Forthcoming Titles

The haiku and senryū in The scuppered lily concern what passes and what we treasure; what amuses us and what confounds us. They record odd, fresh ways of understanding, through the senses and through the imagination. These short poems were written over an eight-year period between 2015 and 2022, published in journals and commended in competitions in Poland, Croatia, the UK and Ireland, US, New Zealand and Australia.

Arresting in scope and nuance, Anders Villani’s third collection voices the tension between answering a demand for care and the inner stories that question our capacity to give and receive it. Crises in two relationships—siblings; intimate partners—become more than calls for the embodied love that care requires, and is. They become tests of humanness, in ways the book’s studies of childhood and adolescence contextualise.

Employing the supple formal control, narrative propulsion, braiding of myth and memory and dream, and the rigorous, compassionate self-inquiry that charged his first two collections, Villani gestures—in moments of access; in lapses and ejections; in almost impalpable feeling; in presence—towards a core behind core beliefs. A poetic space, where the loquat—nespola—fruits.

‘Using seemingly everyday materials and sensations, Nespola hums with its lucid, uncanny tableaux of ambiguous intimacy. These audacious, haunting narratives and lyrics, peppered with ecstatic punctures and folds, know what our bodies bury and hold. They ask, “how much of myself, to save / myself, can I destroy?”. Anders Villani is a wayfinding alchemist.’
Andy Jackson

A woman recedes in her kitchen when her adult adopted son shows up on the street. A daughter furtively watches as her mother finds bliss. Memories assemble, then unravel. Women love and are loved, are betrayed and betray, choose to stay, sometimes riddled with indecision, and leave—wondering if they should cut the ivy before they go.

The fox traces a spectral presence—vanishing, returning, delivering messages, wreaking carnage, inspiring love and heralding transformation. Recurring images converge and diverge, disappear and re-emerge in slant.

This is What it Feels Like is a collection of interweaving stories by five diverse voices, exploring identity in all its multiplicity. Together, these individual stories speak to our innate interdependence as humans.

Paul Munden checks into the suite of rooms in the Murray Hotel, Livingston, Montana, once occupied by Sam Peckinpah, legendary director of The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and other notorious classics. For the poet, it is an act of homage and immersion, not without risk. Addressing Peckinpah directly, he reflects on the films – and the turmoil of their making – in poems both personal and finely attuned to Peckinpah’s own experience.

At the heart of the book is a vision of Peckinpah’s long-cherished but never realised project: Castaway. This more extensive piece bears witness to the director caught up in his own nightmarish script, a dark journey of self-discovery, shadowed by the poet. The overall Suite is a highly informed and structured work that wrestles with the nature of an uncompromising talent, revered yet often misunderstood.

‘I read Paul Munden’s Peckinpah Suite and was so moved by his sublime accomplishments that I immediately reread it. Peckinpah Suite immediately became one of my favorite works of poetry. Munden’s deep research into the life and works of Sam Peckinpah is mightily impressive.’
W.K. Stratton ,author of the award-winning bestseller The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film