We sit down with Al Anderson from Housmans Bookshop to talk about the history of radical bookselling, the role of poetry in the contemporary left and what community means.

As part of a new series of interviews, we are sitting down with various editors of small presses to develop community and peer-to-peer conversations, offering insight into the precarious world of independent publishing and sharing resources. 

To kick the series off our editor Kashif Sharma-Patel speaks to Jess Chandler of Prototype.

Sophie Seita speaks about working across multiple artistic forms, the ethical imperative of queer, feminist practice, and the provisional approach which undergirds her work across visual art, text and performance, as found in her book Lessons of Decal (The87Press, 2023).

Gareth Farmer speaks to us about his book Kerf (the87press, 2022) in a wide-ranging conversation covering his anarchic neo-modernist tendencies, developments in autism poetics, and the role of evasiveness in poetics. We also touch upon Vladimir Mayakovksy, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and poetic form. 

Aaron Kent talks about fictionalised narratives of the self in The Working Classic, his health struggles in the context of late capitalism and how he started Broken Sleep Books. 

Rogelio Braga sits down with editor Kashif Sharma-Patel to talk about the politics of language, migrant bodies and the authoritarian regime in the Philippines

Danny Hayward sits down with our editor Kashif Sharma-Patel to talk about (in)articulacy, exhaustion and disintegration, and the changes in poetry, politics and speech in the 21st Century

We sat down to talk with David Grundy about his recent book A True Account delving into the relationship between poetry and politics in the wake of the 2010 student protests, as well as touching on the themes of aesthetic form, the Black Radical Tradition and Corbynism.

Jessica Widner’s Interiors, published by the 87 Press, is a novel that delves into the psychological and philosophical constraints of social and romantic relationships. Widner sits down with our editor Kashif Sharma-Patel to talk about psychoanalytic frameworks, the role of speech and not-saying, as well as the cultural significance of wine.

In the following conversation I sit down with both writer and translator where we discuss the trilingual nature of the book — Spanish, Taino and Yoruba — the embodied history of the Caribbean and the importance of myth, memory and ritual

Jeet Thayil is a prominent novelist, poet and editor based in India. He recently edited The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, a mammoth anthology of Indian poetry written in English. In the conversation Kashif talks with Jeet about the editorial process, the wider context of Indian poetry with its myriad languages, the question of poetic lineage, and the relationship between Thayil’s prosaic and poetic writing practice.

Three new poems by Gonçalo Lamas: ‘it doesn’t get more historical materialism / than this totally meaningless same / we call same.’

From the collection Poppy, Joseph Minden’s poems incorporate text from various historical and colonial documents to interrogate British cultural memory and the constitution of whiteness

Three new poems by poet-artist Cole Denyer: ‘my pupil dilate as blink rate increases / as teeth which hang-up in gurgles’

These poems by Aaron Kent are written on the cusp of sleep, the phantasmagorical state between dream and wake, as the author battles chronic insomnia and night terrors. The surrealists saw Automatic Writing as a way to suppress conscious control of art; Kent attempts to remove conscious control over his art in the first draft, and then allow it to re-emerge as he edits the work in a fully awake state.

John Wilkinson’s Sky-Blue is a meditation on the ubiquity of singularity, specifically the presence of Tom Raworth.

A new poem from Arab Surrealist Abdul Kader El-Janabi: ‘The poem is a drum / At the whim of the madmen’

In the latest installment of our podcast series Kat Addis discusses her experimental translations of Petrarch in Space Parsley.

In our latest podcast Karenjit Sandhu talks about the process of writing poetry in response to the artwork of pioneering Hungarian-Indian modernist Amrita Sher-Gil in her book young girls! (the87press, 2021), with detours through themes such as 90s girlhood, performance practice, and cultural difference.

We are joined this episode by Sarona Abuaker who takes us through Palestinian resistance, displacement and the role of creative expression in her book Why so few women on the street at night.

For our first foray into podcasting please enjoy this conversation between Luke Roberts and Kashif Sharma-Patel discussing Luke’s new book Home Radio, talking genre, small press culture and E.P. Thompson amongst other things.

Seven, longish poems from Gareth Farmer's 2020 sequence, Strategic Forms or, 74 Questions; 92 Solutions.

A new poem from Lotte L.S.

A poem performance with an improv backing band: ‘An expulsion of the language and symbolic detritus of a certain rancid English imaginary.’

Poems excerpted from Now, Voyager, just out from Veer Books.