Smoked Meat

‘Confident, funny and poignant – Macdonald’s world draws the reader in irresistibly.’ Jane Rogers

Though smothered in snow half the year, Montreal’s demi-monde burns with the secret hurts and poignant epiphanies of those living there. Through the lives of its inhabitants, Smoked Meat paints a portrait of a vibrant melting pot that is buzzing with sexual braggadocio and illicit opportunities. Rowena Macdonald takes us into the lives of people living on the dilapidated margins of Montreal. The city’s seedy mores are slowly corrupting their innocence, turning them, like Montreal’s signature dish, from green to smoked meat.

Strange Horses

In Strange Horses, Olivia Byard creates visceral and muscular poetry that challenges all efforts to mute and silence us. In an eclectic journey, she takes us as far back as the Bible, medieval times and Shakespeare to Keats, Eliot, Auden and Larkin, referencing self-harm and spirituality, Agincourt and Greenham Common, nursery rhymes and Gay Pride, and crossing both British and Canadian landscapes.

‘Olivia Byard’s new book shows the same virtues that gained From a Benediction such acclaim. These are clear-eyed poems of precision and clarity. They restore your faith in the power of poetry to help and to console.’ — Bernard O’Donoghue

‘Olivia Byard is a real poet.’ — Alastair Fowler

Playtime

The plays in Playtime came about via the unique work done in schools by Peter Mortimer. In each case, he worked through a series of workshops with a group of pupils, and out of these a dramatic piece slowly evolved. With one exception – a play created in a Palestinian refugee camp – the first session started with a totally blank sheet awaiting the input of the creative team.

Crossing the Lines

New Writing by International Students

Edited by the acclaimed writers Jackie Kay and Kachi A. Ozumba, and with contributors from five continents, Crossing the Lines showcases new writing by international students living in the UK. These narrative voices explore a wide variety of social challenges and personal dilemmas, as writers from as far away as Nigeria, Australia and Malaysia share their impressions and experiences of life at Britain’s universities. The collection features the 14 best stories from the International Student Short Story Competition run by the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts (NCLA).

Published in association with NCLA and Newcastle University.

The Game of Bear

‘Bennet really does know, very precisely, how to contrive the entry of the powers of place and history into his poems without depriving them of idiosyncrasy, surprise, or their darker natures.’ The Sunday Times

Peter Bennet’s last book, The Glass Swarm, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and widely praised for its formal skill, wit, and imaginative reach. His new collection The Game of Bear centres on a powerful sequence in which vertiginous time-shifts and colliding settings in Northumberland and Aquitaine enhance the drama of a story of sorcery, murder, and demonic retribution derived from a hitherto unknown Border Ballad. As Sir Andrew Motion put it, these poems establish the criteria by which they must be judged.

Family Album

‘Poems that do not flinch from the conflicts and inconsistencies of family bonds.’ Cynthia Fuller

Family Album is preoccupied with migration, journeys and places. In poems full of energy and life, Sheree Mack catches the complexity of family history –‘it was already there waiting for me’ – the pull of the past and the threads that have formed her identity. These poems evoke images of sea journeys made from Barbados and Trinidad to England – ‘a place speckled/with a few brown faces’ – and onward travel to Bradford and Newburn beside the Tyne. This is Sheree Mack’s debut collection.

The Scale of Change

The Scale of Change consists of two striking and distinct sections. From the proto-communist ‘Diggers’ of Surrey, through to Bewick’s radical Tyneside and on to a wet St George’s Day in Dover, the opening sequence, ‘Class’, offers a ‘condition-of-England’ poem for our times and is as light and readable as it is ambitious in scope. The beautifully poised poems that constitute the second half of this book, ‘Rembrandt’s Last Pupil’, quietly reveal an aesthetic that proves to be no less political and contemporary. Desmond Graham’s two previous collections were the acclaimed Heart work and its follow-up, The Green Parakeet.