Nine Arches unveils autumn list with Atta's new collection

Poetry specialist Nine Arches Press has unveiled six titles for its autumn list, including a new collection by Dean Atta and an anthology inspired by the legacy of Sylvia Plath.

The Rugby-based indie will be releasing work that embraces personal, social and national histories, eco-poetics and climate change, as well as gender, sexuality, mental wellbeing and hope.

Kicking off the autumn list is Atta’s collection There is (still) love here, which explores relationships, love and loss, LGBTQ+ and Black history, pride and identity, dislocation and belonging. Atta is a Malika’s Poetry Kitchen member, National Poetry Day ambassador and LGBTQ+ History Month patron. His poems have been highly commended by the Forward Prizes for Poetry while his novel in verse, The Black Flamingo (Hodder Children’s Books), won the Stonewall Book Award and was shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal, Jhalak Prize, LA Times Book Prize and Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.

This will be followed by a debut collection from Sarala Estruch. After All We Have Travelled contains "distinctive and moving poems" about journeys, across continents and cultures, through decades of family history, enduring though grief and embarking into motherhood. 

Estruch’s debut pamphlet, Say, was published with flipped eye in 2021 and her poetry has appeared in the Guardian, New Statesman, Poetry Review and Wasafiri. She has also received commissions from the BBC, the National Trust, the Brontë Society and the Forward Arts Foundation.

October will bring a third collection, Living by Troubled Water by current National Canal Laureate Roy McFarlane, exploring the legacies of slavery and colonialism, place and displacement, social justice, equality, Black motherhood and family, art and the healing power of poetry as a witness to troubled times. 

McFarlane is a poet, playwright and former youth and community worker who is also Birmingham & Midlands Institute Poet in Residence, as well as a former Birmingham Poet Laureate. His previous collection, The Healing Next Time (Nine Arches Press), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and the Jhalak Prize.

After Sylvia, an anthology of poetry and essays inspired by and responding to the legacy of author and poet Sylvia Plath will also be published in October, to coincide with the 90th anniversary of her birth. It will be edited by poets Ian Humphreys and Sarah Corbett, and include commissioned poems and essays celebrating her writing and legacy.

November will bring two new titles from writers based in the north-east of England. Proof of Life on Earth, the debut collection by poet Degna Stone, explores human existence, matters of the heart in both the metaphorical and medical sense, race, the body and self, life and death. Stone is contributing editor at the Rialto and was awarded a Northern Writers’ Award for poetry in 2015. She is an alumni of The Complete Works and Obsidian Foundation, author of four poetry pamphlets, and her poetry has featured in anthologies including Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe), Filigree (Peepal Tree Press), and is forthcoming in More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry (Canongate Books).

Finally, November will also see publication of a new full collection, Bunny Girls by Costa-winning author and poet Angela Readman, following her 2016 collection The Book of Tides, also published by Nine Arches. The new collection mixes myth, wildness and magic realism, drawing on themes of girlhood and womanhood, ageing, anxiety, nature and sex. 

Readman is also the author of Something Like Breathing (And Other Stories), which was shortlisted for The Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and won the Costa Short Story Award 2013, the International Rubery Book Award and the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition.

“We are very proud to have built our list up over more than a decade and are grateful for the continued support of Arts Council England and the National Portfolio Organisation programme of funding, which has enabled us to grow steadily and continue to support and develop poets at all stages of their careers, whether emerging or established," Jane Commane, editor and director, commented.

"In 2021, eight of our books were on literary prize shortlists and longlists, including Daniel Sluman’s single window on the T S Eliot Prize shortlist, Cynthia Miller’s Honorifics on the Forward Prize for First Collection shortlist, and others were shortlisted for the Polari, Barbellion and Ledbury Munthe Second Collection Prizes. We are over the moon to present these 14 prescient, powerful and thought-provoking new poetry books in 2022 and hope readers will cherish them as much as we will enjoy publishing them."

The new titles follow on from the press’ spring and summer 2022 list, announced in December, which features new collections from returning Nine Arches poets, including Tom Sastry, Suzannah Evans, Julia Webb, Jessica Mookherjee and Tania Hershman, as well as new collections from poets Ramona Herdman and Peter Raynard.

A sixth volume of Nine Arches’ Primers series, which showcases emerging new voices in poetry, will also be published in July 2022, featuring Kym Deyn, Estelle Price and Fathima Zahra. It is edited by poet and recent Costa Book Awards judge Rishi Dastidar, who has been also mentoring them.