Cinnamon Press

In a cold, hard city, Chresta and Eran are searching…Interrogating their story in lyric poetry, The Adept examines the frequent disconnect between urbanites living side by side and the dangerous power relations in unorthodox belief systems — colloquially, cults and the cult-like. Our protagonists wrestle with their need for engagement in a world of increasing isolation via home offices and online fora. With the metaverse just around the corner, Chresta and Eran encounter callous users preying on the disenfranchised alongside, potentially, offerings of something profound — a sense of belonging in an increasingly fragmented world.

Told in multiple voices over the course of one-hundred and twenty-five years, A Crack in the Map *is the evocative and immersive story of a house and its residents. From an elegant and simple premise, three timelines are spun: the stories of Jake, Lydia, and Lucy as the nineteenth century gives way to the twentieth; of Miriam and Lenny, whose time in the house spans the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first century; and of Rosie and Steve in the present. Each is overlaid with the voice of the house itself, with its own perspective on life and death, shelter and material existence. Inventive, linguistically deft, pushing at boundaries of form and narrative, *A Crack in the Map can be read in a myriad of ways, giving readers a kaleidoscope of viewpoints. ‘A novel in pieces’, written in glistening, embodied prose, A Crack in the Map, explores what we mean by home and security, how place keeps memory, how stories are told and how ownership excludes young people from shelter. A moving, enchanting and riveting second novel from a distinctive and innovative writer.

In October 2020, as new lock downs were implemented, Jan Fortune moved from a beloved home of twenty years in North Wales to a tiny hamlet in a forest in Finistere. Isolated during lockdowns, facing major unforeseen house renovations, illness and bereavement, she was also training as a herbalist while juggling work. Constantly, she asked herself: What are you doing her? ow had a moment in a church gazing at a stained glass window as a four-year-old, a friendship between two girls who role-played their way through seven years as people from 10th century Moorish Spain, a thirty-one year volatile marriage, work-place assaults, a heart-changing encounter with herbalism and a new relationship led to this place in the seventh decade of lif? t the heart's farthest edge unravels a series of cusp moments so slight they might have vanished unnoticed, yet in retrospect make sense of following a call to a forest in a new land and language, exploring herbalism, creativity and the ways in which we might live a small life well in this beautiful, wounded world. Friendship, motherhood, love, making art and the natural world collide with the times we live in to produce a love letter to moments that persist across years, shining with joy or the sheen of tears, revealing how our deepest stories matter.

Hatched in the UK in August 2017, Sparky is a captive-bred barn owl. Raised by humans, living with them, she accepts them as essential to her life, benefiting from the security they can provide, but suffering under the uncertainty they can inflict. And here, thanks to her current human, t-raay-cee, Sparky recounts her unique story. By turns heart warming and disturbing, Sparky offers an owl’s-eye view of her relationship with her human mates and her search for a special human to bond with lifelong. A mesmerising and ambitious work that crosses genres and raises important questions about how we can connect deeply with the more-than-human world.

Bristol, 1990. The underground acid house scene is hitting the headlines. Architect Anna Weatherby is grieving for her fiancé, who died after taking ecstasy at a rave. While cycling to see her bereavement counsellor, she is injured in a road accident. Billy, her rescuer that fateful day, could just be the perfect new boyfriend. However, as she is drawn into his life, she realises he is hiding something from her. On a weekend away, hidden secrets emerge which connect them in ways they couldn’t have imagined. And they both find themselves fighting to keep their lives from spiralling out of control.

In 1640 Tenby, Lockhart has an uneasy relationship with his brother Emlyn, governor of Tenby castle. Injured during a mission to apprehend cattle rustlers, he meets Wren. Beautiful, intelligent and promised to Emlyn. Why does he see a mist of colour around Wren? And why, on his return to Tenby, does he find that he see colours around everyone? More disturbingly, what is the meaning of the onyx and warning he receives from local seer Ranul? s the wedding of Wren and Emlyn approaches the stakes are raised. Wren is deeply unhappy. The marriage to Emlyn against her will. Caught up in an attack on the castle, she escapes with Lockhart to the Druid island of Wills Mark, where Lockhart learns that he has a guardian walking with him. As his Druid training progresses will Lockhart be able to communicate his true feelings to Wre? s Wren more than she seems? Does her ancestry to the physicians of Myddfai hold the key? How will they negotiate grief and Civil War? And when plague reaches Tenby, will their healing skills be welcomed or put them in dange? oving between Civil War Tenby and a mythical landscape, Echoes from Annwn is a towering love story that asks big questions of how we see reality and what we might mean by eternity. An astonishing and compelling debut.

A DREADFUL CHOICE WITH DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCESFriends involved in a fertility treatment pact fear the impossible choices of the past have caught up with them. Deftly exploring the complexities of 1980s fertility treatment, still in its infancy, The Choice delves into the human consequences of infertility and surrogacy in a landscape of public outcry and rapidly changing legislation. Grief, loss and betrayal leave those involved at risk from the law, whilst the emotional fall-out plays out over three decades in this subtle, immersive and compassionate story. As parents, surrogates, doctors and family struggle to hide or reveal the truth to the now adult children, the stakes are raised and questions multiply. Who are Sarah and Suzette’s parents? What does the future hold for those trapped by the pas? he second book in The Identity Thieves series and a compelling follow-up to The Search, The Choice holds a mirror up to how we construct identity when nothing we believed is true.

Twenty years ago, Bruce Ackerley won Cinnamon Press’s inaugural poetry collection prize with his debut, Sound of Mountain, of which RV Bailey wrote: ‘finely crafted, lyrical and spare… with a musical ear for landscape and relationships. An interesting, individual voice, he writes with power and sensitivity.’In Lightship, Ackerley now brings together his finest writing from two decades, the voice confident and supple with a deepened lyricism and an acute sense of what to say, and what not to say, each poem is a honed gem—poised and resonant. Ranging across the natural and supernatural, the solace and joys of art, film and music, love, grief and sexuality, and the vicissitudes of mental health, Lightship is both an internal record and a reaching out. A moving, distinctive piece de résistance.

Where are my Window Songs? has not a word out of place. The phrases are limpid and shimmer with sensory details so that we encounter places, creatures and the persona of the poet as though in the flesh, meaning and metaphor held in the thingness of this carefully and beautifully drawn world. The natural world, memory, how we journey through life, find form in language that is apparently simple but always holds layers and depths. The poetry here is immersive and questioning, elegant and always perspective-altering, gently powerful, and bears reading again and again. Patricia Helen Wooldridge is the winner of the 2024, Rubery Book Award for best poetry book, a twice winner of the Cinnamon Literature Award and also won the Cinnamon pamphlet award. In Where are my Window Songs? she is writing at the height of her power.

In this extraordinary debut collection, Kathleen Bridget Eva O’Hanlon dives deeply into a personal history that holds a mirror up to all the ways we piece together a lifetime of memories to weave a story of our many connected selves. Rich in references to literature, history, myth and culture, the poetry here remains accessible and resonant, clear-eyed, acutely observant and bristling with intelligent humour. We are reminded of the ways fragments of our pasts become defining moments – the casual remark to a child over a Crunchie bar that remains brutally clear decades later, the act of undemonstrative kindness that makes a child feel seen and valued in the simple gift of a wooden butter curler, the radical grandmother who ‘called a penis, a penis’, the life events and ordinary days that mark us – from almost marrying Casanova to childbirth, from our hungry ghosts to the way insomnia blurs into vision, threading loss and memory. It’s late and getting later, but still there is wit and life, still there is a legacy to leave and hope to insist on, memories that reshape both past and future. Still there is a credo – in the ‘great and final roar that is to come’ and in love.

In Transience, Nick Jones moves across the themes that touch on our fragility and mortality. What do we really believe? How do we live as creatures in time, juggling fate and history? How do we navigate the best and worst of human impact on the earth and one anothe? ransience touches everything and none of us escape without loss. And yet at the heart of it all, love remains, conjured here with poignant elegance and with thanks for all that has been. An expansive, tender collection.

The Dolls’ House Maker’s Room sits in a house of tools and memories, the tools as much metaphors as objects, the memories laden with objects and images, with the places and events that shape what we know and what we don’t. A maven of gentle surprise, Robin Thomas’ language is supple, generous and deeply reflective; his observations sharp, quick-witted and beautifully controlled. There is a signature breadth of reference in these poems — travel, film, the absurdities of life and human history, art, mortality, loss — united by a confident, distinctive, humane voice. bats foxes planes clouds lives made and unmade revolutions tea and cake a stately moon eternal stars I wake. It’s day. You’re still not here. (from ‘Wake’)

Material Witness, Edward Ragg's sixth collection, bears witness to all manner of materials: from botany, bower birds, diving bell spiders, rock formations and coral reefs to a Nazi-stamped photo of the poet’s mother as well as Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Las Meninas paintings of Velázquez and Picasso. In three sections — ‘Scenes’, ‘Acts’, ‘Aftermaths’ — Material Witness reveals an interlinking architecture, constructing a poetry profoundly wedded to the physical universe and variously concerned with love, family history, the natural world, even the simple act of stirring a cup of tea. This is a poetry that conjures in all senses ‘the strange companionship of materials’.

As the global ecological crises deepens, fire and water, elements that bring warmth, life, become increasingly threatening as we hold our breath, the earth burning and drowning. In Becoming Wetland Yvonne Baker dives into the existential menace of a world whose waters have lost rhythm and balance. But we are never in the realm of the didactic. This watery world is one of sorrow and questions, of images so precise and clear we feel them as our own. With her gift for making connections, between heart and world, between events and objects that could go unnoticed and the ripples of their impact, Yvonne Baker skilfully takes us ‘into the waters / of the reedbed as it sinks into darkness’ where we find the lost objects of ordinary, inundated lives. And in a central sequence we move forward through time, looking back on ourselves through the eyes of those still to be born to find, ‘a reminder of the years when we still had hope.’ But back in the present, that hope has not failed, if only we will listen and accept the blessing on those of us, all of us, ‘caught / between the ochre heat, the black rain.’ Timely, poignant and beautiful, from a poet whose writing warns, comforts and invites us to feel deeply.

In a tight sequence of 33 poems, In the Shadow of the Yew, John Barnie leads us through ‘the cemetery of hopes’ (Conrad). A layered monologue in a distinctive voice that is incisive and deeply questioning, Barnie asks whether the suffering of humanity and the suffering we inflict renders our species a curse. ‘...better than both / is the one who has never been born, / who has not seen the evil / that is done under the sun.’ says the writer of Ecclesiastes, and Barnie sits in a long line of writers who consider that the natural world would be better off without us. There’s a note of Leopardi, Hardy, Beckett, Cioran and, above all, Robinson Jeffers in this unflinching collection, with a tone that builds on Jeffers’s The Double Axe and its philosophy of inhumanism. And yet, at the heart of this collection, is tenderness and compassion. Woven through poems that refuse to turn away from war and torture, starvation, greed, injustice and suffering, there are glimpses of a childhood by the banks of the Usk, fragments of the stories of friends and loved ones and homage to writers who have come before the poet. And there is a litany of extinct flora and fauna interspersed through the sequence as well as lines mourning so much loss:six hundred million birds have disappeared from Europe what tonnage is that how many hearts pattering faster than rain on a canopy of leavesAt heart there is a delight in the world that humanity is laying waste to, a yearning for life that is otherwise and the repeated cry: What do we do now?

In this exquisite pamphlet, grief is on every page, yet there is not a maudlin word. The language is clear and vivid, the memories accessible and, despite the emotional weight of loss explored, there is light and joy here. A collection as freighted with gratitude as sorrow. G W Colkitto is a maven of control of form and line, with the ability to say only what is needed and no more, and in If you want to know her, such craft opens spaces that allow the reader to immerse in the poems, feel deeply and leave with grace. An outstanding collection — poignant and true.