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Hit Points: An anthology of video game poetry

 

Released May 31st 2021 // 100 pages // Red or green variants

Video games and poetry may be an unlikely seeming match, if video games are one of the most popular imaginative forms in contemporary culture, then poetry could be one of the most neglected. Hit Points, edited by Matthew Haigh & Aaron Kent, shows where these two disparate worlds meet and how good they are for each other. Featuring a selection of the finest voices in contemporary poetry, Hit Points will have you gripped until game over.

 

The Mario red variant contains a running order decided by Aaron Kent, with 2 exclusive poems by Aaron at the start. The Luigi green variant contains a running order decided by Matthew Haigh, with 2 exclusive poems by Matthew at the start.

 

Roisin Dunnett - Animal, Vegetable

 

Released 31st May 2021 // 52 pages

Roisin Dunnett's Animal, Vegetable is a subversive pamphlet of short stories, exploring metamorphosis, sexuality and the future of intimacy. Animal, Vegetable exists in a queered universe where these unusual and striking stories take place: glancing sideways at accepted social and physical realities. One character imagines an affair with an octopus, another falls in love with a meme while a third has a visceral confrontation with the inside of her own body. Dunnett adopts a vivid colour palette in her work, building contemporary fables in new forms.

 

Jack Warren - Rude Mechanical

 

Released 31st May 2021 // 34 pages

In Jack Warren's debut pamphlet Rude Mechanical, the poems sing with the rhythm and cadences of working life. Warren's poetry moves from the factory to the pub 'searching for a moment's weary epiphany' or finds him staring at the stars in 'the serenity of a cigarette break'. In Rude Mechanical, Warren looks to the role of art, literature and labour in our lives, the value of the natural world, and in an extended sequence on a long-distance relationship, he writes lyrically of falling and remaining in love.

 

Day Mattar - Springing from the Pews

 

Released 31st May 2021 // 32 pages

Day Mattar’s Springing from the Pews is an explosive pamphlet which explores an episode of sexual violence through a verse play interwoven with confessions and journal entries. Mattar’s poetry is eloquent, with a dark intensity underlying the sugary surface, with echoes of Frank O’Hara and Sharon Olds. A breathtaking read, Mattar’s splenetic energy gushes out like water from a fire hydrant.

 

Praise for Springing from the Pews:

'Day Mattar’s ground-breaking debut, exploring the experience of sexual abuse, marries form and content to stunning effect. This is a world of memory and reality where graceful lyricism co-exists with a brutal candour: a recurrent image of birds becomes the surprising and lovely ‘murmuration of origami birds’ - birds folded to evoke peace, the peace desired by the poetic voice who has ‘for too long’ carried his abuser’s ‘cock like a torch.’

The keynote of these shocking, moving, and sometimes wryly-funny poems is their fearless and genuinely challenging ambivalence; through the elegant device of parallel texts, Mattar’s words enact the emotional bifurcation they express, of a desperate confusion on one hand and a taboo-defying celebration on the other.

Drawing on (among other things) the imagery of Catholicism, the questions Springing from the Pews asks - about innocence and confession, guilt and redemption - are unmistakably heartfelt: real, lived, questions. What, above all, does love mean, to a six-year-old child, or to the adults we become? Most urgently, perhaps, in the context of this poet’s experience, what are the limits of acceptance, and what if transgression is not remembered as a simple matter of wrong?

These mature, accomplished poems, for all that they are troubled and troubling, remain triumphantly alive to the possibility of redemption, and to the redemptive power of the art they represent.'

- Alicia Stubbersfield

 

'A sensational, searing, and utterly singular achievement: what a first pamphlet to have written.'

- Andrew McMillan

May book bundle

£28.00Price
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