here, a carnival of characters including Bez from Happy Mondays, Jorge Louis Borges and a medieval pilgrim on a journey to buy a PlayStation appear, in McCabe's sixth and most daring collection.

 

October will bring publication of Bycatch by Caroline Smith. These poems ask where personhood is when memory and language are gone, charting faltering years of a life gradually scraped bare by dementia - yet the book also finds amongst the isolation and sadness moments of epiphany and joy. Smith’s previous collection, The Immigration Handbook (Seren) was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize.

 

Following later that month, Bridport Prize for Poetry 2024 shortlistee and Barbican Young Poets alumnus Troy Cabida will debut a collection of poems in Neon Manila, an exploration of the queer Filipino body in all of its skin and glitter. Looking at pop music, clothing, jewellery by Elsa Peretti, dating mishaps, and everyday London life, these poems seek a better grasp of the relationships we build with others and ourselves. 

 

Finally, November will welcome publication of a new collection by the Hong Kong-born poet and editor Jennifer Wong, who has been previously praised by Hannah Lowe for her “distinctive, intelligent style”. Light Year offers a poet’s constellations of friendships, love and struggles – with the journeys and experiences of migrants and mothers, glimpses of what is breaking or broken, and of what we still hold dear in life.

 

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 also provide poetry mentoring schemes (Primers and Dynamo), Under the Radar literary magazine, regular poetry workshops and 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: “The 2025 list demonstrates contemporary poetry’s unique ability to handle some of life’s biggest themes with the lightest of touches. Here, the poets’ imagination is a space of encounter, empathy and possibility, the poem a vehicle for vital and electrifying connection. We’re immensely proud of these books and their authors. This ambitious and dynamic programme of publishing has been made possible by the investment in our activity by Arts Council England through National Portfolio Organisation funding 2023-26, and we remain grateful for their support.”

 

Peter Knott, Midlands Area Director at Arts Council England, said: “We’re incredibly pleased to be supporting Nine Arches Press through regular funding, to bring a series of new and exciting poetry collections to audiences. With collections exploring everything from health and relationships to glitter and monsters, the 2025 publications are a fantastic showcase of both established and new writers in poetry from around the world.”

 



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