News

Comics and Cosplay: Sidekick hits the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair!

It’s that time again! On Saturday 26th September, the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair rolls into town! (Conway Hall, to be precise.)


Organised by poets Chrissy Williams and Joey Connolly, the event is not so much a book fair as a raucous celebration of poetry in all its guises. In Williams and Connolly’s words:

Free Verse is an all-day bazaar, market, library, meeting place, performance venue, information resource and more. Celebrating the vitality of contemporary poetry in the UK, publishers both large and small, both experimental and traditional, display and sell their work direct to the public.

We’ll be there with a whole raft of new goodies and we’ll also be judging a world first:

A Poetry Cosplay Parade!

Gah. There’s always, like, fifty Geoffrey Hills.

Yes! Come as a poet or a poem, or something tangentially related that requires a detailed explanation but that makes you feel ALIVE. The winner will receive eternal glory and £100 in poetry books!

Most importantly, come and say hi. We’ll be hopped up on coffee and very friendly, and sharing a table with the magnificent Happenstance.

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!

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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!

Korsakoff Returns via Poetry International

The pernicious influence of Dr F spreads! Sarah Howe is profiled this month on the Poetry International website, and one of her featured poems is ‘Le 14 Juillet‘, which first appeared in Sidekick’s fourth micro-anthology, Korsakoff’s Paper Chain, which in turn looks a little something like this:


In this miniature volume, every poem was remade from the remains of another after it had been subjected to some form of violence. ‘Le 14 Juillet’ was once Tony Williams’ poem ‘Sleeve Notes’, before a phial of word rot was spilled on the text, leaving only the verbs intact. Sarah Howe’s poem was then shot full of holes by a rival of Dr F, before being restitched as Edward Mackay’s ‘Le 14 Juillet ’68: apres le mai passe‘.

We are very happy to see the results of this exercise in wanton literary vandalism (and restoration) preserved for further study!

Lives Beyond Us: The Quiz

We wouldn’t want to leave out those of you who couldn’t make the launch for Lives Beyond Us, so here for your brain-tingling pleasure, we present Never Work With Animals or Children – the quiz!

Do you know your Lassie from your Lady? Bound right in and test your bow-wow know-how.*

*Failure may result in consumption by our resident quiz master.




Lives Beyond Us: Essays and Poems on the Film Reality of Animals (co-ed. Seb Manley and Kirsten Irving) is available to buy right here for £12 plus p&p.

This Happened: The Lives Beyond Us Launch

Cliff Hammett with chronophotographic image of a falling cat.
A huge thanks to everyone who came last Tuesday to help up launch Lives Beyond Us: Essays and Poems on the Film Reality of Animals!

For the uninitiated, Lives Beyond Us is a cross-genre anthology with gorgeous colour illustrations throughout. Covering topics as diverse as voyeurism, comic pratfalls and bear interventions, it’s a fresh look at a beloved topic, curated by Kirsten Irving (poems) and Seb Manley (essays).

The anthology is a super-thick bundle of Sidekick-style guile and intrigue, and costs £12 plus postage. Click here to see more and buy.

Cat watches humans watching bird.
We launched the book upstairs at the Genesis Cinema in Whitechapel. Since Sidekick started life in Whitechapel and was based there for five years – less than ten minutes’ walk from the Genesis, in fact – it seemed an oh-so appropriate place to unveil a book that dives face first into film history.

Here’s how the book in question fared under UV light as Jon was setting out the table:

Before the hoard descended.
We had readings and a slideshow, and there was an animal film quiz with a tricksy rebus round by long-time Sidekick ally Siân Moore. Alongside the editors, contributing writers Mike West, Rebecca Wigmore, Sophie Mayer, Simon Barraclough, Angela Cleland, Abigail Parry, Cliff Hammett and James Coghill were all present and correct.

We piece this account together now from whirling fragments, as we spent much of the evening rushing between the projection room (well, the cupboard with the technical things in it), the book stall and various old friends – a little chaotically, since this was our first book launch in over a year and we’d forgotten just how much needs doing to keep things running semi-smoothly.

Lessons learned: always give five-minute warnings in a quiz show host voice; PCs can project to a second screen in one of four different ways; electric fans give poets a neat ‘windswept’ appearance when placed correctly.

Finally, evidence that a selection of readers, hosts, editors and audience members felt the animal magic and posed it out onstage. What a grrrrrand night.

Post-launch cast and crew superhero pose

Animals, Amazons and ACE news!

Hallo one and all!

Hope your year is going mighty well. We’ve had our heads buried trying to make sense of what has already been a packed year of Stuff.

Brace yourself. We have a lot of exciting things to pack in here.

Firstly, those of a certain age might remember back, way back in the mists of time, talk of a lost edition of the fabled Fuselit magazine. Thought by many to be a myth, Amazon has now been unearthed! Featuring exquisite poetry, artwork and prose, this hand-sewn magazine comes with its own talismanic owl amulet and a set of six postcards detailing exchanges between the director Werner Herzog, fond of his Amazon-based films, and his best friend, the erratic, arrogant actor, Klaus Kinski.

Here is Werner Herzog drinking cough syrup out of his own slipper.



Fuselit: Amazon costs £10 and comes in its own card-and-plastic display case. Also, there is a gold monkey hiding inside for you to make friends with. She is called Rolo.



The best bit? This lovingly crafted relic is not available through Amazon! Muhaha!

OK, so onto the ACE news. That’s both ACE, as in 90s-excellent and ACE, as in Arts Council England. For many years, Jon and I resisted applying for funding, preferring to fund Sidekick ourselves from our day job. That was all well and good until we realised that me going freelance and Jon going part-time, while splendid for productivity, chafed the funds somewhat. So we took a deep breath and a jot of advice from very kind indie publishers and applied to part-fund our next five books.

And, um, they said YES.

This is the moment a rep from ACE came to Sidekick HQ to tell us the news:



We’re thrilled, mainly because it means we can pay contributors to these five books, many of whom have been collaborating with Sidekick for some time now. The five books we’re producing with the funding are:

Lives Beyond Us, an anthology co-curated by film scholar Seb Manley and yours truly, featuring essays and poems on animals in cinema.



Birdbook III & IV. So exciting to know we can complete this beautiful series without compromising on production. The final two titles will feature the birds of the mountains, moorlands & heaths and saltwater species. III is so very near to completion I might just pop.



Surveyors’ Riddles, our latest Team-Up, this time between poets Giles Goodland and Alistair Noon. In Alistair’s own words, the pamphlet is “A sequence in classical enigmenga form, consisting of exactly 87 triquatrainal poems of varying types, the 39th poem being by a member of the Kim family, the 59th poem by a Russian symbolist, and the final poem being not allowed to reference the moon, the formal requirements followed faithfully and perfectly.”

You hear that? NO MOON! The perfect collection for selenophobes everywhere. 



And on the Team-Up train, we’re extremely excited about the forthcoming We Go Wandering at Night and Are Consumed by Fire, a collaboration between illustrator Hetti McArthur and poet Rowyda Amin. We’re promised dark fairytales and plenty of getting lost in the woods of the imagination. More on that one later in the year.

Buuuut we got a little drunk on power. 



On top of our ACE books, we are also very excited to be publishing the following titles:

Laboratorio, edited by Simon Barraclough. Following on from his residency at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, and to complement his collection Sunspots, to be released through Penned in the Margins, Simon Barraclough presents an anthology of work written by scientists and poets on the trials and technology of space exploration, from satellites to silverfish. Contains dark matter.



Finders Keepers, a Team-Up exploring vanishing species, devised and created by artist Sophie “Moomintastic” Gainsley and poet Harry “Big in Macedonia” Man. You can see their work so far at this frankly BEAUTIFUL site.

Over the Line, a comics-poetry anthology co-edited by comics editor and comics-poetry aficionado Chrissy Williams and comics artist Tom Humberstone, for which WE WANT YOUR SUBMISSIONS! [Note to self: do not shorten ‘comics poetry’ to an acronym.]



And we have a whoooole bundle more plans lined up for 2016.

(Is that fox still jumping up and down? Righto.)

Thanks, as ever, for your love and support. We are always grateful for it, and keen to hear what you think. Can’t wait to show you the new books!