Stewed Rhubarb Press

Written in a rich but accessible Borders Scots, the poems in Flichter contemplate nature, family, language and history in relation to our contemporary crises. Bringing together award-winning poems and new work which explore the braes of the Borders and beyond, this is a powerful debut from a bold new voice in Scots language poetry. ‘Flichter’ contains many fine individual poems but as a whole it has an almost mesmeric quality, as if you were listening to a quiet but urgent discussion that touches on environment, memory, history and being. Crucially, Scots is the conduit for the flow of thought. Multiple internal rhymes, echoes and alliterations push the ideas on in a way that demands that the poems be read aloud. This is a brave, vulnerable, questioning and vibrant first collection. – James Robertson Craig writes poetry with an evocative power. He creates beauty in the everyday, carefully crafting the nuances of humanity, history and nature. ‘Flichter’ is a celebration of the Scots leid, and in particular, the Borders dialect. This is a beautiful collection that spans across various themes, each resonating deeply. – Taylor Dyson

The Boat Game moves through a world of ships, ferry routes, offshore rigs, and subsea cables, tracing the hidden systems that connect lives across oceans and islands. Here tourist cruises hover above the wreck of the Titanic, decommissioned oil platforms linger as accidental reefs, and radio signals carry fragments of human voices across open water. From Shetland sea stacks to space missions, from childhood imaginings to maritime rescue channels, Siún Carden’s poems explore what it means to travel, to depart, and to remain. Siún is a poet of quite remarkable talent and potential. Her work is a concise, surprising and imaginatively bold interrogation of our relationship with both natural and unnatural worlds. Every one of her poems, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, is an event, a happening, an action, not a still life. – John Glenday Wry, surreal, and always humane, Carden’s poetry is a lightbox to which she holds up the astonishing facades of Anthropocene existence. – Jen Hadfield