Poetry Wales Press

Menagerie Street is a striking debut poetry collection inspired by Thrutopia, a movement where we move through future difficulty, in hope without being naive. Formally playful and emotionally generous, Hilary Watson’s poems move between humour and gravity, attentive to animals, landscapes, queer desire, bodies, and forms of kinship that resist easy definition. This collection is full of wit, tenderness, and formal invention. Alive to the ethical pressures of a precarious world, this debut asks how we live, love, and act together, offering poems that are by turns funny, unsettling, and quietly exhilarating.

Situated between the Ogwr Estuary and the Port Talbot Steelworks, the Kenfig dunes are a unique landscape, once part of Tir Iarll, the Earl’s Land, now pierced by the M4, but shrouded in myth and history. Kristian Evans has been deeply immersed there for most of his life. In Duneland, he marks the passing of the year in this extraordinary place, celebrating its fascinating biodiversity and reflecting on our evolving relationship with the natural world. He takes us on a journey between past and present, from the world of the Mabinogi and a buried Norman town, to stories of working-class lives and the impact of industry, exploring what it’s like to live in a wild edgeland where the horizons are always shifting.

In Real Wrexham: Becoming the City local writer Sara Erddig explores the melting pot of communities, cultures and histories which make Wrexham what it is today. This place has seen a lot of change since Grahame Davies wrote the first Real Wrexham in 2007, not least the Hollywood takeover of its football club. Sara’s illustrated, offbeat guide brings the story right up to date, presenting Wrexham through her eyes. Taking in everything from its industrial past to its thriving arts scene, from Wrexham the town to Wrexham the city (as the county became in 2022), she’s out on the ground celebrating Wrexham in its city ‘era’, and as you’ve never seen it before.

After surviving a terrifying avalanche on the slopes of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), Matthew Myerscough took up a new hobby: fossil hunting. Since then, he has become well-known in the fossil hunting community for finding spectacular marine reptile fossils on the beaches near his home. Recounting his journey from novice to expert, In Search of Sea Dragons sees him venturing to a variety of places, including lesser-known sites in South Wales, Somerset and North Yorkshire, where he makes exciting discoveries and searches for his dream find – a complete ichthyosaur. His story is one of personal growth and maturing into adulthood as well as a practical guide for aspiring fossil hunters. As his months-long search for the second half of an ichthyosaur draws to a close, he considers what’s more rewarding? The discovery or the things you find along the way.

Emergency Dream grows out of the entangled emergencies of our times: social, political and personal. It explores the inextricability of Climate Justice and Disability Justice, drawing on close observation of the natural world and the human world from the position of a disabled bodymind within it. Throughout, states of emergency and states of dream overlap. Visions of the future and past collide in waking and sleeping dreams, travelling landscapes threatened by floods, wildfires and the pandemic to impossible dreamscapes and soundscapes. Disabled joy and disabled rage are both tools for survival learnt from human and non-human communities.

In January 1953, the Welsh town of Laugharne was rocked by a brutal crime. 77-year-old Lizzie Thomas had been viciously attacked at home and died the following day. Local man George Roberts was arrested for her murder. George was Deaf, communicated through his own personal signs and didn’t read or write, yet he was charged and sent to trial based on an alleged ‘confession’ made through interpreters he didn’t know. As the legal arguments raged over his fitness to plead, George was facing the hangman’s noose or indefinite detention at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. In Unspeakable: Murder in Laugharne Simon Tonkin explores the investigation into this unresolved case. How did the local community react? What circumstances led to George’s arrest? To what extent did the police overlook the obvious? And what role did social prejudice and ableism play in what happene? ighlighting a lesser-known and horrifying story from Laugharne’s past, which involved its famous residents Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Unspeakable shows how a vulnerable man and woman were wronged by a system which undervalued, misunderstood and failed them.

Wales is a vibrant multicultural and multireligious nation, home to one of the oldest Muslim communities in Britain, but the depth of the historic connections between Islam and Wales is less well known. In Muslim Wales Abdul-Azim Ahmed explores the stories of nine places which trace this shared history across centuries. The people, artefacts and buildings associated with each site, tell a story of cross-cultural and -linguistic influence, shared journeys and a history impacted by empire and colonialism. Fascinating, vital and beautifully illustrated, Muslim Wales furthers our understanding of this evolving story and how it informs our sense of identity and belonging. It will appeal to casual readers and those interested in learning about this topic in more depth.

Tigress With Wings is a tender and laugh-out-loud collection which weaves a poetic narrative of transformation – from girl to woman. The tigress becomes an emblem for adulthood, a mythical hybrid with the fierce strength of a tiger and the ability to fly. Tigress With Wings reads like a long phone call – to your younger self, to your mother, and to your artist-godmothers. The poems follow a girl as she learns to live in her body, claim her voice and awaken her own power. Intimately woven with the poet’s Panjabi heritage this is a celebration of feminine strength, creativity, and survival.

Wales has a long association with the film and TV industry, but this extends far beyond simply providing a backdrop for iconic films and television shows. Its growing list of credits in cult and blockbuster productions is about more than place and landscape, it’s about culture and innovation within a thriving industry.In Film and TV Places of Wales, award-winning actor and screenwriter, Celyn Jones zooms in on Wales’ cultural and artistic links to cinema. Through stunning location shots and behind-the-scenes content, he explores TV favourites, Hollywood epics and homegrown classics from Wales’ varied on-screen history.

Laura Wainwright’s debut collection is a powerful exploration of resilience in the face of ecological and human crises. Here, new life — whether in words, music, art, nature, or people — emerges from darkness and turmoil, and flourishes despite it. Natural worlds and relationships, containing the human within them, can be familiar but also strange, awe-inspiring, and beyond the confines of our typical narratives. The Storm’s Flora explores these complexities, while celebrating the particularities of place and the earth’s vivid beauty.

Gwrachod Cymru | Welsh Witches is an illustrated and categorised guide to the witches of Wales. Drawing on her extensive research, Efa Lois gathers witches from Welsh folklore, history and popular and contemporary culture and brings their stories vividly to life with her vibrant illustrations. Professional folklorist Juliette Wood explores the context around the history of witches in Wales, common themes in their stories, and what this tells us about Welsh women and attitudes towards them through time.

Vanished Wales: Places Lost in Living Memory is the book to accompany one of ITV Wales’ most popular shows. It explores the fascinating stories of lost landmarks: places in Wales that have disappeared from towns, cities and villages within living memory. As in the series, the book shines a spotlight on this missing heritage, featuring stories from local people who still have a deep personal connection with the remarkable sights that were once on their doorstep.Lost communities, hives of industry, popular public buildings, cultural and sporting venues, wartime placements, Victorian superstructures and even entire villages: these are once prominent places that have been wiped off the map. Including before and after images from the show, Vanished Wales sings their epitaph.

“This is simply extraordinary writing, laced with wonder and devastation…” Joanna KlinkA sequel to her T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Erato, Deryn Rees-Jones’ remarkable new collection sees her returning to ongoing preoccupations: the complexities of memory and memorialisation, desire and the body, and poetry’s place in a hostile world.The book begins with a woman checking into Hôtel Amour, a space both real and imagined, in the heart of Paris. This is a hallucinatory city where surreal symbols loom large: the hotel’s pink neon sign, elephants, doubles, and lost pairings. A bloody heart lies in the street, books concertina into song, and everywhere is the ever-present noise of birds.Playful, and moving by turn, Hôtel Amour experiments with fragmented narrative and poetic form, creating a breathing space for a multilayered and powerful meditation on illness, love and time. Hôtel Amour’s fierce and formidable exploration of ‘the now’ and its many ghostly literary pasts, is the work of a poet at the height of her powers as she asks us to listen, and explore our human capacity for transformation and for hope.

The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning is Alison Binney’s eagerly awaited debut collection. The title refers to the act of de-cluttering one’s own life to save loved ones the trouble, a reality far removed from the poet’s own experience of sorting and clearing the family home of a parent with Alzheimer’s. Connection, memory, loss and belonging are recurring themes in poems which explore all the messy sides of life. Writing with heart and tenderness about coming out, coming of age, teaching, nature, grief and recovery, Alison Binney’s poems sing with vitality and humour.

It’s the 1970s, and a mysterious woman has a cache of letters to sell. They claim to tell the story of the death of Fanny Imlay, half-sister of Mary Shelley and daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Did Fanny really commit suicide in an inn in Swansea in 1816, as historians thought? The letters instead suggest a faked death and an escape from Fanny’s fraught family life. It could have been an independence of which Fanny’s mother would have been proud. But the letters also suggest the re-born Fanny remained misunderstood, mis-used and rejected, in the manner of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster.The women’s intertwining narratives begin to reflect each other as the mysteries multiply and resolve. Gothic body-swaps, dark mansions and unexpected deaths merge with 70s politics and feminism in this tour-de-force by Jerwood Prize-winning author Jo Mazelis.

In the early hours of Good Friday, April 2019, Gerald Corrigan was shot with a crossbow outside his home on Anglesey. The attack proved fatal. The murderer was caught and convicted, but there remain many unanswered questions. The most perplexing being: why?Journalist Siôn Tecwyn covered the case at the time. Working with Meic Parry, producer of ‘The Crossbow Killer’ podcast, he explores the events leading up to the murder and the subsequent investigation. Including unseen content and additional insight from the trial as well as unreported facts about the case which take the story further, *Murder on Ynys Môn *highlights the complexity of this dark and shocking mystery.