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Broken Sleep Books Broken Sleep Books are a small, innovative press, who publish a range of pamphlets and collections, from a range of emerging and debut writers.
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Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s prize-winning despegue / departure is a book about poetry, place, and belonging. Its rich, chal...
08/07/2024

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s prize-winning despegue / departure is a book about poetry, place, and belonging. Its rich, challenging, and subversive sonnets reveal the complexities and possibilities of Cuban contemporary poetry to a new English-language audience. Rodríguez Núñez speaks to a global generation of exiles and those whose hearts remain forever elsewhere, those who have found another home. despegue / departure is an original, inventive and unflinching examination of what it means to leave, to be left behind, and of our ability to stay.

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/victor-rodriguez-nunez-translated-by-katherine-m-hedeen-despegue-departure

Emily Barker's debut poetry pamphlet Where the Black Swans Swim is a thing of wild and restless joy. It is full of wonde...
04/07/2024

Emily Barker's debut poetry pamphlet Where the Black Swans Swim is a thing of wild and restless joy. It is full of wonder, curiosity, music and the ache of memory and displacement. These are poems of love for the natural world, of the fragility and beauty of the creatures that populate it and the human creatures who are so often its despoilers, and which seek to understand its place, and its place in us. This is a luminous book of poetry.

Rarely does one read a collection so accomplished, generous and heartfelt.
— Vanessa Lampert

Where The Black Swans Swim is an exciting and big-spirited debut that faces our burning world with compassion, wit, and energy.
— Fran Lock

These are potent poems of patterning and erasure, restoration and honouring that sing from the tongue and live long in the head and heart.
— Adam Horovitz

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/emily-barker-where-the-black-swans-swim

eat the glitter is an irreverent, lyrical exploration of q***r love, modern culture, and a post-pandemic world. Tender y...
02/07/2024

eat the glitter is an irreverent, lyrical exploration of q***r love, modern culture, and a post-pandemic world. Tender yet cynical, this pamphlet nudges at the discomfort of art, capitalism, social contracts and the disconcerting remnants of lockdown in our lives. Amidst Kat Dixon's poetry lies an undercurrent of vulnerability, an acute and sensitive awareness of the world’s complexities and contradictions.

Modern, stylish and filthy - I loved it.
— Clare Pollard

A superb debut from a richly gifted witness.
— Glyn Maxwell

eat the glitter is the kind of debut that makes you sit up and take notice.
— Tamar Yoseloff

eat the glitter is a smart and stylish pamphlet that, appropriately enough, sparkles with wit and formal inventiveness.
— Emma Simon



https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/kat-dixon-eat-the-glitter

Collecting 15 years of poetry, Post-Atomic Glossaries is Antony Owen’s magnum opus, a selection including his Ted Hughes...
29/06/2024

Collecting 15 years of poetry, Post-Atomic Glossaries is Antony Owen’s magnum opus, a selection including his Ted Hughes award shortlisted collection, The Nagasaki Elder, alongside selections from every book he has published, and an impressive range of new poems. The poems that make up this collection explore war, nuclear power, terrorism, the death penalty, genocide, Hiroshima, nuclear weaponry, family life, masculinity, and much more. The poems are, by turns, beautiful, disturbing, uplifting, and heart-breaking. This is a remarkable body of work by an outstanding poet.

PRAISE for Post-Atomic Glossaries:

These poems are words on a page, but the way Antony Owen spins them, they have a sheer physicality that is truly remarkable. Few poems evoke for me such strong visual images – and bring such a powerful emotional kick. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes raw, these poems convey what it is to be human, to feel, to live, and to die. From the greatest horror of nuclear Armageddon, to the everyday impact and emotional brutality of war, Owens writes it all. He takes us on a journey of head and heart, wrings us out, and leaves us uplifted and far-seeing.
— Kate Hudson, General Secretary for CND

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/antony-owen-post-atomic-glossaries-new-selected-poems

Katy Mack's First, I Turn Off the Light is as unsettling and disarming as it is compassionate and brave. Mack's poems ar...
02/06/2024

Katy Mack's First, I Turn Off the Light is as unsettling and disarming as it is compassionate and brave. Mack's poems are an exploration of illness and mental health, and in doing so are lyrical, imaginative, full of humour and insight. These words are not weighed down by a desire to define illness and mental health, but instead celebrate the human experience that is so often at the heart of both.This is a rare and essential debut.

Katy Mack’s poems, with their hauntings, proliferations and alter egos, offer an inventive, subtle response to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and to mental disquiet.
— Moniza Alvi

The scarecrow, the clown, a heron, a shark costume, Emily Brontë all haunt these enigmatic and powerful poems
— Richard Scott

Katy Mack’s impressive debut offers a unique and riveting interaction with the world.
— Rebecca Goss

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/katy-mack-first-i-turn-off-the-light

Rein It In is a brilliant pamphlet that examines freedom of youthful self-indulgence and recklessness as well as the ine...
27/05/2024

Rein It In is a brilliant pamphlet that examines freedom of youthful self-indulgence and recklessness as well as the inevitable reckoning that can come with that. There is something thrillingly immediate about these poems that makes Héloïse de Satgé’s words feel like they are written about events still happening. de Satgé deftly captures moments in time that are both personal and universal to anyone who has ever felt a sense of disorientation and uncertainty when coming of age. The writing is unapologetically political and speaks to us in a language that is both relatable and startlingly fresh. There’s a sense of freedom in the way the poet’s voice leaps between slang and proper language, and the effect is a poetry of vitality, of life lived and breathed. These poems demand our attention.

an exciting new poet who fuses social media, page and performance to create a dynamic and memorable poetry.
— Daljit Nagra

this is a poet who can wear influences lightly, creating something new, resilient, personal and resonant.
— Luke Kennard

a confident debut that throws up big questions by exploring the intimate, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
— Talia Randall

Prepare for a world where speech has its own rules.
— Jasmine Gardosi

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/heloise-de-satge-rein-it-in

A psychedelic odyssey that plunges the reader into a mythic exurban world of wonder, ritual, folly & friendship, The Dee...
23/05/2024

A psychedelic odyssey that plunges the reader into a mythic exurban world of wonder, ritual, folly & friendship, The Deep Ark blurs the lines between the imagined, the real and the invoked. Moments of tenderness, humor, grief, joy and revelatory intensity combine to form a fragmented narrative of quiet lyrical beauty, suffused with an abiding reverence for the music, memories, community and landscape that inspired it. Check the forecast one last time, put your headphones on, open The Deep Ark and get lost.

Gnarled, airy, and vibrantly psychedelicized, The Deep Ark is the kind of organic artifact that not only satisfies aesthetically, but draws you into the magical traces of its own production
— Erik Davis

The Deep Ark is an extended meditation on the periphery of the state, represented in the social unit of the collective… the actual geography of heathland, golf courses, hills, & quarries… & in the UK’s melancholic electronica of the 90s
— Matthew Ingram

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/the-arkonauts-the-deep-ark

Divine Hours is a collection of poetry which has that intangible sense of being in the presence of a master craftsman, s...
16/05/2024

Divine Hours is a collection of poetry which has that intangible sense of being in the presence of a master craftsman, showing us the possibilities of language at its most inventive, and its most necessary. Simon Barraclough's work showcases a confidence in the music and structure of poetry's potential, and a willingness to test the mettle of words beyond the constraints of their usual associations.

What Divine Hours displays in super-abundance is an awareness of the quicksilver nature of play — how serious and direct a method it is of getting at the heart of matters. And it’s really this that we recognise in him: the poet as revelator, showing us our most intimate attempts to negotiate a reality that seems determined only to manifest itself in the things we invent.
— Bill Herbert

Simon Barraclough’s associative flourishes of the unconscious are reminiscent of Joyce; his dark, bathetic humour recalls Beckett; his majestic lines and themes are Miltonic. And yet. These dazzling poems are entirely distinctive. Simon has again put his inimitable voice and style into a collection of poems that resembles nothing else being written today, restoring my faith that innovations in poetry are not only still possible, but being enacted by capable hands.
— Kathryn Maris

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/simon-barraclough-divine-hours

The Demon Tracts is a faithful reproduction of the loggbok of Norwegian-Shetlandic modernist poet, Kristján Norge who va...
06/05/2024

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.

Across unbridgeable space, The Demon Tracts, therefore, amounts to an adventurous collaboration between two Scotian kindreds, passing hand in hand through the whirligig of time.
— Ishion Hutchinson

The work astounds me.
— James Byrne

Exploration of these pages cuts away slack flesh to reveal the be***al hunger of the alien for a time of natural magic.
— Iain Sinclair

The Demon Tracts is an important book; it will change the face
of literature.
— U. G. Világos

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/kristjan-norge-the-demon-tracts-introduction-by-macgillivray

Chalking the Pavement, written during the first part of the Covid pandemic, includes a number of poems, as well as a lon...
03/05/2024

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.

PRAISE for Chalking the Pavement:
For many of us the recent pandemic provided an unforeseen occasion to concentrate on our immediate surroundings and think about what we most need for well-being both physical and spiritual. For Kate Noakes, a lifelong asthma suffer, it brought breathing and inspiration into high relief. Chalking the Pavement reveals how those years inflected her attention to detail, her acute phrasing and fair attitudes. The result is a distinctive contribution to poetry's communal project of transmuting suffering into intelligent pleasure. With these sequenced journal entries and framing poems we can enjoy how she finds a hop, a skip and a jump in the art of drawing breath.
— Peter Robinson

Kate Noakes's Chalking the Pavement contributes to the witness and assessment of a the most critical and challenging period of our recent history. In the Covid lock-down the writer's gaze is acute and necessary.
— Tony Curtis

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/kate-noakes-chalking-the-pavement

Something Man-Made Is Here and It Is Dangerous is a pamphlet of poetry that finds humour, beauty, and fascination in the...
29/04/2024

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.

‘This place / may never be a garden again but you / might as well try while you’re here’, says the speaker of one of Stefan Mohamed’s poems, the line break on but you reminding the reader that there is still hope for our actions even ‘in a library / of bones’. Mohamed’s poems are structurally, even ontologically unafraid, braiding language from sci-tech & idiolect alike into universe-songs that bring to mind Will Alexander cosmologies, Prynne tunes. Stefan Mohamed has scored a music meet for our various & variegated world, its processes & realities, its ‘sound full of / blood’.
— Tom Snarsky

Something Man-Made Is Here and It Is Dangerous is a truly inventive piece of work. These poems dig deep into dark places– the hostile architecture and unknown bedrock of our never-quite-post nuclear future, and the wider reaches of the expanding universe. Here language holds together and falls apart in a way that calls us to imagine our own beautiful destruction. The world and its words are defamiliarised with tragic and blistering wit and even time becomes unhooked from its moorings - ‘have you always been here / often’.
— Suzannah Evans

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/stefan-mohamed-something-man-made-is-here-and-it-is-dangerous

All Empty Vessels is an urgent, emotional commentary on what it is to exist in our contemporary world. Aaron Kent and St...
27/04/2024

All Empty Vessels is an urgent, emotional commentary on what it is to exist in our contemporary world. Aaron Kent and Stuart McPherson each taking 6 sections of 6 poems each, explore topics as widespread as the class system, Edgar Allen Poe, and the lyricism of night. Even poetry and poetics itself becomes a subject of scrutiny. In the hands of these two poets, these themes become an eclectic, fluid tapestry of ideas that mold themselves around both the specific and the universal, and that present an unapologetic, honest, and uncompromising account of modern life. All Empty Vessels is a book for those who want poetry to be unafraid, and written with a fire whose embers lay smouldering long after the pages of the book have been closed.

This joint collection makes few promises, but the one it demonstrates is that even in emptiness, connection is a companion for All Empty Vessels.
— Pádraig Ó Tuama

Read this and be fully nourished, yet hungry and, as I did, read it all over again.
— James Byrne

In a dual showmanship of a new warning for both past and future, these are 'new forgeries. . . for invisible dawns' housed in a 'coffin rolled across a minefield'. You stand warned.
— MacGillivray

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/aaron-kent-stuart-mcpherson-all-empty-vessels

How is it to be a tourist in Yemen, Turkmenistan, Nauru or Mauritania?Globetrotter Gunnar Garfors has been to all the 19...
14/04/2024

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.

ABOUT Gunnar Garfors:
Gunnar Garfors (1975) is originally a journalist, but he has worked with media technology since 2001. The Norwegian is an avid traveller and author. He grew up in the little village of Naustdal on the West Coast together with his parents and six siblings. Garfors now lives in Oslo.

In 2012 he visited 5 countries on 5 continents in just one day, a Guinness World Record. In 2013 he completed visiting every country in the world, as the youngest hobby traveller ever. And in 2014 he visited 19 countries in just one day, another world record.

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/gunnar-garfors-elsewhere

Stu Watson’s latest collection spans the personal and the global. Fersehturm Berlin is as much a record of the author’s ...
10/04/2024

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.

Nothing’s back, baby — yes, the anxious vacuity of Seinfeld and yes the zeros haunting binary code, but most of all the absence that is full of all that surrounds it, the impossible compulsory emptiness out of which, Stu Watson reminds us, each consciousness bursts forth.
— David B. Hobbs

With telescopic erudition and disarming vulnerability, he exhumes buried truths both private and public in this new vision or version of a speculative poetics.
— Chris Campanioni

Here is courage for past, present, and future encounters, legends, wonders, heartaches. Listen and learn.
­— Chris Hosea

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/stu-watson-fernsehturm-berlin

'If' taken from Geoff Hattersley's Instead of an Alibi.In his first book in over a decade, Instead of an Alibi proves th...
08/04/2024

'If' taken from Geoff Hattersley's Instead of an Alibi.

In his first book in over a decade, Instead of an Alibi proves that Geoff Hattersley has lost none of the sharp wit and incisiveness that has defined his brilliant and unique poems to date. Instead of an Alibi is a sharp and vital poetics of the lives of working-class Britain in a post-industrial, post-capitalist landscape.

PRAISE for Instead of an Alibi:
What a privilege to wander once more into the county of Hattersley; here’s Nev, just as I remembered him, here’s these pubs and supermarkets and kitchens again rendered as crucibles of beautiful language, here’s Geoff’s singular way of looking at the world, remade for the contemporary moment.
— Andrew McMillan, 100 Q***r Poems

Geoff Hattersley's work has been distinguished for a long time by its lethal direct address, knife-turning humour and attention to character. In Instead of an Alibi, his cast of skinheads, solo drinkers, failed musicians, gentle giants - not to mention 'the ugliest gravedigger / in the whole of England' - are completely alive and realised, in poems of tenderness and human connection which are also sheer knockabout fun. This is vintage Hattersley.
— John Clegg, Aliquot

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/geoff-hattersley-instead-of-an-alibi

The Titanic Sinks, from Scout Tzofiya Bolton's remarkable A Terrific Uproar. ***No, you forgot to cap the bulkheads at t...
07/04/2024

The Titanic Sinks, from Scout Tzofiya Bolton's remarkable A Terrific Uproar.

***

No, you forgot to cap the bulkheads at the top.
No, you ignored the Mesaba’s warnings.
You said the ocean was too calm to spot an iceberg.
You forgot to pack binoculars for the crows-nest.
You ordered hard-a-starboard too late,
And you went on to let the starboard
Scrape along the iceberg.

You were the liar who said the compartments were airtight.
You were the idiot who said we should reverse the engines.
I said simply bearing left would do the trick,
But you thought you knew better.
You launched the lifeboats well below capacity
You put 38 too few people on the first one, and actually —

“Posh” never meant “Port Out, Starboard Home”.
“F**k” never meant, “Fornication Under the Command of the King”.
“Golf” never meant, “Gents Only, Ladies Forbidden”
You have always said such ridiculous things.

The lights went out at 2:18 am,
The nearest rescue ship
58 whole nautical miles away.
But you knew that, of course,
Because I told you it was, because
it was me who said:
“The nearest rescue ship is literally
58 whole nautical miles away”.

***



https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/scout-tzofiya-bolton-a-terrific-uproar

SUBMISSIONS CALL:We are open for submissions of full-length poetry collections (40+ pages).Email:Include a short biograp...
06/04/2024

SUBMISSIONS CALL:

We are open for submissions of full-length poetry collections (40+ pages).

Email:
Include a short biography, brief synopsis, & poetic influences.
Subject: Poetry collection Submission - [Name], [Title]

We aim to respond to all submissions within 8-10 weeks of the closing date.

Please consider buying a book so you know what we produce and how we publish. We rely on book sales to survive. Though buying a book will not affect your chances at all.

Please do not send links to websites or file transfer sites - these will be deleted.

Size 10 font.

Simultaneous submissions ok - but please indicate if this is the case in your email.

All submissions considered, regardless of location.

Collaborative submissions and translations are considered.

Previously published work shouldn't make up more than 50% of the full ms.

Full details & guidelines: brokensleepbooks.com/submissions

JLM Morton’s Red Handed, is a remarkably original and impressive debut collection of poetry exploring the histories of c...
05/04/2024

JLM Morton’s Red Handed, is a remarkably original and impressive debut collection of poetry exploring the histories of cloth and dye, the natural world, and family. Morton skilfully combines personal recollections with political activism and care, her voice raw and her imagination fierce. These poems are exquisitely crafted, with a sensory language of colours and textures, Red Handed is vibrant and alive.

JLM Morton’s dazzling debut Red Handed dares speak the ‘unspeakable’ truth as a ‘moth wants the light’.
— Vasiliki Albedo

Poems which are beautiful and powerful, varied and vigorous and which slide seamlessly between the intimate and epic.
— Alice Jolly

These are poems that look for trouble, under the skin of earth, show us our own predicament.
— Helen Mort

Red Handed deals in place – places that are mutable, evasive, subject to a history that is anything but linear.
— Martha Sprackland

Red Handed is a revelatory, raw, and deeply imaginative evocation of rural working-class heritage.
— Pascale Petit

A stunning debut collection of poems that run like rivers and stones through each other.
— Monique Roffey

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/jlm-morton-red-handed

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