Böcker i The Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets-serien

You never know how things really are in other people's families, in other people's homes. There's the public face and the private truths - the personal griefs and tragedies, whether festering or resting in peace. In her wry, engagingly strange poems, Anne Bailey takes the door off the latch and lets us inside. She shows us loss and disappointment, as well as hardness and resilience, particularly through the eyes of a daughter, wife and mother. We see the domestic sphere in such close-up detail that it becomes bizarre, an uncanny dimension that nonetheless rings horribly, weirdly true. "e;So you've put a picture on the lovely blank wallthat used to go pink in the sun and feel like an ice cream. A wall on which I used to rest my eyes in pleasant contemplation."e;- from 'Domestic'

Rehema Njambi unpacks identity, faith, womanhood and - above all - agency, in poems partly inspired by conversations with the Black, mostly African, women around her. Imbued with quiet resistance to patriarchal societies, Njambi's debut collection is an ode to the women who have raised her, and their strength and their ability to hold, sustain, and be rooted in their faith. The poems resound with their idea of home, and belonging they wish to pass on to their daughters.GHOSTS IN THIS HOUSEThere were footsteps in the dark all night,almost every night, and we were scared - but we didn't say a thing.She called us to prayer in the morning, every morning.With our small hands and smaller faithwe asked the Lord for protection -but He didn't say a thing.

In Milk Snake, Toby Buckley invites us to look at the world from a slightly different angle, where small things become unsettling if you look closely enough. The poet explores queerness, displacement and trauma through clear-voiced, deceptively gentle poems about fishermen, maggots and bees. bleary from sleep and warmwater and no glassesi spot an uncertain commaslidinghe drags his tail up myshower wall cumbersomeand not unmaggotesque and ican seehis gutsor maybe it'shis dinner- from 'companion'

Tender, loving and visceral, Ovarium is a pamphlet of poems about a giant ovarian cyst. The poet charts her journey with the cyst, from diagnosis to surgery to recovery, via a landscape of scanner rooms and hospital wards. The poems explore the impact of illness, and the body as a site of disgust and shame but also healing and endurance. Ingham's poems are forensic as she looks at the disorientating and sometimes patriarchal language of anatomy and medicine, and the way illness can change the relationship we have with our own bodies.I tried to think of you as fruit, growingagainst the sun-warm wall of my gut.Melon-headed, you nudged the leafy organs,dug out a place for yourself in the plot.I never guessed. I was only bloody earthto you, a coldframe full of light. - from 'Cyst'

Rachael Matthews is a working-class poet who paints poetic miniatures of domestic and psychological interiors. Her debut pamphlet, do not be lulled by the dainty starlike blossom, is a playful, dark meditation on the queer body as site of pleasure, connection, fertility, loss and trauma. Matthews finished writing these poems during lockdown, while she was heavily pregnant with her daughter. It was an unwitnessed pregnancy, experienced in isolation from friends and family, and invisible to the psychotherapy patients she was treating virtually when New York City became the global epicentre of the pandemic. Resilience and hope are woven into its DNA.