{"title":"Bad Betty Press","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781913268701","title":"Some People Are Trains","description":"'you need to be a warrior right now,especially in Wetherspoon’s where you’re slightly scaredto take a pissand for comfort you search ‘Mudlarking’ on your phone,as you squat in the cubicle with one footpressed hard against the door                         in case someone should come in                         and realise what you are.'Jackson Phoenix Nash is an essential new poetic voice. Funny, tragic, deeply lived, his poems snap you wide awake.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308784497013,"sku":"9781913268701","price":7.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268701_9c88622a-722d-4d56-aecf-758d99afe9c9.jpg?v=1786030535"},{"product_id":"9781913268565","title":"Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition","description":"Alex Mazey’s playful text art sequence follows Ghost through a hyperreal metropolis beset with neoliberal temptation and eschatological peril. Woven between the visuals are virtuosic lyric poems: poignant, philosophical and irreverent. Mazey gamifies this astute, genre-defying collection with an intricate plexus of symbolism, mysticism, numerology, reference and ritual. Haunting and haunted, Ghost Lives paints an eerily recognisable picture of how it feels to be lonely, or, in other words, to be human.   “In Alex Mazey’s singular fusion of visual and Cute poetics, join Ghost as they pass through the liminal spaces of empty car parks, hotel corridors and lighthouses – searching for, but never quite finding, connection. Part poetry collection, part minimalist comic, in which our reality shifts from the political to the virtual, from FBI raids to survival horror-style locales – in which we are both the possessor and the possessed. Ghost reassures us that it’s heartbreaking to be human, and society is set up to fuel that loneliness. But, there is light within the gloom of capitalism’s ennui. Most notably the glow of vending machines at night – or is that the afterlife?” Matthew Haigh, Death Magazine","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308784595317,"sku":"9781913268565","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268565_f1f3a07c-10b0-433b-8935-923e522a03e5.jpg?v=1786030530"},{"product_id":"9781913268527","title":"On the Subject of Fallen Things","description":"'you start every new day with an inventory: a moth, a cape, a parachute, a coffin, a gun, the wall you built to mount the gun.'On the Subject of Fallen Things is an addictive, Chekhovian metanarrative: phenomenological, absurd, and dripping with black humour. James Kearns’ speaker keeps company with Lazarus, an inept psychic, and a deceased superhero, but finds himself increasingly alone—lost in dialogue with mortality, both personal and anthropological. Permanence, culpability, the function and corruption of human storytelling: all come into play in a surge of momentum that grips the reader, even as it breaks apart: a lean explosion, a gunshot in the distance.   “On the Subject of Fallen Things weaves whimsy into narrative epiphanies that you never see coming. Each line aggregating weight like the lightness of snowflakes gathering into an avalanche. Hugely enjoyable. Get it now.” Roger Robinson, Ondaatje and TS Eliot Prize winning poet“A really brilliant sequence of poems. Like Ponge, or Herbert, or Steger, or Simic, it manages to be both serious and fleeting, weighty and funny.” SJ Fowler, 3:AM Magazine","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309101101429,"sku":"9781913268527","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268527_3849d0f3-7683-4b01-9190-c044b40a716f.jpg?v=1786030529"},{"product_id":"9781913268688","title":"Unruly Blood","description":"'the song soil sweat of it knowing nothing of \/ a binary bondage a bountiful mess of myself \/ everything under the sun is changing all the \/ time all my skin soft lovers flocking to the \/ river';Olivia Douglass’ new pamphlet takes us into the shape-shifting experiences of young selfhood, family and what it means to be between worlds. Douglass’ poetry is like a strong shot of the good stuff, an irresistible introduction to this multi-talented artist.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309103133045,"sku":"9781913268688","price":7.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268688_0d3f16b0-df32-4c89-9500-e409e1ccb718.jpg?v=1786030534"},{"product_id":"9781913268626","title":"Green","description":"Suzannah Evans' new pamphlet introduces us to Green, half human, half angry nature spirit. Green serves as a stunt double for our own rage and complicity in nature's destruction. He shows us nature's delights so we may mourn their loss more deeply.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309170307445,"sku":"9781913268626","price":7.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268626_a5969c40-2452-488d-9594-d8bd5c4863e7.jpg?v=1786030533"},{"product_id":"9781913268589","title":"Treasure","description":"“Alert to injustice. Alive to pleasure in every way that counts.” Fran Lock“Moving, radical and innovative.” Rebecca TamásJemima Foxtrot's Treasure is a shining work of alchemy and liberation, exploring power dynamics, sex work, desire, and female friendship with a fresh and playful perspective. Foxtrot investigates shimmering sexualities, the economies of desire, the theft of childhood and pathways towards reclaiming it. Her language is lush: intimate, intricate, full of fertile earth's possibility. The poems of Treasure live up to its name: showing us where the gold is – the joy – how to feed it into the soil of our lives.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309170831733,"sku":"9781913268589","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268589_2d503c91-3ca0-41d0-8903-726f02eab026.jpg?v=1786030532"},{"product_id":"9781913268503","title":"Inheritance: Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection","description":"Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First CollectionA Poetry Book Society Recommendation Inheritance is a profoundly moving exploration of what is passed down by our forebearers, what is left behind when we lose someone, and what we learn from being loved. Jasmine Cooray holds our most fiercely-guarded myths to the light, refracted through second-generation diaspora, family legend and life-changing loss. Her poems embrace both the quiet and the storms within. They sing of self-belief rising to the surface as drowning feels imminent, of desire and how it can cultivate hope. This is a timeless debut: wise, wild and empowering, a lodestar for survival.  \"A strident, playful language dance through life's more challenging parts, always towards something transcendent.\" Anthony Joseph, Winner of the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize  \"Intimate, vulnerable, poignant and provocative. Inheritance is a stunning debut brimming with tenderness, authenticity and heart.\" Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309254291829,"sku":"9781913268503","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268503_7e79535c-a749-40fd-8b4b-85b1018ba3df.jpg?v=1786030529"},{"product_id":"9781913268725","title":"Altar: Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection","description":"Poetry Book Society RecommendationThe debut poetry collection from award-winning writer and spoken word artist, Desree, Altar explores multifaceted dimensions of sacrifice, challenging its heroism and examining its ties to servility. The poems in Altar urge their protagonists to play neither lion nor lamb, but to live and flourish on their own terms. Each page glimmers with vivid, often devastating vignettes: we witness the resilience of youth, the strength of the Black female body, the complexity of chosen and unchosen family, the sweeping effects of gentrification. Through reflections on Black British identity, queer joy, place and belonging, faith and consent, Desree invites the reader on a journey of reclamation, while her wry wit and disarming tenderness hold us through the necessary storms that mark the way.   \"A collection of wonder and witness. These poems - both powerful and tender - grapple with the parallels of life and death, the body and spirit, loss and love, and demand a response.\" Rachel Long \"This is thrilling writing. Unexpected, alive, and curious. Desree enters the page, stage left.\" Joelle Taylor\"Desree is one of the brightest of us. Through masterful juxtapositions, humour and surrealism, her poems act as a hallway: the reader drops off selves they didn't realise they were carrying, and returns, new and re-accepted into their own arms. Epiphanies shift our world a few inches to the left. For those of us who wonder if we've been 'turned off at the wall': Altar says 'sis', and does the speaking for all of us.\" Kareem Parkins-Brown","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309412823413,"sku":"9781913268725","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"9781913268602","title":"Songbook","description":"Poetry Book Society Recommendation\"The poet laureate of UK jazz.\" The Guardian\"One of the most important writers working today.\" Dr Obaro Ejimiwe aka GhostpoetJoshua Idehen's collected works has been a long time coming. Songbook comprises verses from Mercury-nominated and MOBO-winning albums by Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming, alongside watershed poems of spoken word legend, newly captured in book form. From Poejazzi and Benin City to a string of supreme collaborations, Idehen's impact resonates far and wide across the landscapes of poetry and jazz\/electronica. Cross-examining colonialism, Brexit Britain, masculinity, mental health and ways of healing, his writing is an essential provocation, a comedy roast, an intervention, a cannonball from which no one is safe, least of all himself.   \"Songbook feels like a large, black, tattered flag, running at enemy hordes, screaming, It's on.\" Roger Robinson \"A few Idehen songs before bedtime will leave you feeling revolutionary.\" Leone Ross \"A writer whose poems leap from the page. Idehen's indomitable spirit shines through in Songbook.\" Yomi Sode","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309413085557,"sku":"9781913268602","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268602.jpg?v=1794537495"},{"product_id":"9781913268664","title":"Impossible Heat","description":"Ciara Maguire's poems explore the bright fields and dark corners of love. They are heartbreaking, sexy and addictive.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309413118325,"sku":"9781913268664","price":7.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268664_ad058abb-0485-45e8-a536-b7b019e0abf5.jpg?v=1786030534"},{"product_id":"9781913268848","title":"We Will Be Fine","description":"Spiky, and as ominous as snow in June, We Will Be Fine is full of wistful yearning and eerie surrealism. With an arch, ironic tone that belies the precision of its imagery, this pamphlet lampoons the fallacy of the picture perfect relationship. The seemingly romantic and domestic is rendered silly, Sisyphean and downright absurd.  But amongst the fatalist cynicism and dark humour are, I promise, sublime moments of fleeting tenderness. Expect magic, flying, burnt dinners and naked mole rats, just don't hold out for happily-ever-after.   \"In We Will Be Fine, the everyday takes on a fabulously surreal sheen: we are led into a world in which ant societies and naked mole-rats reveal unsettling truths about romantic relationships; a world in which ‘grass creaks’ and a flower can be grown from a buried stone. Throughout, Lyster deftly reflects on poignant moments of human connection — two people sheltering in a church porch, a choir of women breathing in unison — moments when barely suppressed fears and longings rise to the surface. With her signature wit and deliciously deadpan delivery, Lyster immerses us in the bizarre beauty and messiness of being alive.\" Natalie Linh Bolderston\"The title may be ironic, but the poems are as earnest as they are uncertain, offering a perceptive view of the world and its entanglements. Resolution hinges on connection (‘I decided to give you back the horse, inside out, so you could see its beauty all the time’) as much as it does scepticism (‘I suspect the trees \/ aren’t real’). The poems are contemplative and precise, honest and hopeful: full of unique metaphors rooted in the mundane and the domestic, and venturing out into the world only to deconstruct it in this searching and skilful debut.\" Isabelle Baafi\"The everyday anguish of being human is made magical here, as an extraordinarily vivid internal landscape is laid out before us. The poems in We Will Be Fine are funny, original, fresh, slightly scary, knowing at the same time as moving, strange and surprising. All of that, and all at once.\" Mark Waldron\"Rowan Lyster's poems capture the shape of hands almost touching. In Lyster's word-world, moments of connection and severance come together with painful accuracy. The interior life of the human is revealed to be no different to that of the naked mole-rat, but in being picked up and weighed – which is to say, held – it becomes glowingly present again.\" Will Harris","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56368235676021,"sku":"9781913268848","price":7.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268848_5a02a50b-d9ea-44ca-b449-41416feb64c7.jpg?v=1786030539"},{"product_id":"9781913268862","title":"Pulling Faces: Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize for Poetry 2026","description":"Pulling Faces yanks you by the collar and talks like your favourite, wayward cousin. Fresh and vivid, these poems are equal turns cheeky and world weary, defiant and mournful. Speaking of and to the Somali community, Zakariye eschews the romanticised cliches of the diasporic experience. Instead, he embraces the ugly, the strange, the mundane and the magical in all its simultaneity. It is never quite clear what is truth and what is myth or where the line between love and fear is drawn, and this very ambiguity is this pamphlet's biggest strength. This is a gut-lead work that speaks just as loud in its omissions as its well chosen words.   'Generosity, craft and bite. These words share a voice fully connected to what it notices and clearly burning with more to say. Wicked.' Steven 'Polarbear' Camden'This pamphlet is a stunning meditation on growing up, the continual and often fractious journey to becoming, on learning to grieve and to live. Zakariye writes family, brotherhood, friendship, community and coming of age with such style, energy, technique and precision. Cinematic, joyful, tender. It will make you smile. It will break your heart.' Cecilia Knapp'Zakariye has an amazing ability to capture the world around him in its fullness. He manages to find the hope in darkness, the cold perspective that accompanies joy and the reality hiding in every dream. He does this with skill and clarity, allowing you to really feel the emotion that sits behind the work in a beautiful way.' Casey Bailey","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56368235807093,"sku":"9781913268862","price":7.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268862_b15ff807-09bb-48ff-9cfc-ad1243add4fc.jpg?v=1786030539"},{"product_id":"9781913268763","title":"Woman : Plant : Language","description":"I will not diefor any monolithic country playing its anthem to the deadTime is my country,it counts my inhalations,a merciless teacher untying my hair Part lullaby, part insurrection, Agata Maslowska’s dazzling poetry is powered by the drive to understand life at its deepest level, pre-human and beyond borders. To explode language, grasping what we can know in our bones and roots, and to live according to that knowing. Lyrically sublime, playfully provocative, the poems in Woman : Plant : Language disrupt form to challenge rampant authority, layering the lived experiences of womanhood, migration and war between the ripple of bryophytes, the songs of the soil, the fading call of endangered species. Maslowska’s work is myceliumesque, linking arms with Etel Adnan, Jane Hirshfield, Nan Shepherd, Anna Tsing and more, to flourish within a crystalline network of thinkers. An unforgettable debut, calling us back to the unspeakable world.   “Astounding: powerfully fragile, strongly precarious, harmoniously raging, ultimately tender. Speculative stories are hinted at, in a voice so musical that we would follow it anywhere. It takes us into the garden, to a lighthouse, through nuclear holocaust. Poems probe the thick facts of plant life (figs, wasps, pollen), and our human entanglement. Ordered to flourish in a 'hostile environment', this poet peels apart our perverse systems. A personal heritage of European war, migration, and music translates into lullaby and confrontation. There is a forest of allusions—Jane Hirshfield and Etel Adnan, among others—including an Edwin Morgan-esque sonic nonsense investigation that sounds the soil of the seabed, and of a nuclear plant. A book in the best traditions of yearning, warning, mischief, and hope.” Anthony Vahni Capildeo“Woman : Plant : Language by Agata Maslowska finds uncanny intersections between the things that continue to grow in these fallow end times. Viewing the world from the soil up, these poems are deeply attuned to the movements of nature, people and ideas—from the fruitful and fricative collisions of new and old languages, to the legacy of European war and displacement. Musical, allusive, and always formally subversive, these are poems of precise philosophical enquiry that make the reader see this tired old world afresh.” Jessica Traynor","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56420144841077,"sku":"9781913268763","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268763_48d46ebe-d7ef-4e90-b981-94ea93f2c8d1.jpg?v=1786030537"},{"product_id":"9781913268787","title":"Suburban Locust","description":"I dare the lightning,          take hold of its leverscranking out the weather          while God is on business.   I take on the responsibility          without knowing the consequences,without knowing the thunder.   Antosh Wojcik's anticipated debut, Suburban Locust is a wild ride of a collection born to be read in a single, breathless sitting. With compelling narrative cohesion and dark yet whimsical surrealism, Wojcik's poems drive us into the heart of an earthquake, within which a loveable, dysfunctional family battle against the elements of addiction and inherited trauma, their seemingly weatherproof bonds stretched to breaking point against an angry sky. Set across Texas, Warsaw and an unspecified English suburb, nonetheless this story feels biblical in its music and litany. It is visited by plagues (locusts, dealers, feds, choirs, wartime ghosts, sandy dudes, termites, bad neighbours, shark-headed behemoths, problematic astro-turf installers) and ablaze with the fiery glow of the apocalypse. An ingenious and irresistible read, from one of UK poetry's brightest talents. 'Like James Tate, but drunk' Roger Robinson","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56420455252341,"sku":"9781913268787","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268787_d097b4ef-cbf1-437f-95cf-264c4a974ff1.jpg?v=1786030538"},{"product_id":"oi-you-lot","title":"Oi You Lot","description":"'The sky belongs to everybody and everybody belongs to the sky. When the genie comes out, wish for late busesand missed trains, and beers on benches,because when someone is gone, they are gone.'Kareem Parkins-Brown’s highly-anticipated pamphlet is an audacious and richly plural celebration of friends and selves, present and otherwise. In Parkins-Brown’s hands, language bends like an illusionist’s spoon – a dazzling, fisheye-lens distortion of daily grief, absurdity and communion – while reminding us always that the trick is to carry on living.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492372619637,"sku":"9781913268640","price":7.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268640.jpg?v=1786529210"},{"product_id":"hide-me-under-the-blood-and-i-shall-be-satisfied-shortlisted-for-the-forward-prize-for-best-collection","title":"Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied: Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize","description":"Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot PrizeShortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best CollectionPoetry Book Society RecommendationKeith Jarrett's dazzlingly lyrical new collection asks how we process violence when it's lionised in our language, on city street signs, in the edicts of a vengeful god. Its title borrowed from an unknown songwriter, this book is a palimpsest, layering known and unknown verses: those sung in Pentecostal churches or whispered in silent worship, texted to a 3am suitor or redacted from a eulogy. These poems are requiem and carnival: for the dead, the buried, the erased, the forgotten. They are magnetic, musical, scorched in glitter, skanking on the offbeat. With courage, insight and mischief, Jarrett invites the reader to look sideways, to consider the absurd, messy and problematic with a playfulness that feels, in itself, slyly revolutionary.   \"A virtuosic collection in which Jarrett tests and revivifies language, willing to bend and even break it in search of something new.\" Victoria Adukwei Bulley\"There is an erotics, a rage, a prayer, a love, a figuring-out, a making-up, a throw-down, a challenge, a confession and a summons. Delicious.\" Padraig O Tuama\"Keith Jarrett is one of London's most radiantly living bards, the embodied poet as storyteller, historian and one-man archive. In Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied, Jarrett channels a voice and a chant of \"the undocumented history of this Empire\" where spirits, saints and literary ancestors are summoned to carnivals and holy communions. There is much defiance, queering and inquiry in these poems, a \"reckoning with sorrow\" as only a poet can put it. As well as formal inventiveness, there is playful bilingual lyricism and humour. I love this poet. He is important. To know why, you must hear his hymns.\" Raymond Antrobus","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492373406069,"sku":"9781913268886","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268886.jpg?v=1794537498"},{"product_id":"crow-pirate-fly","title":"Crow, Pirate, Fly","description":"Crow, Pirate, Fly is a glitching manifesto of pain, pleasure, domination and submission. A power play of identities, authors, lovers and mothers, Hannah Silva’s long-awaited second collection is subversive and compelling, intimate and estranging, animal and alien. Ten years in gestation, this genre-queering text began as a cut up of Kathy Acker’s literary terrorism with E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, and now emerges as its own thing — dark, wild, innovative and pregnant with desire. There are no safe words.   “Strange, and poignant, and timely and timeless on care and gender and parenting.” Rachael Allen“I was swept along by Crow, Pirate, Fly: its raw emotive power, its mixture of constraint and overspill, and its orchestral evocation of birth and early mothering. This is a tremendous new collection from an endlessly inventive and surprising poet.” Sarah Howe“No writer I know in drama is as brave or as vulnerable. Hannah Silva talks to another hinterland of the mind.” Fiona Shaw","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492374061429,"sku":"9781913268909","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"the-butterfly-bush","title":"The Butterfly Bush","description":"William Wyld's The Butterfly Bush exposes the mercurial, merciless absurdities of living in a body, of grief, art and hope, the way a garden, up close, reveals an endless orchestra of life: its dirt; its baroque and brutal euphoria. 'This is a crushing debut pamphlet on the surrealism of death and the queerness of loss, in the lineage of Emily Berry and Franz Kafka. \"You were so sweet \/ and kind, Mum, but your corpse is a fucking nightmare,\" Wyld's speaker sighs, or deadpans, or screams. Just when they appear to be stuck forever in a weird nightmare, they find some comfort, some interest to get them through. The Butterfly Bush is a testament to Wyld's endless curiosity: reader, return that gaze and your attention might just pupate into a butterfly.'  Helen Bowell'Wyld has a unique voice; simultaneously alarming and seductive. You might think you know where a poem is going, only to be met by a sudden switch that is catnip for the synapses. Wyld weaves a sensuous spell rooted in the materiality of life. Their surreal humour creates space for fresh ideas about the interplay of experience and survival, injury and bereavement.'  Lisa Kelly'An expansive, maximalist project with an alluring, permeating strangeness. The turns are constantly surprising, the language delicate and luscious but the images bodily and caustic. The recurring image of dirt across these poems becomes a semantic burial plot, a way through elegy that focuses on the soil beneath our feet.'  Susannah Dickey","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492374946165,"sku":"9781913268961","price":8.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268961.jpg?v=1786529213"},{"product_id":"ultraviolet","title":"Ultraviolet","description":null,"brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492375765365,"sku":"9781913268985","price":8.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268985.jpg?v=1786529214"},{"product_id":"you-must-become-field","title":"You Must Become Field","description":"You Must Become Field moves with astonishing fluidity from the 1915 arrest of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople to a 2025 Beirut club bathroom, where girls fix each other's eyeliner between airstrikes. Kantarjian braids genocide's long aftermath with the urgent present: Lebanon's economic collapse, the port explosion's glass rain, Artsakh's exodus, war in Lebanon - without flattening either into metaphor. Here is girlhood and nationhood, seedless grapes at Tesco, wedding preparations and war, all held in the same devoted attention.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57510199525749,"sku":"9781913268923","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781913268923.jpg?v=1794537499"},{"product_id":"the-worlds-darling","title":"the world's darling","description":"\u003cp\u003ebrave thing. pushing your spotless bodyfrom earth, awakening through that subconscious abyssto succumb to dumb death by human-crease. i'll keep you alive, darling, like i wash a mushroom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘the world’s darling is a full moon cycle through mandisa apena’s inner sanctum. a pastoral moment-place. omens disguised as humans; desire and hopeless lust roam without leash; dream portals unfurl in the corner of childhood bedrooms. what is left at the end of nature’s kind tantrum? a sophomore pamphlet from a poet whose approach is full of conviction, urgency and the strange sap of living.’\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTice Cin‘mandisa apena is one of my favourite writers ever. This pamphlet has helped me on my own journey towards healing, helped me understand the beauty and power of words, the complexities of womanhood, the pain and joy of existing. It reminds me what it means to be human, to feel, to cry, to laugh and then to cry again. Yes, the world is a cruel place, but mandisa makes it all look and feel so beautiful.’ Lola Young\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘These poems crackle with mischief and menace, tenderness and rage where dreams bruise into nightmares, and girlhood collapses into womanhood. They refuse the expected, finding music in survival; light where it has no business being. Strange, urgent, unforgettable. There is only one mandisa apena.’\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRachel Long\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Each of these poems is like a best friend I just made. A barista who invites me to their birthday party. A chatty stranger on a night bus who asks me in for a cup of tea. I’m honoured each poem trusts me with its organic self so soon, its vulnerability and alchemy.’ Kareem Parkins-Brown\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57679973253493,"sku":"9781918605006","price":8.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781918605006.jpg?v=1792422783"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/publisher-bad-betty-press.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}