Announcing our debut poet

Whilst busy reading the submissions from poets for next year’s list, we thought we’d like to announce our commissioned poet whose collection will launch the press. Why commission someone? Well, all three editors agreed on the voice and mood of the press and in our meetings were throwing around names of poets whose work we admire and wish we had published! So we thought about inviting someone to be our first poet…

One name kept popping up – her poems are startling in their energy, beautifully crafted, tender yet muscular, and gathered in the pamphlet we are currently editing are absolutely stunning. We don’t only want to publish the poems, we wish we had written them!

So, our first poet is Anna Kisby – a Devon-based poet and we are so pleased to have her on board. A leap of faith in the press for which we are most grateful. So, a bit about her…

After growing up in London she studied Literature and Film at the universities of East Anglia, Sussex and the Sorbonne, taught English in Prague and sold cowboy boots in Massachusetts, then training as an archivist and working with women’s history collections. Her poems are widely published in magazines including Magma, Mslexia and Poetry News and anthologies including 154: contemporary poets respond to Shakespeare’s sonnets and Campaign in Poetry. In 2017 she was part of the collaborative poetry performance Somme Suite – a First World War commemoration. She won the BBC Proms Poetry competition 2016, the Havant Poetry Competition 2016 and was commended in the Faber New Poets Scheme 2015-16. 

Now you know! So it’s time to go back to reading the fabulous submissions for next year…. we will be announcing details  in early August, but for now we’ll leave you with one of Anna’s poems:

Boating under the Northern Lights
for Sara from Nunavut

The way she tells it, the sky is a peeled nectarine.
We wear bear leather, row an umiak of stretched skin
smelling of the tar that holds it together, make ripples
like salmon on the lake.

I think she is the seagull husband and I the goddess Nerrivick
whose fallen fingers turn to whale, seal and caribou –
as she talks her eyes slice through the walls of the rented room
in King’s Cross. All day we waitress; each night our hair streaks
the sink enamel with the dirt of London’s heatwave.

The northern lights are the colour of kumquat,
she says, it’s enough to make the world blush
with pleasure. I remember her foot against mine cold as ice
cream, rippled through and through with frozen berries.