EVEN MORE Spring Releases at Verve Poetry Press

Your eyes do not decieve you! We’ve got even more amazing Spring collections ready to order – details of these brilliant books and their wonderful authors below.

For more on these and our upcoming releases, check out our Coming Soon page here.

Kathy Pimlott – the small manoeuvres

apr 22

Pimlott is my favourite flâneuse, conjuring place like no one else, with an immaculate eye for the juicy, telling detail. In these clear-sighted poems she confronts aging and lockdowns, both bringing a world: ‘wilder and straitened / like the bins.’ I love Pimlott’s cast of memorable characters; her tinder-dry wit; her hard-won knowledge that: ‘what matters now is grace on a wire, enough sleep.’

Clare Pollard

Kathy Pimlott

Kathy was born in Nottingham, in the shadow of Player’s cigarette factory but has spent her adult life in London, the last 40 or so years in Covent Garden, specifically, in Seven Dials. She has had a rag-bag career in social work, community activism, arts television and artist development and now works on community-led public realm projects. She has published two pamphlets with The Emma Press, Elastic Glue (2019) and Goose Fair Night (2016). Her work has appeared in Magma, Mslexia, Brittle Star, The North, Poem, The Rialto and Under the Radar.

Kayleigh Campbell – Matryoshka

apr 22

Matryoshka represents the feminist notion that females are human beings with agency; it presents the good, the bad and the incomprehensible. A mixture of confessional and imagined writing, it explores motherhood, love, death and violence. There are saints and sinners, witches, celebrities and mischievous cats against a backdrop of Russian folklore and magical realism. It is haunting and melancholic, unsettling and dark, but there are also little pockets of comedy and relief. The poems take the reader on an unpredictable trail through the enchanting forest of the female.

Kayleigh Campbell

Kayleigh Campbell finished her PhD at The University of Huddersfield in March 2022 and is a member of the Editorial Board for Grist Books. Her poems have appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Rialto, Stand Magazine & The High Window; she was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2021. In 2019, her pamphlet Keepsake was published by Maytree Press.

Sarah James – Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic

may 22

‘Sarah James’ Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic compellingly conveys the journey of a life pervaded by type one diabetes and the myriad struggles of that hidden disability [...] Always engaging and often moving, James’ poems deftly immerse as well as inform, urging a deep appreciation of life’s plenty, “breath[ing] in the sky.’

Carrie Etter

Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic is award-winning poet Sarah James’s exploration of 40 years living with type one diabetes, a life-threatening autoimmune condition that is now treatable, but remains incurable. The collection tracks her personal journey from diagnosis, age six, to adulthood, including the high and the low points, as well as the further long-term health risks lurking in the background. These are poems of pain, but also of love and beauty, taking in motherhood, aging and establishing self-identity in a constantly updating world.

The route to some kind of acceptance and belonging may be troubled by ‘trying to escape’ but it also ‘holds | more light than your eye | will ever know’

Sarah James

Sarah is a poet, fiction writer, journalist, occasional playwright, photographer, poetryfilm maker and arts reviewer, as well as editor at V. Press. Author of four poetry collections, three poetry pamphlets, a poetry-play, an ACE-funded multi-media hypertext poetry narrative > Room and two novellas, she also enjoys artistic commissions, mentoring and working as a writer in residence, and was delighted to be The High Window Resident Artist for 2019!

Georgina Wilding – Hag Stone

may 22

Hag Stone is an exploration of the ways in which working class girlhood, broken homes, and sex interact, with a realisation that each is seemingly interconnected in more ways than one.

The poems in this manuscript take rigid childhood events and reclaim the narrative through aggrandized surrealism, making it so that the harsh realities of some of these events are suddenly mutable against the whimsy, and in some places, desperate chaos that occurs in the work.

Georgina Wilding

Georgina Wilding was crowned Nottingham’s first Young Poet Laureate 2017 – 2019, and Creative Director of Nottingham Poetry Festival until early 2021. In 2015 she set up the poetry publishing house, Mud Press. Georgina has featured at events such as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, International Poetry Day:Granada, Sofar Sounds, Bright Spark, Hit the Ode, Straatstheatre Braunschweig and Off Milosz festival in Poland. She has been commissioned by organisations such as The Royal Shakespeare Company and BBC Radio Nottingham. She has been published in literary journals such as The Rialto and Kontent, in magazines such as Pussy Magic, Rebelotte and Left Lion, and in anthologies such as Peace Builders Small Acts of Kindness and Jubilee Press’ The ‘art of Nottingham. She was recently long-listed in the OutSpoken prize for poetry performance category.