Mono-browed cousins, clandestine paperboys, murderous action heroes and Swiss euthanasia clinics jostle for position in Ross Sutherland's intelligent and wildly entertaining debut collection of poetry.  Sutherland charts the never-ending urban excursions of Pac-Man; constructs mash-ups of celebrity obits; and dons a surgical mask to conduct an 'Experiment to Determine the Existence of Love'. Things To Do Before You Leave Town is a sharp, ambitious and blackly comic exploration of the end of things, where 'all the roads that lead out are really leading back in'.  REVIEW QUOTES  'In his free-wheeling lyricism, caustic wit and brilliantly surreal turn of image, Sutherland is a truly contemporary original. His poetry rejuvenates techniques as disparate as collage, memoir, sound experiment and formal appropriation in vigorous but finely wrought lines. Refreshingly fearless and bleakly funny, Things To Do Before You Leave Town collects works that shock and delight in performance but reveal their true depth on the page.' Luke Kennard  'Ross Sutherland's poetry approaches the epic; a kind of epic on a human scale. If he were a piece of furniture, he would be an elegant high stool that felt uncomfortable and stylish at the same time.' Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3

Things To Do Before You Leave Town

Literature & Fiction

Sutherland, Ross

Poetry

Penned in the Margins

Charismatic Megafauna

Kendrick, Tamsin

City State: New London Poetry

Chivers, Tom

Love / All That /& OK, an anti-confessional by experimental British poet Emily Critchley. This major new publication brings together a diverse range of work previously published in chapbooks since 2004, and includes new material from the sequences 'Poems for Luke', 'The Sonnets' and 'Poems for Other People'. REVIEWS 'Really intelligent, coquette, fuck-you work ... a space for a new kind of anti-misogynism in poetry.' Marianne Morris 'I think the project is high electrics and considerable. I particularly care for the frailty and edges of coherence loss. It's the intelligent frays that push under my thought and matter most.' Allen Fisher "[Critchley's] writing addresses love and gender politics with surprising directness, albeit mostly through misdirection, and though the book is couched as an 'anti-confessional', it strikes me as more of a kind of ironic examination of the confessional mode and its place in women's poetry." Jon Stone, Dr Fulminare

Love / All That / & OK

Critchley, Emily

In this extraordinary sequence of prose poems, coral reefs fall from the sky, volcanoes smoulder and pirates come to power in Britain.  Combining montage techniques with reckless interventions, Steve Spence mashes up the worlds of robotics, banking, fishing, optometry, entomology, climate change, speech synthesis and meteorology to create a dizzyingly contemporary poetics - and a new form of nonsense. As entertaining as it is politically engaged, Limits of Control speaks to the challenging predicament we find ourselves in: 'Things cannot go on as if nothing has happened yet the events which follow are even more strange.'  REVIEWS  "In his new collection Limits of Control [Spence] presents short prose poems that splinter and fragment before your eyes and ears, slipping from music therapy to oil in the ocean..." Ian McMillan, The Verb, BBC Radio 3 (Listen back)  "Rarely have I read a work that manages to represent the complexities of contemporary experience so completely and truthfully. More than that, the experience of reading the collection mirrors its content - I felt anxieties, uncertainties and relief not simply because they were described well but because Spence knows exactly how to weave disjointed ideas into a semi-coherence so unnerving that it lingers like a horrific, beautiful vision. Anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry should buy this collection." Lindsey Holland, Tears in the Fence

Limits of Control

Spence, Steve

Speak to Strangers

Seltzer, Gemma

<p>Welcome to a strange new world in which a poem can be written using only one vowel, processed through computer code, collaged from film trailers, compiled from Facebook status updates, hidden inside a Sudoku puzzle, and even painted on sheep to demonstrate Quantum Theory. Discover a multitude of new and unusual poetic forms - from tweet to time-splice, and from skinny villanelle to breakbeat sonnet - in this inspiring and inventive anthology. Adventures in Form features over ninety poems by forty-six contributors including Patience Agbabi, Christian Bök, Joe Dunthorne, Inua Ellams, Roddy Lumsden, Ian McMillan, Paul Muldoon, Ruth Padel and Hannah Silva. Edited and introduced by Tom Chivers.</p>

Adventures in Form

Ellams, Inua

McMillan, Ian

Silva, Hannah

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION   NEXT GENERATION POET 2014  "Beautiful Girls is not a book for the faint-hearted. The reader has been invited to a sleepover at the asylum, a night in which five-year old girls drift alone through the wards, where the mentally unstable do sit-ups when nobody is watching and where heaven is a place between "the sky and the planets" reserved for those with personality disorders. This collection will be a home-to-home for sufferers and a journey through terrible night for those who've been fortunate enough to take the non-scenic route in life. Melissa Lee-Houghton significantly moves us on from any romanticising notion of the 'mad' poet driven through suffering to achieve their full genius. Mental suffering is here shown in all its nocturnal and diurnal detail: the nurses, the drugs, the lack of sleep; the disconnect from the yearned-for true self. Beautiful Girls will survive as a testament to poetry's force in overcoming." Chris McCabe

Beautiful Girls

Lee-Houghton, Melissa

Where Rockets Burn Through

Jones, Russell

Explosive political satire and acerbic wit leap from stage to page in Mondeo Man - the hotly anticipated debut collection from Luke Wright. Yummy mummies and debauched Tory grandees mingle with drunk Essex commuters and leering tabloid paps; a small town chip-shop becomes the site of a heart-wrenching story of failed marriage; and a televised manhunt enthrals an entire nation. Wide-ranging, approachable and formally adept, Mondeo Man both celebrates and laments a country of disappearing pubs, celebrity anti-heroes and motorway service stations, perfectly capturing the English idiom at the turn of the twenty-first century. Whether in sonnet, ballad, ottava rima or univocalism, Wright's fast-paced rhythms and inventive rhyme always hit the spot and never pull their punches. This is poetry at its most contemporary, satirical, fun, and archetypally English. _ Reviews "If any contemporary collection is going to convince the unbeliever that poetry can be a riot of cheek, giggles, boobs, tears and Facebook - while keeping its artistic integrity firmly intact - Mondeo Man is it.' Huffington Post "Although Wright's sprightly verse drips with cynical disdain for Tories, outraged tabloidese and the weekend excesses of a feckless working-class, there's a rich strain of empathy coursing through his work. More Crappy Albion than Broken Britain." The List "Celebratory, mournful, critical and tender - Mondeo Man frames the stuttering start to the twenty-first century" Julia Bird, Poetry London"

Mondeo Man

Wright, Luke

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