The Manchester Writing School, Number 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH. Entry free, but booking essential. 7 PM start.
The Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met is delighted to present this special event to launch Nikolai Duffy’s latest poetry collection, Up The Creek, published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press and Ian Seed’s short story pamphlet, Italian Lessons, published by Like This Press. More here.
I’ve “…been really interested in the physicality of books and book production for a while, an interest that was piqued in particular when I visited the Tyopgraphy Museum in London several years ago. I think it’s more established now but it was an old, ramshackle place then, hard to find, largely unorganised, with boxes of type lying out on every surface. It was a place in which to lose yourself.” Nikolai Duffy talks about Like This Press on Rob Mclennan’s blog.
The latest publication from Like This Press is Stephen Emmerson’s book-in-a-box, Albion.
Albion was generated at Inland Studios over 2 days in August during an installation organised by Stephen. Details of the original exhibition are available here: http://www.inlandstudios.co.uk/home/index.php?/projects/abion/
This installation was centred around the work of William Blake.
An 8 foot by 8 foot pentagram was placed on the floor with a typewriter at each of the 5 points. There were 5 visual poems derived from Blake’s writing, and a 30 minute soundtrack that was played on a loop. Participants were asked to channel Blake and let him write through them, but the event was also a way for the audiovisual landscape to be translated into text.
Each box contains:
1 x introduction in an envelope
4 x hand-ripped poster poems
6 x photos
1 x 6 track CD
44 x hand-torn loose leafed transcriptions
Boxes can be purchased for £9 direct from Like This Press: http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/stephenemmerson
Stephen Emmerson is the author ofTelegraphic Transcriptions (Dept Press),Poems found at the scene of a murder(Zimzalla), The Last Word (Very Small Kitchen), A never ending poem…(Zimzalla), Pharmacopoetics (An Apple Pie Edition), and No Ideas but in Things (Dark Windows Press). He lives in London. More information about Stephen is available on his website at: http://stephenemmerson.wordpress.com/.
Like This Press is delighted to announce the publication of three new titles: Blart & Kid by Andy Spragg, Neurotrash by James Russell, and When You Were a Mod I Was a Rocker by Robert Graham.
All titles can be purchased direct from Like This Press here:
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/andyspragg
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/jamesrussell
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/robertgraham
Blart & Kid is a book-in-a-box comprising 1 x poetry pamphlet, 1 x photo book and 3 x postcards by Natalie Orme.
‘To Blart & Kid is a stop-start pile-up of angelically goofball, loosely metrical verse and a sharp chart of repetitive fear; a proprioceptive documentary-tale of an outrage only sometimes felt among the meek in a time of “well-pulped vocations and lost confidence”. Here between the clouds of overseer and overseen, Spragg shows you what’s yours and what’s not, and in the process enacts a kind of ontological crisis that is already blithely churned up by a cement-mixer, or “located in the foot-well of a minicab.’ – Amy De’Ath
‘To Blart and Kid sets itself the task of pushing a poetics of suburbia beyond a glib, broadsheet-endorsed clutch of epiphanies about the so-called ‘magic of the everyday’. The writing here edges into this territory, surveying the abandoned quarries, feeling out rents in the chainlink, sniffing ‘mildewed wood and/ stink leather’, but gradually enacts a landgrab, asserting itself over GCSE-syllabus verse via a frenetically inventive formal approach. Sure, there are rainswept cadences your average Faber wannabe would die for, but these are interspersed with notes of satirical belligerence which evoke nothing so much as Dada’s little-known Leatherhead branch. ‘Dozing and touching periphery’, Andy Spragg’s idiomatic cartography of the stockbroker belt is a remarkable phenomenological outing, in both senses of that word.’ – Joe Kennedy
Neurotrash seeks to to attend away from the popular neuroscience that envelops us, nodding to it in a distracted manner. The idea that the brain sciences will dissolve deep mysteries is beyond parody and eventually it will go away. Meanwhile, we have the more serious and joyful business of poetry itself, which is capable of capturing the various nature of life and the way language can play in the deep waters.
When You Were a Mod I Was a Rocker is Like This Press’ first fiction title: a book-in-a-box comprising 7 individually bound short stories and 1 collection of flash fiction, with original illustrations by Hannah
Dickinson.
All enquiries to: nikolai@likethispress.co.uk
Online now.
Nikolai Duffy reading at our recent event
Out now on Like This press, Where Were You When the Stars Went Out? consists of a group of 10 poems in memory of the singer Jhonn Balance (of the group Coil), composed by applying a chance selection procedure derived from Jackson Mac Low to Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”, then treating the results of that process as a first draft to be edited, shaped, added to, deleted from, etc. Phil Davenport has commented how: ‘Nigel Wood allows himself to be a vessel of others’ voices, other modes of hearing. In this daring but subtle book he uses another human’s life as material for an experiment in both commemoration and forgetting. Where were you... is a scattered memorial for the musician Jhonn Balance, quite unlike the ‘lead graves’ and last words that are usually stacked up to make the obituary of a life. In fact, they frequently mock the ponderousness of death-speak and the gothic. But more intriguingly, as I read some of these pieces I have the sense that the lines have been somehow erased even as they’ve touched the surface of the page, they’re the gaps in narratives, the pieces of half-dusted thinking, the moments of lucidity that toppled. It’s a book that’s been lived rather than written, or, more fancifully, I suppose it’s a book that’s been ‘died’. Wood’s melodic transliterations of this other-space sing from from the page, they’re scores of what comes between – breathings-in and whiteout. This little book of un-ideas imprints on me deeply – and has done so from the first time I encountered it. The details are so sharp and so heavy: childhood’s illnesses evaporate across the inevitable scales to nowhere Poised to a nicety, Wood writes us into some impossible conjuring trick – a knife blade balancing atop a pebble. The delicacy of these moments is often vertiginous, unsettled. Jhonn Balance lived forcefully, embracing both the shitstorm and the big light. Where were you… somehow manages to employ the forces that impinge on living as components of composition. It’s as if horror and happiness, disappointment, ennui, forgetfulness, transcendence have become tools for shaping. And out of it all, something emerges that is brisk and full of marvelling.’
Tuesday 19th March. 7.30 at The Gregson Arts and Community Centre, (Olive Bar), 33 Moorgate, Moor Lane, Lancaster, LA1 3PY.
Free entrance. Open bar. Books to browse and buy.
Out now on Shearsman.
New from Like This Press, The Tower of Babel comprises a set of 24 original postcards and an essay, both by Rupert Loydell, together with an anthology of Babel poems, featuring: Philip Terry, Sheila E Murphy, Andy Brown, rob mclennan, A.C. Evans, H.L. Hix, Angela Topping, Paul Sutton, Peter Dent, Camille Martin, Ian Seed, David H.W. Grubb, Seren Adams, Andrea Moorhead, Jane Routh, John Mingay, Luke Kennard, Steven Waling, Alan Halsey, Peter Gillies, Bill O’Brien, Mike Ferguson, David Hart, Martin Stannard, Rupert M. Loydell, Mark Goodwin, Natasha Loydell, Ira Lightman. Each box is hand-stamped and lined with black tissue paper.
Nikolai Duffy reads with Linda Black and Marcus Slease on 6th February for The Other Room at The Castle Hotel in Manchester. Entry is Free. It starts at 7pm. Click on the links.
Publishing – http://www.likethispress.co.uk/
A Poem, In Hiding – http://www.shadowtrain.com/id442.html
Marcus Slease reads with Linda Black and Nikolai Duffy on 6th February for The Other Room at The Castle Hotel in Manchester. Entry is Free. It starts at 7pm. Click on the links.
Blog
Linda Black reads with Marcus Slease and Nikolai Duffy on 6th February for The Other Room at The Castle Hotel in Manchester. Entry is Free. It starts at 7pm. Click on the links.
Links to publications
As editor
BOX consists of three hand-stamped pamphlets, Each edition of BOX is hand-stamped and comprises three A5 pamphlets: Hairy Kate, Images of War, and Night Letters. Each item is hand-torn and hand-bound, and printed on heavyweight vellum-laid paper. Copies can be purchased here. Free postage and packing on all orders.
After our next event with Nat Raha, Alec Newman and Seekers of Lice on 5th December at The Castle, Manchester, we have the following two dates already organised at The Castle for your diaries:
Out now from Nikolai Duffy’s Like This press, TURF explores relations of poets and natural history, both in the field and amongst books. Three handbooks – A Pedagogy of Grasses, Understanding Glaciers, and Bird Song for Dogs – provide basic orientation and identification skills, whilst notebooks and memos offer histories of Anglo-American poetry in which the geographer Carl Sauer and botanists Agnes Arber and Edgar Anderson are fellow travelers with poets including Charles Olson, Jonathan Williams and Lorine Niedecker. Throughout, Dürer’s image of The Great Turf is found-icon for this book-in-a-box chorale “Of [SODS] of [SODS] [SODS].”
Each box is hand-stamped and comprises three A5 pamphlets, one A6 essay and one A6 series of notes, together with a postcard of Albrecht Dürer’s 1503 drawing, ‘Great Turf.’ Each item is hand-torn and hand-torn and printed on heavyweight vellum-laid cream paper; each individual cover is hand-stamped.
Read a sample here
hand-bound, with hand-torn pages and hand-printed covers
card backs and paper
140pp
September 2012
Copies can be purchased here. Free postage and packing on all orders.
David Berridge is a writer based in London. He curates VerySmallKitchen (http://verysmallkitchen.com/) and was recently writer in residence at X Marks the Bökship, where he researched the use of scripts and scenography in contemporary art writing. He is the author of Lemonade (LemonMelon), P.Z.T.C (Knives Forks and Spoons Press), BLACK GARDENS (The Red Ceilings Press) and The Moth is Moth This Money Night Moth (Knives Forks and Spoons Press).
Click here to watch an interview with David by The Other Room.
Based in Manchester, Like This is an independent press committed to publishing high quality and beautifully designed books that do things just a little bit differently. Currently we specialise in publishing handmade pamphlets and limited edition books-in-boxes. More information about the press can be found here.
New pamphlet out now from Nikolai Duffy’s Like This press:
“Comprising six sequences, tusitala of white lies is a meditative, fragile and frequently beautiful collection of poems. Concerned with delicacy of phrase as well as the space of the page, Iain’s poetry is about breath, and thought, and the way language maps the shape and rhythm of a life.”
Out now on Nikolai Duffy’s Like This press. “Ian Seed’s mysterious Threadbare Fables equate the storytelling impulse with existential loss. Insistently sad and compelling.” – Tim Allen
Nikolai Duffy’s Like This Press launches with Waterloo, by JT Welsch. More details, including how to buy a limited hand bound and stamped edition, can be found at the Like This site.
otherroom.org 