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Submissions Call! Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon

Hot on the heels of our first four Ten Poets titles, we’ve gotten all fired up for another one! Launch your best words our way for

Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon! If you’re not familiar with the Ten Poets series, each title dips into a beloved pop-culture theme, from murder mysteries to ghost stories to erotica to monster movies. We want you to think creatively and show us your own take on the subject each time. Do you discover something strange? Do you think about your life on Earth? Do you make it to the moon at all? Submissions should have the general character of a poem or poem-adjacent text, but they do not have to be straightforward lyric pieces. You could create a prose poem, vignette, short lyric essay – in fact, we encourage you to think in terms of longer, looser forms (up to 500 words). This follows the trend established over our last eight anthologies, which mixed and combined poetry with elements of essay, guidebook, puzzle, flash fiction and so on. For more visual pieces, please note that all pages will be printed in black and white, and will be in portrait format. Check out the submissions call for more information and FAQs, and feel free to email us with questions.

Deadline: 15 December

Ten Poets Series out now! Be haunted, challenged, intrigued and seduced!

Sidekick Books is proud to present the Ten Poets Series!

These four cross-genre books send poets cantering into unknown terrain: erotica, folklore and urban legends, murder mysteries and even kaiju monster movies!

Titles include:

Cover to 'Ten Poets Defend Their Cities from Giant, Strange Beasts'. Etching of man holding up an arm as a mythical monster approaches.

In which our fearless poets battle monsters in many forms, from raging waters to gentrification to music icons gone very bad indeed. Grab whatever weapon you have to hand and join their party for the showdown.

Cover to 'Ten Poets Tell You Their Favourite Ghost Story'. Etching of crowd surprised by a spectre.

In which our poets dance from classic fable to urban legend, taking in a little techno-horror along the way. Eerie tales are made all the more uncanny by poetic cadence, urging you on, down that path, nudging you further through that cursed book, tempting you to repeat that name once more in the mirror…

In which our poets, fond of patterns, games and intrigue, and drawn to mysteries, open the case files within and witness bodies in the forest, brutalised landscapes and nuns covering up more than usual. Less Randall & Hopkirk, more Rimbaud & Hopkins, if you ask us…

Front cover for Ten Poets Charm the Pants off Ten Historical Figures. A couple dancing in a vintage print.

In which our bards become time-travelling Nell Gwynnes, seeking and seducing historical crushes. Will they meet with ecstasy or agony? Slip inside to find out.

Featuring:

Kat Addis / Vasiliki Albedo / Nick Asbury / Tom Bland / Helen Bowell / Penny Boxall / Matthew Caley / Tim Tim Cheng / G.B. Clarkson / James Coghill / Swithun Cooper / Anne-Laure Coxam / Adam Crothers / Kym Deyn / Jen Feroze / Livia Franchini / Matthew Haigh / Rachel Jeffcoat / Aaron Kent / Sean Wai Keung / Mathew Lyons / Rowan Lyster / Nora Nadjarian / Helena Nelson / Luke Palmer / Caleb Parkin / Ilse Pedler / Amy Jo Philip / Clare Pollard / Kevin Reinhardt / Patrick Davidson Roberts / Imogen Robertson / Tom Sastry / Danny Snelson / Nathaniel Spain / Chloe Stopa-Hunt / Róisín Tierney / Becky Varley-Winter / Alice Willitts / Erica Wright

View the trailers for each book here:

Intrigued? Click the image below to buy the whole set

Covers for four books: Ten Poets Defend their Cities from Giant Strange Beasts, Ten Poets Tell You Their Favourite Ghost Story, Ten Poets Get to the Bottom of Some Grisly Crimes and Ten Poets Charm the Pants off Ten Historical Figures.

Future Karaoke: Polar Expedition at the Polar Museum, Cambridge

The next event we’re co-organising (with the Cambridge Writing Centre) is the 6th Future Karaoke event, this time with the theme of ‘Polar Expedition’. It’s a hybrid (in-person or online) event taking place at the Scott Polar Museum in Cambridge, on Wednesday 3rd April, from 6.30-8pm. 18 writers will be reading 18 new pieces based on objects from the museum. It’s free! Tickets can be booked (for in-person or online attendance) via Eventbrite.

“She saw your kindness poke fun at her crying eye just once.”

You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories is on half-price sale for three days, from now until Friday, and we’ve added a poem from this bitter-honey anthology to our new online collection. Read Camille Ralphs’ ‘She Learns to Count’ here, or enjoy the poem in image form below:  

Hipflask Books: Deadline Extension

The cover designs of the new Hipflask series

We’ve had some enquiries from writers saying that our original deadline for the Hipflask series call was rather too tight in terms of their being able to come up with original work. In response, we’re extending the deadline for submissions by one month to Sunday 28th November.

Hopefully that will give more of you a chance to be included in the project! We’ve had a healthy response so far, and will begin reading though these over the next month – but we won’t make any final decisions until after the new deadline has passed.

Spotlight: ‘Barotrauma’ by Chris Kerr and Daniel Holden

‘Barotrauma’ describes tissue damage resulting from changes in air and water pressure, typically rupturing the lungs or ears. It is a notable cause of death among bat populations due to them flying close to wind turbines, and Chris Kerr and Daniel Holden reach deep into the physicality of such a violent end for this short interactive sequence. It begins with a stuttering, choppy poem that documents the death in close-up, then digs into a three-way visual metaphor – corrupted data as broken body, but also as haywire psychogenetic programming. What happens when technology outpaces the evolutionary development of organic species? We misfire. We struggle to evade suffering.

The code poem at the heart of the sequence begins with a pun: ‘.bat’ is the file extension of a Windows batch file, and the poem is written in this style of scripting. Like all code poems, it plays on the tension between language as information and language as visual architecture, but here that tension has an additional significance – the code executes the animal it embodies. In living, it dies. The fleshy pinks and purples of the text against a black background are a subtle echo of the bat’s physical form, and the asemic cascade of punctuation produced by running the file resembles the fading pulses of a brain.

The final part of the sequence tasks the reader with defining the functionality of various command prompts to help the bat avoid this fate – in other words, a kind of beginner neurosurgery. How would you edit the mind of an animal – or a person – to enable it to better survive?

This sequence is part of Battalion, a compendium of meditations on bats and human—bat relations. Contributors will be reading from the book and inviting audience participation at a special event on 12th December at the Walthamstow Wetlands Centre, as part of their Wetlands Lates series. Tickets can be booked here.

Chris Kerr and Daniel Holden have previously collaborated on a collection of 12 code poems, published online and in print. These can be seen here.

Chris Kerr’s website.
Daniel Holden’s website.

No, Robot, No! Deadline extended

Busy month? Didn’t quite pull together your proposal in time? We’ve decided to extend the submissions call for No, Robot, No! to Monday 26th March. (We will also be putting back the final deadline for successful proposals accordingly). Consult the full briefing here, and read about our thinking behind the submissions procedure here.

A new approach to submissions

The submissions call for Sidekick’s next title, No, Robot, No!, breaks with the tradition of asking writers to send in completed individual pieces. Instead, we’re looking for proposals – an idea of what you would do with 3-5 pages, your own little slice of the book. Here are a few words on our thinking behind this.

From its inception, the idea behind Sidekick was to publish collaborative books. ‘Collaborative books’ is almost a tautology – a book is nearly always a collaborative effort between artists, editors and designers, to say nothing of those people thanked on the acknowledgements page for their varying degrees of influence and judgement. But in terms of poetry – as well as other leading genres – the writer is generally credited (and marketed) as sole author. The single author collection is by far the dominant form in poetry publishing, and this makes the poetry ‘industry’ extremely reliant on the celebrity and saleability of individuals.

(As a side note, the fact that publicity leans so heavily on author identity is one cause of the lack of diversity at the top layer – since it’s easier to pass off older white men as having the authority required of the ‘eminent poet’ archetype. It’s true that recently, there has been a shift toward celebrating alternative perspectives and experiences, particularly those of women and minority groups, but the emphasis on identity is unchanged, and this carries with it the danger of reducing non-white-male authors to cyphers.)

Beyond the single author collection, the second most dominant form in poetry publishing is probably the ‘survey’ anthology – in effect, an instrument of categorisation and organisation. Then there are celebratory or occasional anthologies, and therapeutic or self-help anthologies. With the exception of Bloodaxe’s Staying Alive and its sequels, books in the latter two brackets are critically ignored, regarded as purely commercial exercises.

So the somewhat ambitious remit behind Sidekick was to try to find or forge a new form of mainstream poetry book, one that emphasised the collaborative aspect of book creation and avoided emphasis on the figure of the poet. What if poetry was the mode, rather than the genre? What if, instead of all poetry being confined to the Poetry section of a bookshop or online marketplace, it was found in all the other sections – one of the ways in which any topic might be explored, or any genre realised?

To this end, we’ve published mainly themed, multi-author compendiums of newly solicited writing, mixing poetry with prose, illustration and graphic arts, questing for the right balance between charming and unruly, orderly and idiosyncratic. We tried to make our Birdbook series a kind of catalogue or ornithopaedia as much as a poetry collection, and we tried to involve as many different poets as possible across the various projects – driven in part by the notion that more poets can reach a wider audience if they aren’t fighting over the same few pulpits. (Or crowns? Pistols? Whichever metaphor suits).

One disadvantage of this approach is that a poet who has written one or two poems for one of our books isn’t likely to feel very well represented, or like they’ve had much influence on the overall shape or feel of the book. It also makes compiling and editing particularly fiendish – imagine trying to make a complete jigsaw out of dozens of pieces from different jigsaw sets, but without being able to choose exactly which pieces.

So we came up with a new plan: offer poets (and other experimental writers) a little patch of land. Book-land. Space for a sequence, or micro-pamphlet, or something substantial. Ask them to describe to us what they would do with it, based on a broad idea of the theme of the book. Then select a number of those ideas to commission in full and put together the skeleton of the book from there. The process is intended to be less top-down, more generative, with the work of individuals given a little more space to breathe. It should also streamline the production process, since we can start on the layout before the final components arrive.

Undoubtedly, there will be downsides to this approach as well, and difficulties we haven’t foreseen. But we thought it was worth experimenting with. As with other aspects of our unconventional approach to publishing, the results should be, at the very least, rather interesting.

Submissions Call: No, Robot, No!

Our new submissions call is live. We’re looking for writers to help us build No, Robot, No!, the third in our headbooks series. We want proposals – what would you do with 3-5 pages of this book? Collages and collaboration, calligrams and rewirings, interactive and game poetry, situationist, experimental and lyrical writing all encouraged. Please read the full brief on our Submissions page.

CONTACT:

contact [a] sidekickbooks.com

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