Bad Betty Press

Pulling Faces yanks you by the collar and talks like your favourite, wayward cousin. Fresh and vivid, these poems are equal turns cheeky and world weary, defiant and mournful. Speaking of and to the Somali community, Zakariye eschews the romanticised cliches of the diasporic experience. Instead, he embraces the ugly, the strange, the mundane and the magical in all its simultaneity. It is never quite clear what is truth and what is myth or where the line between love and fear is drawn, and this very ambiguity is this pamphlet's biggest strength. This is a gut-lead work that speaks just as loud in its omissions as its well chosen words. 'Generosity, craft and bite. These words share a voice fully connected to what it notices and clearly burning with more to say. Wicked.' Steven 'Polarbear' Camden'This pamphlet is a stunning meditation on growing up, the continual and often fractious journey to becoming, on learning to grieve and to live. Zakariye writes family, brotherhood, friendship, community and coming of age with such style, energy, technique and precision. Cinematic, joyful, tender. It will make you smile. It will break your heart.' Cecilia Knapp'Zakariye has an amazing ability to capture the world around him in its fullness. He manages to find the hope in darkness, the cold perspective that accompanies joy and the reality hiding in every dream. He does this with skill and clarity, allowing you to really feel the emotion that sits behind the work in a beautiful way.' Casey Bailey

Spiky, and as ominous as snow in June, We Will Be Fine is full of wistful yearning and eerie surrealism. With an arch, ironic tone that belies the precision of its imagery, this pamphlet lampoons the fallacy of the picture perfect relationship. The seemingly romantic and domestic is rendered silly, Sisyphean and downright absurd.  But amongst the fatalist cynicism and dark humour are, I promise, sublime moments of fleeting tenderness. Expect magic, flying, burnt dinners and naked mole rats, just don't hold out for happily-ever-after. "In We Will Be Fine, the everyday takes on a fabulously surreal sheen: we are led into a world in which ant societies and naked mole-rats reveal unsettling truths about romantic relationships; a world in which ‘grass creaks’ and a flower can be grown from a buried stone. Throughout, Lyster deftly reflects on poignant moments of human connection — two people sheltering in a church porch, a choir of women breathing in unison — moments when barely suppressed fears and longings rise to the surface. With her signature wit and deliciously deadpan delivery, Lyster immerses us in the bizarre beauty and messiness of being alive." Natalie Linh Bolderston"The title may be ironic, but the poems are as earnest as they are uncertain, offering a perceptive view of the world and its entanglements. Resolution hinges on connection (‘I decided to give you back the horse, inside out, so you could see its beauty all the time’) as much as it does scepticism (‘I suspect the trees / aren’t real’). The poems are contemplative and precise, honest and hopeful: full of unique metaphors rooted in the mundane and the domestic, and venturing out into the world only to deconstruct it in this searching and skilful debut." Isabelle Baafi"The everyday anguish of being human is made magical here, as an extraordinarily vivid internal landscape is laid out before us. The poems in We Will Be Fine are funny, original, fresh, slightly scary, knowing at the same time as moving, strange and surprising. All of that, and all at once." Mark Waldron"Rowan Lyster's poems capture the shape of hands almost touching. In Lyster's word-world, moments of connection and severance come together with painful accuracy. The interior life of the human is revealed to be no different to that of the naked mole-rat, but in being picked up and weighed – which is to say, held – it becomes glowingly present again." Will Harris

I dare the lightning, take hold of its leverscranking out the weather while God is on business. I take on the responsibility without knowing the consequences,without knowing the thunder. Antosh Wojcik's anticipated debut, Suburban Locust is a wild ride of a collection born to be read in a single, breathless sitting. With compelling narrative cohesion and dark yet whimsical surrealism, Wojcik's poems drive us into the heart of an earthquake, within which a loveable, dysfunctional family battle against the elements of addiction and inherited trauma, their seemingly weatherproof bonds stretched to breaking point against an angry sky. Set across Texas, Warsaw and an unspecified English suburb, nonetheless this story feels biblical in its music and litany. It is visited by plagues (locusts, dealers, feds, choirs, wartime ghosts, sandy dudes, termites, bad neighbours, shark-headed behemoths, problematic astro-turf installers) and ablaze with the fiery glow of the apocalypse. An ingenious and irresistible read, from one of UK poetry's brightest talents. 'Like James Tate, but drunk' Roger Robinson

I will not diefor any monolithic country playing its anthem to the deadTime is my country,it counts my inhalations,a merciless teacher untying my hair Part lullaby, part insurrection, Agata Maslowska’s dazzling poetry is powered by the drive to understand life at its deepest level, pre-human and beyond borders. To explode language, grasping what we can know in our bones and roots, and to live according to that knowing. Lyrically sublime, playfully provocative, the poems in Woman : Plant : Language disrupt form to challenge rampant authority, layering the lived experiences of womanhood, migration and war between the ripple of bryophytes, the songs of the soil, the fading call of endangered species. Maslowska’s work is myceliumesque, linking arms with Etel Adnan, Jane Hirshfield, Nan Shepherd, Anna Tsing and more, to flourish within a crystalline network of thinkers. An unforgettable debut, calling us back to the unspeakable world. “Astounding: powerfully fragile, strongly precarious, harmoniously raging, ultimately tender. Speculative stories are hinted at, in a voice so musical that we would follow it anywhere. It takes us into the garden, to a lighthouse, through nuclear holocaust. Poems probe the thick facts of plant life (figs, wasps, pollen), and our human entanglement. Ordered to flourish in a 'hostile environment', this poet peels apart our perverse systems. A personal heritage of European war, migration, and music translates into lullaby and confrontation. There is a forest of allusions—Jane Hirshfield and Etel Adnan, among others—including an Edwin Morgan-esque sonic nonsense investigation that sounds the soil of the seabed, and of a nuclear plant. A book in the best traditions of yearning, warning, mischief, and hope.” Anthony Vahni Capildeo“Woman : Plant : Language by Agata Maslowska finds uncanny intersections between the things that continue to grow in these fallow end times. Viewing the world from the soil up, these poems are deeply attuned to the movements of nature, people and ideas—from the fruitful and fricative collisions of new and old languages, to the legacy of European war and displacement. Musical, allusive, and always formally subversive, these are poems of precise philosophical enquiry that make the reader see this tired old world afresh.” Jessica Traynor