prototype publishing ltd gb (158 results)

Paperback. Condition: New. Mensah's work challenges dominant modes of masculinity, and disrupts the elitism of poetry through its accessible, honest, raw and intimate language and rhythms. Free from the constraints of convention, Mensah writes in his own, unique voice, layered with rhythm and surreal imagery, unified by its fearless commitment to emotional honesty and its openness about the power and cost of creativity.Safe Metamorphosis explores the transformations experienced in everyday life and the unspoken traumas caused by the uprooting of self as we are thrusted from one identity-building state to another. The trauma of leaving school, 'growing up', the demise of a romantic relationship, the loss of faith in a purpose: common, formative experiences too often dismissed. The poems in this striking and original collection explore metamorphoses at different points of our journey into adulthood, addressing the ways in which the associated upheaval of change and lost identity alters our sense of self and relationships with others.For Mensah, poetry and hip hop are a stimulus for philosophical reflection and introspection, and the poems in Safe Metamorphosis welcome us into the imaginative and highly observant mind of an artist committed to the healing and unifying power of communication.

Pamphlet. Condition: New. A History is an elegiac 10-poem sequence, written about and in memory of Jill Robinson, a vital and continual presence in the poet's life for almost seven decades, until her death from cancer in 2018. Burt's eye is acute, unsentimental, and self-critical, unflinching in its depiction of illness, and unrequited love. His language has a Yeatsian severity, charged by vulnerability and an acute and expansive historical awareness.Published to coincide with his personal-political memoir Every Wrong Direction (Carcanet), A History is a major work from a writer whose life story and poetic sensibility takes us to places not often captured in poetry.

Paperback. Condition: New. During a time of restricted movement, the narrator of Mr Outside visits his reclusive father Thomas who is packing up to move into a care home. As father and son grapple with the task, long-buried conflicts resurface. Thomas, a poet and former radical priest, slips between affection and fear, while the narrator struggles to find the words he's been holding back. Yet amidst confusion and grief, moments of humour and connection emerge, as both men discover new ways to understand each other and let go.Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces' distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, the limits of intimacy, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go.

Paperback. Condition: New. Artifice is an exploration of the art of making. Its poems celebrate the artistry of craftsmanship: how works relate to beauty, and how they might inspire or ensnare. They consider issues of artificiality and authenticity, 'the man-made' and 'the natural'. They warn of artfulness, in the sense of cunning or deception. And they wonder at the mystery of art and language, that which resolutely remains unknown or ineffable. For Artifice is as much riddle as revelation, stirring delight and discomfort as it delves into the nature of aesthetics and the creative process. How are works made and how do they make us, in turn? What worlds can be built from words? This book dwells in possibility, presenting an ambiguous space for contemplation, connection and, ideally, hope - for 'to marvel is the beginning of knowledge' (E. H. Gombrich).

Paperback. Condition: New. In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. Dutton's writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life.The collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create.

Paperback. Condition: New. 'Sultry, raw and relentless. This intoxicating poetry seizes you with its beautiful, rich images and refuses to let go.' - Awater Poetry Prize jury'This book is stunning. Totally wild.' - Jack UnderwoodIn Virgula, Sasja Janssen's award-winning collection, the comma becomes much more than a punctuation mark; it stops the stillness and allows thoughts and language to move forward. Virgula is invoked as a muse and a companion; she is called on in every poem, as if she were a goddess, friend or lover, someone who offers space when the emptiness becomes too heavy.Virgula received the Awater Poetry Prize and was nominated for the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Prize and the Herman de Coninck Prize and De Grote Poëzieprijs (Grand Poetry Prize) for best poetry collection 2021.

Paperback. Condition: New. A novelist questions why she's been shortlisted for the Prize of Prize's Prize; an artist duo has a messy break up; a schoolgirl is saved from a predator by a flash flood and a gang of dead animals; a surgeon has an incurable identity crisis; a budding actor can't see what's so funny; a pregnant food writer gets a craving for luxury consumerism.These thirteen stories by writer and literary translator Jen Calleja pick apart the hidden motivations behind our desires, and the ways we seek out distraction from difficult truths. They investigate histories, power dynamics, rituals, institutions - the roles we adopt, as well as the ones we inherit. Known for her acclaimed poetry and translations, and as a performer in numerous bands, these facets manifest in an attention to the latent ambivalence of language, and the nature of storytelling itself. This writing is direct and considered - it asks to be read, read out loud, retold, refashioned into fables with a distinctive mouthfeel.I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For is a sharp, bold, inventive and prescient fictional debut from a versatile and brilliant writer.

Paperback. Condition: New. 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.

Paperback. Condition: New. A narrator and her dog are criss-crossing the Swiss Alps. She travels with friends who share her interest in food, languages and their topographical contexts. They collect colours, even look for colourlessness, and develop the idea of a walk-in diary, a vain attempt to archive their observations.Gradually, other mountains appear in their observations and memories, as do the mountains of literature and art. Mountains may be sites of fear and awe, of narrow-mindedness, racism and ever-looming collapse; Alpine lodges may be places of hospitality, retreat and unexpected encounters; of nature under threat.In 515 notes, Zsuzsanna Gahse unfolds a finely woven interplay between her six characters while giving us a vivid panorama of mountain worlds, a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish.

Paperback. Condition: New. In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster - the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets.One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers.Compiled from the Researchers' disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

Paperback. Condition: New. Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West's saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16th June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses.Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened last night with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way.

Paperback. Condition: New. Drinking to excess is living when you're young. But what happens if living becomes rape. assault. death?!!Lisbon: that city at the mouth of the Tagus, that city that whispers, licks and seduces its visitors, that city that haunts those seeking refuge or its pleasures. Who would wish to escape?It is the start of the millennium and two 'lads' from South-East London are trapped in Lisbon among people and experiences set to push them to the limits. Attempting to lie low after a fateful night back home, the friends find themselves navigating an unfamiliar and unnerving new reality. A crime novel inspired by a real-life incident, and distinguished by its sensitivity to subtleties of language and dialogue, Along the River Run is a story of guilt and retribution played out amid the streets, sounds and sights of this bewitching city. Just as the undercurrents of Lisbon's Tagus are ever present, so the literary undercurrents of the capital as written by Pessoa, Saramago or Sa-Carneiro are there to enrich and pervade the evolving narrative. The novel follows the author's much-praised earlier book on Lisbon, a cultural exploration in a 'Cities of the Imagination' series, setting up authoritative background research for this haunting story of psychological destruction.

Paperback. Condition: New. Emblem is the debut collection from Lucy Mercer, winner of the inaugural White Review Poet's Prize. This is a book of ecological poetics, interested in exploring the changing symbols of the natural world in literature. Emblem revitalises this forgotten hybrid form in the present as a frame to contemplate the obscurities of motherhood, faith and the interior. In ghostly conversation with the sixteenth-century emblematist Andrea Alciato - a witness to a lonely time - the poems are carried forward by a non-linear dream logic of metaphor and similitude, speaking pictures who remain silent and a focus on an adjacent imaginal world. As well as reusing images from Alciato's emblem book, the poems fixate on alternating relations between text and image that blur into relations between mind and body, child and mother, red and green, past and present, public and private, the living and the dead.

Paperback. Condition: New. Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and personal aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart his face in front of a giant mirror.Originally a play, Sorcerer is a book about the pleasures of being together and being alone. The characters find contentment in each other's company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sitcom in which conflict never arises. Unease is exported to furniture, gadgets, and bodily movements. The result is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. There's levitation.

Pamphlet. Condition: New. The sea is spread and cleaved and furled is an interdisciplinary book and film-work by poet and visual artist Ahren Warner. It is a sequence of lyric poems, a narrative, voice-over and compendium of notes-to-the-self. Written and filmed across thirteen countries, from the Greek Islands to South East Asia to the Black Sea, the Balkans and the Baltic, it is at once a travelogue and an exploration of stagnating memory, of mental fracturing and its corollary: the exuberant performance of the self. It is both a love poem, an intermedia obsession with *cats*, and the personal and philosophical exploration of alienation, moving from Andrew Marvell to Cardi B, from Foucault and Back to the Future to the inane and repetitive close reading of Drake. The sea is spread and cleaved and furled is a poem and a film about the veneer of dialogue, narcissism and pleasure, about contemporary economies of capital, human movement and desire, and the resistance of the sensible or affective world to language itself.

Paperback. Condition: New. The 3rd issue of Prototype's annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between.With contributions from Rachael Allen, Campbell Andersen, Edwina Attlee, Rowland Bagnall, Tom Betteridge, Sam Buchan-Watts, Pavel Büchler, Paul Buck, Theodoros Chiotis, Natalie Crick, Raluca de Soleil, Roisin Dunnett, Maia Elsner, Yuri Felsen trans. Bryan Karetnyk, SJ Fowler, Ella Frears, Sam Fuller, James Gaywood, Chris Gutkind, J L Hall, Ziddy Ibn Sharam, Daniel Kramb, Dal Kular, Eric Langley, Neha Maqsood, Helen Marten, Lila Matsumoto, Otis Mensah, Calliope Michail, Lauren de Sá Naylor, Astra Papachristodoulou, James Conor Patterson, Oliver Sedano-Jones, Marcus Slease, Maria Sledmere, Andrew Spragg, Nick Thurston, Olly Todd, Nadia de Vries, Stephen Watts, Karen Whiteson, Frances Whorrall-Campbell, Alice Willitts, Frannie Wise and Antosh Wojcik.

Paperback. Condition: New. The 3rd issue of Prototype's annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between.With contributions from Rachael Allen, Campbell Andersen, Edwina Attlee, Rowland Bagnall, Tom Betteridge, Sam Buchan-Watts, Pavel Büchler, Paul Buck, Theodoros Chiotis, Natalie Crick, Raluca de Soleil, Roisin Dunnett, Maia Elsner, Yuri Felsen trans. Bryan Karetnyk, SJ Fowler, Ella Frears, Sam Fuller, James Gaywood, Chris Gutkind, J L Hall, Ziddy Ibn Sharam, Daniel Kramb, Dal Kular, Eric Langley, Neha Maqsood, Helen Marten, Lila Matsumoto, Otis Mensah, Calliope Michail, Lauren de Sá Naylor, Astra Papachristodoulou, James Conor Patterson, Oliver Sedano-Jones, Marcus Slease, Maria Sledmere, Andrew Spragg, Nick Thurston, Olly Todd, Nadia de Vries, Stephen Watts, Karen Whiteson, Frances Whorrall-Campbell, Alice Willitts, Frannie Wise and Antosh Wojcik.

Paperback. Condition: New. Fatherhood is the debut novel from award-winning poet Caleb Klaces, combining prose and poetry in an experimental work of verse fiction. Following the birth of their first child, a couple move out of the capital to the northern countryside, where they believe the narrator's great-grandfather, a Russian emigrant, was laid to rest. The father dedicates himself to parenting, writing and conversation with his dead ancestor, newly conscious of the ties that bind the present to the past. It is a time of startling intimacies, baby-group small talk, unexpected relationships and tender rhythms, when every clock seems to tell a different time, and the solidity of language is broken. As his daughter begins to speak, the father's gentleness turns to unexplainable rage. He begins to question who he must protect his child from - the outside world or himself. Their new house, the family discover, is built on a floodplain.Moving between history, memory and autobiography, its shifting form captures a life and language split open by fatherhood. An experiment in rewriting masculinity, it asks how bodies can share both a house and a planet.

Paperback. Condition: New. During a time of restricted movement, the narrator of Mr Outside visits his reclusive father Thomas who is packing up to move into a care home. As father and son grapple with the task, long-buried conflicts resurface. Thomas, a poet and former radical priest, slips between affection and fear, while the narrator struggles to find the words he's been holding back. Yet amidst confusion and grief, moments of humour and connection emerge, as both men discover new ways to understand each other and let go.Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces' distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, the limits of intimacy, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go.

Paperback. Condition: New. 'Sultry, raw and relentless. This intoxicating poetry seizes you with its beautiful, rich images and refuses to let go.' - Awater Poetry Prize jury'This book is stunning. Totally wild.' - Jack UnderwoodIn Virgula, Sasja Janssen's award-winning collection, the comma becomes much more than a punctuation mark; it stops the stillness and allows thoughts and language to move forward. Virgula is invoked as a muse and a companion; she is called on in every poem, as if she were a goddess, friend or lover, someone who offers space when the emptiness becomes too heavy.Virgula received the Awater Poetry Prize and was nominated for the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Prize and the Herman de Coninck Prize and De Grote Poëzieprijs (Grand Poetry Prize) for best poetry collection 2021.

Paperback. Condition: New. Fatherhood is the debut novel from award-winning poet Caleb Klaces, combining prose and poetry in an experimental work of verse fiction. Following the birth of their first child, a couple move out of the capital to the northern countryside, where they believe the narrator's great-grandfather, a Russian emigrant, was laid to rest. The father dedicates himself to parenting, writing and conversation with his dead ancestor, newly conscious of the ties that bind the present to the past. It is a time of startling intimacies, baby-group small talk, unexpected relationships and tender rhythms, when every clock seems to tell a different time, and the solidity of language is broken. As his daughter begins to speak, the father's gentleness turns to unexplainable rage. He begins to question who he must protect his child from - the outside world or himself. Their new house, the family discover, is built on a floodplain.Moving between history, memory and autobiography, its shifting form captures a life and language split open by fatherhood. An experiment in rewriting masculinity, it asks how bodies can share both a house and a planet.

Paperback. Condition: New. 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.

Paperback. Condition: New. Emblem is the debut collection from Lucy Mercer, winner of the inaugural White Review Poet's Prize. This is a book of ecological poetics, interested in exploring the changing symbols of the natural world in literature. Emblem revitalises this forgotten hybrid form in the present as a frame to contemplate the obscurities of motherhood, faith and the interior. In ghostly conversation with the sixteenth-century emblematist Andrea Alciato - a witness to a lonely time - the poems are carried forward by a non-linear dream logic of metaphor and similitude, speaking pictures who remain silent and a focus on an adjacent imaginal world. As well as reusing images from Alciato's emblem book, the poems fixate on alternating relations between text and image that blur into relations between mind and body, child and mother, red and green, past and present, public and private, the living and the dead.

Paperback. Condition: New. A novelist questions why she's been shortlisted for the Prize of Prize's Prize; an artist duo has a messy break up; a schoolgirl is saved from a predator by a flash flood and a gang of dead animals; a surgeon has an incurable identity crisis; a budding actor can't see what's so funny; a pregnant food writer gets a craving for luxury consumerism.These thirteen stories by writer and literary translator Jen Calleja pick apart the hidden motivations behind our desires, and the ways we seek out distraction from difficult truths. They investigate histories, power dynamics, rituals, institutions - the roles we adopt, as well as the ones we inherit. Known for her acclaimed poetry and translations, and as a performer in numerous bands, these facets manifest in an attention to the latent ambivalence of language, and the nature of storytelling itself. This writing is direct and considered - it asks to be read, read out loud, retold, refashioned into fables with a distinctive mouthfeel.I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For is a sharp, bold, inventive and prescient fictional debut from a versatile and brilliant writer.

Paperback. Condition: New. In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Danielle Dutton imagines new models for how literature might work in our fractured times. Dutton's writing is as protean as it is beguiling, using the different styles and different spaces of experience to create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life.The collection covers an inventive selection of subjects in four eponymous sections which contrast and echo one another, challenging our expectations and pushing the limits of the dream-like worlds and moods that language might create.

Paperback. Condition: New. Home, the latest collection from writer Emily Critchley, is part experimental confession, part elegiac plea. It is an exploration of the damage done by, in and to many different manifestations of 'home', with poetry about child abuse, wrongful imprisonment, #MeToo, borders, Brexit, 'our lost biophilia' and global warming, among other issues. It is also an attempt to work through the pieces of a broken family, a broken society and a broken planet, with whatever limited tools the poet can summon. Whatever shards of hope may be picked out of the wreckage are in the understanding that we must be capable of doing more than we think - as individuals and collectively - to write a different future for ourselves and those with whom we share, indeed create, 'home'. The collection dreams of a new 'binding ground' - something stabler beneath all our feet, and that a turning point, a 'being otherwise' may be under way.

Paperback. Condition: New. In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster - the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets.One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers.Compiled from the Researchers' disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

Paperback. Condition: New. rock flight is a book-length poem that follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine's occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.'rock flight is relentlessly potent. Merging resistance and poetry, Hasib Hourani writes back-against the "suffocating state" and imperial forces. Be ready to be transformed by Hourani's diasporic anticolonial poetics.' - Don Mee Choi'Here is a poetry of passion; a poetry of necessity; a poetry of survival, and a poetry-triumphant.' - Maxine Beneba Clarke.

Paperback. Condition: New. Declared a 'contemporary masterpiece' on its original publication in 2007, Sascha Aurora Akhtar's debut collection is a work of post-modern Gothic. Its poems are concerned with mythology, meaning-making, the magical and mystical; a grimoire is a magic textbook or spellbook. Akhtar's writing skilfully blends archaic languages with contemporary slang, wordplay, and esoteric vocabularies to create a language of its own.'On reading The Grimoire of Grimalkin, it's clear that Sascha Aurora Akhtar is a language-diviner, her poems conjured from "the galaxy of lingual acrobatics." Akhtar's poems, which are like nobody else's, are gobsmacking, magical. This work casts a wild, incantatory music that beguiles both ear and tongue.' - Sylvia Legris.

Paperback. Condition: New. Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West's saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16th June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses.Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened last night with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way.