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Hipflasks Ahoy! Four new Sidekick books emerge!

After a long, fascinating commissioning, editing and production process, Sidekick’s new Hipflask Series is ready to launch!

Four book covers, featuring a dictaphone blended with an octopus, a game board blended with a snake, a couple dancing blended with gunpowder and a lighter and a moth blended with binoculars. The four new books are:

Look Again: A Book of Hidden Messages

Read on and reflect on all the ways messages can be hidden – and uncovered – in other messages. More than that, we invite you to think about the relationship between the within and the without, and what it tells us about ourselves. Look Again is a compilation of curious poems, short texts and extracts from longer works that all have something to hide or reveal, taking their cues from riddles, cyphers and imaginary languages.

Buy Look Again

Roll Again: A Book of Games To Play

A collection of rules and instructions – for games to play on your own, with friends or enemies, outside or in. Most are designed to be very short, but one or two may last a week, a month, or a lifetime. There are role-playing games, dice games, creative games and battles, extracts from the likes of H. G. Wells and Charles Cotton as well as new work by contemporary writers. But this compendium is also an experiment in literary form – it includes texts which are more poem than game. It urges readers to dive into the ambiguous space between imagining and enacting, and in so doing, rethink the meaning of everyday experiences.

Buy Roll Again

Say It Again: A Book of Misquotations

Quotations are used to motivate, intimidate, compel, amuse and persuade. But perhaps the quotations themselves need a little manipulation. This curious, critical, playful volume whips away carefully arranged context and sees what happens when well-known words become a little less familiar. We’re saying all the right things, but not necessarily in the right order.

Buy Say It Again

You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories

What are the things you can’t live with or without? What can we expect from relationships that refuse to resolve themselves one way or the other? You Again collects together accounts of ruinous tension and blighted passion, mixing extracts and cut-ups from famous works with fresh slivers of contemporary writing. There’s romance, of course – but other kinds of entanglement as well, all awash with delight and frustration, rage and joy, hope and perplexity.

Buy You Again

Want the whole lot together in one big lovely Again Agathering?

Four book covers, featuring a dictaphone blended with an octopus, a game board blended with a snake, a couple dancing blended with gunpowder and a lighter and a moth blended with binoculars.

Buy the Hipflask Series here

Want the whole lot together in one big lovely Again Agathering?

Four book covers, featuring a dictaphone blended with an octopus, a game board blended with a snake, a couple dancing blended with gunpowder and a lighter and a moth blended with binoculars.

Buy the Hipflask Series here

Surveyors’ Riddles Oxford Launch


Giles Goodland and Alistair Noon will be launching their sprawlingly epic collaborative pamphlet Surveyors’ Riddles at the Albion Beatnik in Oxford this Friday, 2nd October, from 7.30pm.

That’s the Albion Beatnik, 34 Walton Street in Oxford, the very next Friday after this very blogpost, from half past seven o’clock in the evening!

But what is Surveyors’ Riddles exactly? Or rather, what are the Surveyors’ Riddles? A lost ancient text from an alternative dimension? A kind of auto-mutating procedural text containing clues to the past and the future? A series of translations that take place through a dozen languages?  Do even Noon and Goodland know what they have uncovered through their audacious technique of ‘genetic poem sequencing’?

We at Sidekick invite you to let this ever-shifting, anarcho-comic-historic poemavalanche swallow you up.

Over The Line: Launched, Available and Gearing Up for Gosh


Over The Line: An Introduction to Poetry Comics, edited by Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone, is out now and available via our site. Bookshops should be able to order it in from Thursday.

One of our two launch events has been and gone – wine, short readings and talks were laid on at the Poetry Cafe last Thursday, accompanying an exhibition of pages from the book that will run in the cafe until 31st October.

Work by Ivy Alvarez and Cristian Ortiz on the wall of the Poetry Cafe

The view from the book table

John Aggs discussing his poem-comic collaboration with W. N. Herbert
The second launch event will take place on 17th September at Gosh Comics in London, from 7pm, and a whole swathe of the contributing writers and artists will be in attendance.

If you’re planning on coming and want to buy any of our other books directly from us, just let us know via email and we’ll bring some along!

Comics Poetry Launch/Exhibition/Workshops, as approved by Alan Moore!

Sidekick is ridiculously excited to be publishing Over The Line, an introduction to comics poetry edited by poet and comics editor Chrissy Williams and comics artist Tom Humberstone.



And it’s not just us, apparently. A certain comics legend says the following about the project:

“This is that spine-tingling moment when two attractive and sophisticated forms, both admired for their rhythm and sense of timing, eye each other across the cultural dance floor. In Over The Line, at once an insightful introduction and a comprehensive showcase for the emerging phenomenon of Poetry Comics, Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone provide the best possible venue for what looks like being a breathtaking tango. I really can’t recommend this venture highly enough, and I’d advise you mark your card immediately.”
                                                                                                ALAN MOORE


We’re so excited, in fact, that we’re having not one but TWO launches.

Launch #1 is on Thursday 3rd September from 6.30pm, to mark the opening of the accompanying exhibition at the Poetry Cafe. Here is the event!

Readers include: Sophie Herxheimer, Anna Saunders, Amy Key, Chris McCabe, John Aggs, Chrissy Williams and others.

Launch #2 will embrace the comics side of its dual nature, taking place at the splendid Gosh Comics on Thursday 17th September. Here is the Facebook event!

Readers and artists include: John Canfield; Lorraine Mariner; Shauna Robertson; Ioan Morris; RH Parry; Sean Azzopardi; Cristian Ortiz; Douglas Noble; Hayley Fiddler; Emix Regulus.

Come and meet the editors, drool over the merch and get stuck into poetry comics!

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL…

If you’d like to learn how to make your own poetry comics, editor and long-time comics-poetry-workshop organiser, Chrissy Williams is running a Poetry School workshop on Saturday 5th August, where you can do just that! Investigate here!

***

And in case you’re bamboozled, more information on poetry comics lives here:
www.poetryandcomics.tumblr.com

Surveyors’ Riddles Oxford launch in October!




We’re very excited to give you a date for your October diaries, with the launch of our latest Team-Up, Surveyors’ Riddles! On Fri 2 October at 7.30 pm, get thee to the Albion Beatnik, 34 Walton St, Oxford for a night of poetic chicanery and outright lies.

The result of some serious formal (and informal) mischief by poets Giles Goodland and Alistair Noon, Surveyors’ Riddles is a sequence written in the classic ‘enigmenga’ form and translated out of the original tongue. 

At least, it might be. Frankly, the more you read of this devious title, the more you come to doubt a words its authors are saying. Expect layered, gneissic verses glittering with allusions to the contemporary, the historical and the alt-historical, and spot the tricks where you can.

For other Sidekick Books Team-Ups, head here!

Birdbook Launch, 17 December!


It’s on! Birdbook II: Freshwater Habitats will officially take flight at 7.30pm on Monday 17 December at Paper Dress Boutique and Bar, Shoreditch!

We’ll be having short readings from a flock of the poets involved in the project, along with projections of the beautiful artwork representing each of these incredible freshwater birds. We’re looking forward to meeting the talented writers and artists who have made this book such a treat to produce.

Nearest tubes are Shoreditch High St (Overground), Liverpool Street and Old Street, and stacks of buses go to the area.

Ah yes, and the Facebook event is here!

We’d love to say hello, so if you’re in London at that time, come on down and have a flutter!

CONTACT:

contact [a] sidekickbooks.com

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