No one asked, but I went. To the coppiced holt beyond / the manor.
Ten Poets Get to the Bottom of Some Grisly Crimes
£8.00
edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone
Do poets make good detectives? Find out, as we follow their feats of deduction across ten wildly varied accounts of mystery and murder. See them soften the tight lips of witnesses, squeeze the hearts of suspects and wrestle with the muddledness of the inner life exposed. Watch for their subtle skill, but also for the all-too-human weaknesses and maddening contradictions that all honest poetry (and all good detective fiction) holds up, glintingly, to the light…
72pp, ISBN 978-1-909560-35-2
Please note: Due to customs issues, we can no longer ship directly to Europe. European friends, please order from our distributors at Inpress or through your local bookshop.
10 Poets is a series of books, each of which sets a decet of poets on a new course, turning their skills to new and surprising ends. Each title in the series takes an existing genre of storytelling and blends in poetic elements. Whether they’re slaying kaiju monsters, spooking us out, solving murders or seducing icons from history, our game bards shapeshift, time-travel and stoke the campfire in their own poetic ways.
Famously fond of patterns, games and intrigue, poets are 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…
Contributors
G.B. Clarkson, Anne-Laure Coxam, Livia Franchini, Mathew Lyons, Helena Nelson, Luke Palmer, Ilse Pedler, Nathaniel Spain, Chloe Stopa-Hunt, Erica Wright
If not, let me approach you / differently, measure our symmetry: the square / of you against the square of me.
Ten Poets Charm the Pants off Ten Historical Figures
£8.00
edited by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving
Poets are famous rakes, seductresses and time travellers, are they not? Cast all doubt from your mind by taking in these ten tantalising accounts of extremely inter-generational flirtation, whereby prominent persons from history are left weak-kneed and willing. But is that all there is to it? Or are our poets, as poets tend to be, engaged in more than mere dalliance? Will they change the past forever, or vanish ecstatically into it?
62pp, ISBN: 978-1-909560-36-9
Please note: Due to customs issues, we can no longer ship directly to Europe. European friends, please order from our distributors at Inpress or through your local bookshop.
10 Poets is a series of books, each of which sets a decet of poets on a new course, turning their skills to new and surprising ends. Each title in the series takes an existing genre of storytelling and blends in poetic elements. Whether they’re slaying kaiju monsters, spooking us out, solving murders or seducing icons from history, our game bards shapeshift, time-travel and stoke the campfire in their own poetic ways.
Ten Poets Charm the Pants off Ten Historical Figures sees our bards become time-travelling Nell Gwynnes, seeking and seducing historical crushes. Will they meet with ecstasy or agony? Slip inside to find out.
Contributors
Vasiliki Albedo, Tom Bland, Helen Bowell, Penny Boxall, Matthew Caley, Swithun Cooper, Rachel Jeffcoat, Patrick Davidson Roberts, Imogen Robertson, Becky Varley-Winter
I conclude that I am pretending to impress myself. I conclude that I only grew a personality to make someone like you love me.
— Lotte Mitchell Reford
You Again: A Book of Love-Hate Stories
£4.00 – £8.00
edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone
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.
90pp, ISBN 978-1-909560-30-7
Please note: Due to customs issues, we can no longer ship directly to Europe. European friends, please order from our distributors at Inpress or through your local bookshop.
The Hipflask Series is an improvised dance of unusual forms and genres, played out across four collaborative, pocket-sized collections. Each book comprises a selection of written works that skirt close to (or cross the border into) poetic composition, revealing the dynamic relationship between poetry and other written forms.
The major theme of each Hipflask is extrapolated from one or other of these key aspects of modern poetry – play, appropriation, subtext and conflict – but the result is a series that occupies its own strange niche: mutant miscellanies, oddball assortments. Good for a nip or a shot or a long, deep swig.
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.
Contributors
Emily Brontë, G. K. Chesterton, Claire Crowther, Lara Frankena, Caroline Gilfillan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ramona Herdman, Wes Lee, Julia Rose Lewis, A. A. Milne, Claire Orchard, Ovid, Lotte Mitchell Reford, Henry T. Riley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sappho, Mary Shelley, Paul Stephenson.
If his cypher was discovered too soon, his life would be the forfeit. If never, his labour would be in vain …
Look Again: A Book of Hidden Messages
£4.00 – £8.00
edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone
We invite you to 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.
98pp, ISBN 978-1-909560-31-4
Please note: Due to customs issues, we can no longer ship directly to Europe. European friends, please order from our distributors at Inpress or through your local bookshop.
Cryptic symbols, secret languages, riddles and warnings hidden in plain sight. Look Again is a pocket cipher, full of double meanings and linguistic secret passageways. Carry it with you. Read and re-read it. You won’t want to miss a thing.
The Hipflask Series is an improvised dance of unusual forms and genres, played out across four collaborative, pocket-sized collections. Each book comprises a selection of written works that skirt close to (or cross the border into) poetic composition, revealing the dynamic relationship between poetry and other written forms.
The major theme of each is extrapolated from one or other of these key aspects of modern poetry – play, appropriation, subtext and conflict – but the result is a series that occupies its own strange niche: mutant miscellanies, oddball assortments. Good for a nip or a shot or a long, deep swig.
Contributors
Eve Bishop, Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Adam Crothers, James Kearns, Vika Gusak, Harry North, Jason Johnson, Paul Kavanagh, Claire Orchard, Belle Roach, Patrick Davidson Roberts, Imogen Ruth, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Wells Gallup
We’re swooping into the dark for our festive Battalion launch! Join us for a magical interactive reading on 12th December 2018, as part of Walthamstow Wetlands Lates!
We’ll be starting at 7pm sharp, and the hour will include readings and short talks from Battalion contributors L. Kiew, Mike Weston, SJ Fowler, Julia Lewis, James Coghill and Cliff Hammett. Your hosts will be your devoted editors, Kirsten and Jon.
Expect party bags, micro-games and exercises themed around bats and poetry about these enchanting flying mammals.
Tickets are £5, which includes a glass of mulled wine and access to all of the other events going on that evening at the reserve. You can explore the space and take a peaceful moonlight turn around the centre. You’ll also be supporting a wonderful project to protect wildlife in the heart of London.
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 has been and gone and delighted us all once again. We were thrilled that Bad Kid Catullus (thus far the only Sidekick title to receive a Parental Advisory sticker) was featured in the Guardian as one of their top 10 anthologies!
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…
Salve Citizens! We are thrilled to announce that National Poetry Day, the biggest annual event in the UK poetry calendar, organised by the Forward Arts Foundation, has selected Bad Kid Catullus as one of its recommended poetry books!
Here’s what they have to say about Our Kid:
“The scabrous, self-contradictory poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (84BC-54BC) have been revisited many times before, and it’s always been a messy affair. But this collection throws the concept of the faithful translation to the wind, allowing poets to create their own weird, wild and shaggy versions. Readers too are challenged to write in this book, until “it’s full of vice and voluptuousness”. There’s no better way to summon and entertain the spirit of Catullus. Rude and beautiful!”
Busy month? Didn’t quite pull together your proposal in time? We’ve decided to extend the submissions call for No, Robot, No! to Monday 26th March. (We will also be putting back the final deadline for successful proposals accordingly).
Consult the full briefing here, and read about our thinking behind the submissions procedure here.
Happy New Year everyone! 2017 was fantastic for us at Sidekick Books, and we’d like to say thank you to everyone who has supported, hosted and read our work this year.
Huge thanks in particular to Arts Council England (ACE) for funding our next run of alchemical misadventures – thank you for supporting us!
Here’s a whistlestop rundown of our 2017 highlights, and some things to look forward to in 2018, including calls for new poetry:
Aquanauts
Aquanauts was the first in our Headbooks series: a set of interactive, highly visual complete-me-yourself books aimed at taking poetry out of one corner and inviting readers to become collaborators.
To launch Aquanauts, we joined forces with live artist and poet Abi Palmer to host Aquanautica, a deep dive into a post-flood world. Participants followed the signal of the mysterious Captain Nautilla to find a cavern of merbartenders, scientists, sirens, signs, sceptics and sculptures.
Enjoy more of poet John Canfield’s photos on our Instagram channel.
And you can find Aquanautsright here!
Bad Kid Catullus
Bad Kid Catullus, aka Headbook #2, takes Rome’s filthiest bard as its starting point, but this is no ordinary series of translations. In BKC, an orgy of poets transports Catullus through genre, time and form: sashay from noir to high fantasy to western, spy some pointed graffiti or study a sex position calligram of those famous carmina…
Get down and dirty with Bad Kid Catullusright here.
Headbooks exhibition
The Headbooks launch took place at the Poetry Café, Covent Garden, included wine, grape, figs and honey cake, as well as fauns, fornication and a forum of toga-clad poets.
Visit Ian McLachlan’s Instagram for more decadent photos (Ian was the faun in question!).
The Headbooks exhibition features art from Kid Catullus and Aquanauts, and is on for free at the beautifully refurbished Poetry Café until 31 January 2018.BUT ALSO! Got some poems hanging around that need a good Frankensteining? Come and join us for Sidekick Remixathon, a workshop to go along with the exhibition, in which Jon and K will show you how to make gold from “gah!”
More information here!
Advent Calendar
Finally for 2017, we invited poets to send us aperture poems for our Advent Calendar. The aperture poem was invented by James Midgley, and involves taking an existing text (or inventing one), and placing an imaginary window frame over part of it, leaving only a portion visible to create a new micro-poem.
Like so!
View all 26 (yes, we got carried away) aperture poems here!
COMING UP!
That was all dandy, but this is the exciting bit. What comes next?
Do your resolutions include writing more? Then get yourself in a mechanical or echolocatory frame of mind! We’ll be issuing calls for two new Sidekick Headbooks! Follow us on Twitter or Facebook or sign up for our mailing list at the bottom of the page to get the first alerts!
Ahem!
1. No, Robot, No! will be a celebration of real and fictional robots. Philosophy, ethics, mechanics, automation – choose your mode!
2. Battalion will explore the dark and delightful world of bats. We’re after biology, ecology, myth and movement – keep your ears open!
Have a Happy New Year, one and all – look forward to playing with you all in 2018!
Jon and Kirsty
Submissions Call: Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon
Our next book in the hit 10 Poets series is inspired by this year’s National Poetry Day theme of ‘Counting’, which made us think of the countdown sequence in Tintin: Destination Moon and, in turn, of cosmic horror and interstellar exploration. As with previous titles, we’ve approached a number of poets directly. But for this one we’re also opening up four places for previously unpublished poems submitted to us between now and December 15th.
What kind of poems are the editors looking for?
We want writing that responds to the prompt embedded in the title – or, more accurately, writing which enacts what is proposed by the title! While this should, of course, have the general character of a poem or poem-adjacent text, it does not have to be a straightforward lyric piece. It could be a prose poem, vignette, short lyric essay – in fact, we encourage you to think in terms of longer, looser forms, of up to 500 words. This follows the trend established over our last eightanthologies, which mixed and combined poetry with elements of essay, guidebook, puzzle, flash fiction and so on.
The titles in this series allude to broad themes from popular culture, and our intention is to subvert the usual stereotypes about what poets write about. But they’re a starting point – while each piece of work should technically fit within the remit, the series showcases how far a good writer can run with (and/or swerve from) a simple concept, while also investing it with unexpected depth. Feel free to submit what is in essence an advertisement for your own style and set of preoccupations.
Is there any payment?
At the moment we aren’t funded by the Arts Council or any other arts charity funding, and as we otherwise tend to operate on a break-even basis, we aren’t in a position to pay contributor fees this time. If your poem is selected for inclusion, however, you will receive contributor copies of the book and a discount code for all Sidekick titles.
I’ve already been in a 10 Poets book. Can I submit again?
For now, we’d like to have it so each book in the series contains a unique set of poets. This way the series will eventually, with a fair wind, grow to be a window onto the work of a significant number of poets.
I’m worried my poem is going to be too similar to other submissions, as the theme is quite narrow.
This is certainly a risk if you get too caught up in descriptions of the lunar landscape or references to the moon landings, say, so really do try to take the title as a starting point and imagine what strange events might occur after you reach the other side of the moon. Or perhaps the emphasis could be on the journey, rather than the destination? Maybe ‘the dark side of the moon’ means something else in your piece?
Will there be other submissions calls like this one, for books on other themes?
If the series continues to sell and generate interest, then yes. We enjoy putting the books together and want to create a big collectible series, but they’re a lot of work and the market for slim anthologies is tough! Tell your friends these books exist!
How do I submit?
Send one piece only as an attachment to contact@sidekickbooks.com, with the subject line ‘Ten Poets Submission’. No need to include a bio at this stage – just a short covering note. The deadline is midnight 15th December.