Our Personal Book Choices

 In Dream Logic, poet Satya Bosman moves through the hazy terrain between memory and imagination, loss and renewal. Her debut collection is a delicate meditation on belonging — on the fragments of the past that persist, flickering just beyond reach, and the quiet ache of searching for something unnamed. Through myth, intimacy, and moments of startling clarity, Bosman explores how writing itself can become a form of return: a way of finding home in the self when the world feels unmoored.

Bosman, founder and co-editor of Black Cat Poetry Press, has been widely published in journals including 14 Magazine, Acropolis Journal, The Lake, Porridge Magazine, and The Storms Journal. Winner of Third Prize in the 2025 Kent & Sussex Poetry Society folio competition, she brings to this debut the assurance of a poet attuned to nuance and silence.

Lyrical yet grounded, Dream Logic invites readers to linger in the spaces between things — where absence hums with meaning, and where the boundaries between the real and the remembered dissolve into something tender, uncertain, and true.

Publisher: Crumps Barn Studio
ISBN: 9781915067777
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 7 mm

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John Elkin’s Cairn City Cairn Ville invites readers into a vivid new mythology — a world where words become stones, symbols, and spells. Conceived as a “language of Anthropoetry,” Elkin’s work blends literary imagination with anthropological inquiry, crafting a city both real and metaphysical. In its towers of rock and echoing homes, wanderers gather, their voices carrying songs of wonder, loss, and love.

This special bilingual and illustrated edition offers English and French readers a rare, immersive encounter: poetry as a living structure, translation as dialogue. Alix Daniel’s French rendering — sensual, faithful, and full of rhythm — extends the book’s dreamlike resonance. A writer, translator, and medical doctor known as Docteur Cybirdy, Daniel brings a lyrical precision that mirrors Elkin’s visionary craft.

Together, poet and translator create a text that transcends language boundaries, offering a shared mythology for the modern reader. Cairn City Cairn Ville is both spell and study — a landscape built of feeling, reflection, and imagination, where every line becomes a cairn marking the path toward a deeper human connection.

Publisher: Cybirdy Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1068281480 / 9781068281488
Dimensions:  111 x 181 mm, 140 grams 

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Set between the shadows of postwar Germany and the lingering turmoil of the Vietnam era, Jerry Simcock’s Giselle and Mr Memphis unfolds through the journal of Ignatz Himmelsputz — survivor, dwarf, and entertainer. Living in 1970s Frankfurt with Giselle, a trans singer and fellow survivor, Ignatz begins to record his past after an unexpected encounter with Hermann, the son of the SS officer who once controlled his fate.

What follows is a haunting, layered narrative that bridges personal trauma and historical reckoning. Ignatz recounts his forced companionship with the officer’s sister, a young woman with Down’s Syndrome, whose tragic story exposes the cruelty of the Nazi euthanasia programme. In the present, he faces Giselle’s own struggles with identity and memory, while forging an uneasy friendship with Hermann — now a child psychologist confronting inherited guilt.

Drawing on his own experiences in Frankfurt’s countercultural scene, Simcock crafts a deeply compassionate meditation on survival, forgiveness, and the shared human need to heal. Both intimate and universal, Giselle and Mr Memphis is a striking debut — part confession, part testament — exploring how even the deepest wounds can open the way to understanding.

Publisher: Vagabond Voices
ISBN: 978-1-913212-26-1
Dimensions: 210 x 140 x 19 mm 

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As a copywriter and creative director in the UK, Julian Gorham has used — and occasionally abused — the English language more than most. His first published press ads were for Rochas Perfumes; his last grand rebrand was for the University of Bristol. Along the way, he helped to name Cadbury’s Heroes, the Nectar card and Atlas, the A400M military transport plane. He has written thousands of the right words in the right order for websites and blogs, TV and radio commercials, press ads, posters and brand films. His scripts have been voiced by Alexei Sayle, Steve Coogan, John Peel and Susannah York, among others.

In his poetry, Gorham plays with words and ideas, caring as much about how they look on the page as how they sound aloud. “In my head,” he says, “writing is drumming and music — the aim is no false beat, no wrong note, from start to finish.” A great-nephew of jazz legend Sir George Shearing, that rhythmic sensibility runs deep. His poetry collections — New and Too — are published by Paekakariki Press, with illustrations by Nelly Dimitranova, joint winner of the 2021 Hugh Casson Drawing Prize. Each book is £10, including UK P&P.

“I don’t know why there’s so much bad writing around,” says Gorham. “I do know that good writing takes imagination — the best writer of car ads I ever met couldn’t drive; that quick, fidgety, persuasive copy takes time; and that I was lucky to work with two brilliant mavericks, John Wood and Alan Page. They taught me to use words as swords and laudanum. But mainly — to cut the crap.”

Publisher: Paekakariki Press
Limited Edition, signed copies.

See or buy the books by getting into contact with Julian here.

Steve Denehan’s A Quarter Dead and Half Alive is a beautifully crafted, wide-ranging collection that lingers at the intersection of humanity and the environment. Foregrounding ageing parents and new family arrivals, then zooming out to take in the natural world, it is tender, wry, and wildly relatable, shot through with humour and hard-earned wisdom. A prolific and widely published Irish poet, Denehan builds here on the strength of six previous collections, where the everyday and the profound meet the joys of creativity and the darker edges of modern life. As Cauvery Madhavan notes, “Steve Denehan takes the simplest of words and magics them into profound statements that will make you rethink life, love and living.” He lives in Kildare with his wife Eimear and daughter Robin, and is the winner of the Anthony Cronin Poetry Award and twice winner of the Irish Times New Irish Writing, with work published in Poetry Ireland Review, Westerly and beyond. Asked about this collection, he remarks with characteristic understatement, “It’s just another one of about five billion trillion poetry collections out there.” Perhaps. But this one sings. 

Publisher: Renard Press
Paperback with flaps

160pp

ISBN: 9781804471609

See or buy the book here.