Banshee Press

Render plunges the reader into the vibrant setting of Barcelona in the second half of the twentieth century. A compelling character study, the book is presented as the collected works of a fictional poet: Alberto Cenas, the lonely scion of a wealthy Catalan family. Taken individually, Render's poems offer piercing insights into the exuberance of youth, the disillusionment of early adulthood, inherited trauma, creativity, ageing and finality. Collectively, the book delivers the immersive experience of a concept album or an existentialist film, creating a complex portrait of a strange and sympathetic figure.

Noted novelist and essayist Tim MacGabhann's debut collection demonstrates a rare confidence and coherence. These formally assured and blackly funny poems chart the course of addiction and recovery, contemplating the injuries a body and mind can sustain, and what joys we find in these darker spaces in the shape of friendship, music, and community. The spare, stark poems of love and survival in Found in a Context of Destruction open windows on rarely-seen vistas, bringing us on a delirious but vividly captured journey from Ireland to Mexico.

Bebe Ashley''s prizewinning second collection charts the poet''s efforts to qualify as a British Sign Language interpreter. Intershot with enquiries into the nature of language as it is spoken and signed, and the process of leaving and finding home, Harbour Doubts is a collection that tangles with the burning desire to communicate in the isolation of a late capitalist, post-pandemic world. It''s also a love letter to the delights of linguistics and language, a three-dimensional exploration of words and the body. Bringing together meditations on language as mediated through sound, sign, vision, and film, this exciting sophomore collection cements Bebe Ashley''s reputation as a fearless experimenter.

On their arrival in Trieste in 1904, James Joyce left Norah Barnacle outside a railway station while he went to scare up money. A penniless Norah was left alone for almost an entire day and night sitting on their suitcases at the station in a city where she knew no one and where she didn''t speak the language. In real life, Norah waited for him. This novel asks - what if she hadn''t? In Penelope Unbound, Mary Morrissy weaves a spellbinding speculative history. Sensual, inventive and uproariously funny, Penelope Unbound reimagines a Joycean heroine for the 21st century.

An eerie discovery at a building site triggers a crisis for a garda and his family. A grieving woman comes to believe that she is being possessed by the spirit of her mother, and seeks an unusual exorcism. A brave new world is established as Galway disappears slowly underwater. And a young woman experiences the morning after the night before in a strange, condemned midlands town. In these stories of an Ireland both strange and achingly familiar, Claire-Lise Kieffer animates our collective past, present and future. Humorous, off-kilter, savage and surreal, she depicts the bonds that hold couples, families and communities together with a sharp, humane and deeply original slant.