The Truth at the End of the Night by Malka Al-Haddad
The Truth at the End of the Night is Malka Al-Haddad's poetry collection about the UK Asylum Process. Malka grew up during the Iran-Iraq war and lost several close family members during the first Gulf War and American invasion in 2003. She became a poet and a human rights advocate, which attracted hostility towards her in Iraq. While she was studying English in preparation for her PhD in the UK, death threats against her escalated and she couldn't return back to her beloved home and family. Malka's asylum claim was continually refused by the Home Office and after 11 years, she was eventually granted leave to remain. Her pain and anger on behalf of all those caught up in the UK asylum system give her poems a passionate strength and urgency.
The Punished Wound by Simon Lichman
Simon Lichman's poignant poetry collection, The Punished Wound, was inspired by the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Simon is the Founding Executive Director of the Centre for Creativity in Education and Cultural Heritage, a non-profit-making organisation in Jerusalem, which brings together Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Arab (Moslem and Christian) communities through educational programmes based on folklore. His poems reveal the emotional and psychological burden of working towards peaceful coexistence during the ongoing violent hostilities between and within the nations.
Thrift by Alison Lock
Alison Lock's new collection, Thrift, grows out of a ‘communing in slow grief’ for the Earth and its vanishing creatures – an experience as painful as any personal bereavement. The collection’s poems are grouped into three sections: Rue, Thrift and Sage – herbal names that lead readers on a spiritual journey from despair through learning to be more frugal and sustainable to a new wisdom and potentially more hopeful future.
Thrift launched on 24th March 2024 in Meltham, West Yorkshire.
Please Don't Kill All The Poets by Adnan Mohsen
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.
Vanishing Point by Kathy Miles
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.
Vanishing Point will launch in West Wales on 29th May 2024
Welcoming Blue Robins by Roz Doe
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.
Welcoming Blue Robins will launch in London on 27th June 2024
Because of You by Bilal Al Masri
Bilal Al Masri is one of Lebanon's foremost living poets. The publication of Because of You - Selected Poems is the first time his poems are available in English. His poems were translated by Mohamad Haj Mohamad and Anba Jawi.
Bilal's writing captures the tension between human beings' need for closeness to others and the fear we are doomed to remain apart. There will be a launch in Tripoli as well as readings from the collection this summer in London.
Layering Dartmoor by Helen Boyles
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.
Layering Dartmoor will launch in Devon on July 15th 2024
Contact Information
Camilla Reeve, Senior Editor
© Copyright Palewell Press Ltd 2024
Registered in England. Number 10473109. Registered Office 89 Sheen Lane, London SW14 8AE