About the Book
“One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—”
When a poet turns to the subject of ghosts, it’s as much conjuration, or spectral evocation, as it is a story. We have gathered here ten in one slim book — ten possible summoning spells, primed to plant sounds and images deep in the ear and eye. Would you risk reading them aloud? Be careful — repetition is a kind of incantation. And the ghosts in these lyric tales are as angry as they are mournful as they are cold ...
About the Author :
Kirsten Irving is a Lincolnshire-born, London-based poet and editor. Her work has been published by Salt, Happenstance and Guillemot, widely anthologised and thrown out of a helicopter. She has won the Live Canon International Poetry Prize, judged competitions, and taught courses on folklore in poetry, and currently edits for First Story. Jon Stone is a Derbyshire-born writer, editor and researcher. He won a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and his debut collection, School of Forgery, (Salt, 2012) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He has written several shorter poetry books and a monograph, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames (DeGruyter, 2022). He teaches writing and publishing at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. From www.noranadjarian.com:
Nora Nadjarian is an award-winning poet and author of short fiction. Her work deals with the themes of women, refugees, identity, exile, love and loss, as well as the political situation in Cyprus. She lives in Nicosia, Cyprus.
Best known in Cyprus for her short story collection Ledra Street (2006), she has had poetry and short fiction published internationally. She has been cited or published in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Telegraph and has also won prizes and commendations in international competitions, including the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, the Binnacle International Ultra-Short Competition, the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize and the Reflex Fiction flash competition. In 2022 her story "Doors" was included in the Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fictions of the year.
Her work was included in A River of Stories, an anthology of tales and poems from across the Commonwealth, Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press), Being Human (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) , Capitals (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Stony Thursday Book (Limerick, 2018) and Europa 28 (Comma Press). Her latest book is the collection of short stories Selfie (Roman Books, 2017). Her short plays Mermaid and Catalina were performed at the Old Red Lion theatre in London.
Nora has represented Cyprus at literary events and festivals in Europe and elsewhere, including Frankfurt Book Fair and Dresdner Bardinale and within the framework of EU2016, in the poetry project In European Poetry I want to live (Amsterdam). She was a writer-in-residence at Goga Publishing House (Slovenia) in 2019 and a speaker and workshop facilitator at the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol (2019 and 2022). She presented her work at the Literarisches Colloquium (Berlin) in July 2019. The Hay Festival selected her to represent Cyprus in the project Europa28: Visions for the Future in 2020.
From https://clarepollard.wordpress.com:
Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and currently lives in South London with her husband and two children. She is a Doctor of Letters, having received an honorary doctorate for her services to literature from Bolton University.
Her first collection of poetry, The Heavy-Petting Zoo (1998) was written whilst she was still at school, and received an Eric Gregory Award. It was followed by Bedtime (2002) and Look, Clare! Look! (2005), which was made a set text on the WJEC A-level syllabus. Her fourth collection Changeling (2011) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and her latest is Incarnation (Bloodaxe, 2017). Her pamphlet The Lives of the Female Poets is published by Bad Betty Press (2019). Her poem ‘Pollen’ has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Individual Poem for 2022.
From https://turaspress.ie/roisin-tierney-contemporary-poetry:
Róisín Tierney was born in Dublin and studied Psychology and Philosophy at University College Dublin. She lived in Spain for several years (Valladolid and Granada) and is now based in London. She has worked in many areas, from theatrical make-up artist to museum administrator.
From https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poets/rowan-lyster:
Rowan Lyster is a poet, cartoonist and arts administrator from Herefordshire, whose work is forthcoming in Magma, Tears in the Fence and Under The Radar.
From https://dss-edit.com/word:
I am a writer, editor, and archivist. Most of my work investigates some variable configuration of these three terms. However, these tags tend to proliferate, expanding into a wide array of media, formats, and genres. These expansions index precisely the type of creative and scholarly work I hope the catalog on this site.
I am an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA. My online editorial work can be found on UbuWeb, PennSound, Eclipse, and Jacket2. I am the author of several books of scholarly creative writing, including Radios (Make Now Press, 2016), EXE TXT (Gauss PDF, 2015), Epic Lyric Poem (Troll Thread, 2015), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectural Association, 2011). With Mashinka Firunts and Avi Alpert, I work as one-third of the academic performance group Research Service.
In both writing and research, I place the study of contemporary poetics, material text, and digital culture in conversation with twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry, art, and cinema. As Daniel Scott Snelson, my book project The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats argues for materially-invested readings of works of print, sound, and cinema from within a new media context. Considering questions of scale, this study probes big data analysis on one hand, while operating in homage to the little magazine on the other. With a particular interest in the modes of media-specificity exercised by the historical avant-gardes, my research develops interdisciplinary tactics for addressing contemporary media practices. Articles, artworks, and performances on these topics have appeared widely, including venues such as Amodern, American Book Review, Centre Pompidou, Jacket2, Palais de Tokyo, The New Museum, and Brown University.
From https://solpoetry.org.uk/tom-sastry:
Poet Tom Sastry grew up in Buckinghamshire and has lived in Bristol since 1999. After being chosen by Carol Ann Duffy as one of the 2016 Laureate’s Choice poets, his debut pamphlet Complicity (2016) was a Poetry School Book of the Year and a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice. Since then, he has published two collections, both with Nine Arches Press: A Man’s House Catches Fire in 2019, which was highly commended in the Forward Prize and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize, and his new book, You Have No Normal Country To Return To, which came out in 2024. Tom has been described by Hera Lindsay Bird as “a magician of deadpan” and praised by Carol Ann Duffy for how he “navigates the mysterious everyday… making friendships and love affairs new and strange”.
From https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/this-fruiting-body.html:
Caleb Parkin is the third Bristol City Poet. He won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2016, the Winchester Poetry Prize 2017 and various other shortlists. Poems in The Rialto, The Poetry Review, Under the Radar, Butcher’s Dog, Coast to Coast, Strix, Magma, Envoi, Lighthouse, Finished Creatures, Tentacular and Molly Bloom. His educational work is extensive, tutoring for Poetry Society, Poetry School, Cheltenham Festivals and First Story. He holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. His debut pamphlet Wasted Rainbow was published by Tall-Lighthouse in early 2021. He was awarded ACE DYCP funding to explore queer ecopoetry in this first full collection.
From https://poetrywales.co.uk/matthew-haigh-how-i-write-a-poem:
Matthew Haigh is a poet from Cardiff. His debut collection, Death Magazine, was published with Salt in 2019. In the same year he published a pamphlet, Black Jam, with Broken Sleep Books. Matthew’s work has appeared in a number of anthologies from Sidekick Books, The Emma Press and Bad Betty Press, and his poetry was highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2020. He is co-organiser of the experimental poetry night CRASH in Cardiff.
Jen has been in love with language for as long as she can remember. She worked as an editor of children's books in London for ten years, authoring and editing titles on as diverse a range of subjects as the politics of creating a micronation and the rewriting of classic fairytales, to folk-dancing meerkats and Justin Bieber. She's a former Foyle Young Poet of the Year, and published her debut collection in 2020.
