Clarity in vision, thought and language, distinguishes The Time Being, John FitzGerald's first collection. With poems that explore place and memory, family, relationships and the natural world, John FitzGerald establishes a potent empathy with his reader through a watchful, precise poetry. Some poems enact themselves through their linguistic physicality and rootedness in place. Others search deeper for what it means to be alive and alert in the world today. Moments from America, Iceland and China are set among experiences of the land and countryside around the poet’s home in rural Ireland. All are revelations of one sort or another, their controlled energy producing a drama that is at once private and universal. Delighting in setting, language and form, The Time Being marks the arrival of a distinctive presence in Irish poetry.

                                  . . . and I wonder 

if my real purpose in returning here 

has been to make good the past,

ensure that someone gets it right this time . . .
— ‘Seeing Clear’

John FitzGerald was born in Cork in 1962. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2014 and was shortlisted for a Hennessy Award in 2015. A chapbook, First Cut, appeared in 2017, followed by Darklight, a limited edition, in 2019. A recipient of a Key West Literary Bursary, John FitzGerald has lived in Dublin, London and Florence, and since 1995 has worked as University Librarian at University College Cork. He lives with his family on their farm in Carrigdarrery, County Cork. His first collection, The Time Being, was published by The Gallery Press in June 2021.

Aurora Town is the hotly anticipated first collection from Eric Gregory Award winner Annie Katchinska. It takes its title from an underground shopping street in Sapporo, a city in the north of Japan where Katchinska lived for two years. The poems are warped, diced up, loosely autobiographical texts built from her notebooks, illuminated by a ceaselessly inventive creative spirit. Aurora Town neatly captures the displacement and loneliness of living far from home, of turning to faith and then losing it, in a style which is completely her own.

Annie Katchinska was born in Moscow in 1990 and grew up in London. She was a Faber New Poet in 2010. In 2018 she won an Eric Gregory Award and her pamphlet Natto was published by If A Leaf Falls Press.

Honorifics is an astonishing, adventurous, and innovative exploration of family, Malaysian-Chinese cultural identity, and immigration. From jellyfish blooms to glitch art and distant stars, taking in Greek gods, space shuttles and wedding china along the way, Miller’s mesmerizing approach is experimental, luscious, and expansive with longing - “My skin hunger could fill a galaxy”.

Here, the poetry is interwoven with the words for all the things we honour – our loved ones and our ancestors, home and homecomings, and all that is precious and makes us feel that we belong and are beloved. It is also a book that examines contemporary issues of migration in sharp and enquiring relief. Language itself becomes a radical power for reimaging, challenging, and making change, and Miller’s distinctive and multifaceted poetry creates an extraordinary space for multiplicity and celebration.

Cynthia Miller is a Malaysian-American poet, festival producer and innovation consultant living in Edinburgh. Her poems have appeared in Ambit, The Rialto, Butcher's Dog, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, harana poetry, The Best New British and Irish Poets and Primers Volume Two. She is also Co-Founder of the Verve Poetry Festival.

‘ . . . know this: someone
  once looked upon your life
  and wished it were theirs.’

Audrey Molloy was born in Dublin and grew up in County Wexford. She now lives in Sydney. A mother of three children, she is studying for a Masters degree in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She received the Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry and the An Post Award for Irish Poem of the Year. Audrey’s work has appeared in magazines and anthologies in Ireland, England and Australia. Her debut collection, The Important Things (The Gallery Press, 2021) received Australia’s 2021 Anne Elder Award for a first collection. She is the grateful recipient of a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland.

Deltas, Leonie Rushforth’s first book, reveals a poetics on high alert, where the ‘tireless human sonar’ scans a compromised world for calamity and grace. In her vision of precarity and connectedness, attention might prove the opposite of surveillance: a tender, sober act of keeping faith with the ethical force of exact expression.  

Her poems are provisional landscapes, like river deltas, where with language both sidelong and luminous she suggests a way of seeing and measuring distances – temporal, spatial, political – that opens a route not only to individual survival but to humane dialogue and the hope of community.

Leonie Rushforth was born in Ely in 1956. A writer, editor and poet, she was the winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize in 2003, and was awarded second place in the 2021 Poetry London Prize, as judged by Malika Booker. Alongside her many years of writing poetry and journalism, Leonie has also served on the judging panels of the Costa Book Awards and the Forward Poetry Prizes. She lives in East London, and Deltas is her first full collection of poems.