I chair the acquisitions meeting of Reaktion Books, an independent publisher. We're open to unsolicited book proposals: history, art, music, film, food, animal studies and any great indefinable non-fiction book ideas you might have. Check out the list and get in touch.

Any leaf might hide the paradise-bird

Judith Wright, ‘To Hafiz of Shiraz’

‘The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse’ published first in 1930 is richly enjoyable, especially read aloud, with an incomparably funny index. Currently published ⁦NYRB Classics⁩. Would love to see a similar one for bad prose.

Five years since Safarà Editore published the Italian edition of my book, translated by Riccardo Duranti (translator of Raymond Carver among many others). So glad to be on their list with Barbara Comyns, Gerald Murnane, Alasdair Gray, Yūko Tsushima and more.

I chair the acquisitions meeting of Reaktion Books, an independent publisher. We're open to unsolicited book proposals: history, art, music, film, food, animal studies and any great indefinable non-fiction book ideas you might have. Check out the list and get in touch.

Gravenhurst (Nick Talbot), 'The Foundry', live on 'BBC Introducing in Bristol', 2012 youtube.com/watch?v=kt81XU…

What does love mean

Adrienne Rich, from ‘Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev’

hell is where we're bound

Marina Tsvetaeva, 'Bound for Hell', tr Stephen Edgar

the statue itself

Frank Bidart, ‘Hammer’

Claire Carroll’s striking first book, ‘The Unreliable Nature Writer’, unsettles the reader into stories of imagined natures, ones we live in & beside, & that might outlive us. Worlds of present & approaching dread, slow cooked in catastrophe, of transformed or extinct personhood.

The James Stuart Garden in Norwich (named for the pro-women’s suffrage MP) is the closest public green space to Thomas Browne’s meadow (sadly now a car park) where he conducted botanical observations that informed his ‘Observations on Grafting’ & perhaps ‘The Garden of Cyrus’.

Sven Lindqvist’s short book, ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’, continues to be the history of the present. Essential reading.

the air of atrocity

George Oppen, 18, ‘Of Being Numerous’

Beginning to wonder

George Oppen, ‘The Forms of Love’

George Oppen reading from 'Seascape: Needle's Eye', 1973 [excerpt]