Smith|Doorstop Books

In* Missing Person*, Zoë Walkington blurs the line between detective fiction and poetic sequence.Through a series of poems that range from the playful and surreal to gritty and mysterious, we piece together evidence around the disappearance of 10-year-old Kyle Petch from a suburban underpass in York. Along the way, our investigation will hear testimony from gravestones, AI chatbots, Forensic Science Reports, crisp packets, and the Readers Digest How to Clean Just About Anything. This electric new pamphlet combines powerful poetic experimentation with a gripping crime narrative and, for the attentive reader, a chance to solve the case.Zoë Walkington’s pamphlet I Hate to Be the One to Tell You This was a winner of the 2022 International Book & Pamphlet Competition, judged by Romalyn Ante and Jonathan Edwards. She is a Professor of Psychology at the Open University, specialising in the psychology of police investigations.

Winner of the 2024 New Poets Prize, judged by Holly Hopkins.An archaeological dig, a visit to an imagined London, puppies that come back from the dead. In Notes on Burials, Jayant Kashyap makes a series of journeys: real, mythological and etymological as he navigates what is lost and what is buried. Kashyap’s poems of love and remembrance reach out to collective losses, human and environmental, in a series of disappearing acts and excavations that take us from broken childhood patio to a snowboarder in an avalanche.

Winner of the 2024 New Poets Prize, judged by Holly Hopkins.A gold bangle, a barber’s shop and Diana Princess of Wales in an Indian wedding video. In Lobe, Cia Mangat navigates what we inherit and what we leave behind in a book which plays with private and public mythologies. These poems create a world of love and surveillance, where Diana’s revenge dress prepares for the paparazzi and aunties gossip in the threading parlor. Bodies are pierced and cut from magazines while the wedding halls beckon. Lobe is a book of resistance and reimagining, where Di escapes her buttercream wedding, a woman shaves her head and ‘george michael will sing every song you have ever wanted to you /directly accompanied by hundreds of thousands of people you love’.

In A Foreign Country, Nigel Pantling takes us to some strange places - the exotic, the imaginary and the rediscovered past - and for each he serves up a heady local brew, equal parts memory, invention, wit and menace. Here, North Korean tourists rub shoulders with Syrian adventurers, the newly dead with a City lothario, Popeye and Olive Oyl with Cold War warriors. Surprising and unsettling by turns, these poems are a whistle-stop journey though different times, countries and customs, enriched by deep personal experience.