Newly published

Ink & Blood & Nicotine is a deeply personal and affecting collection which turns an unflinching eye on the issues of modern society, finding refuge in the words and songs which offer understanding and comfort.

Urukalo Franov examines her world with a confronting directness, but leavens her poetry with humour and sympathy. At times chaotic and with the wild energy of creative thought, these poems will introduce you to a bold, new poetic voice, but will leave you to answer its questions as best you can.

Nick Crowley's collection, "Which way is that thing I don't like?", is a clinically precise introduction to the baffling world we inhabit. Every everyday moment seems to offer its own juxtaposition: a shadow, a reflection, a mirror image.

"At dusk the sharks come closer to shore

i keep an eye out for fins"

The disturbing moment immediately undercut,

"Until i get bored

and earnest concern fades to lusty hope

i pray for a black fin"

Crowley may not offer many definitive answers, but at least you are certain to enjoy the questions...

Bozo's Obstacle is a deeply contemplative celebration of the everyday. Wexler's poetry is personal and reflective, drawing on reminiscence and longing, but placing it firmly in the present, shaping the past to make sense of the now.

This collection is gentle and surprising, laced with humour and acceptance and a deep understanding of the human condition; a condition that seems equal parts humour, sadness, confusion, and wonder.

A portrait artist lives along a road built of the pips and stones from orchard fruit. He watches the other residents come and go and paints portraits of them, imagining their lives.

Each portrait, each story, comes together to form a picture of Cherrystone Lane and reveals who gave the painter a black eye and how the most recent resident was guided to misadventure.

David L Hume has written a gentle, compelling history in a series of short vignettes of the addresses that make up Cherrystone Lane.

Steve Evans' new collection, The Crow on the Cross, Wedding Songs & Others, is collection which examines the social and cultural phenomenon of marriage in ways that are equal parts personal and analytical. 

His poems are both lush and spare. The endless human desire for a partner, an equal, is celebrated and questioned in poems of deep understanding and knowing humour. 

Evans brings all his formidable skill as a poet to a remarkably diverse examination of the topic, at once deeply thoughtful, comfortingly familiar, and perceptively humorous. This mastery of form is continued in the second part of the collection, a miscellany of subjects united by the skill and insight of an accomplished poet.

A play in one act by poet and playwright, Jack Farrugia.

While racing to receive medical attention, two brothers, long disconnected by time and circumstance, confront a shared history and discover the reality of an unknown present.

Salt Flats in Heaven is an exploration of male tenderness and violence, anger and forgiveness. In this tense tragicomedy, Farrugia exposes the wrenching difficulties of two men striving to find and accomplish their purpose.

Rural Ecologies is a collection of haiku united by their subject matter: a love of the natural world and the wonder it inspires. Michael J. Leach embraces contemporary practice in writing these short, contemplative verses 'in the spirit of haiku' rather than trying to contort each poem into three lines while pretending that English syllables can be considered Japanese morae.

This is a thoughtful, sometimes playful, collection that celebrates the resonance of the momentary.

Corollary is a wildly ambitious collection of poems by young Nigerian poet, Anthony Ogbonnaya Chukwu. He retells the history of our cosmos and our species, translating the scientific knowledge of the physical into the personal and metaphysical language of poetry and religion.

Chukwu explores and celebrates the contradiction of our continuing primitiveness and our grandiose learning: "... we brought/the moon to our soles..."; the hubris of our ambitions and our ultimate fate: "How fascinating it will be that those who/were champions here... melted by the rays of the light"; the connection of our individuality with the enormousness of space: "When light was/created early/today,it did not find its way hard/in locating me".

Chukwu examines his world unflinchingly - "They burnt a young woman to a cinder/in Nigeria for allegedly crossing their red lines..." - but with enormous sympathy and quiet humour as his poems progress from the creation of our world to the appearance of our species. The final piece, a prose poem, uses the image of a fisherman lost in a storm to encapsulate our destiny. "This is how the

gathering is made to think about the present: the man, and what has happened".

In this thoughtful, confronting collection, Letizia faces life in the bleak, hard winters of the Northeastern United States, an environment which forces its people to acknowledge oblivion and to look for meaning in the experience. If meaning is often out of reach, the poet still looks to build, love, create, teach, learn and to record the effort, facing down oblivion "perhaps out of instinct, habit, conditioning, or simply because there is nothing else to do".

This collection is not a record of triumph, but a record of resilience and the of the moments when life lived in knowledge of oblivion still masters it, however briefly.