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.