Go Full Boiler and collect any five of these brilliant books for only £35; add to, start, or complete your own 'Boiler House Press shelf' and sample yet more of some of the best poetry in English right now...
SPACE ODES by RTA Parker
An entertainingly bonkers romp of constellation and collage, writing and re-writing its entertainingly allusive way through intertextual space lampooning, deriding, despairing at and celebrating robots, the universe, love and sport (cricket, mostly) in a wonky poetics of anxiety and joy at the world we are thoroughly and catastrophically screwing up.
DESIRING MACHINES by Andrea Brady
These poems find breathing spaces within the minutes dilated by fear, the slow ticking of grief, rage stalled and wandering, the strangely activated temporalities of illness and pain, or the long cataclysm of climate emergency. In a world sick and on fire, this fierce and vulnerable book clings to life; to the consoling possibilities for continuing in love and solidarity.
BREACH by Lisa Samuels Breach
... is a song of lockdown: its tragedies, absurdities, non sequitur linguistic hilarities, and nightmarish lexical distortions, presented at a perfect moment for reflection, as we each continue adjust our bodies, lives and breaths. Starting with the dead, with Li Wenliang, who was the first to raise the Covid alarm, the book pitches and surges in deflections, hungers, and political feeling through pandemic-as-ordinary-life.
RABBIT by Sophie Robinson
The long-awaited third collection from one of the UK’s finest, most virtuosic of modern lyric poets. These poems take the reader on surprising journeys of healing, hard-won amid personal and social vicissitudes – including triumph over addiction, and alcoholism – and open spaces in which to share in emotional, quasi-spiritual transcendence despite. Who could ask for more? PBS Wild Card Choice for Winter, 2018.
OF SIRENS, BODY & FAULTLINES by Nat Raha
A book of prophecy against this Brexit era, rising from a post-2008 London, where crisis and austerity meet the vanity projects of the super-rich. Committed to the immediacy of a present that is precarious and under surveillance, Of Sirens... attends to queer, transfeminist and people of colour counter-memories and histories. It seeks new expressions of desire and modes of breath, pushing against the gravities that would rather these lives and worlds disappear...
SELF HEAL by Samantha Walton
... brims with riotous and tender experimental lyrics on love, work, protest, and survival among haunted interiors and post-industrial landscapes and explores processes of destruction and healing, testing the possibilities of self and collective care through meditations on poetic artifice and the architecture of identity, all with a thrilling linguistic strut and twinklings of mordant wit.
SUB ROSA: THE BOOK OF METAPHYSICS by Francesca Lisette
A fascinating, three-part interrogation of love, gender, ritual, and the body which charts the breakdown and aftermath of a romantic relationship, then traces several feminine archetypes – the mother, the girl, the wild woman, the mermaid, Venus – in a critique of gender identity, and then reconstructs these through a somatic and poetic (re)connection with the elements via crystal work, dance, somatics and food.
THE GREEN MONK by Marcus Slease
... is simultaneously contemporary and ancient, built on visual images and techniques of juxtaposition and collage, accompanied by entertainingly absurd narratives and concerns, variously, erotics, animism & magic, food, death & sublime nature, fairy tales & alchemy, & the wonders of everyday life.
LATANOPROST VARIATIONS by Jeff Hilson
Beginning with an extended riff involving the glorified music search engine Spotify and ending with the ongoing and ignored tragedy of European migration, these prose poems [sic] address a range of historic and contemporary particulars including the entertainer/paedophile Rolf Harris, ripoff payday loan sharks, English football grounds, world shipping, the endangered flora & fauna of the British Isles and singer-(not)songwriter Art Garfunkel.
TEN THOUSAND THINGS by Emily Critchley
... is about motherhood. Also it is about the equipmentality of woman in/to society in general. It is about parenting as labour; poetry as labour; labour as poetry; poetry as thought; thinking as poetry; protest as labour; poetry as protest; and our perennially changing, perennially stuck hereditary lines. It is for warrior-women. It is for girly-men. It is for all persons, animals, plants in between.
ON FATHERS < ON DAUGHTYRS by Tim Atkins
In a poetics of the transcendent domestic, which combines the styles of The New York School and Britain’s Tom Raworth, slapstick and tragedy coexist on its every page. Poet George Oppen asked the question; "My daughter, my daughter, what can I say of living?" This, Atkins’ happy poem, is a 120-page answer: "Come down here right now/ & get your snot off the ceiling."
WORD/WORLD by Marianne Morris
... is a progression, through language, from the unruly, abstracted language of trauma, into a more integrated and embodied approach to a language that inhabits an awakened body in the present tense. The fabric of WORD/WORLD spans heirloom seeds, police murders, witch burning, Ayahuasca tourism, shamanism, the asteroid Chiron, soul mates, alchemical principles, plant medicine, tantric sex, gangster rap and the end of American Apparel.
CLICK & COLLECT by Colin Herd
... explores the shape and shaping of consumerism, internet culture, queerness and emotion. How do we brand the world and how does it brand us? It gives advice on how to frighten your friends, weighs up the pros and cons of cream jeans, questions the efficacy of algae as a face mask, gives dental hygiene tips and ideas for floral arrangements.
Go on, do it... you won't regret it...