On holiday 29 Sept-14 Oct! Orders placed between these dates will be posted as soon as we're back!

Books | Poems | News | About

sidekickBOOKS

Kirsty’s book is loose – catch it quick!

Never Never Never Come Back is out now from Salt Publishing! Available initially in a limited hardback run, with gorgeous hotfoiling under a dust jacket featuring artwork by the very talented Matt Latchford.

Here’s the spiel!

Don’t go over the hill, or look too long into the well, or go carousing with strangers, or you’ll never never never come back. With the haunting quality of nursery rhymes but the complexity of a dark and smoky wine, these poems brood on absence and abandonment, outcasts and anomalies, monstrosity and mistakes.

At the heart of the collection are a suite of tightly focused, often impressionistic character studies ranging from cannibals to schoolgirls, but Irving also finds space in the shadows for desperate love songs to pilots and robots, satiric odes to tyrants and deft engagements with popular and literary culture. Whether turning the features of a pinball table into an emotional debris field or recounting unnerving sexual encounters, these are rich and rangy poems of a defiantly unusual character that linger in the mind as much for their controlled dissonances as their uncompromising subject matter.


Huge thanks to Salt Publishing’s Chris Hamilton-Emery and my editor Roddy Lumsden. I could not be more stoked.

Stay tuned for launch details!

For review copies, please contact me on kirsten.irving@gmail.com.

School of Forgery reviewed in Poetry London


The Autumn issue of Poetry London carries a very generous review of School of Forgery by Alison Brackenbury. Choice extracts:

“Should young poets learn to shorten their books? I hope that Jon Stone will not. School of Forgery, though replete with contemporary reference, remains old-fashioned in its rich sprawl.” 

“Bold coinages and leaps of thought leave Stone’s poems echoing, beyond novelties of physical description, into new spaces in the mind.”

“These intricate collages flash with moving lines … They retain all of Stone’s ingenious energy …”

“… I have never seen well-written poetry in such a brilliant visual joke as Stone’s Avengers silhouettes.”

(For anyone wondering, I have no plans to shorten my books. In fact, I think they might get longer. Ideally, long enough for the page corners to be used to carry a flickbook animation.)

CONTACT:

contact [a] sidekickbooks.com

Sidekick Books Site assembled by Jon.
Wordpress TwentySixteen theme used to power the news and books sections.