Sandsnarl is a settlement steeped in sand – though where it came from and how long ago is a matter of tall tales and steely whispers. The sand itself makes accurate record-keeping impossible. It is drug, ore, plague and delicacy. The inhabitants of this region (or is it a fallen kingdom?) talk and think through its haze. Some alter their shape. Others fizz and seethe with the habit of resistance. These poems eavesdrop, extract and sift. Together, they make a brief impression of a time and place, a Buñuelian musical without the music.
Click here to view sample poems and buy your copy!
News
Where have Sidekick Books been, and what’s next?
Oh, sorry. WHERE have we been for the last year? It’s a good question. Thanks to the pandemic, Jon and K have been in London, Durham, Derbyshire, Buckinghamshire – all over the shop really.
This has meant an unofficial Sidekick Books hiatus throughout 2020 and halfway through 2021. Like a lot of small presses we’ve looked at the pandemic situation with a furrowed brow, and held off making concrete plans for future projects until now.
This last year has been testing for everyone, but it’s also been a time of discovery. During the pandemic, both Jon and K got assessed for ADHD, and both had the diagnosis confirmed. 2020 was apparently a record year for ADHD diagnosis, and this makes sense – once you’ve had a lot of social engines switched off and you’re left with your thoughts, you often spot things that have been masked by the hectic day-to-day. If you’re curious about late-diagnosis ADHD, K writes about her experience on her personal blog.
What this means is, now we know a little bit more about why we find certain aspects of publishing and, y’know, general moving through the world, especially difficult. That’s information we can work with to make Sidekick Books even better.
Getting back into the poetry publishing groove, Sidekick Books recently joined in the fun at the online One-Off Indie Poetry Press (OOIPP) festival from 19-25 July 2021. Organised by Jake Wild Hall of Bad Betty Press, this week-long Zoom festival celebrated UK indie poetry publishing at its finest.
There were stacks of excellent readings – many folk really playing with the Zoom format as a new tool for creative performance. Our Sidekick champions were Ian McLachlan (Confronting the Danger of Art, Bad Kid Catullus), Rowyda Amin (We Go Wandering at Night and Are Consumed By Fire, No, Robot, No!), JT Welsch, (Hell Creek Anthology) and Chelsea Cargill (Aquanauts).
Presses featured were: Bad Betty Press, Out-Spoken Press, Stewed Rhubarb Press, Broken Sleep Books, Guillemot Books, The Emma Press, flipped eye publishing, Lifeboat Press, Burning Eye Books, Hesterglock Press, HVTN Press (Haverthorn Press), Hajar Press, Verve Poetry Press and Hercules Editions.
So what’s next?
New books and calls for submissions!
In the grand Sidekick tradition, we’re planning several gorgeous, playful themed collaborative books for release in 2022. Some will be pocket rockets and some will be big old beasts. There will be hidden messages, miniature games, love, hate and inventions aplenty.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our mailing list for new submissions calls.
Finally, huge thanks to our amazing sales and marketing agents Inpress, who have worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic to keep promoting and selling our books, testing out new technologies to help indie publishers, negotiating with various stakeholders and keeping our spirits high. They’ve also shown the patience of saints when dealing with our pre-diagnosis communications. We’re incredibly grateful for their tenacity, skills and support, and excited to work more closely with them from now on.
That’s us up to date for now. Thanks, as ever, for your support in these strange times. Onward to new adventures!
Sidekick Books at the One-Off Indie Poetry Press festival (OOIPP)
Sidekick Books is taking part in two days of the festival, represented by Rowyda Amin (We Go Wandering At Night and are Consumed by Fire), Chelsea Cargill (Aquanauts), Ian McLachlan (Confronting the Danger of Art, Bad Kid Catullus) and J.T. Welsch (Hell Creek Anthology).
Events start tonight (19 July) and run from 19.15-20.45 BST. It’s pay-what-you-can, so book on Eventbrite and enjoy the rich range of indie poetry being published in the UK today.
Here’s the line-up:
Day 1 (19 July)
Day 2 (20 July)
Day 3 (21 July)
Day 4 (22 July)
Day 5 (23 July)
Day 6 Showcase (24 July)
Day 7 Showcase (25 July)
See you there!
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.
Battalion interactive launch at Walthamstow Wetlands Lates!
Book your ticket at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/wetlands-festive-late-tickets-53058902606
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/740817272941454/
SUPPORT BATS!
Looking to give something back this Christmas? For every full-price Battalion we sell in December 2018, we’ll donate £1 to the Bat Conservation Trust to support their vital work.
National Poetry Day roundup: Catullus in the Guardian, Headbooks special offer and a cheeky Imp!
Here’s what they said:
Stone and Irving, the two poets responsible for Sidekick Books – a tiny publisher specialising in irresistible anthologies that double as compendia of jokes, puzzles, teases, weird lists and doodle pages – outdid themselves last year with this anthology of new and old poems inspired by ancient Rome’s filthiest wordsmith, Catullus. Certain concrete poems are X-rated, but if acrobatic acrostics and saucy experiments with form tickle your fancy, this is just the book for a weekend of Latin love.
To celebrate, we’ve extended our National Poetry Day sale until the end of the day on 5th October 2018. Get in quick and get four Headbooks for the price of three! Just £30 for four fizzing, bubbling interactive treasures!
Lastly, Sidekick’s own Kirsten Irving was chosen to represent her home county of Lincolnshire in the BBC’s Local Poets celebration. The project, organised by the Forward Arts Foundation in collaboration with the BBC, saw 12 poets from across England writing on the theme of Poetry for a Change.
Here’s the video for K’s poem, ‘The Lincoln Imp’s Birthday’.
AND FINALLY! The fun doesn’t end just because NPD is over. Stay tuned to our Twitter @SidekickBooks and our Instagram @sidekickbooks over the next few days for a robotastic competition. We can say no more for now…
National Poetry Day recommends Bad Kid Catullus!
National Poetry Day is on 4th October 2018. Follow them on Twitter @PoetryDayUK and on Instagram @nationalpoetryday.
You can find an interactive map of events across the country here: https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/join-in/
The Hour of the Saboteurs Approaches…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone hates to be hassled for online votes. Which is why we’re only going to mention this once, and then we’ll get back onto making you more weird and wonderful books about robots, bats and soforth.
Sidekick Books have been nominated for the Saboteur Awards in the following categories:
1. Most Innovative Publisher
2. Best Anthology (Aquanauts)
Now, a) we believe we’re pretty innovative as a press, and we are very proud of the beautiful underwater odyssey that is Aquanauts. And b) The Saboteurs are the only awards that recognise the strange literary concoctions we make.
So if you like what we do, please vote for us. We would truly appreciate it. If someone else takes your fancy on the shortlist, vote with your heart. In the case of octopus fans, vote with all three of your hearts.
Voting closes on 9th May 2018.
That’s it. That’s as much as we’ll hassle, harangue and badger you. Thanks for reading, and thank you, as ever, for all of your support!
No, Robot, No! Deadline extended
A new approach to submissions
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.