Category: Bad Betty Press

No space for tiny dying

~ oxfordbrookesuni

there is no moon tonight. this has its consequence. for
you. it is something akin to glimpsing the flight path of
monsters. sleeplessness is to grieve in small sections.
dust by chisel. minutiae explosions happen to the right
of your face. a communion of worry dolls accompany
your skull. wince upon orbit. you’re awake & twitching
over gravity. how wordlessly you splinter in the dark.
supposing you only have forty years left to lick parch-
pink rock? devour soil. circling its bounty desperate
brown. in the lost hours you float guilty. eating your own
goodbye. now invisible. now from a teaspoon. the
connection to survive is always hold me. let us last it out.

by Jess Murrain

from One Woman-Horse Show, Bad Betty Press, May 2022

Jess Murrain is a queer poet of British-Caribbean heritage working mainly in performance, live art and theatre. She won the Ledbury Poetry Competition 2021 and the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry 2023. Her wider practice explores film-poetry and she is one of Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 21/22. She is also co-founder of ‘Theatre with Legs’, an experimental company based in Bradford and London. One Woman- Horse Show is her debut poetry pamphlet.

Bad Betty is an independent small press, committed to publishing the most exciting, innovative new poetry in the UK and abroad, showcasing stories less often told and voices less often heard. Bad Betty is the winner of the 2022 Michael Marks Publishers’ Award, and a regional finalist for the 2023 British Book Awards Small Press of the Year. Their books include five Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice selections, a Michael Marks Pamphlet Award winner, a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, and longlistees for the Laurel Prize and Polari First Book Prize. Bad Betty produces live poetry events across the UK, and is supported by Arts Council England.

‘The epitome of bold independence, Bad Betty publishes books of a rare breed.’ The Big Issue

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Landscape

~ oxfordbrookesuni

After Lili Elbe

In the history of medical arts I do not exist.
The archive is destroyed.

A simple white frame illuminates my skin.

Hands clasped, neck and jaw one continual line,
painted bow mouth and my eye drawn                

to the muscles in my face, the cut of this shirt,
the false unevenness of these breasts.

This landscape is a brute.

It is not with my brain, not with my eyes,
not my hands that I want to create

but with my heart and with my blood.
Lay your body over mine like a stencil,

know that nothing stranger will ever happen,
that nothing stranger could.


by Nicola Bray                                


If you’re interested in finding out more about the Poetry Centre’s work, including our international poetry competition, judged this year by Caroline Bird, and news of two new ignitionpress pamphlets launching next month, please sign up to receive our newsletter. You can read the latest newsletter on this page, and follow us on social media – we’re @brookespoetry.

‘Landscape’ is copyright © Nicola Bray, 2021, and is reprinted here from Boi (Bad Betty Press, 2021) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet on the press website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

In Boi, Nicola Bray recasts gender as poetry, as a grounding, as blurred ink, slippery and fishlike. This speaker reminds us that selfhood is not a mast to which we are tied, but the waves we traverse, still or stormy, pulling us under, lifting us up. The journey here speaks to predecessors, to an ancient story with no archive. Bray’s linguistic and narrative art is both precise and instinctive: we feel our way through it, knowing by touch rather than sight, that we have been here before.

Find out more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Nicola Bray lives in London where she graduated from Royal Holloway’s Creative Writing MA. Her poems were highly commended in the 2015 Faber New Poets scheme and in 2017 she was selected for the inaugural Poetry London mentoring scheme. Boi (Bad Betty Press) is her debut pamphlet.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, born in 2017 and run by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. Our authors include Gboyega Odubanjo, Anja Konig, Charlotte Geater, Susannah Dickey, Tanatsei Gambura, Matthew Haigh, Kirsten Luckins and Tom Bland. Our books include PBS Pamphlet Choices, Poetry School Books of the Year, a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, Laurel Prize longlistees and BAMB Readers Award shortlistees. We’ve been thrice shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award, named The Book Hive’s Indie Publisher of the Month, and described by The Big Issue as ‘the epitome of bold independence’.

Find out more about our books on our website and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Dear Sophie, 14th November

~ oxfordbrookesuni

Dear Sophie,                         
14th November

A sunspot
            sharpens a shadow on the gate
making me see
                          both shadow
                                                  and gate.

You sit on the old sofa.
The leather arms cool under your skin.

A sunspot
            through the yellow curtains
making me see
                            you
                                    are
                                            made of gold.

The weather changes.
Clouds
take away the gold
and the gate.

Can we talk about the dark that’s coming? 

Kirsten Luckins


If you haven’t yet signed up to the Poetry Centre’s new monthly newsletter, please do! The first newsletter included details of our Fire Up Your Poetry Practice course designed to help you get your poetry published (and there are still a couple of places available for upcoming sessions). You can sign up to receive the newsletter via this page. You can also follow us on social media (links at the foot of this message).

And with the launch of a new website, we have also relocated our archive of Weekly Poems, which stretches back to 2007! You can now find them on our dedicated pages.

‘Dear Sophie, 14th November’ is copyright © Kirsten Luckins, 2021, and is reprinted here from Passerine (Bad Betty Press, 2021) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the book and buy a copy from the press website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

In Passerine, Kirsten Luckins’ epistolary poems distill the daily process of grieving, healing, remembering, through nature’s wild and atomic industry. Reading this collection is like pressing your ear to the ground to hear the orchestra of the world: alive with buzzing hum and beating wing; death, all the while, lurking on the doorstep. The language is lush, tack-sharp and playful, capturing both the contradictions of being in and of the world, and the rare honesty of a true and fierce friendship. It’s this friendship that binds the collection: a golden thread of sunlight.

Find out more about Passerine on the Bad Betty website.

Kirsten Luckins is a poet, performer, and creative producer who lives on the North East coast, as close to the sea as possible. Her practice is centred on poetry but driven by playfulness, collaboration and experimentation, so encompasses film, collage and text art, performance and theatre-making. She has toured two award-nominated spoken word shows, and worked as dramaturg to many poets and projects, including the award-winning The Empathy Experiment. She is artistic director of the Tees Women Poets collective, and co-founder of the Celebrating Change digital storytelling project where she teaches creative memoir writing. Passerine is her third collection.

You can read more about Kirsten’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, born in 2017 and run by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. Our authors include Gboyega Odubanjo, Anja Konig, Charlotte Geater, Susannah Dickey, Tanatsei Gambura, Matthew Haigh, Kirsten Luckins and Tom Bland. Our books include PBS Pamphlet Choices, Poetry School Books of the Year, a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, Laurel Prize longlistees and BAMB Readers Award shortlistees. We’ve been thrice shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award, named The Book Hive’s Indie Publisher of the Month, and described by The Big Issue as ‘the epitome of bold independence’. Find out more about our books here and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

A Bitter Plum

~ oxfordbrookesuni

See this plum. See how this plum fits my mouth;
its furry pit revolves between my tongue until I spit it out.
I use the back of my hand to wipe my lips which wait for—                                                           

Actually my love, it’s not a plum but a stone. See how this stone
fits the palm of that little brown girl’s hand as she plays along the sea’s
edge. Isn’t she so pretty, the way she holds it with such—                                                           

Forgive me, this is really inexcusable of me. It’s not a stone
but a bullet. See how this bullet travels through air, enters the abdomen
of that man with the green vest and heavy satchel—not old, not young,
with the beautiful brown eyes.                                                           

This isn’t a poem about how that bullet fit my mouth, fit the palm
of that little brown girl’s hand as she played along the sea’s edge
and entered the abdomen of that man with the green vest and heavy satchel—
not old, not young, with the beautiful brown eyes.                                                           

It’s a much, much more tangled story.

by S. Niroshini        

Two notes from the Poetry Centre: this evening (Thursday 21 April), join us and Granta Poetry as we bring together the acclaimed Canadian poet Sylvia Legris and our colleague, award-winning poet Mary Jean Chan, in a joint reading and conversation. Hosted by poet and Granta editor Rachael Allen, the event is online and starts at 7pm. To find out more and register, please visit this Zoom link.

This semester the Centre is showcasing the research being carried out by Dr Eric White into the American avant-gardes, and we invite you to join us! ‘Shaking the Lights’ is a series of free digital events, open to all, and continues on Tuesday 26 April with an online lunchtime discussion group looking at poetry by Kathleen Tankersley Young. You can register for the event and find copies of the poems we’ll talk about on the Poetry Centre website.  

‘A Bitter Plum’ is copyright © S. Niroshini, 2021, and is reprinted here from Darling Girl (Bad Betty Press, 2021) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy from the press website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

Niroshini’s poems live at the intersection of beauty, history and violence. They embody the stillness within the maelstrom required to reclaim oneself from unlawful ownership, from colonial and gender-based trauma. We find ourselves on a rooftop in Colombo, in Neruda’s latrine, submerged in the waters of the Indian Ocean, and on the battlefield with Kali, imagined as a mother in conversation with her daughter. The voices contained within each tableau are tenderly devastating, entreating girls, like the gods, to call out their one thousand and eight names.

Find out more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

S. Niroshini is a writer and poet based in London. She received Third Prize in the Poetry London Prize 2020 and a London Writers Award for Literary Fiction. Born in Sri Lanka, she was educated in Colombo, Melbourne and Oxford and worked as a solicitor before starting to write poetry, fiction and essays. Darling Girl is her first pamphlet (Bad Betty, 2021). 

You can find out more about Niroshini’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, born in 2017 and run by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. Our authors include Gboyega Odubanjo, Anja Konig, Charlotte Geater, Susannah Dickey, Tanatsei Gambura, Matthew Haigh, Kirsten Luckins and Tom Bland. Our books include PBS Pamphlet Choices, Poetry School Books of the Year, a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, Laurel Prize longlistees and BAMB Readers Award shortlistees. We’ve been thrice shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award, named The Book Hive’s Indie Publisher of the Month, and described by The Big Issue as ‘the epitome of bold independence’. Find out more about our books here and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Back Story

~ Thomas

So I made myself a seagull
dyed everything grey and white
glued sexless feathers to a Weetabix box
and circled the school carpark                                                           

bombing children with lip-shaped
sweets if I liked them
and smaller creatures’ eggs
if I didn’t                                                           

hovered by the gates studying
how girls in bunches became bananas
still green and hard
but not as hard as me                                                           

I was an unblinking seagull
always out of reach
I was the chip-stealer
the sky-klaxon                                                           

a squawk so loud
nobody would want
to hurt me
couldn’t if they tried                                                   

and I beat my wings
till the white vans and boys
in their bad uniforms
blew out out out to sea

by Helen Bowell

Happy World Poetry Day! It’s a busy week for the Poetry Centre and we invite you to join us for one (or both!) of the events we have coming up. Tomorrow (Tuesday) from 6-7pm online, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Showcase will gather together Brookes poets from undergraduate to PhD level to share a sample of their work. Join us to hear a wonderful range of writing. To register and receive the Zoom link, please visit this Zoom page.

Then on Friday from 7-8pm online, as part of the university’s Creative Industries Festival, we’ll be hosting a panel about independent poetry presses. We’ll be in conversation with three of the leading indie presses in the UK: Bad Betty Press, represented by Amy Acre; Out-Spoken Press (Anthony Anaxagorou); and Nine Arches Press, represented by Jane Commane. We’ll be discussing topics such as how presses select poets, editorial policy, funding models, markets and sales, and how we enable people from a broader range of backgrounds to get involved in publishing. To register to attend, visit this Zoom page.

‘Back Story’ is copyright © Helen Bowell, 2022, and is reprinted here from The Barman (Bad Betty Press, 2022) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet on the  press website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

Helen Bowell and The Barman form a relationship from which you won’t easily look away. This debut pamphlet is a sharp, witty exploration of the nuances of a sometimes reluctant co-dependency. At times it feels like you are the third housemate, unashamedly pressing your ear to the wall to hear conversations as intimate as they are absurd. Bowell deftly interrogates what it means to feel both othered and adored, comfortable and wary. The Barman is an introduction to a poetic voice unique in its ability to subtly express its desires, leaving enough room for the reader to find parts of themselves in the world it creates.

You can read more about The Barman and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Helen Bowell is a poet, critic and producer based in London. She is a co-director of Dead [Women] Poets Society, a live literature organisation which ‘resurrects’ women poets of the past. Helen is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and an alumna of The Writing Squad, Roundhouse Poetry Collective, London Writers Awards and London Library Emerging Writers Programme. Her work has appeared in Magma, The North, Poetry Wales, Ambit, harana poetry and elsewhere. Since 2017, she has worked at The Poetry Society.

You can read more about Helen’s work on her website, follow her on Twitter and watch her read from her work in this Creative Future Writers’ Award video.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, born in 2017 and run by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. Our authors include Gboyega Odubanjo, Anja Konig, Charlotte Geater, Susannah Dickey, Tanatsei Gambura, Matthew Haigh, Kirsten Luckins and Tom Bland. Our books include PBS Pamphlet Choices, Poetry School Books of the Year, a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, Laurel Prize longlistees and BAMB Readers Award shortlistees. We’ve been thrice shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publishers Award, named The Book Hive’s Indie Publisher of the Month, and described by The Big Issue as ‘the epitome of bold independence’. Find out more about our books  here and follow Bad Betty on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Cause of Death

~ oxfordbrookesuni

We do not
discuss politics
at the dining table.
We might stab
it with a fork,
lift it to a trembling
mouth and swallow.
We nudge it
to the edge
of our plates,
look past it,
scrub the plates with
barbed wire,
slit our hands,
drain our blood
in the sink.                                                           

These hunger strikes
are a shovel in a graveyard.
Citizen is the epitaph.
Cause of death is silence;
cause of death is a scream.
Somewhere between the two
my country buries me. 

by Tanatsei Gambura

This semester the Poetry Centre is showcasing the research being carried out by Dr Eric White into the American avant-gardes, and we invite you to join us! ‘Shaking the Lights’ is a series of free digital events, open to all, and beginning this Thursday 24 February with an online lunchtime discussion group looking at poetry by Langston Hughes. You can find details of that event and the others in the series on the Poetry Centre website. 

‘Cause of Death’ is copyright © Tanatsei Gambura, 2021, and is reprinted here from Things I Have Forgotten Before (Bad Betty Press, 2021) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy from the press website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

Brick by brick, Tanatsei Gambura dismantles walls of silence to show us the story behind the story: in a township room in 80s Harare, a straße in Bonn, an otherplace locked into grandmothers’ hips. In her pamphlet, Things I Have Forgotten Before, we find lost brothers, predatory officers, the smiles of women on Fair & Lovely tubes, the concomitance of personal and national cataclysms. We confront our collusion in collective forgetfulness, and the painful but necessary process of rememory. Assured and inventive, Gambura reminds us that words are tools for worldbuilding, engineering language with startling grace.

Find out more about the pamphlet on the Bad Betty Press website, and you can watch her read another poem from her collection via The Poetry Archive.

Tanatsei Gambura is a poet, intermedia artist, and cultural practitioner working transnationally. Her debut pamphlet Things I Have Forgotten Before (Bad Betty, 2021), from which this poem is taken, was the Poetry Book Society’s Autumn 2021 Pamphlet Choice. Tanatsei is the runner-up to the inaugural Amsterdam Open Book Prize (2020), a Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize longlistee (2020), and a recipient of the Library Of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD) and Savannah Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) Writing Residency (2021). She is an alumnus of the British Council residency, These Images are Stories, the inaugural Obsidian Foundation Writer’s Retreat, and the Writerz & Scribez Griot’s Well residency.

Read more about Tanatsei’s work on her website.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, born in 2017 and run by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. Our authors include Gboyega Odubanjo, Anja Konig, Charlotte Geater, Susannah Dickey, Tanatsei Gambura, Matthew Haigh, Kirsten Luckins and Tom Bland. Our books include PBS Pamphlet Choices, Poetry School Books of the Year, a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, Laurel Prize longlistees and BAMB Readers Award shortlistees. We’ve been thrice shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publishers Award, named The Book Hive’s Indie Publisher of the Month, and described by The Big Issue as ‘the epitome of bold independence’. Find out more about our books here and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Buddy

~ oxfordbrookesuni

He moulds a hand into my right shoulder
to soften the nervous muscle,                                                           

the friction between open mouth and stubbled cheek
revealing the truth in how much I’ve learnt                                                           

to find pleasure in the things that fight back.
I explore his tall, his swimmer lean,                                                           

enjoy touch as in gentle not penetrating,
let my body be a Friday afternoon.                                                           

In between exhales he calls me
stupid names like bro or buddy                                                           

as part of the experiment,
to be a sounding board of sorts,                                                           

to help make peace with old faces
who couldn’t possibly give back.

by Troy Cabida

Do you know a keen writer aged 16 or under? Could they write a terrific science poem? If so, please encourage them to enter this year’s IF Oxford poetry competition for young people! The competition is open to any young writer in the UK and is judged in three age categories (one of the judges is Dr Niall Munro, Poetry Centre Director). The winning poem and two runners-up from each age category will be performed at a special event at IF Oxford, the Science and Ideas Festival in October 2021. Winning poems will be published online and in a printed anthology. Other prizes will include science kits and books. The deadline is 11 June. For more details, visit the IF Oxford website.

‘Buddy’ is copyright © Troy Cabida, 2020 and is reprinted here from War Dove (Bad Betty Press, 2020) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

Troy Cabida’s War Dove is a story of profound growth, of growing into oneself, of knowing tenderness, not as a skin to be sloughed on the way to maturity but a central muscle beating vital strength into the body. Cabida’s poetry refracts mental and emotional wellbeing through a kaleidoscope of cultural identities. This dove learns to soar and sway, heal and harden like ‘honey / crystallised and unflinching’. You can find out more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Troy Cabida (b. 1995) is a London-based Filipino poet. He is a former member of the Barbican Young Poets and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, and a producer for open mic night Poetry and Shaah. His poems have appeared in bath magg, TAYO, harana, Bukambibig, Cha and Macmillan. War Dove (Bad Betty Press) is his debut pamphlet. Find out more about Troy’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, founded in 2017 by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. We love writing that is bad (in the Foxy Brown sense) and beautiful (‘a Betty’ in 90s slang). We love the strange, raw and risk-taking. We believe strongly in art’s capacity to challenge its own definition, to curve away from the norm, making space for more and varied voices. Find out more about our books on our website and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

a black cloth over your face isn’t the same as night

~ oxfordbrookesuni

I used up the summer controlling people
[in a video game]. I made him handsome
and tall and I made her patent the peanut
-size sheath that keeps umbrellas open that keeps
them from collapse. She got picked up for work in
a mint green Datsun each morning and one day
I made him drop his soft wallet in the street
and I made her DING DING hurtle after him
like a sneeze. I watched their nailless fingers touch
and then I intervened because god! think of
a pursuit less fruitful than affinity!
I made them go about their days. He married
a dentist and she died young and he ran down
his years evading the diagnoses of
bruxism and she died young. Neither handed
the damp debasement of a life spent wanting.
Their lives were lilac aldehyde there was no
asbestos slung behind their walls. Now Autumn                                                                                               

is here and I need a life soft-edged with heart
motif a small girl’s ring-bound notebook. I need
insight. It oozes from the corners navy
damp DING DING You’re a product of your choices
you’re a totem pole you’re hunger on top of
caprice on top of the grazed cheeks of debauched
nights spent folded your face in the gravel like
an animal. I decide to fix things I
streamline my practices. I wear a yellow
mini dress in an always temperate clime.
My house is pristine now and if not I’ll eat
or fuck or swim to lessen the scores of it
all. I’ll buy a dog and then I’ll teach that dog
to die and when it does my children will be
prepared for everything in the world and then
– when my life is panacea smooth – a new
person will enter the game through the back door
DING DING yes it is attainment and we’ll dance.
We’ll dance to the open fire on the stove
top to the graceless wordless music to all
the things I mistook for the sky and we’ll dance
to the entombed cockatoo moans of my dog
– buried neat beneath the geranium bush.

by Susannah Dickey

The latest Poetry Centre podcast is now live! Poet celeste doaks talks about her wonderful chapbook American Herstory (Backbone Press, 2019), which explores Michelle Obama’s time in the White House and her choice of artwork for the White House walls! Listen via our website or the usual podcast providers.

‘a black cloth over your face isn’t the same as night’ is copyright © Susannah Dickey, 2020 and is reprinted here from bloodthirsty for marriage (Bad Betty Press, 2020) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

There is an arresting and profound specificity to Susannah Dickey’s astute tragicomedy, in which the sky is ‘the colour of a cous cous salad’, gods rub shoulders with video game characters and everyone is enslaved to desire.

Corrupting the classically male, reportedly frivolous hendecasyllabic form, Dickey forges a register that feels both ancient and millennial. At the centre of this work beats a star-bright pain, seen through the poems’ breezy vacillations and squandered love, crushed to a shimmer. You can find out more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Susannah Dickey is the author of three pamphlets, bloodthirsty for marriage (Bad Betty Press, 2020), I had some very slight concerns and genuine human values (The Lifeboat). Her first novel, Tennis Lessons, was published in July 2020 by Doubleday. You can follow Susannah on Twitter.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, founded in 2017 by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. We love writing that is bad (in the Foxy Brown sense) and beautiful (‘a Betty’ in 90s slang). We love the strange, raw and risk-taking. We believe strongly in art’s capacity to challenge its own definition, to curve away from the norm, making space for more and varied voices. Find out more about our books on our website and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

COMPLAINING

~ oxfordbrookesuni

After Terrance Hayes
                       

If it wasn’t for your constant moaning,

I may have taken you seriously. You ask me if oiling

engines would have been more worthwhile. There is still so long

for you to go, and you’re stuck trying to be honest and plain

in your work, wondering if your lamp

is worth the match that failed to light it, mapping

your way through your mental list of excuses. Your peers are icons

not because they are valuable and you are a failing coin,

but because they are good at carrying on. Yet here you are, nailing

yourself to a spaghetti stick cross, impaling

your loins with a toothpick. Child, behave. Stop pretending your task is the mouth of a lion.
                                                           

by Gabriel Àkámọ́

News from the Poetry Centre: one of our recent ignitionpress pamphlets, Ripe by Isabelle Baafi, was selected as the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2021! You can read more about the pamphlet, hear Isabelle talk about it, and buy a copy on our website. Ripe was launched alongside two other pamphlets: Lung Iron by Daniel Fraser and Kostya Tsolakis’s Ephebos – they are also both available from our site.

‘COMPLAINING’ is copyright © Gabriel Àkámọ́, 2020 and is reprinted here from At the Speed of Dark (Bad Betty Press, 2020) by permission of Bad Betty Press. You can read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Notes from Bad Betty Press:

In At the Speed of Dark, Gabriel Àkámọ́ pits the mind’s chiaroscuro against the many shades of grey that make up our reality. These questioning poems hold empiricism and faith, gravity and progress in the balance. Formally expansive, they play on the equivocation of white space, its ‘faux-quirky false irony’. Like an epiphany lost on waking, they entreat us to slow down, ‘reclaiming time, clawing back at the clearness of sky.’ Read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty website.

Gabriel Àkámọ́ is a Nigerian-British poet, actor, facilitator, and creative producer. He has worked with organisations including Rich Mix, Roundhouse and WIRED Next Generation, been commissioned by institutions such as the Southbank Centre, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Academy of Arts, and been a speaker at Gresham College. Festival performances include Lovebox and Bestival, and Festival Kometa in Riga, Latvia. He is a proud Barbican Young Poet alumnus, National Youth Theatre alumnus, and a former Roundhouse Resident Artist (2016-17) with Spit the Atom Poetry Collective. You can read more about Gabriel’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, founded in 2017 by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. We love writing that is bad (in the Foxy Brown sense) and beautiful (‘a Betty’ in 90s slang). We love the strange, raw and risk-taking. We believe strongly in art’s capacity to challenge its own definition, to curve away from the norm, making space for more and varied voices. Find out more about our books on  our website and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

nonrestorative sleep

~ oxfordbrookesuni


& sometimes this sick can be beautiful
I suck in air wake up all stomach all breath 

                                          can I tell you
how each minute of dead quiet morning
will taste of course I can I have
almost all night awake in my lungs
I am a space I practice expanding
often I make rooms I fill them up
with pain can I fill you 

             up to survive
is to name everything you own 

if it hurts name it
                                  beautiful 

pain flowers in my back

all night all over
a beautiful boy exists    

his breath filling me
    up to name him 

beautiful beautiful boy

by William Gee

This is the final Weekly Poem before a Christmas break. We wish you and your family all the very best for the holidays and look forward to sharing more poems with you from early January!

We were delighted to learn recently that one of our new ignitionpress pamphlets, Ripe by Isabelle Baafi, has been selected as the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2021! You can read more about the pamphlet, hear Isabelle talk about it, and buy a copy on our website. You can also still watch the online launch of Ripe, which we featured alongside two other exciting pamphlets: Lung Iron by Daniel Fraser and Ephebos by Kostya Tsolakis. Find out more about them on the website.

‘nonrestorative sleep’ is copyright © William Gee, 2020. It is reprinted from Rheuma, published by Bad Betty Press by permission of the publisher. You can read about the pamphlet on the Bad Betty Press website. 

William Gee’s breathtaking, disruptive debut is written in the language of the body. A song from somewhere deep within, it sings of what the body remembers, how it rebels. These are dizzying poems, opening up and obscuring, primal and elusive. To read them is to understand the precariousness and the violence of love, of living with secrets, of being in a body that won’t conform. The pamphlet was chosen as the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2020.

You can read more about William’s pamphlet and buy a copy on the Bad Betty Press website, and follow William on Twitter.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, founded in 2017 by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. We love writing that is bad (in the Foxy Brown sense) and beautiful (‘a Betty’ in 90s slang). We love the strange, raw and risk-taking. We believe strongly in art’s capacity to challenge its own definition, to curve away from the norm, making space for more and varied voices. Find out more about our books on our website and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.