Ten Poets series – build a bundle!

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We were all at home or far behind when it happened.

Ten Poets series – build a bundle!

edited by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving

Build a bundle of at least 3 different Ten Poets titles and get 25% off your haul! (discount applied at checkout)

Sometimes the hero you need is not the one you expect. In these cross-genre books, we’ve handed poets wild new assignments: defending their cities from monsters, spinning ghost stories, solving grisly crimes, rocketing to the Moon, committing acts of piracy and surviving a vampire’s keep. And being poets, they’ve gone about their missions in intriguing and offbeat ways…

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.

Categories: 10 Poets, anthologies, Cross-Genre, Folklore & Myth, History & Satire, Love & Romance, Mystery, Science Fiction Tags: 10 Poets, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, crime, detective, ecopoetry, Edinburgh, environmental, erotic, folklore, ghosts, Glasgow, history, Ipswich, LGBTQI+, Liverpool, London, love, monsters, murder mystery, mythology, pirates, poetry, queer, Reykjavik, space, storytelling, Truro, vampires

Description

Description

10 Poets is a series of four 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 Defend Their Cities from Giant, Strange Beasts

takes its cue from the nuclear anxieties of the Godzilla franchise. 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. 72pp, ISBN 978-1-909560-33-8

Ten Poets Tell Their Favourite Ghost Story

sees 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… 60pp, ISBN 978-1-909560-34-5

Ten Poets Get to the Bottom of Some Grisly Crimes

shows the famous fondness poets have for patterns, games and intrigue. 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… 72pp, ISBN 978-1-909560-35-2

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. 62pp, ISBN 978-1-909560-35-2

Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon

sees our intrepid poets set off for the stars, testing their bodies, their resolve and their navigation skills. From musical legends to mythology to Mare Frigoris and back, they’re on a mission to bring back the finest lunar verse. 60pp, ISBN 978-1-909560-39-0

Ten Poets Prowl the Seas in Search of Plunder

sees ten more poets set out with cutlasses and compasses, high spirits and troubled pasts to chart depths unknown. 60pp, ISBN 978-1-909560-40-6

Ten Poets Spend the Night in a Vampire’s Castle

sees ten more poets venture, nightsticks, nerves and desires aloft, through the corridors and catacombs of a mysterious host’s lair. 64pp, ISBN 978-1-909560-41-3

Contributors

Kat Addis, Nick Asbury, Vasiliki Albedo, Sophie Blacklock, Tom Bland, Helen Bowell, Penny Boxall, Emma Brown, Jacob Burgess Rollo, Matthew Caley, Heather Chapman, Tim Tim Cheng, Emmy Clarke, G.B. Clarkson, James Coghill, Swithun Cooper, Luigi Coppola, Anne-Laure Coxam, Adam Crothers, Al Crow, Abbie Day, Kym Deyn, Kat Dixon, Emma Du Toit, Matthias Mūnkey Ediger, Jen Feroze, Elizabeth Gibson, Giles Goodland, Jem K. Hubbard, Andy Jackson, Livia Franchini, Matthew Haigh, Rachel Jeffcoat, Aaron Kent, Mathew Lyons, Rowan Lyster, Nikki Marrone, Kate Moore, Nora Nadjarian, Alfie Nawaid, Helena Nelson, Rebecca Ostler, Abigail Ottley, Luke Palmer, Caleb Parkin, Megan Pattie, Ilse Pedler, Amy Jo Philip, Clare Pollard, Richard Price, Emma Reay, Kevin Reinhardt, Patrick Davidson Roberts, Imogen Robertson, Lark Sabre, Freya Sacksen, Tom Sastry, Dorian Shire, Candy Smellie, Danny Snelson, Nathaniel Spain, Catherine Spooner, Chloe Stopa-Hunt, Róisín Tierney, Becky Varley-Winter, Sean Wai Keung, Alice Willitts, James Womack, Erica Wright, Jerrold Yam

Submissions Call: Ten Poets Do Their Bit for the Secret Service / Ten Poets Lose Themselves in the Land of the Fae

For pity’s sake, will no one think of the poets? For our Ten Poets series, we’ve sent these poor creatures into so many perilous situations (vampires’ castles, pirate ships, lunar missions, crime scenes, you name it!), without training, protective equipment or even a necklace of garlic! Do we regret our actions? Apparently not, because we’re doing it again!

This time we’re dispatching our adventurers to spy and be spirited away with Ten Poets Do Their Bit for the Secret Service and Ten Poets Lose Themselves in the Land of the Fae. Decorative

The full call is here, so firm up your alias, gather your goblin fruit and join us in strange new realms…

Deadline: 28th February 2026

Vampires vs. Pirates

A zombie Lego pirate and Lego vampire clash swords in from of two books: Ten Poets Prowl the Seas in Search of Plunder and Ten Poets Spend the Night in a Vampire's Castle

From the ‘Foreword’ to Ten Poets Spend the Night at a Vampire’s Castle:

A tall figure descends the stairs at the centre of the great hall. He is the very picture of calculated languor and boredom, though passion burns in the depths of his bright, dissimilar eyes. He wears a frock coat like a second skin. His open shirt collar erupts from it like the spathe of an arum lily. He is himself peculiarly pale – not the pallor of death, but that of a beautiful alabaster vase. There are fine blue veins upon his features. He is possessed of a boldly prominent brow and delicately cut nose. The hairline recedes around the temples, but the hair itself is dark and thickly curled. The smile strikes at you like a knife – it is contemptuous, almost vindictive. Vampire? Or poet?

And from the ‘Cast Off’ of Ten Poets Prowl the Seas in Search of Plunder:

The last poem o’ this here book, Jim-Lad Womack’s ‘Admire Devaluates Scavenger (6, 2, 9, 8)’, finds sixteenth-century Spanish writer Cervantes poised o’er ‘is most famous novel, Don Quixote, wonderin’ ‘ow it be that such a blood-soaked thief an’ murderer as the pirate Blackbeard e’er came to be considered as loveable rogue. Indeed, mateys, piracy be a topic that raises somethin’ of a double quandary fer poets. On the one ‘and, it be the stuff o’ children’s parties an’ cheap fancy dress. Insufficient gravitas, ye might say. Pantomime patois twice as gratin’ as this one here. Parrots, posturin’, plastic-an’-elastic eyepatches (I once worn two o’ these, one on each o’ me good eyes, while steerin’ a canal boat, but that be a tale for another time). On the other ‘ook, if ye lean toward ‘istorical accuracy, all be grimness an’ squalor.

These are the latest two titles in our ‘10 Poets’ series, starring 20 poets we’ve never published before, many of them fresh to the scene. For those unfamiliar with the series, the premise is all there in the title of each book: contributing poets adopt a persona — lusty corsair, say, or hapless prey of some blood-sucking creature — in order to explore all manner of themes through a somewhat otherworldly lens. That’s it — plus a foreword/introduction and a surprise appendix. We’re seven books into the run, and we do think they look rather good together:

But it’s the poems, of course, which really count. Try a little spoonful of Nikki Marrone’s ‘Terms and Conditions Apply’, from Vampire’s Castle:

The invitation arrived folded in midnight. No envelope, just a note pressed to my chest: You’ve been chosen. Glow accordingly. I must have said yes. There’s no other way to explain how I got here. The hours between then and now were soft and slippery, like the ones gone missing when you look up and realise the light has changed. Now I’m seated between a duchess and a woman who used to be an actress (though no one mentions that anymore). The candlelight makes everything soft: the velvet walls, the blush on their cheeks, even the wine, which tastes like memory. “She arrived last week,” someone says, slicing a fig with the edge of her fork.

Delicious! You thought the poets would, in every case, find themselves alone with the vampire in question? The contents ae wilder than that. As noted in the foreword, “oddly enough […] this might be, as much as anything, a book of love poems.” And what about Prowl the Seas? Well, the idea of ‘plunder’ has been interpreted very cleverly, and while we do have a fair number of doubloon-addled ruffians aboard, there’s also room for poetry that plunges into the ‘broken, bent and battered’. Abigail Ottley’s ‘The Sea Always Wins, or, The Ageing Wreck Diver Speaks of the Ocean’ begins as follows:

The sea is an indifferent lover. She may be your delight, your mistress, your beloved, but she’s not the great prize you imagine. You, in your passion, your tender obsession, are smitten, held fast in her thrall. You see nothing but her beauty, her unplumbed depths, her colours endlessly shifting. But she is nothing if not sly, and her heart is full of perfidy and guile …

You can read the rest of the poem for free, on our website. Look out for more samples from our books on this Substack in the future, as well as further insights into the pieces and the processes behind their creation. In the meantime, choose your poison: grog from the belly of a hijacked sloop, or claret from the cobwebbed bottle cellar? Order it into your local ~~booze-stop~~ bookshop and help us stay afloat!

And if you are yourself a poet, check out our next calls for submissions to the 10 Poets series, closing 28 February 2026!

Twin Moon Launch plus Free Verse Book Fair!

After months of planning at Ground Control, we’ve got a flurry of events coming up.

Come and SEE US AT FREE VERSE 2025, THEN join us in London or Cambridge as we launch Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon!

Join us for a double lift-off as ten intrepid poets set off for the stars, testing their bodies, their resolve and their navigation skills. From musical legends to mythology to Mare Frigoris and back, they’re on a mission to bring back the finest lunar verse.

Cover of Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon, featuring black-and-white illustrations of space.

LAUNCH ONE: ROYAL HOLLOWAY SMALL PRESS TAKEOVER, 29TH APRIL 2025

Small Press Takeover: Sidekick Books. 29 April 2025. Address: Stewart House Room, Senate House Library, London WC1E 7HU. Launching Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon.

We’re joining the wonderful Dr Briony Hughes to take part in Royal Holloway’s Small Press Takeover series. There’ll be readings, a Q&A and many, many Moons!

TIME: 6.30pm-8pm
ADDRESS: Stewart House Room, Senate House Library, London WC1E 7HU
NEAREST TUBE: Russell Square (Piccadilly Line)
COST: FREE

Readers: Al Crow, Kat Dixon, Andy Jackson, Elizabeth Gibson, Giles Goodland, Jerrold Yam and more!

LAUNCH TWO: WATERSTONES CAMBRIDGE, 6TH MAY 2025

After that, we’re heading east to Waterstones Cambridge for some high-flying tales in low-lying regions!

TIME: 6-7.30pm
LOCATION: Waterstones Cambridge, 22 Sidney St, Cambridge CB2 3HG
COST: £8 Admission (£5 Waterstones Cardholders) OR £10 Book and Ticket
READERS: Kat Dixon, Freya Sacksen, Richard Price, Emma Reay and more!

FREE VERSE BOOK & MAGAZINE FAIR 2025

And next Saturday, 26 April, Sidekick Books will be at the Free Verse Book and Magazine Fair in London! Come and visit us at the Sidekick stall for early-release copies of Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon, or grab a bargain from our slightly-scuffed £10 kilo sale! Click the image for more info, or visit the Poetry Society’s Free Verse page.

FREE VERSE INFO DATE: Saturday 26th April 2025 TIME: 12-6.30PM (main fair) 7.30pm on for readings/afterparty LOCATION: St Columba's Church, Pont St, London SW1X 0BD (nearest tube: Knightsbridge) COST: FREE!

Look forward to seeing you, on earth or in outer space!

Tag: Ten Poets