I’m thrilled to be on the 2020 list of Nine Arches Press!
I’m in the company of a fantastic group of poets. I couldn’t be happier.
https://www.ninearchespress.com/about-us/news.html
“Midlands-based independent poetry publisher Nine Arches Press, which achieved Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation status in 2018, will publish eleven new books of poetry in 2020, from a mix of established and emerging poets from across the UK and across the world…
Acclaimed novelist Rosie Garland will also join the 2020 list in October with her third full collection of poems What Girls Do in the Dark, a book alive with galactic, glimmering energy. Rosie’s award-winning short and long fiction, poems and essays have been widely anthologised and in 2019 she was selected by Val McDermid as one of the 10 most compelling LGBTQI+ writers working in the UK.”
Image: Poets confirmed for the Nine Arches Press 2020 list
Top: l-r: Jennifer Wong, Rishi Dastidar, Abegail Morley, Geraldine Clarkson, Nina Mingya Powles.
Bottom: l-r: Peter Kahn, Maria Taylor, Gregory Leadbetter, Rosie Garland, Kate Fox
Flapjack Press, 2016
I wish to express heartfelt gratitude to Char March for her generous editorial input, without which this collection would be far weaker.
And to Ruth Fainlight, for her inspiring suggestion that ‘As In Judy’ would make a great title.
‘The reason I love Rosie’s work so much is that she provides food for thought. She addresses issues that need addressing, and imagines the inner and outer landscapes we all inhabit with eloquence and grace. Shed your light, Rosie.’ David Hoyle 2016
A poem from the collection:
At night, she leaps and does not land. Spreads her arms and soars
above the fenced and neatly weeded garden. Her dreams
are practice sessions where she lifts cars, sees through walls, fights
dragons. She is a pirate captain, a queen, a horse. She is neither girl
nor boy: the distinctions are irrelevant when her small body encompasses
male and female; human, beast. A turbulent child figure-heading
the prow of her beaked ship, she buckles on armour, rescues
princesses from charming princes and spinning wheels,
fearless of the shapes beneath the bed. Too soon
she hears the summons: Breakfast! Now!
Blinks this world into focus. Hushes battle cries,
sheathes her sword between the pages of her book.
Every bedtime her mother tucks in
the sheet of marriage, husband, children: tucks it in tight.
© Rosie Garland 2016
Online with Facebook Live
Saturday, 9 January 2021 4:00 pm EST, 1:00 pm PST, 9:00 pm UK
Price: free
Celebrate the publication of Escape Wheel, great weather for MEDIA’s latest anthology of poetry and short fiction. Each month we showcase a range of contributors in a live international event.
The readings will be streamed live to our Facebook page
JANUARY GUESTS
Lisa V. Conway (NYC), Rich Ferguson (Los Angeles), Rosie Garland (Manchester, UK), J. Miller (China), stephanie roberts (Canada), Peggy Robles-Alvarado (NYC), Alex Vigue (Vancouver, Washington), Gina Williams (Lake Oswego, Oregon)
Hosted by Lyndsey Ellis
"Escape Wheel" is a dynamic collection of contemporary poetry and fiction from established and emerging writers across the United States and beyond.
Publication day: What Girls Do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press)
Rosie Garland’s dauntless and enthralling new poetry collection, What Girls Do in the Dark, invites us to leap into deep space - across a universe where light, names, place and time become the “distance between things that stand like sisters”. We venture through strange night-time transformations, between northerly points and places of being and not-being. In a twilight alive with glimmering energy, we discover not just outer-space, but inner space – where the body and the self are made of infinite galaxies, illuminated for the briefest blink of a life.
Garland’s poetry is rooted in the realm of gothic imagination, mythology and the uncanny. It contains magnitudes and magic, feminist fables starstruck with science and astronomy. Like comets, these dazzling poems explore containment, liberation, near-misses, extinction, and ultimately, they ask what it means to escape the pull of gravity and blaze your own bright, all-consuming and astonishing path.
£9.99 – available now
ISBN: 978-1-913437-05-3
eISBN: 978-1-913437-06-0
Price £9.99
Date: 15th October 2020
Format: Paperback
Extent: 72 pp
The Bath Hotel,
66 Victoria St,
Sheffield. S3 7QL
7.30pm
£4
This is my Sheffield launch of ‘As In Judy’ – my new poetry collection with Flapjack Press. It’s my first solo poetry publication since 2012. I’m really excited: I’ve had wonderful editing from Char March, and both John Hyatt and David Hoyle have made blushingly complimentary comments about the poems.
Love hearing and meeting great poets? It’s second Tuesdays at Writers in The Bath
With special guests Rosie Garland & Stephanie Bowgett
Welcome to our final programme of 2016 - and we’re going out not with a bang but a dazzling conflagration (I hope not literally - the open fire is usually well behaved) but in terms of the brilliance of our awe-inspiring guests.
We’re honoured to have two writers who have both made massive contributions in diverse ways to literature and entertainment in the north of England. Both are making significant journeys to reach us, so let’s turn out in force to welcome them to the warmth of The Bath.
I’m honoured – my essay ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ is included in this wonderful collection! (Nine Arches Press, ed Ian Humphreys)
‘What motivates poets in the 21st century? How do they find their voice? What themes and subject matters inspire them? How do they cope with set-backs and deal with success? What keeps them writing?
In Why I Write Poetry twenty-five contemporary poets reflect with insight, wit and wisdom on the writing life, each offering their distinctive take on what inspires and spurs them on to write poetry. Also - individual writing prompts to help you create your own new poetry.’
https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/why-i-write-poetry.html
A wonderful way to end a difficult year – ‘What Girls Do in the Dark’ selected by Pippa Hennessy as a Poetry Society Best Book of the Year!
https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poetry-news-best-books-of-the-year/
“Finally, Rosie Garland’s What Girls Do in the Dark (Nine Arches) – Garland is a true gothic polymath. This is reflected in her poetry, which roams through astrophysics, war zones, quantum theory, human biology, history, relationships and non-relationships, and more. The poems in What Girls Do in the Dark take this variety to extremes, yet somehow manage to bring concrete details and abstract ideas from all these areas together into a coherent, explosive, dazzling, gorgeous whole.”
– Pippa Hennessy is a bookseller at Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham.
Thank you Henry Normal for selecting What Girls Do in the Dark for Northern Soul’s Best Reads of 2021!
Books: Northern Soul’s Best Reads of 2021
Henry Normal, poet and writer
What Girls do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press) by Rosie Garland is my favourite poetry book of the year. Garland was a singer in the 1980s post-punk/goth band The March Violets. More recently, she’s established herself as a poet and novelist with several titles. I had the honour to read with her in Birmingham a while back, so when her new collection was released I was already interested. From the first poem I was captivated. She has a way of keeping one foot tentatively in the world we know with the other searching for a foothold in an unseen or imaginary world. I was inspired and transported by these poems in a way I’ve not experienced since first getting excited by the possibilities of poetry in my teens. I suspect it would not be good form to choose one of my poetry books for this feature but even if it was, I would choose Garland’s What Girls do in the Dark.
https://www.northernsoul.me.uk/books-northern-souls-best-reads-of-2021/
Thank you Vive le Rock magazine, for the great feature on The March Violets!
https://vivelerock.net/product/vive-le-rock-84-motorhead-girlschool-preorder/
Well, look at what happened on Record Store Day UK on July 17th 2021!
The March Violets ‘Big Soul Kiss’ - all the 1980s BBC Sessions in one place.
And PURPLE vinyl too #RSD21 #rsddrops
UPDATE – the entire pressing sold out in 24 hours. Jungle Records are releasing a CD version in 2022… plus more releases planned. Watch this space!
https://www.facebook.com/JungleRecords/