Life, if you're lucky, is long and memories stack up like books on a nightstand. There are the meaningful ones, the love and loss ones, the serious and important ones, but also the wild ones - nights out that started without a plan and ended up an adventure, hours' long conversations that evolved into debates, theses, setting the world to rights, encounters with strangers that led to unexpected friendships, sad nights that felt like endings. This collection is about those nights out and their memories, penned across pages during a pandemic that kept us all from even thinking about going out. "Jiving off each other's wistful reminiscences of glittering nights out, Damien B. Donnelly and Eilín de Paor shimmer, shift and shimmy throughout the sassy and sumptuous 'In the Jitterfritz of Neon'. This book is alive with vivid and vibrant imagery, richly nuanced lyricism, sharply crafted syntax and playful narratives. Capped off with decadent humour and hard-won worldly wisdom, it is a delight of nocturnal exploits, stylish city scenes, romantic dalliances, high-spirited camaraderie and aches for the freedoms we once shared." Anne Casey, Poet "Damien B. Donnelly and Eilín de Paor's dazzling collection of twenty poems shimmers and magnetizes with sensual, nostalgic, celebratory evocations of wild nights in Dublin, Amsterdam and New York. The poems complement each other in a beautiful dance, revelling in sensory experiences, friendship, desire and hope." Nathanael O'Reilly, Poet, author of (Un)belonging, Preparations for Departure and Distance "'In the Jitterfritz of Neon' serves up a heady mix of poetic cocktails, taking you on a ghost world odyssey of epic wild nights out. A chatty mix of adventure and self-discovery, it swirls glorious recollections of those precious shared times out that shape us and imbue places with meaning." Rhona Greene, Writer "The live feed between Damien B. Donnelly & Eilín de Paor's sensual and deeply personal poems, is electrifying. The twinned hearts of these poems invoke duende as they beat their daring, striking rhythms." Eleanor Hooker, Poet

"In a pamphlet saturated in colour, Damien Donnelly takes us on an immersive journey through a landscape of pigments. Written with great lyricism and emotional intensity, these poems contrast darker hues with lighter tones to create a sequence of poems that will linger in the memory."

The poems in (Un)belonging explore physical and psychological spaces, examining the consequences of a life lived on three continents, defined by separation from homelands and loved ones, shaped by departure and return, and the evolution and multiplication of identity. Throughout the collection, the setting continually moves from Australia to Ireland to the United States, making stops in England, Iceland, Greece, Italy, New Zealand and Slovakia. O'Reilly's poetry engages with a range of concerns and obsessions, including identity, belonging, expatriation, immigration, exile, ancestry, landscape, alienation, homesickness, suburbia, fatherhood, nostalgia, death and grief ... finding beauty, contentment and joy amidst an elusive quest for home.

'In Pratibha Castle's sensual, sacramental debut pamphlet, words hum like insects in high summer, tempt the tongue like the last sweet smear of cake batter, and fly like feathers after a lifelong mother-daughter catfight. From lonely childhood Wimpy Bars to lecherous confessionals, Portobello Market in the Swinging Sixties to a garrulous Friday night down the pub in Kells, remote family homes to mourning walks in the South Downs, all the vivid spirit and pain of an Anglo-Irish girlhood coming-of-age is resurrected in these pages and released like petals on the wind. Castle's poems have a heady perfume and courageous way with a secret reminiscent of Edna O'Brien and Medbh McGuckian - and a subtle incantatory magic all their own.' Naomi Foyle 'Pratibha Castle has matched the flow of these poems to the yearning souls they describe. Her light-footed words often slip free in surprising fashion, nimbly breaking the lines and creating unexpected angles onto a fund of timeless material in which souls yearn for release from the grip of bullying belief-systems, and where nature offers its ancient consolations.' David Swann, author of 'The Privilege of Rain' 'How I have enjoyed reading this collection by emerging poet Pratibha Castle as she guides the reader into the liminal spaces that rest between love, loss and the spiritual world... Her use of imagery, language and metaphor both informs and empowers her work. There is a strong elegiac quality to the poems which adds depth and richness, a delightful tapestry of light, shade and gravity. 'A Triptych of Birds and a Few Loose Feathers is a beautiful work of art.' Raine Geoghegan, Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee 'The poems in this collection are full of nature and memory, love and loss. They speak movingly of the hinterland of self, of how we are shaped by people and places - and how, no matter where we go or who we become, the landscape of the past still lies within us. Pratibha Castle sustains a clear, lyrical voice, but is also not afraid to speak directly to the heart. A great debut collection.' Moyra Donaldson From you and her smiling at me as I curl in bed, puzzling why you never smile that way at one another (Riddles) 'A Catholic adolescence infused with abuse and magical thinking...flaunts(ing) sexual awakening in the Mary Quant generation to follow Edna O'Brien...even 'nasturtiums writhe/with promiscuous/lithe ache.' With a language recalling Medbh McGuckian, Castle crosses a South of England Catholic upbringing with a rich, difficult knot of inheritance 'flashed crazy/like a Kildare mare' as she signs the death of her mother with a circling of bird-calls. A superb debut.' Simon Jenner

Everything sings in these pages, from birds to buildings who remember the children who once lived there. The work is a soundtrack of ghosts, a world of recovery where the dead sit on deckchairs and the living compare themselves to chalk outlines on the pavement. Powerful, startling, and utterly original these prose poems have a pulse. Hardwick is a master of the form. Angela Readman Poems in The Lithium Codex shape pages of a book of melancholy; gently fabricated soft prose blocks of longings and losings; lyric attempts - doomed to fail but, as failure, always also positively self-contained - to home in on and perhaps also to shrink from, or simply to understand, the painful distance or chasm agape between self and world, I and other, psyche and language, through beautiful, thoughtful, fragile phenomenological laments. Memoryscapes, mindscapes, drifting, to-ing and fro-ing in private and public time, without a real desire for origo or destination, or even authorship and/or companionship, always torn by tension of phobia and philia, processing the process of being, remembering, writing itself. Ágnes Lehóczky While each poem of The Lithium Codex gives the impression of being improvised, what impresses is how skilfully the effects are realised. It is not just the inventiveness of the writing but its precision. These prose poems have the authority of a classic. David Mark Williams

Bloom & Bones is a collaboration between Swansea poets Rae Howells and Jean James with colour at its heart. In words rather than paint, the poets capture the shades of very different stories. From Georgia O'Keeffe to a murderer on the run, from a lonely woman in an insane asylum to goldfinches visiting an expectant mother, and from a plague of ladybirds to a meteoroid tracking through space, these poems take the reader on a rainbow journey through time and place. The pamphlet is inspired by the bestselling book The Secret Lives of Colour, and works through the ten family colours set out in its pages, beginning with white, through yellow, orange, pink, red, purple, blue, green, and brown, concluding with a dark full stop at black.

Of Ochre and Ash, Eleanor Hooker's third collection of poems, lends to her familiar themes of family, place and memory a trademark uncanny, even otherworldly atmosphere, in which the glimpsed, the intuited and the half-known provide a great deal of the interest.The desire to "see my home from the other side" is a constant, but so too is immersion in the moment and, indeed, the ever-present nearby "darkening lake". "Eleanor Hooker's voice guides her reader through large metaphoric visions and the consolations of ordinary life. This is a collection full of urgent, haunted poems with a subtle range of approach; they are many-faceted works, reflecting the fragmented strangeness of experience. We face wild gothic moments, whose counterweight is the familiar, calm or stormy, world of the lake she lives beside and the people whose life is shared with hers." - Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin "Eleanor Hooker's poetry has a way of resonating in the reader like secret histories passed down through the generations. It is a strange effect: the drift of these poems seems to have been with us even before we began reading and lingers long after the book is closed. They are both strangely familiar and incredibly new and run the gamut of human experience: poems of sickness and healing; journeys and journeying, poems of the dead and the unborn; of storm and calm. The world she describes for us is by turns unsettling, mythic and surreal, but ultimately so exquisite and affirming that it can only be our own. " - John Glenday