The Emma Press

Steam rises from bowls of noodle soup, tender steaks are seared in butter, sand-roasted chestnuts are shared from a paper bag. Suyin Du Bois's Eating Air is a mouth-watering book of poems about food, belonging and connection. Charting a journey across cuisines and continents, these poems carve into the author’s dual Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage and food’s enduring role in our cultural, familial and personal histories. From the low stools of Penang’s kopitiams to the bright lights of London’s Chinatown, Eating Air is a love song to food and a poignant catalogue of its profound capacity to serve up memory, language, and longing.

What can we learn from dragonflies, aardvarks, elephants, weeds and peat? Take a stroll through the natural world with Victoria Gatehouse and let’s find out together. From frogs with superpowers to otters with pockets, Aardvark Day is full of poems that shine a light on the fascinating lives of creatures and wildlife – and it’s all true!As a zoologist and nature lover, Gatehouse shares her passion for quirky creatures and fascinating plants in her debut children’s collection. Beautifully illustrated with organic-feeling, lively line drawings by Kate Lucy Foster, and accompanied by factual notes alongside the poems and poem-writing prompts at the end for budding writers.

While newly married, with the couple expecting their first child, Catherine Redford’s wife was tragically diagnosed with a terminal illness. The Way the Water Held Me is a mesmeric plunge into the caring, grief, loss and love experienced by a young widow. Across poems of heartbreak and honesty, memory and mourning - and through unlikely companionship with a widowed Mary Shelley - Catherine Redford’s debut collection is visceral, profound and alive with what it is to be human, to have lost and to find ways to continue to love.

Two brothers wrestle, a bird lies in a young boy’s hand, an entire field lives within the eye of a needle. Noon is a sparkling debut from Birmingham-born poet Zain Rishi, exploring home, family and faith. From the heat of the school relay and his grandmother’s Kashmiri chai to the images of a young man kissing a city goodbye, these poems chart a coming-of-age journey across place, sexuality and family ties. Rich in its interrogation of language and inheritance across generations, Noon announces Zain Rishi as one of the UK’s most exciting new voices.

London, in a not-too-distant future. The city is being swallowed into the ground, the rich are still getting richer, and Waiters do the jobs you don’t have time for. They queue for your concert tickets, stay in for your deliveries and stir your risotto.Step into the shoes of an unnamed Waiter who has no recollection of who they were before their role at the Company. Now select your next job and decide whether to peek into the client’s luggage, and if you''ll risk losing work credits by helping a tired woman with her shopping. Balance your humanity with your job security at every turn, and manage your creeping desire to understand who you once were, and who you might become. You’ll want to crawl as close as possible to the edge of the maw without falling into its depths.With 12 different endings and countless journeys towards them, The Waiter creates a labyrinthine world of possibilities and parallel worlds which combine to explore queer longing, consumerism and agency in a city and a psyche on the brink of collapse.

A witchy poetry collection for older children.A hard-working junior witch strides around a magical landscape, learning her craft. Her cloak is stuffed with scraps of paper – letters, notes and lists – some of which have tumbled out and been collected into this book.Nature blends with magic and sometimes more everyday concerns in these soothing, playful, empowering poems. A to-do list for planning a pumpkin party. A blessing for a tiny tree. An identification spell for a bird curse.Poems from a Witch’s Pocket is an eerily enchanting collection aimed at pre-teens but suitable for all ages. Perfect for all aspiring hovel witches!

Mate Arias is Lewis Buxton’s love song to his friends, a soaring voice attempting to communicate in a masculine world often punctuated by silence or violence. Muscles are torn, crossword clues are pondered, and pints are lifted as the poet attempts to make sense of his friends and himself, and their often clumsy, physical dances around each other.Under the glares of floodlights and movie screens, with a backdrop of superheroes and zombies, Buxton creates the settings for new versions of male friendships. A poignant and funny exploration of making and maintaining relationships as lives begin to move in different directions, Mate Arias is a unique celebration of the tenderness and love that can be communicated by men.

To witness. To contain. To hunt.People in Smaland are being provoked into action by a destructive species. It moves in packs at night. Gardens are being destroyed, farmland churned up. Yet its illusiveness draws in both visitors and inhabitants.The forests of this stony province are home to a growing population of wild boar once on the verge of extinction. Told by three people newly arrived in an isolated community, Wild Boar is a compelling and poetic debut from Finnish/Swedish author Hannah Lutz about animals and people, their places in a changing ecosystem, and their capacities to grow and to destroy.

A middle-grade book breaking all the rules, inviting readers to zig-zag across the page between the funny stories and the footnotes.Traditionally, once a book is published, the author’s role is over.* The book belongs to the reader after that, and it’s up to you to decide what the stories are about.Rob Walton is having none of it. He has insisted on popping up throughout this book with further thoughts and facts.** We, the publishers, recommend that you ignore his nonsense and focus exclusively on the stories.And what stories they are! If you like horses, chocolate and time capsules, or have a passing interest in libraries, supply teachers and Lincolnshire, this is absolutely the book for you. Well done for finding it, and we hope you enjoy it very much. Just remember: don’t read the footnotes!* As far as the text is concerned, anyway. We of course insist on them doing tv appearances, red carpets etc, to promote the book.** All incredibly true and triple-checked with various sources.

From the gentle rivers of Shropshire to the heat-baked seas of Greece, Daughter of the Sun radiates with mothers and tracks our orbits around them.Split into two parts, a sonnet sequence recounts Spence’s time reconnecting with her estranged mother – caring for her through illness and grieving her passing – before a bold rewriting of the myths around Medea reimagines her not as a murderous witch but a child-free scientist ahead of her time.With the power and salve of the natural world always close by, Daughter of the Sun contends with being a mother and a daughter, and also what it means to liberate ourselves of those identities and write our own myths full of freedom and possibility.