EPDS 2023-24: Poet Focus /  by Out Spoken

We’ve been fortunate enough to work with the following four emerging poets over the last year, and want to share some of their work with you:

Courtney Conrad

Courtney Conrad is an award-winning poet born and raised in Jamaica and currently based in London. Migrating from Kingston as a teenager, Courtney’s poetry interlaces subversive diasporic image, national political commentary and shatteringly personal narrative. 

Courtney’s work is published widely – read her poem ‘Final Destination’ in Propel Magazine here: https://www.propelmagazine.co.uk/courtney-conrad-final-destination

Her debut pamphlet I Am Evidence (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2023) was the winner of the 2022 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker, and the 2023 Michael Marks Poetry Award. 

“Courtney Conrad, what an outstanding, original voice! These poems bear (unbearable) testimony and witness. This is work so rooted and yet transportive, utterly transformative.”
— Rachel Long

Emily Abdeni-Holman

Emily Abdeni-Holman is a British-Lebanese writer. She grew up in Warlingham (UK) and Jamhour (Lebanon), and worked as an arts and culture writer in Beirut before pursuing a doctorate in literature in the UK. Her first novel, At the Pine House, takes place in Jamhour in the 1960s-70s. She currently lives in Cambridgeshire.

Emily published Body Tectonic with Broken Sleep Books in July 2024. Spanning the first three years of Lebanon’s economic crisis, from October 2019 to October 2022, Body Tectonic is an experiment in news poetry, exploring what it’s like bodily when the ground shifts daily beneath your feet.

“this humane and intelligent work examines at first hand matters laid within our history that ‘cannot be undone’ – and the ways in which, in the face of crisis, the human body ‘knows all over again what’s real’.”
— Gregory Leadbetter

Jane Thomas

https://www.janethomas.org/

Jane Thomas is from The Wirral and is passionate about words, health inequalities, and interbeing. She has been highly commended in the Bridport, Fish, Live Canon, Hippocrates, and The Rialto Pamphlet competitions, and published in Stand, Mslexia, Urthona, Rialto, Envoi and The ORB.  She is currently completing a collection on the theme of Alzheimer’s.

Jane’s poem ‘My Father in a Coracle’ was runner-up in the Poetry Society’s 2023 Stanza Poetry Competition on the theme of 'Refuge':

“The first runner up portrays a father circling his own mind, as if in a coracle; an unforgettably tender description of the failing brain as a ‘boat-for-one’”
— Judge, Gwyneth Lewis

Alex Mepham

https://amepham.carrd.co/

Alex Mepham is a PhD student investigating how background noise impacts speech understanding. Alex’s work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Under the Radar, PROTOTYPE, fourteen poems and more. Read ‘Memorial’ by Alex Mepham on berlin lit here: https://www.berlinlit.com/memorial/

Alex’s poem ‘Dark Matter’ won third place in this year’s Disabled Poets Prize:

Explore our 2024 Catalogue /  by Out Spoken

As we hit the midway point of 2024, we’re looking back at the titles we are so proud to have published so far this year:

Find out more about each of these, including sample poems, and about what we have coming up for Autumn in our 2024 Catalogue below, or download a PDF copy here.

This is not a review, this is not a blurb: Bhanu Kapil on [...] by Fady Joudah /  by Out Spoken

This is not a review or a blurb: Some words in support of [...] by Fady Joudah

Who do petals belong to?  How are they named? Imagine petals that look away, that don't socialize in the way you expect a petal to love or mourn or listen. Imagine petals organzing to form a bridge. To where?  From what?  In the logic of Fady Joudah's sequence, the petals "kept my toes warm," but only after they "ate the worms." So, what is this?  It's what you think it is. What eats what's eating your dead becomes silk, cotton, wool or "gauze." It becomes a covering, a woven cloth.  Who weaves it?  The petals?  The petals coat or warm a posture so exposed that it both precedes and out-dates life.  Suddenly, the voice of this poem is the voice you never expected or wanted to hear in this context. It's the voice of the one who will never return in their given form, or arrive. Are the petals performing, without performing anything, the construction of a shroud? In these poems that can't be aftermath (in conditions that do not end), the beloved's "open heart" is also a face with "two ears, two eyes. One set for breath, one for blood."  I'm so moved by the potential of a wound to become a face, to exert a possibility beyond the recognition that accompanies it, always, in the imaginations of others. But also: "If you read this and can hear me," writes Joudah, what's that smell?" Is this an interview?  And if this is an interview, then the poet is archiving what we are never meant to know, just as the messages of our internal organs are dormant until something is wrong. Only then do we experience an impossible sensation. On page 77 of this collection, a collection written by a doctor, a translator of the poems of Mahmoud Darwish (among others), a poet who has lost over a hundred members of his family in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, a collection written in one long and broken sitting in the Autumn of 2023, comes the "Dedication," a poem or beyond-poem that changes what feels possible for a poem, or book of poems, in the current era. Is this an era? No, once more, as Joudah reminds us, eras time out. This collection is not a primordial art work. Instead, it is written in the present and in the future, simultanously. Joudah dedicates his book: "To those who will be killed on the last day of  the war. To those who will be killed on the first day after the war ends. To those who succumb in the humanitarian window of horror." Reading these words is to stop reading. To continue reading in another way. 

"I am not your translator." -- Fady Joudah.

This is not a review, and it's not a blurb. 

[…]

Bhanu Kapil, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

With thanks to Bhanu for providing these liberated and liberating words of support.

[…] by Fady Joudah is published on 21 March 2024 and is available for pre-order here.

Bhanu Kapil is the author of six books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006; forthcoming in a new edition from Kelsey Street Press, 2022), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2016), and How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020).  How To Wash A Heart was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize and a Poetry Book Society Choice. Kapil is the recipient of a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry from Yale University, and is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Announcing our Out-Spoken Press 2024 List: Titles from Fady Joudah, Azad Ashim Sharma, Jay Gao, Rebecca McCutcheon, Rojbîn Arjen Yigit & Juana Adcock /  by Out Spoken

We are pleased to share with you our 2024 poetry list, including an urgent and timely collection of poems by prominent Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah — […], forthcoming 21 March 2024 — and the third poetry collection by Azad Ashim Sharma — Boiled Owls, forthcoming 18 April 2024 — alongside titles by Jay Gao, Juana Adcock, Rebecca McCutcheon and Rojbîn Arjen Yigit.

Out-Spoken Press Editor Anthony Anaxagorou says:

“With all the horrors taking place at the moment, the poets in our forthcoming list offer insight, artfulness and integrity, at a time when so many of us may feel withdrawn and hopeless. From war, displacement, climate breakdown and psychological trauma, these particular books reflect on what it means to not only be alive in the world, but to survive it.”
— Anthony Anaxagorou

Fady Joudah’s [...] is  a raw, weighted account engaging largely with the diasporic experience as a Palestinian American, and will be published in March. Joudah is a prominent Palestinian American physician and poet, and a winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. On the title of [...] Joudah says: “I wrote the bulk of this collection between October and December of 2023. I could not imagine a title for the book or for most of its poems in a time of extermination. The text of the poems already says enough. The text also betrays a necessary silence. And yet the silence in the book is the silence that the reader, listener, recipient should practice. In some moments I share this silence with them, and they with me. In many moments, however, the silence is solely their task. The ellipsis in brackets highlight the space in which a Palestinian speaks and others listen.”

Editor Anaxagorou acquired UK and Irish rights to [...] from Tanya McKinnon of McKinnon Literary. North American rights were acquired by Milkweed Editions.

 

Azad Ashim Sharma’s third collection, Boiled Owls — described by Bhanu Kapil as “a stunning rendition of “half imaginary geography,”’ — demystifies drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, and anxiety whilst thinking through their relation to capitalism and its resistance, the family, and a writer’s compulsion to write, and will be published in April.

Anaxagorou acquired UK and Irish rights to Boiled Owls from Suresh Ariaratnam at Spring Sultan.

The Press has acquired rights to Juana Adcock’s fourth collection, I Sugar The Bones, forthcoming October 2024. UK and Irish rights acquired by Anaxagorou directly from the author.

Anaxagorou’s 2024 list is completed by a new title, Bark, Archive, Splinter, by award-winning poet Jay Gao, and debuts by Rebecca McCutcheon and Rojbîn Arjen Yigit.

Poets for Palestine: Recording /  by Out Spoken

Recording of Poets for Palestine online fundraiser for Medical Aid for Palestinians on 30 October 2023.

We request that if you would like to watch the event, please make a donation to to MAP here:: https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate

Poets for Palestine come together to express their unwavering support and solidarity to all those affected by the tragic conflict in the region. Like so many of you we feel distraught and helpless as events continue to unfold, with thousands of Palestinian civilians, half of whom are children, now dead or in desperate need of aid following Israel's breaches of international law and the Geneva Convention.

This event included short readings and pre-recordings from prominent international poets who have openly supported the rights of Palestinian people, and called to end Israeli occupation, as well as a conversation between Shareefa Energy and Nabil Al-Raee, speaking from the West Bank to what is happening there.

A document containing details of and links to the poems read, and other useful links, can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eZJ33A4yKUcRVhkwxgTBpf7-AkQwXWsBzjtmky3d_3Y/edit?usp=sharing

The evening was hosted by Hanan Issa, and readers include: Lowkey, Chen Chen, Omar Sakr, Mira Mattar, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Leone Ross, Zaffar Kunial, Natalie Shapero, Zeina Hashem Beck, Joelle Taylor, Jay Bernard, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, lisa luxx, Shareefa Energy, Alycia Pirmohamed, Rebecca Tamás, Nuar Alsadir, Sanah Ahsan, Maryam Hessavi, Azad Ashim Sharma, Sandeep Parmar, AK Blakemore, Juana Adcock , So Mayer, Inua Ellams, Eve Esfandiari-Denney and Adam Kammerling.

Event organised by Out-Spoken Press, with the support and solidarity of our independent publisher friends at Makina Books, The 87 Press, Hajar Press, Broken Sleep Books, Haymarket Books, Saqi Books, Pamenar Press, Prototype and Bloodaxe Books.

Out-Spoken Press Named Finalist for the British Book Awards Small Press of the Year 2022 /  by Out Spoken

The British Book Awards 2022 Small Press of the Year Regional Finalist #BritishBookAwards

We’re absolutely delighted to have been shortlisted for the British Book Awards Small Press of the Year Award for the third year running!

After running on adrenaline for much of 2020, 2021 was, for us as for most—between the pandemic, Brexit and supply chain issues—a tough one, and it’s great to be on this list alongside so many great small presses both in London and across the UK (and we’re always not-so-secretly particularly rooting for comrades-in-poetry Carcanet, Fly on the Wall Press and Arachne Press.)

You can read the full shortlists on The Bookseller here.

"This was small press publishing at its best, smart and nimble, with amazing attention to detail, and always with an emphasis on the reader at the heart of it all." — Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller and chair of the judges

Joelle Taylor Wins 2021 TS Eliot Prize /  by Out Spoken

Joelle Taylor sits on a backwards chair

Celebrating the monumental news that Joelle Taylor has won the 2021 TS Eliot Prize for her collection C+nto & Othered Poems (2021, The Westbourne Press), described by judge Glyn Maxwell as “a blazing book of rage and light, a grand opera of liberation from the shadows of indifference and oppression.”

Joelle is one of the hearts of Out-Spoken and it’s hard to convey the energy she brings to everything she does. She writes fearlessly, lives generously and wears the hell out of a suit — we, and UK poetry, are lucky to have her and it’s a joy to celebrate this well-deserved success.

Anthony posted this on Instagram, and it feels right to share here too:

selfie of Joelle Taylor and Anthony Anaxagorou

This is my friend Joelle. I met her in 2000 when I was 17 in the basement of the Poetry Society offices. The 5 years I spent at secondary school were difficult. I was in every bottom set in one of the top state grammar schools in the country. My peers were all exceptionally bright, scholarly and eager. I lacked interest in most things aside from language and poems.

My mum entered me into a competition themed around Respect which Joelle had founded that same year. Because I wasn’t part of a school or group I had to read my poem to her so as to qualify for the slam. I remember standing there, the paper shaking, my mouth dry, reading what I’d written. She rocked back and forth, closing her eyes and moving her feet. I felt seen, alive, heard, accepted. When I finished she clapped, hugged me and said ‘son, that was exceptional.’ On the train back to north London my mum told me how proud she was, and for the first time in my seventeen year life I felt I’d properly achieved something.

Why am I telling you this? Because this story isn’t unique. I’m not unique. I’m part of a long line of young adults who found the confidence to move forward through Joelle’s energy, love, encouragement and care. Twenty odd years later she’s still one of my best friends. Last night her poetry book C+NTO won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize. What that said to me was not only is her work and skill as a writer formally recognised, but the support she’s shown thousands of people over a 30 year period has now come back to hold her up. She’s a maverick, an intellect and an artist like few I’ve met.

“this story isn’t unique. I’m not unique. I’m part of a long line of young adults who found the confidence to move forward through Joelle’s energy, love, encouragement and care”

Going forward I hope everyone reads Joelle’s poetry. She’s never been concerned with trends and zeitgeist subjects, she’s been writing these poems from the very start. I want us to celebrate her win, to see what it means for those who came from poor backgrounds, from performance poetry and spoken word, and how Joelle’s community can now benefit from feeling that little bit more seen.

— Anthony Anaxagorou

“Prizes don’t define a book’s cultural and spiritual value, but in a sector starved of attention they every so often get it right. Last night the three judges got it right. ”

Introducing our 2022–3 Publishing Programme /  by Out Spoken

As we move into Autumn, we’re excited to look ahead to our 2022–3 publishing schedule. Wayne Holloway-Smith will commence his tenure as Editor, succeeding the brilliant Joelle Taylor, and we’re delighted to announce the six poets he has selected to publish.

Wayne says:

“It’s been hugely encouraging to see the amount of talent that exists among the emerging poetry community. It’s also been a privilege to be able to choose these new voices to work with. I stand behind and 100 percent believe in the poems these writers are producing — each one with something unique to offer — and I cannot wait to help usher the books into the world. ”

Focusing on debuts, Wayne’s list features pamphlets from Helen Quah, Mukahang Limbu, Maria-Sophia Christodoulou and Oakley Flanagan, and debut full collections from Katie O’Pray and Emma Jeremy — you can learn a little more about the poets in the introductory booklet above.

We’re both honoured and excited to be publishing them, and can’t wait to bring their work to readers.