Thanks to the lovely Erin Morrill, Bad Press has for U.K./E.U. distribution a number of copies of Marianne Morris’ chapbook Iran Documents, published in the U.S. by Trafficker Press last year.  These will be available for a limited time, and only to U.K./E.U. customers.  More info about the book is available via this interview with Marianne Morris & David Brazil; and Michael Cross has posted some excerpts from the book at his Disinhibitor blog.

They are £5 plus p&p.  

And, thanks to the lovely Rosa van Hensbergen, we also have a handful of Marianne’s DSK chapbooks for distribution, again for U.K. customers only.  These are £4 plus p&p. More info can be found on the Tipped Press homepage.

Click here to buy Iran Documents, click here to buy DSK, or order em both for £11.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are gathered here today to welcome into the world such material objects of considerable mass as these you see now gathered together in their lump summed mass above, constituting in their congregation The Institute of Our Love in Disrepair, a book of poems by Sophie Robinson. 

This publication is Bad Press’s first perfect bound collection, and also, therebyhenceforcewith, its heaviest, which caused a degree of quantum, ecological and ethical consternation for a moment or two until today’s board meeting, at which it was roundly decided that the congregation is worth its mass by way of being comprised completely and only of AWESOME POEMS.  This book is full of blinding one-liners, perfectly formed love lyrics, and kick-ass couplets.  HOORAY!

“I love these poems, these scratched accounts of the bars, kitchens and hospitals, bathrooms and bedrooms of East London. Paris is nicer than Hackney, but we’ve got all the decent cologne, all the toothpaste and scissors. If we’re too tired too riot, well, the mixed drinks and melodramatic moments of Sophie’s poems will probably change that. These are love songs to make us crack, gag and hum, wolfishly, all over Dalston Junction. It deserves it. All of this can be seen from the roof of the 243 Waterloo-Hackney bus, if you know how to look. Shall we do shots?” - Sean Bonney

In the UK these are £7 plus £1.75 p&p, and in the U.S. they are $10 plus $4 p&p, which you may send us henceforthrightwith whomsoever you shall.

Thrilled to our boots at Bad Press to read Rich Owens’ enthusiastic review of Sam Solomon’s Life of Riley, thinking about the lyric as a space of multiplicity.  Bye bye, Ophelia.  Get thee to a binary. Etc.

Thinking about Samuel Solomon’s Life of Riley (Bad Press 2012) while reading through Yeats’s “Introduction,” the 1937 prefatory note composed for an edition of his complete works that never appeared, I found myself struck by the following claim: “A poet is justified not by the expression of himself, but by the public he finds or creates; a public made by others ready to his hand if he is a mere popular poet, but a new public, a new form of life, if he is a man of genius.” Beyond calling out the extraordinary belatedness of recent critiques of self-expression at all times linked with an irrepressibly bourgeois desire to recuperate genius as an operative concept, this statement from Yeats is fascinating for its attention to the formation of publics. But rather than imagining a public as a social formation that one participates in building with others, we are offered here one of two options: if we are “mere” poets, we can move blindly along with an uninspired herd; or, if we are artists of genius, we can single-handedly construct a new form of life like some sort of megalomaniacal one-size-fits-all vision of good living. There are unquestionably other possibilities, i.e. aligning oneself with a broader, more lateralized collective effort to construct a “form of life,” or ways of feeling and grasping, capable of meeting the confluence of demands disposed in the present. Solomon’s Life of Riley angles toward such an alignment, each of the poems grounded in a strategic deference that subordinates the narrativized self to a more collective endeavor without surrendering, and arguably by way of, an otherwise self-indulgent lyric excess.

Hot off the press - the second run of Amy De’Ath’s Caribou.

The first run of the Caribou GALLOPED out of our hands.  But we have re-printed this great beauty.  You can order it for £4 / $7 + p&p.

A cerebrally serpentine collection of love poems re-working the lyric into a silken girder that will dizzy you with echoes of itself ALL AFTERNOON: in short, YES.

Caribou whizzes its readers from the ‘Fast Eddy’ of East London to the ‘Vertigo Valley’ of West Canada. “Now I am conducive to everything” writes Amy De’Ath and she means it, through her wonderfully sassy lyric ‘I’ that negotiates the rapids and gulps at the cliff edge with never a flicker of introspective self-importance. These poems are fleet-footed and fancy-free. They love to dance but they know the depths they skip across, the brow that beetles, the heart that almost disintegrates. So they are an example to us. — John Wilkinson

Accelerates from fast break scatter into pocketa pocketa: a love careen. “This thing-ting, thinking! … this out-of-sync wonkybeat,” this poetry knows its game too well not to bash the balls off the table. Go on, De’Ath, “boom brighter than the moon.” — Cathy Wagner

Samuel Solomon reads some of the poems now collected in Life of Riley. (Recorded at the Sussex Poetry Festival by Rich Owens)

Part personae, part lyric, part lyric personae part purple limerick part sun.

a killing gesture

shapes its own world

i’ve measured them from night to night:

tiny ponds of splooge gleam in hawk-stripped light

In this series of red shouts, misremembered lyrics and culture
skimmings, Samuel Solomon offers a poetics of conviction: language
bumped and rigorous, tampered by gavels but still boisterous in ‘the
shadow of our right’.  ‘These are not tactics raised to principles. /
Every good poem is a transitional demand’.  Taken as a set of analects
‘in the interest of positions sometimes happy’, Solomon’s Life of
Riley offers both a serious engagement with the ludicrous what-is and
a flicker of its opposite: resisting eviction from public space, the
territorialism of capital, and the plunge out of affect into the trap
of concepts, these are poems to lean on. - Andrea Brady

The smash and clash of discourses buzz across these fully occupied
pages, from rant to camp, from sotto voce to shout in the street, where
“Every good poem is a transitional demand.”  They come in from the
parks and off the screens, but not without lyric shelters deeply earned. 
These are voices, many and singular, that are urgent to be heard. 
Listen in. - David Lloyd

These are £5 / $8 + p&p. [24pp.  ISBN978-0-9567743-4-7]
Cover image by Lee Triming.

More:

Rich Owens, Samuel Solomon, His Life of Riley
Samuel Solomon, Reading at the Sussex Poetry Festival 2012

stop the press!  or, uh, start the press!  because we have just unearthed 5 copies of Ryan Dobran’s 2008 Bad Press chapbook Yr Guilt Is A Miracle, which we were certain we had sold out of years ago.  these are £4 + p&p.

you can watch a clip of Ryan reading from his more recent work here.

Stuart Calton (illustrious aka THF Drenching) reviewed YRGIS here, thusly:

Where it is unusual is in its restrained potency, it refuses to sit up and perform for the reader, it takes its own path firmly, regardless of the expectations placed upon it. It is, in this sense only, quite sedate. But we must scratch any period-drama-drawing-room connotations: this is tightly-wrought work, coiled and buzzing precisely because it holds itself in abeyance, simmering but refusing to boil over, on its guard.

word to who made yuh