PALEWELL PRESS

Adnan Mohsen is an Iraqi French poet, critic and translator, a literary innovator in both Iraq and France. He has published widely in both Arabic and French. Please Don't Kill All The Poets is his first collection to be translated into English. Mohsen's surreal, trenchant and aphoristic poems are deceptively simple; inside their no-frills package, they contain complex wisdom, irony and the consoling absurdity of our shared humanity. His translator, Dr. Anba Jawi, has characterized him as one "who has escaped from the poets' barracks." Iconoclastic, irreverent and deeply humane, these are poems with universal resonance.

Kathy Miles is a poet who writes about the interaction between human and animal worlds. The poems in Vanishing Point draw on surreal images but never lose touch with close observation of people, creatures and landscape.  As Gillian Clarke said of Kathy: “her poems are layered with myth, history, personal experience... the real enriched by myth, and myth deepened by the essential realism of the poet’s vision.”

Living in West Wales, near enough to the sea to be enveloped in its mists and moods, Kathy is a previous winner of the Bridport Prize. In this, her fifth collection, a number of poems grew out of a close family bereavement. But their elegiac bereft quality echoes the grief many of us feel at climate change and other humanity-driven impacts on the environment.

Roz Doe holds an MSc in Forced Migration and has been working with young refugees and asylum seekers for over 20 years. In 2004, she co-founded the charity, Young Roots, which worked with young refugees in Lebanon, Egypt and Nepal and currently provides services for young people living in London. The poems in Welcoming Blue Robins were inspired by young refugees she worked with and the pamphlet also contains poems written by and with young refugees in London. 

Helen Boyles lives in a Devon village within sight of Dartmoor and her new pamphlet poetry collection celebrates the moor's creatures and landscape. From the top of a tor to peat thickening under the earth's surface, from historical figures to those working there today, Layering Dartmoor peels back the moor's many layers.

Sue Wallace-Shaddad's pamphlet poetry collection, Once There Was Colour, charts the impact of the current crisis situation in Sudan and how it has affected the poet and her family. These poems tell the stories we rarely hear - the realities of life on the ground during unrest, the inability to reach loved ones, and - despite our best efforts - the impotence created by distance. An important read for our times.

The Box is a beautifully observed novel about loss, trauma and recovery. Susan Jordan writes eloquently about bereavement and the after-effects of abuse. Susan was a psychotherapist for many years and also worked for a branch of Mind, in projects helping users of mental health services lead fuller lives in the community. Part of the inspiration for the novel comes from Susan's work in the mental health field.

Each poem in Kim Whysall-Hammond's pamphlet collection, Messages from the Road, has a motorway sign as its title. She uses these messages to jump into narratives about love, loss, grief, childhood memories, joy, journeys in all weathers and journeys into the human condition. 

The poems in Home and Belonging were contributed by 12 poets invited by the British Bilingual Poetry Collective (BBPC) to bring a poem to a series of community-translation workshops in 2022 and 2023. This intriguing migration-themed anthology encourages readers to wonder what 'home' is and what it really means to 'belong.'

Words That Walk Through Walls is a remarkable dialogue between Turkey’s longest-serving student prisoner and some of the finest poets in Europe, New Zealand and the United States. This is a book of poems for and with İlhan Sami Çomak, who is a Kurdish writer and prisoner of conscience who has been held in a Turkish prison for more than thirty years and is still detained at the time of writing.