Primers Volume Seven by Katie Hale

Primers Volume Seven by Katie Hale

In 2023, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a seventh time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Katie Hale as selecting editor. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Jade Cuttle, Antonia Taylor and Laura Varnam. Primers Volume Seven now brings together a showcase from three distinctive poets, exploring everything from mudlarking and making a ‘mossary’, to the borderlands of conflicts and a bold retelling of an Old English epic. Through lively engagement with language, deep connection to place and time, and the unearthing the stories of myth, history and peoples, these revealing poems offer an insightful collection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices.

"The poems in Primers: Volume Seven take us to the heart of human experience: love, heritage, identity, grief, and humourThrough playful language and form, the poems excavate what it means to belong – to a nation, to an identity, to the earth. These are poems that speak out, whose voices are heard long after you close the book on the final one." – Katie Hale

"Primers: Volume Seven demonstrates the impressive reach of contemporary poetry - and for debut writers to show their dextrous ability to encompass and embrace the wider world in subjects close to their hearts. Whether that is in archaeology as a way of unearthing and carefully examining identity, as in Jade Cuttle's work, the fractured nature of nations, their stories and our inheritance in Antonia Taylor's poems, or the mother/monster at last given her larger-than-life voice in Laura Varnam's re-imaginings of Beowulf, this is new poetry at its most bracing, brilliant and best" – Jane Commane

Katie Hale is an internationally recognised poet and novelist, who has held residencies and fellowships around the world. Her novel, My Name is Monster, was shortlisted for the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award and has been translated into multiple languages, and her second pamphlet, Assembly Instructions, won the Munster Chapbook Prize. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, Hawthornden Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, and was awarded a 2021 Northern Debut Award for White Ghosts. She lives in Cumbria, where she also writes for theatre and immersive digital performance, and mentors emerging poets. Jane Commane is a poet, editor and publisher. Her first full-length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, for a decade she also worked in museums and archives and in 2016 she was chosen to join Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 writer development programme Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press, co-editor of Under the Radar magazine, and is co-author, with Jo Bell, of How to Be a Poet, a creative writing handbook (Nine Arches Press).In 2017, she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. In 2019, Jane was commissioned by Historic England and the Poetry Society as part of the Where Light Falls project to write a poem alongside community groups which was projected onto the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and viewed by over 15,000 people over three nights as part of a music, poetry and light installation. Jade Cuttle is a BBC New Generation Thinker and former Arts Commissioning Editor at The Times, completing AHRC-funded research into British Nature Poets of Colour at Cambridge. Since her Masters in Poetry at UEA she has won a Northern Writers Award, Arts Council and PRS Foundation grants, first place in BBC Proms Poetry Competition, National Poetry Competition longlisting and selection for Faber's Writing Chance. She's a Ledbury Critic and Poetry School tutor, anthologised by Carcanet and broadcast across the BBC. Her albums of poem-songs include Algal Bloom and Orchid Duets. www.jadecuttle.co.uk @JadeCuttle Antonia Taylor is a British Cypriot communications strategist and poet, and writes The Conversation, a newsletter on thoughtful marketing and creative living. She is currently working on her first collection of poems centred on diasporic identity, war, bi-culturalism, empire, womanhood, and violence. Her work has been featured in publications including Propel, Ambit, Harana, Marble Magazine, Dear Reader, Ink Sweat & Tears and Atrium as well as a new anthology of Reading poets from Two Rivers Press. Laura Varnam is the Lecturer in Old and Middle English Literature at University College, Oxford. She is working on a poetry collection inspired by the women of the Old English epic Beowulf. Her poems have been published in journals including Bad Lilies, Banshee Lit, Berlin Lit, Dust Poetry, MIR Online, Osmosis Press, Wet Grain, Under the Radar and in the anthology Gods & Monsters. Her poems have also been published with creative-critical essays in postmedieval and Annie Journal, and her academic work on late medieval literature and culture is widely published.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781913437985
ISBN 10	1913437981
Title	Primers Volume Seven
Author	Katie Hale
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Nine Arches Press
Year published	2024-08-08
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.