Bøger udgivet af Broken Sleep Books

The Demon Tracts is a faithful reproduction of the loggbok of Norwegian-Shetlandic modernist poet, Kristján Norge who vanished from the Outer Hebridean Eilean a' Bháis (Isle of the Dead) in 1961. Part diary, part collage, its collaged contents betray a figure profoundly disturbed by the vicissitudes of island life. The loggbok entries are aligned with the lunar cycles of the new moon and full moon of 1961, beginning on July 11th (which opens this 'dorchar taibhse' or 'dark vision') and ending with the full moon on the 22nd of December. The loggbok concludes with a long, unedited poem: The Demon's Progress, which is surely a nod to The Rake's Progress and antithetical to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Crudely attached inserts include: a black and white plate of the Palatine Graffito depicting Christ as a crucified donkey; a fortune-telling card illustrated with a man wrestling a lion from the Grand jeu de Mlle Lenormand deck, Grimaud, France; a reconstructed cella using an Egyptian postcard of the Temple of Edfu; numerous typescripts and a 1950s image of wolves in a wood, possibly at Whipsnade zoo. Norge's handwritten scrawl is meticulously transcribed to reveal an arcane theatre of paranoia and self-betrayal akin to Nijinsky and Strindberg's own diaristic breakdowns. The Demon Tracts manifests out of Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire as microcosmic evidence of charred thinking and reduced selfhood via the invented ventriloquism of the 'Sluagh nam Marbh', a malign Highland tempest wind that seemingly drew Norge toward his death.

Chalking the Pavement, written during the first part of the Covid pandemic, includes a number of poems, as well as a long extract from Kate Noakes' daily writings, which take the form of prose poems. Noakes aims to capture the soon-forgotten details of the changes to our lives during this extraordinary period, when living in the city became something of a prison.

Something Man-Made Is Here and It Is Dangerous is a pamphlet of poetry that finds humour, beauty, and fascination in the post-human. Stefan Mohamed explores landscapes that might be unfriendly to us but friendly to others, and in doing so plays around with the strange voices and concepts that might spring from that. This is a remarkable work that engages with science-fiction, scientific language, eco-poetry, the evolution - and loss - of language, and the thought processes of abstract beings.

How is it to be a tourist in Yemen, Turkmenistan, Nauru or Mauritania? Globetrotter Gunnar Garfors has been to all the 198 countries of the world - twice. On his journeys he is driven by curiosity and has met people from many different cultures and societies. Garfors' mild and open disposition helps him to easily get in touch with locals wherever he is. In Elsewhere he shares his experiences from the 20 countries people are least likely to travel to. The author skilfully blends his experiences in an easy and entertaining read. You will get close and personal with people, including a very open and cheerful prime minister, the world's best chocolate maker and a mango farmer from Yemen. At a time characterized by conflict and war, Garfors wants to inspire us to get to know parts of the world that differ from ours, places that many are reluctant to travel to. A wider understanding of other cultures, faiths and worldviews may change how you perceive the world. Perhaps the globe we live on could become a better and more beautiful place if more of us challenged our comfort zones. Elsewhere takes you to some of the most facinating places on earth. Enjoy from the safety of your chair or find inspiration to travel elsewhere yourself.

Darren Freebury-Jones's Rambling is a book of fragments exploring the topographies of love, grief, friendship, family, youth, and age in Wales. Ranging from anecdotal to linguistically complex and hauntingly intertextual, the poems in this collection chart a life from childhood to adulthood, its scenes bursting with light humour and heavy darkness. In Rambling we journey through the minutiae of everyday life, discovering the extraordinary potential for both the big and small dramas of living; love and loss, the familiar, the uncanny, and the in-between.

Stu Watson's latest collection spans the personal and the global. Fersehturm Berlin is as much a record of the author's experience as it is a cultural document, in which the poems both enact and record the processes of history, memory and technology. With deft use of form and language, Watson's poetry captures our current moment with subtlety, compassion and acuity. This is a timely and essential book which address the world, its stories, its language, and its conflicts, both micro and macro, real and imagined. But it is also an extended act of witness, a record of how things have been and what they are now, an extraordinary testament to how we process the past and are haunted by the stories we tell ourselves and others.

Annunciation Sonnets climbs out of the frame of the sonnet and through speculative encounters with artworks depicting the annunciation, probes form and rupture. What can be done with and to form, out of suspicion of the form, concerns form, and in re-encountering the annunciation tableaux Linda Kemp steers a poetic encounter into a querying of propositions subtending a language of art.

Broken sleep and disturbed dreams, or vice versa. A compilation of modernity's conditions needs to include insomnia, accompaniment to work stress, twitchy doomscrolling, existential dread, memories of minor indignities, hectic feelings of a lack of control, shame. Often attributed incessant technological interruption, by radiant blue light, the proposed cure is often also technological, the white and brown noise from Bluetooth speakers, the voice of the podcast to counter loneliness. Yet people have always struggled and the greater the struggle the further from peace. Shakespeare described his weariness, seeking 'dear repose for limbs with travel tired' only to begin 'a journey in my head / To work my mind when body's work's expired'. Others sought out insomnia: the desert fathers wandered in abject poverty and sleepless doxology. Gaining a perspective on insomnia is hard when in its grip, or its wake. We read insomnia as a symptom of our waking life, its worries. We interpret insomnia according to our working life, its stresses. But can insomnia also be a gift, a door ajar, a point of access? In this short collection a number of contemporary experimental writers write of insomnia, or write from insomnia to see what might be discovered.

Martin Malone & Bryan Angus's Gardenstown offers a vivid evocation of changing seasons in a village, from spring to winter. The book is a sequence of Malone's remarkable poetry, interspersed with Angus's exquisite linocuts, which capture the essence of the people, places and wildlife in north-east Scotland. Here they watch the year pass as, like the tide the seasons come and go.

Skirting arranges poems in columns that provide multiple reading routes, giving the reader opportunities to make and create a series of ways to engage with and understand the text. This system of arranging and rearranging the poem is explored within the texts too, these poems circle around their subject without naming the events explored. The poems skirt around a figure, event and thoughts, trying to get close to a difficult subject without being able to fully articulate or fix it to the page. Skirting is many attempts at using language to describe and locate.

In the wake of five years which had seen a heart-attack, an operation to remove one third of his lungs, and increasing pain and difficulty walking from arthritis, Callum James resolved to walk the South Downs Way, one hundred miles from Winchester to the coast at Eastbourne. Walking five miles one day each weekend, James limped down the steep hill into Eastbourne four months later. The South Downs is partly a grimoire of the walk, partly a linear topography, partly a treatise on necromancy. Subverting the expectation that books on landscape are divorced from folklore, spirits, and the magic of a place, Callum James writes as one who does this magic, speaks to these spirits, and follows this lore. As a result, this is a book which is neither fiction nor non-fiction, because those categories don't work when you leave materialism behind. It is story.

In these astounding poems, Yanita Georgieva explores the different thefts and losses that accompany the human condition - from the theft of freedom and origin to that of loved ones and bodily autonomy. What happens after the theft? Can there be joy in it? At the heart of the pamphlet is an interrogation of grief, sexuality, and memory through the prism of the immigrant experience. Small Undetectable Thefts is an exploration of the ways in which our lives are marked by 'in-betweenness', loss and displacement, and what is gained as a result. A masterclass in the craft of the line, this is a pamphlet to savor and return to again and again.

Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices is a powerful, visceral reminder that masculinity is more than the sum of its parts, and a call to open up a dialogue about masculinity that is inclusive, progressive, and affirming.

Nathaniel Rosenthalis' Works and Days is a brilliant, lyrical, and exuberant collection of poems. Playful, tender, and often wise, these works combine self-portraiture, literary homage, familial anecdotes, mythological retellings, and philosophical contemplation to create a series of moving depictions of what it is to be human and part of a world of both great suffering and great joy. With humor, intelligence, and vulnerability, the poems examine themes of love, loss, beauty, language, and the meaning of art and art making. Works and Days is a work of great depth and heart.

The language in Rhian Elizabeth's poetry feels instinctual: the poems in girls etc pulse and ripple with energy, their rhythms are perfectly pitched. Elizabeth writes of personal experience with an intensity and sharpness that challenges you to look closely. girls etc showcases a defiance, alongside the beauty and vulnerability here, which resonates long after the last page is turned. Rhian Elizabeth brings a breath of fresh air to contemporary poetry.

Written over a period of eight years, the poems in Shale Bings amble across adolescent landscapes, hazy spectres of West Lothian and the (queer) loves within, playful in their encounters with creatures and flora otherwise disregarded. Through these poems Ian Macartney attempts desire paths towards 'posthuman joy' - poems that ask to come play in the soil, to jump in the canal, to pretend to be a lovely dog, then follow through on what such shared futures might look/smell/taste/sound/vibe like.

freebleeding is a conversation between two poets, Charley Barnes & Wendy Allen, written in letters, poems and short prose. The collection explores facets of menstruation, bodily fluids, and feminism, and finds the many points at which these topics intersect. Through these works, Barnes and Allen explore what it is to bleed, what it is to cease bleeding - and how we might respect and know our bodies in both states. freebleeding is a vital conversation about what it is to bleed in a world in which women's blood is seen as a threat, and men's as power.

F. van Dixhoorn's Collected Works is made up of sequences and series in which short colloquial phrases make surprising, sometimes puzzling, connections inside strict 16-line grids. Different counting mechanisms in each series create a cadence that orders a multitude of disparate data and places them in a new field of tension: observations, memories, reflections, impressions, and current events. The poems depict in an extraordinary way what can go on the poet's mind on any given day: consciously, semi-consciously and unconsciously. Poetry, in short, as an art form. Poetry, in short, which creates and obeys only its own laws.

sonnets is an unforgettable and unsettling sequence of lyric sonnets. The violence of Edward Doegar's poems disrupts our most fundamental notions of love and family, of the past and the present, and our own ability to reconcile through rich and beautiful writing, which is also acutely disquieting and uncomfortable. These poems are brutal, but they are also tender, and we read them, as we must read them, as witnesses. sonnets is a unique and stunning body of work.

Plainsong is a cultural history cycle of persona poems drawn from the time of the earliest English poetry to the industrial era and Suffragette movement. Victor Tapner explores universal themes - love and loss, alienation and betrayal - revealed through the characters' narratives, and the result is a powerful, moving, and memorable collection. Plainsong is an anthem to those who have left this earth and an ode to those who remain.

ways to say we're not alone explores themes of estrangement and upheaval; how to keep going, how to be ourselves. These are poems of remorse and tenderness which come alive on the page, that fizz with a deep uncertainty and a yearning for home. Alderwick's sense of language is quietly playful amidst the often stark backdrop of what it means to be a broken human. His attention to the quiet moments of deferral or joy that characterise our relationships are wonderfully evocative. He is adept at the kind of surreal fable which makes a reader consider their own capacity for magic.

In Night Vision Pippa Goldschmidt writes about outer space and explores its multiple meanings as a place of awe and wonder to a more materialistic site in which scientific ideas are formulated and tested. This book explores space as a location of potential capital where commerce is being developed, leading to a new threatened 'enclosure of the commons'. Goldschmidt posits that outer space is not just a backdrop to our human lives, it connects us to each other through space-time, its ability to generate myths and stories, and our reliance on it to transmit information.How we view and use space is narrated through the lens of Pippa Goldschmidt's own interactions with it: a child reading a guide to the night sky, an astrophysicist doing research on the most distant objects known in the Universe, a regulator of outer space using international and British legislation, and finally a writer. Night Vision argues that we need to understand the importance of outer space in all its various manifestations so that we can protect it, and ourselves, from exploitation. Just as we have destroyed natural habitats on our own planet, we are now at risk of doing the same to other planets.

Raymond de Borja's facture is an inventive book, both literary and wondrously attuned to the most minute subtleties. The poems in facture are uncannily cohesive, each a small sculpture, a little engine. De Borja's poems speak through the history of the art world, the history of art theory, and an acute sense of the material world as well. De Borja's work feels in service of a larger project which we could call the making of art, art which emerges through the work of one's hands and mind. There is a kind of tenderness toward the poet's and reader's body in these poems, a kind of care and compassion in relation to craft, and in the relation of writing to the world.

Fragmented and angular, Erode with Me envelops the reader inside a full collapse of charged emotions. Carving words into structures and overlayed with frenetic glyphs, Nikki Dudley disassembles matters of the self, the family, and relationships into a torrent of poetics that hooks the reader into wanting to turn the page, to see and feel its deconstructions that are so immediately relatable. Erode with Me is the breaking of things; a unique and intelligent outpouring that crystalizes our common shared experiences of living through this difficult life.

Variety Turns is a collection of elegies for Christopher Arksey's mum who passed away from cancer in 2016. Arksey pays tribute to his mum by recalling not just the solemn moments, but the dark humour we often lean on when trying to cope with loss. These poems exemplify the permanence of grief, while bringing to light the unknowable and unfulfilled parts of the lives of those we've lost. Written with subtle precision, Variety Turns is both a tender tribute and a quiet but affecting exploration of loss and how we grieve.

Rhyheim: A Porn Poem is a beautiful book of eroticism, of desire and of the longing for intimacy. The book-length poem can be read as a devotional to the gay porn star Rhyheim Shabazz.

In their new pamphlet, Jaydn DeWald offers a haunting meditation on love and loss-a series of grief-induced sketches 'where drums pound // the whispers' and 'a horn wails / [t]he darkness.' What is the difference, asks DeWald, between an incantation and a poem, a ritual and a song? Engaging well-known poets and heretofore unknown forms, Then Darkness embodies the restorative, if not the resurrectional, powers of apostrophe.

In the sequence of poems that forms the spine of this debut collection, Luke Palmer casts 16th Century alchemist Paracelsus as an eccentric single father, giving voice to his Homunculus; a preformationist child and the secret to eternal life. By turns playful and profane, the arcane bleeds into the everyday, untethered from history - a walk in the woods is an encounter with an angry god, a potty training accident becomes a metaphysical exploration. Elsewhere, Palmer addresses masculinities from both sides of the 'father tug', roving between the concrete and ephemeral, asking questions of language, the wants of an aging body, and what it means to live forever.

The Broken Sleep Books Anthology showcases the best writing from the press in 2023, featuring extracts from every publication, covering poetry, non-fiction and short fiction. An essential purchase for anyone interested in new writing, or curious about the work of a vibrant, dynamic and award-winning independent press.