Kirsten Irving, Author at Sidekick Books

Sidekick Aperture Poetry Advent Calendar Day One – Andrea Tallarita

Happy Advent, one and all! This year, we put out a call for Aperture poems to light up the old Sidekick Calendar.

The Aperture Poem is a form invented by the poet James Midgley for his ‘Pinhole’ sequence. The form places a window-shaped frame on an existing text, to show us only a fragment, as if we are passing by a house, eavesdropping on a conversation or sat in the restricted access seats at the theatre.

The results have been wonderful, and we can’t wait to fling wide the window and show you the splendid pieces we chose.

But wait we must! One day at a time, folks!

To kick off with, it’s a fantastic piece by our favourite Roman Senator, Andrea Tallarita. Without further nonsense, here’s Day One! Can you guess the text at which we’re sneaking a peek?

PS: We will also be illustrating each post with a copyright-free window cat, because we can.

Big Fish, Little Fish, Shaped Like Box…

We’re gearing up to launch Aquanauts in immersive, submersive style in London on 22 September (click here to book your free place). To celebrate, we thought we’d share one or two of the tiddler poems that were too shy to go into the book. Introducing a swoosh of Cubist Collage Fish, alongside their real-world counterparts. We deliberately chose fish which change colour, to emphasise the shape-shifting aspect of the form:

Betta splendens – the Siamese Fighting Fish

Aquanautica! An immersive, interactive book launch!

We’re nearly ready to smash the champagne bottle on SS Aquanauts!

To launch this anthology of aquatic adventure, join Sidekick Books and artist Abi Palmer for Aquanautica, an immersive live art voyage!

Let us tickle your senses with our poetic tentacles, using light, sound, touch, 1:1 performances and a grand reading. Leave your mark with interactive games and frolic in the fronds.

The event is FREE but booking is essential as places are limited to aid accessibility and make the experience enjoyable for all.

You can book here:

https://form.jotformeu.com/plazzmatron/aquanautica-booking-form

Once you have booked, you will receive details of how to get to the Mystery London Venue. At the booking stage, you can also tell us about any accessibility requirements you might have. Here is a more detailed breakdown:

ACCESSIBILITY

The event takes place at an accessible indoor location between 7-10.30 pm on Friday 22nd September. There will be fleeting performances in multiple spaces, and you are welcome to come and go as you please, with latecomers welcome.

The event is in a child-friendly, low-crowd, wheelchair-accessible space. For more detailed accessibility information, please see below.

TRANSPORT

Nearest tubes:

Bermondsey (Jubilee Line, level access): approx 8 minutes away

London Bridge: 12-18 minutes away, level access on all lines.

VISIBILITY

Friday’s launch event will be a multisensory experience, in varying light conditions. If you have a particular lighting need, please mention this on your booking form.

An even lower-crowd multisensory, audio described tour of the exhibit can be arranged on Saturday 23rd September. Please contact access@abipalmer.com to book this.

Due to staffing and crowd limitations, we cannot promise a 100% audio-described tour on Friday 22nd September, but the event will contain multisensory performances and 1:1 interactions. On request, these can be adapted to provide as much audio description as possible!

DOORS/SPACE

Doors, rooms and corridors inside the venue are all extra wide, and have turning space for wheelchairs. There are automatic doors on all entrances.

The space is on the 3rd floor with access via wide lifts.

TOILETS

The bathroom is level and wide enough for a chair to enter. There is a perching stool by the sink. There is no hoist.

CROWDING

The venue will include a relaxation area in a carpeted room, with varied, comfortable seating and places to lie down. Headphones and ear plugs are available if you want to vary the noise conditions Tickets will be limited to minimise crowding.

Fiddle props and multisensory activities will be provided.

SOUNDS

Due to the size and acoustics of the venue, performances will not use microphones. The relaxation room is carpeted but the main performance space will not be.

Background music will be used. If you would prefer to limit additional noise, please include this request on the form.

This multisensory event will include text, touch, movement and visual installations. We aim to provide written transcripts wherever possible. Due to space and budget restrictions, we cannot provide full BSL performance at this stage, but we are working towards this for future events!

SEATING

A wide variety of chairs, sofas, rugs, mats, reclining spaces and cushions are available. Please shout if you have a special request.

DRINKS

Custom sea-cocktails (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic) will be available for a small donation. There will also be a range of other drinks and a wide variety of teas.

THE BOOK:

You will be able to purchase Aquanauts at the event using cash, card or PayPal. Alternatively, you can find more about it here.

Dive in!

ACE news, Headbooks and making a splash!

Sidekick Books is extremely happy to announce that Arts Council England have given us funding to produce our first four Headbooks! This thrilling and unusual set of titles aims to introduce poetry to new audiences through play, rich visuals and interactive elements. Huge thanks to ACE for their generosity in supporting our work. Sidekick’s collaborative, multi-author focus means our titles fall outside the guidelines of many prizes, so ACE’s support enables us to carry on mixing, meddling and commissioning strange creations.

The Headbooks series is a genre-busting set of gift books blending visual poetry with games and activities, and bringing poetry out of the corner of the bookshop, into the light. Our first Headbook, due out next month, is Aquanauts, a twisting, turning journey under the water. Featuring calligrams, colour pages, exercises and creative prompts, it’s a deep dive into the unknown and a feast for the senses. Here’s a taster:

Aquanauts cover, featuring enigmatic model El Aguador

We’ll be following up this aquatic adventure with a journey through time to the Roman empire, to meet Bad Kid Catullus, an explosive set of new Catullus translations, riffs and reactions, mixing collage with frottage. That’ll be due in September. Finally, in 2018, we’ll be issuing open calls for submissions for The Sidekick Book of Sidekicks, a tribute to the shadows that follow heroes and villains, and No, Robot, No!, an updated, multiplayer version of K and Jon’s debut joint pamphlet.

The Saboteurs are in our midst!

It’s March, and that can, frankly, mean many things.

But for Sidekick Books it means something particularly important!

Yes, the most important indie poetry awards are back! With the exception of the Ted Hughes Award, only the Saboteur Awards explicitly recognise poetry anthologies and collaborations. These awards are nominated and voted for by you, the public! If you like the work we do (and Dr F takes credit for, and Bandijcat regularly derails), please take two minutes to nominate us for these incredibly important indie awards. We will be tremendously grateful. Three categories we would love your vote in are:

Best Collaboration (Finders Keepers)

Best Anthology (Birdbook IV: Saltwater and Shore)

and if you’re feeling particularly warm and fuzzy towards us:

Most Innovative Publisher (um…)

Thank you, as ever, for your love and support. Nominate away!

Finders Keepers makes the Ted Hughes Award shortlist!

Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry logo

Dr Fulminare is ridiculously jittery to announce that Finder Keepers by Harry Man and Sophie Gainsley has been shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry! Finders Keepers front cover

This incredible collaboration has been a real labour of love, and goes far beyond the average poetry collection. Harry Man has travelled around the UK to shadow conservation teams and geocache poems for nature lovers to discover.

Ice poem by Harry Man's for Finders Keepers — Ice poem by Harry Man’s for Finders Keepers

Meanwhile Sophie Gainsley’s vibrant, scurrying artwork brings Harry’s emotive, investigative poems to life.

Copyright Harry Man and Sophie Gainsley, 2016

Best of all, the project continues, with future geocaches planned! Finders Keepers embodies what Sidekick Books stands for – energy, teamwork, playing with genre and format. It’s been a pleasure to work with these two talented artists. Thank you to everyone who nominated Finders Keepers for the Ted Hughes Award. We’re thrilled and touched, not least because this news has put Dr Fulminare in such rude spirits he’s doubled our rations! You can read the Poetry Society press release here!

Alkemi: post-show thoughts and thanks!

As August slipped out of sight and September approached, Alkemi took place at The Nines, Peckham, as Sidekick Books, in collaboration with the Stockholm Review of Literature, put on a post-Brexit reading celebrating European poetry!

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

We paired up the following readers to share translations in and out of English:

Sofia Capel and Lucy Durneen

Image: Ian McLachlan

James Coghill and Lucy Leagrave

Image: IanMcLachlan

Jen Calleja and Marta Kowalewska

Image: Ian McLachlan

Gabrielle Nolan and Kirsten Irving

Image: Ian McLachlan

Poets read translations of their own work across French, German, Swedish and Polish, alongside non-translated poetry and the work of their partners. We got Brechtian love poetry, anxiety and shape-shifting, memories and adventure.

Jon Stone hosted, reading translations of Dutch and Spanish work (with thanks to a brave audience member who stepped up to read the original Spanish in one case!). You can read his run-up Europoetry posts on Paul Celan and Raymond Queneau on the Sidekick blog.

Music was provided by the late Jacques Brel and visual stimulation by a beautiful array of European cinematic classics, provided by Sofia, including this well-timed still:

Image: Ian McLachlan

We had a Mini Translation Quiz, which you can take here (and the answers are here).

The ten-point question asked for three-line poems on a time when words failed you, and one of my favourites came from Sian Moore:

It was a fantastic night, and we’d like to thank all of the performers for such great sets. It was also a brilliant opportunity to meet people involved in other poetry projects around translation, such as Giorgia Cacciatore from the Movimento per l’Emanzipazione Poesia, who furnished us with a stash of beautiful Italian poetry to read, enjoy and pass on:

Thanks to the Nines for having us, the wonderful audience who embraced their curiosity, the readers and the Stockholm Review of Literature. Here’s to more collaborative projects in the future!

Beasts! Beasts all over the Library!

Orcas and Dinos and Bears, oh my!

A parliament of strange beasties crept and swooped and skittered across Covent Garden last night, as Sidekick ran wild with Birds, Tiger and Terrible Lizards: A Literary Bestiary!

We all scrambled down to the fancy Library members club for a night of mask-making, quizzing, poetry and partying:

A feathered raccoon, a many-eyed bear and a very stripey long-eared bat. Dr Moreau would be proud.

The event was a celebration of three of our snarliest titles:

JT Welsch came down from York for a fantastic set, which brought to life the prehistoric stars of Hell Creek Anthology (not to mention his splendid tribute to his dog, who couldn’t make it along).

The poets of Birdbook III: Farmland, Heathland, Mountain, Moorland treated us to their finest animal poetry.

Sarah Hesketh reads some merlin magic.

Chris Jones describes the ring ouzel.

Alison Brackenbury speaks of the fieldfare and redwing

Christopher Reid on the carrion crow and corncrake.

Dzifa Benson talks little owl and wood pigeon.

Richard Osmond goes all golden eagle

Chris Beckett takes on the woodlark and red grouse.

And Jon and K sprinkled some movie magic in there too with a couple of extracts from Lives Beyond Us.

Photo courtesy of Ian McLachlan

The rightful quiz victor was Peter Daniels, whose poem addressed the rook.

Thank you to Library for hosting us, Ana Sefer for inviting us, all of the readers, the poets and artists of Birdbook III and the masquerading, dino-drawing, quizzical, wonderful audience. You!

I’ll leave you with the winner of the mask-making. Transforming a bear into an orca, indeed.

Over The Line featured in World Literature Today!

We’re very excited to announce that World Literature Today magazine have featured our poetry comics anthology Over The Line in their Nota Benes section, calling it “an ambitious anthology”!

You can read more from World Literature Today at www.worldliteraturetoday.org/.

“Contagious creativity” – Poetry London and New Welsh Review on Over The Line

This just in! New Welsh Review and Poetry London love Sidekick’s poetry comics anthology Over The Line!

Poetry London‘s Julia Bird describes the anthology as “a book bursting with contagious creativity, a book offering a truly stimulating combination of art and analysis.”

She also praises the work of editors Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone, saying:

“The tone is instructive and inspiring; it makes you want to take scissors and glue to your own Marvell words and Marvel art to see how image, text, space and silence can be recombined to create and uncover meaning.”

Read the full review in Issue 83 (which also features poetry by the marvellous Mark Waldron).

The praise keeps coming, as Nicky Arscott, writing for New Welsh Review, finds Over The Line “visually exquisite, intellectually stimulating” and says it “offers a wide-reaching introduction to the poetry comics genre.”

She adds that

“this book

succeeds in making poetry playful, and it elevates the status of the comic through encouraging us to appraise it on the same level as we would the poetry.”

The full text of the review is open to subscribers only, which is an excellent excuse to explore new Welsh writing.

Thank you to Julia and Nicky for the fantastic in-depth, insightful reviews. Comics poetry fever is upon us!

Author: Kirsten Irving

Sidekick Aperture Poetry Advent Calendar Day One – Andrea Tallarita

Big Fish, Little Fish, Shaped Like Box…

Aquanautica! An immersive, interactive book launch!

ACE news, Headbooks and making a splash!

The Saboteurs are in our midst!

Finders Keepers makes the Ted Hughes Award shortlist!

Alkemi: post-show thoughts and thanks!

Beasts! Beasts all over the Library!

Over The Line featured in World Literature Today!

“Contagious creativity” – Poetry London and New Welsh Review on Over The Line

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