News
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:
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.
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…
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
Future Karaoke: Polar Expedition at the Polar Museum, Cambridge
“She saw your kindness poke fun at her crying eye just once.”
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!
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?
Buy the Hipflask Series here
Want the whole lot together in one big lovely Again Agathering?
Buy the Hipflask Series here
Hipflask ideas videos now live!
Thinking of submitting to our Hipflasks call but need a creative jump-start?
K’s put together four short videos full of ideas, one for each of the books.
Get your submissions in by 28th November!
Hipflask Books: Deadline Extension
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: LOOK AGAIN
The call for submissions for our latest books, the Hipflask Series, is open until 25th October 2021. These are unusual titles, even by Sidekick standards, so we’ve put together a series of short posts, one for each of the four books, breaking down the ideas and influences behind the book and what we’re looking for from you. This time we’re squinting and spying to find the covert comms in the texts all around us, with…
What’s the big idea?
“I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!”
– George Eliot
We all want to be in on a secret, to have some subtle inside knowledge that gives us mastery over a subject. It’s the root of conspiracy theories, espionage and even honest translation. Just as we look for faces in everyday objects, even if the original author hasn’t planted a message in their work for someone to find, chances are we’ll spot one anyway.
Who and what gave us the idea for this book?
There’s a rich tradition of text-bothering in literature, and we’ve been keen to revisit this theme since our micro-anthology Korsakoff’s Paper Chain, which saw a hapless Meccano manual burned, eaten and dissolved, then painstakingly restored by poets making their best guess at its contents.
What are we looking for in submissions?
We’re after two different kinds of text for this title: firstly, pieces which conceal, typographically, a hidden message which an average reader stands a good chance of being able to figure out. Each piece should be no longer than 250 words, 25 lines of verse, or one page (see template for page size).
Secondly, we want your discoveries of hidden messages inside existing texts. You can send us high-res scans of texts you have annotated, blocked out or doctored to reveal the message, or you can send us an image accompanied by an explanatory text. The explanation should be no longer than 250 words, 25 lines of verse, or one page (see template for page size). The image should fit on one page. Bear in mind that the book will be printed in black and white.
There may be copyright issues with reproducing some texts, and we will have to examine these on an as-they-come basis. We recommend using texts that are in the public domain.
Please send us no more than three pieces per individual submission.
What are we not looking for?
Brand names, fleeting trends and adult content. We want the Hipflasks to be as enjoyable 20 years from now as they are today, and we want to take them to as large an audience as possible.
Where to look for inspiration?
• The New York Public Library has an excellent selection of text and image erasure art: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/04/20/erasure-literature
• Spycraft of all kinds, e.g. singer Josephine Baker’s secret messages to the French resistance, written in invisible ink on her sheet music.
• Vladimir Nabokov’s genre-dodging Pale Fire chooses not to deface or erase its core text (a poem by the fictional writer John Shade), but instead drowns it out with the pompous footnotes of his narrator, Shade scholar Charles Kinbote.
• Writing Through The Cantos by John Cage takes a typically disruptive approach to Ezra Pound’s opus, as Cage seeks and caps up the author’s name hiding in various lines:
Any further questions?
Check the call for submissions in case your answer lies there. If not, email contact[at]sidekickbooks.com or find us on Twitter @SidekickBooks.
Spotlight: YOU AGAIN
The call for submissions for our latest books, the Hipflask Series, is open until 25th October 2021. These are unusual titles, even by Sidekick standards, so we’ve put together a series of short posts, one for each of the four books, breaking down the ideas and influences behind the book and what we’re looking for from you. Today we’re encountering the mixed feelings, tense tangos and dark duels of…
What’s the big idea?
Smeagol: [weeping] “I hate you. I hate you.”
Gollum: “Where would you be without me, uh? Gollum, gollum… I saved us! It was me! We survived because of me!”
Smeagol: [stops crying] “Not anymore.”
– Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
You Again is a book bursting with romance and rows, magnetism and antagonism, sweet-sorrow partings and good-riddances. Contributors will each write about a person, place, idea, object etc. that both attracts and repulses them, raising both their heart-rate and their blood pressure simultaneously.
Who and what gave us the idea for this book?
Love-hate relationships have been written about since time immemorial. Roman poet Catullus’ in Carmina 85 (Odi Et Amo), wrote:
“I hate and I love. Wherefore I do this, perhaps you ask.
I do not know, but I feel it being done and I am tormented.”
More recently in history, we’ve seen non-romantic examples. Take the fraught dynamic between James Joyce and Dublin, the hometown he fled but could not forget. Or Michael Bluth’s bungee-cord attachment to his dysfunctional family in Arrested Development. Something about these relationships keeps us coming back time and again.
What are we looking for in submissions?
We want your lyrical narrative or critical writing on something you both love and hate. This could be a person, an institution, an abstract concept, or anything else. We want to see the conflict and complexity that characterises these relationships laid out on the page.
For structure, think prose poems and micro lyrical essays. Maximum length if submitting in prose form: 600 words per piece. Maximum length if submitting in verse form: 50 lines per piece, and a maximum of three pieces.
What are we not looking for?
Images, brand names, fleeting trends and adult content. We want the Hipflasks to be as enjoyable 20 years from now as they are today, and we want to take them to as large an audience as possible.
Give us an example.
• William Wilson – Edgar Allan Poe’s short, sharp tale of paranoia and guilty conscience sees the eponymous speaker encounter an identically named man who follows the narrator throughout his life, seemingly to highlight his inadequacies and faults. The speaker begins by being dazzled by the other Wilson, and being mistaken for his brother, but this enchantment gradually turns to loathing and resentment, culminating in tragedy.
• Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) – one of the best-known literary love-hate tales. The pendulum of affection between Catherine and Heathcliff swings in the winds of the rough moors, from romance to rage to ruin.
• Here You Come Again (Dolly Parton) – a classic Dolly song about getting back on your feet after heartbreak, only for the heartbreaker to stroll back into town and undo all that hard work by smiling that smile.
• No Children (Mountain Goats) – this lilting, caustic ballad tells of a marriage of mutual, unbreakable loathing. A surprisingly popular song choice for weddings.
Any further questions?
Check the call for submissions in case your answer lies there. If not, email contact[at]sidekickbooks.com or find us on Twitter @SidekickBooks.
Spotlight: ROLL AGAIN
The call for submissions for our latest books, the Hipflask Series, is open until 25th October 2021. These are unusual titles, even by Sidekick standards, so we’ve put together a series of short posts, one for each of the four books, breaking down the ideas and influences behind the book and what we’re looking for from you. Today it’s the turn of our Puckish playbook, full of rules and misrule…
What’s the big idea?
“Not only does God play dice, but… he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”
– Stephen Hawking
Games are not just pastimes or diversions. They allow to us to bat about ideas, meet and overcome resistance, come together with others (or find new ways of being with ourselves), and create new works as by-products of our play.
Games and poetry cross over in these goals, and this book gathers together new games with creative, poetic elements, in a jostling, joyful compendium for rainy days, holidays – all days, really.
Who and what gave us the idea for this book?
Instructive, or didactic, poetry has been around for centuries. Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata and even Mary Schmich’s ‘Wear Sunscreen’ speech (later set to music by Baz Luhrmann) all offer guidance on how to progress. This book gathers similarly instructive work, but instead of life, we want to know how to play games. Your games.
What are we looking for in submissions?
Send us the rules or explanations to your own invented games – up to three per individual submission. No game is too simple. They should be at least theoretically playable by readers, and as accessible as possible (i.e. not requiring expensive or exclusive equipment or staging). They can be reimagined versions of existing games, physical or mental, tabletop or outdoor, but the submission should consist mainly of a description of how the game is played.
You can include diagrams for illustrative purposes, but bear in mind that the book will be printed in black and white, and please take into account the page dimensions (see template in call). We’re looking for pieces not longer than 600 words for prose/prose-like text, 50 lines for verse, or three pages (again, check the template for the page dimensions).
What are we not looking for?
Brand names, fleeting trends and adult content. We want the Hipflasks to be as enjoyable 20 years from now as they are today, and we want to take them to as large an audience as possible.
Where to look for inspiration?
• Adam Dixon’s Gamepoems are a great place to start. Find simple ways of slipping poetry into your daily wanders.
•Sidekick’s own interactive Headbooks series includes puzzle and play pages linked to the poetry in the books.
• Holly Gramazio has created a treasury of digital and analog games. Among her many projects is a website with accompanying book called New Rules, exploring modes of play during the pandemic.
• House: Some Instructions by Grace Paley is a ladder or staircase of a poem, ushering us into the emotions of the house in question and guiding us in its care.
• How to Make Stew in the Pinacate Desert by Gary Snyder takes the form of a recipe, seasoned and peppered with environmental details.
Any further questions?
Check the call for submissions in case your answer lies there. If not, email contact[at]sidekickbooks.com or find us on Twitter @SidekickBooks.