A virtual event to celebrate Karen Downs-Barton, Luke Samuel-Yates, Jon Miller and Zoë Walkington. Join us as we celebrate these excellent new books from the four winners of the 2022 International Book & Pamphlet Competition. Tune into our special digital launch event for readings and discussion with Karen Downs Barton, Luke Samuel Yates, Jon Miller and Zoë Walkington.
Click here to watch the launch. Get tickets here.
Didicoy
By Karen Downs Barton
Didicoy offers a window into the colourful, precarious world of a multiracial Romany family, and focuses on characters at the often-untold margins of society. Blending lyricism with formal experimentation, these poems explore what it is to belong. Clear-eyed and outspoken, Didicoy has something of the impact of a contemporary Cathy Come Home.
Find out more on the Smith Doorstop bookshop.
Past Tense Future Imperfect
By Jon Miller
In these rich and witty poems, we encounter a gallery of characters, voices and situations in various stages of emotional undress and bewilderment, fretting at just the wrong distance from reality in railway stations, ferries, restaurants, war zones and watery dystopias. They are filmic pieces that announce the arrival of an unusually gifted poet, in a short collection much bigger than its size – entertaining, disturbing and despite the odds curiously life-affirming.
Find out more on the Smith Doorstop bookshop.
Dynamo
By Luke Samuel Yates
What is Dynamo? It is the first full-length collection by an extraordinarily entertaining and exhilarating poet. Over the course of this book, things break down, start again, light up, get stuck. Relationships stagnate, mountains and seas diminish, White nationalists fall over in Blackpool, and a wealthy couple’s house disappears one day, leaving them surrounded by their appliances, tanned and eating an egg.
Find out more on the Smith Doorstop bookshop.
I hate to be the one to tell you this
By Zoë Walkington
It’s a shame, isn’t it, to have to rat on your neighbours? Upsetting to find out that both your husband and the dog have been telling you lies? And I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there are bad people everywhere, at large, going about their business. Financial insolvents on online-dating sites, contortionist plumbers with a point to prove, and a bloke named Barry, from Halifax, who is singlehandedly ruining the livelihoods of perfectly legitimate psychics.
It’s not all bad news though, there are sham marriages to look forward to, ducklings to be held captive by, and that dog, well, you can always put him up for sale. Life, I’m afraid, is based on nothing more than slippery moorings, and this debut pamphlet breaks the bad news with humour and a twist of darkness.
Find out more on the Smith Doorstop bookshop.
Accessibility:
This event will use live auto-captioning. As the event is live-streamed, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of these captions. Correct closed-captions will be added to the Youtube video once the livestream is saved and re-uploaded. We will also provide a link to a Google document with poem text.
Please do get in touch with us via email (office@poetrybusiness.co.uk) if you have any concerns or queries about the accessibility of this event.
Karen Downs-Barton 