The Tangle Box by Dave Kavanagh
"Darkly compelling and driven by a powerful, page-turning momentum."
-Kevin Barry
Author of City Of Bohane & Night Boat to
Tangier
'The Tangle Box is compelling. A subtle and complex portrait of crisis and all that ripples out from it, drawn with sensitivity and care.'
-Helen Mort
Prize winning poet and author of Division
Street and Black Car Burning.
'I read The Tangle Box in one gulp, start to finish. I could not put it down. It is a great book.
-Una Mannion
Author of A Crooked Tree
'A relentless narrative engine drives this story. It's a psychologically subtle and morally complex tale.'
-Aiden O'Reilly
Author of Greeting Hero
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Trouble Crossing The Bridge by Diana Powell
The characters in ‘Trouble Crossing the Bridge’ are separated by time, place, age, gender, and yet they are brought together here, making this debut collection a melting-pot of personalities, voice, setting, and plot.
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The Clock Museum and Other Stories by Frances Thimann
In The Clock Museum and other stories, words, stories and books weave like smoke in and around the lives of a wonderful cast of characters. With sometimes life-affirming and sometimes tragic outcomes, these sensitive and insightful stories combine into a beautiful collection that will delight all readers of finely-crafted literature.
-Andy Christopher Miller
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You’re Pretty Gay by Drew Pisarra
“You’re Pretty Gay is a prime example of Drew Pisarra’s dangerously funny and queerly inventive brain. Each story is its own performance, its own shattering of expectations and social mores. But shining through all the wild wit is a glowing heart looking for connection.”
– Kevin Sampsell, This Is Between Us
“Drew Pisarra is a poet writing prose. And his second book of stories, You’re Pretty Gay, reveals his poetic gifts – the nakedness, the clarity, the conciseness – in all their glory.”
– Leanne Grabel, Brontosaurus: Memoir of a Sex Life
“Each highly enchanting story is like another spoonful of a gloriously rich yet light gateaux that will makes you hungry for more.”
– Alison Norrington, Class Act
“These stories instill a sense of anticipation and longing, recalling not simply what happened but also bringing forth the wishes for what might have been.”
– Nicholas Ealy, Narcissism and Selfhood in Medieval French Literature: Wounds of Desire
Animal Behaviour by Amanda McLeod
This inventive debut collection focuses on the complexities of human interaction through the lens of animal behaviour and quirky natural phenomena. The best of these tales blend transformative, fantastical happenings with a wry but soulful tone, reminiscent of writers such as Aimee Bender. There is plenty of structural and thematic boldness in Animal Behaviour, but at the same time, Amanda McLeod always maintains a clear empathy with her characters and their struggles. A really diverting read.
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Girl by Maria Straw-Çinar
Reshaping The Light by Breda Joyce
Reshaping the Light is a collection sprinkled with particles of light. Joyce’s belief in its precious power to illuminate emotional spills, to create a shield against darker shades is an integral element in these poems. Mined from experience, history, mythology and the natural world, life’s complex dualities are sieved through finely tuned ‘words weaving possibilities out of the shadows’ (Murmuration, i.m. Seamus Heaney). Sensory perceptions startle imagery into memorable territory, ‘big showy cones/of white and blue,’ (A Bunch of Lilac) or ‘a harvest moon holds us in its yellowed glow’, (Noctiluca). There are many such glints. Indeed, the poet at times reveals a sacred connection.
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She anoints the poems with phrases such as ‘like a thurible’ or ‘scent the air with incense’ (The Bee-Smoker). Joyce’s lyrical aesthetic moves within the natural world with ease; personifying nature in lines such as ‘Sunflower heads, heavy and low,’ or ‘A wasp taps at the windowpane,’ (Hiatus). There is no light without dark, inevitably evoking the urge to ‘resist the weight of the eyelid dark’ (Hiatus). When loss occurs and ‘apples quickly rot and are ripe with death’ (Lucia), Joyce finds solace in mythology, taking her to Demeter pleading with Hades ‘to rebirth,’ (Lucia). She bears witness to the horrors of war. In a searing testimony to man’s inhumanity, a visit to the Jewish Museum in Berlin tells how ‘we walk on the faces of the dead, (Mute) and how ‘a baby’s mouth unopened, no cry uttered’ tells ‘their frozen story,’ (Mute). The cycle of life, the resilience of nature to reshape ‘when the sky spills rain,’ (Pearls) is the hallmark of a keen sensibility, an aware observer as a poet and a human being, attuned to the moment when ‘something flutters beneath my breast’/released beyond blue pages.’ (Aerogramme)
- Eileen Casey
Praise the Unburied
Praise the Unburied proves “there are no rooms in our bodies without ghosts.” We move through achy poems of yesterdays during the Romanian Communist regime and warm memories of family where each day “peels off like dry shallot”.
More info →Children’s Routes and Red Streamers by Paul Sutherland
Sutherland is as much inwardly as he is outwardly reflective on matters of heart and place. A writer of considerable talent and grace you are always rewarded with reading his poetry and prose
More info →The Rain Girl by Rose Mary Boehm
In The Rain Girl, Rose Mary Boehm’s poetry explores our world through a lens of disorienting contrasts: past and present, youth and age, male and female, escape and entrapment, real and surreal. Through the current of time, we see sharp images of wartime Europe and fairy tales, violence and dreams and, through it all, a love ever-lost but ever-seeking. The speaker in these psychologically-fraught poems becomes “the note between the / harmonies, the breach between severed limbs, and the twilight / between worlds.” And though the ground continually shifts beneath readers’ feet, they walk wide-eyed through this collection, willing travelers in times they can never quite trust due to the transience of the subconscious. As the poem “Haunting” tells us: “the time that passes between / lighting and thunder, / that’s where you’ll find me.” It’s also where you’ll find yourself – fascinated from start to finish.
More info →Living Water by Bernie Crawford
More info →Bernie Crawford’s debut collection has been obviously on its way for a while now. In truth, if there were any justice in the poetry world, which there absolutely isn’t, it would have been already out there and up for all the prizes. Bernie is beyond serious about the art of poetry; every poem has the shine of perfect editing. And yet the authentic voice of the first draft remains.
Kevin Higgins
Only One Life by Dorothy Simmons
The stories in Only One Life are from a female perspective. Central to each is the assertion of individual agency: the ability to take charge of your life, to make your own myth. Some narratives envisage historical events, others re- imagine contemporary issues.
