Calling a Wolf a Wolf – Kaveh Akbar
Alice James Books, 2017

Taking the form of a personal narrative that follows a path through addiction and to recovery, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is the much-anticipated debut collection from Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar. Originally published by Alice James Books in the USA in September 2017, a UK version was released by Penguin Books in January 2018.

Akbar has revealed that this collection was his way of processing what he experienced as an addict, exploring not only what he felt through the process of recovery but also how addiction completely isolated him from society and made the world around him so surreal. These are powerful, intimate poems of thirst: for alcohol, for other bodies, for knowledge and for life.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf is available to buy from penguin.co.uk

The Penguin Book of Haiku
Penguin Classics, 2018

Now a global poetry, the haiku was originally a Japanese verse form that flourished from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Although renowned for its brevity, and for its use of natural imagery to make Zen-like observations about reality, in fact the haiku is much more: it can be erotic, funny, crude and mischievous. 

Presenting over a thousand exemplars in vivid and engaging translations, The Penguin Book of Haiku offers an illuminating introduction to this widely celebrated, if misunderstood, art form. Adam L. Kern's new translations are accompanied in the anthology by the original Japanese and short commentaries on the poems, as well as an introduction and illustrations from the period.

The Penguin Book of Haiku is available to buy from penguin.co.uk 

Miracle in the Andes – Nando Parrado 
Crown, 2006

In October 1972, members of a Uruguayan rugby union team were on a flight from Montevideo to Chile when their plane crashed into a mountain. Miraculously, among the people on board, many survived the initial crash. However, stranded more than 11,000 feet up in the wilderness of the Andes, the survivors soon heard that the search for them had been called off. When what little food they had ran out after 10 days, those still alive agreed that after their death the others should eat their bodies to survive.

Miracle in the Andes is an autobiographical account of the 1972 Andes plane crash and rescue. In this non-fiction book from 2006, survivor Nando Parrado recounts the rugby team's survival on a glacier in the Andes for 72 days.
 
Miracle in the Andes is available to buy from orionbooks.co.uk

Autobiography Of Red – Anne Carson
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998

Autobiography of Red is a verse novel based loosely on the myth of Geryon and the Tenth Labor of Herakles. In this extraordinary epic poem, Anne Carson bridges the gap between classicism and the modern, poetry and prose, with a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. Sexually abused by his older brother, his affectionate mother too weak-willed to protect him, the monstrous young boy finds solace in photography and in a romance with a young man named Herakles. 

A deceptively simple narrative layered with currents of meaning and emotion, Autobiography of Red is a powerful and unsettling story that moves, disturbs, and delights. Originally published in 1998, it was warmly received by authors and critics, and has been called one of the crossover classics of contemporary poetry.

Autobiography Of Red is available to buy from penguin.co.uk

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces – Georges Perec
Galilée, 1974

Georges Perec was only forty-six when he died in 1982. Despite a tragic childhood, during which his mother was deported to Auschwitz, Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of the age. His literary output was deliberately varied in form and style, and Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is a generous selection of his non-fiction work. 

In this collection of essays, Perec contemplates the many ways in which we occupy the space around us, and depicts the commonplace items with which we are familiar in a startling, engrossing way. He recounts his psychoanalysis while remaining reticent about his feelings, and depicts the Paris of his childhood without a trace of sentimentality. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces demonstrates Perec’s characteristic lightness of touch, wry humor, and accessibility. 

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is available to buy from penguin.co.uk

Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry
Ignota Books, 2018

Spells, the first poetry anthology from independent publisher Ignota Books, brings together 36 contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. Reflecting recent struggles around #MeToo and the growing interest in witchcraft and astrology, these poems unmake the world around them so that it might be remade anew.  

Edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás, with an introduction by So Mayer, the contributors to Spells include Emily Berry, Kayo Chingonyi and past Crunch guest Nia Davies. Spells takes us into a place where the right words can influence the universe.

Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry is available to buy from ignota.org

All My Mad Mothers – Jacqueline Saphra 
Nine Arches Press, 2017

All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamorous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp. 

These astute poems step assuredly from childhood’s first exposures to the scratched records and unsuitable lovers of young womanhood, the slammed doors of daughters and sons, the tears and salted soups of friendships, and the charms of late love. All the time, incandescent and luminous as an everlasting lightbulb, at the heart of each of Saphra’s poems is a delicate filament kicking out a heavy-duty wattage.
 
All My Mad Mothers is available to buy from ninearchespress.com

That Lone Ship – Rhys Owain Williams
Parthian Books, 2018

That Lone Ship is the debut collection from The Crunch’s own Rhys Owain Williams. It was launched by Parthian Books in October 2018 alongside Salacia: the debut collection from our Issue 10 guest Mari Ellis Dunning.  

During the ‘What We’re Reading’ segment of Issue 10’s podcast, Adam took the opportunity to ask Rhys and Mari how their books had been received, and how it felt now that they were out in the world. Mari and Rhys also gave us an insight into what it’s like to launch a collection alongside other poets. 

That Lone Ship and Salacia are available to buy individually or as part of a bundle​ from parthianbooks.com

Teaching a Bird to Sing – Tracey Rhys 
Green Bottle Press, 2016

Tracey Rhys’s Teaching a Bird to Sing was published by Green Bottle Press in 2016, and was featured in The TLS in its end-of-year round-up of the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets. Touching yet unsentimental, Teaching a Bird to Sing explores Rhys’s son’s diagnosis of autism, what it means to her and the frustrations, worries and hopes it brings. 

Written from the perspective of both mother and child, the poems in this pamphlet are by turns tender and outraged. Some were featured in the Winterlight Theatre stage show Touch Blue Touch Yellow, providing a sobering insight into the lives of autistic people and those who love them.

Teaching a Bird to Sing is available to buy from greenbottlepress.com

The Wild Gods – Malene Engelund
Valley Press, 2016

Malene Engelund grew up in Aalborg, a city grown from a former Viking settlement in northern Denmark. She moved to England in 2002 and currently lives in Greenwich. The eighteen poems that comprise her debut pamphlet, The Wild Gods, reveal a distinctly Nordic imagination, punctured with rich colour, shadows and light. 

Here are letters, portraits and prayers, composed with an almost painterly precision. Searching and clear-eyed, each poem is a compact saga that revives folklore and extends it into the present. Engelund’s wild gods take their places between borders: of home and belonging, darkness and dawn, the silenced and the lost. 

The Wild Gods is available to buy from valleypressuk.com

Giraffe – Bryony Littlefair
Seren, 2017

Giraffe is a beguiling, beautiful and entertaining debut pamphlet of poems by Bryony Littlefair. Her poetry displays novelistic qualities: clarity of language and the use of realism, a feeling for plot and incident, an eye and ear for character. Also noted are the subtle ways that Littlefair indicates character and relationships. There is a good deal of wit on display in Giraffe, but also a wonderful humanity.

Poems need head, heart, and soul but this particular Mslexia Poetry Prize-winning pamphlet has an extra ingredient: a feminist kick. Littlefair is acutely aware of women’s lives and gives us mothers, daughters, grandmothers, friends and colleagues whose adventures or misadventures we become increasingly eager to follow. 

Giraffe is available to buy from serenbooks.com

physical – Andrew McMillan
Jonathan Cape, 2015

Winner of the 2015 Guardian First Book Award, Andrew McMillan’s debut poetry collection physical confronts what it is to be a man, and interrogates the very idea of masculinity. Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male body – to male friendship and male love – muscular, sometimes shocking, but always deeply moving.

McMillan is an elegant stylist and an unfashionably honest poet. Dispensing with conventional punctuation, he is attentive and alert to the quality of breathing, giving his poems an extraordinary sense of being vividly poised and present – drawing lines that are deft, lyrical and perfectly pitched from a world of urban dereliction. 

physical is available to buy from penguin.co.uk 

The Adulterants – Joe Dunthorne 
Hamish Hamilton, 2018

Joe Dunthorne’s The Adulterants is an uproarious tale of competitively sensitive men and catastrophic open marriages, riots on the streets of London and Internet righteousness, and one man's valiant quest to come of age in his thirties. 

Fresh, sharp and wickedly funny, The Adulterants is Dunthorne's third novel, following Submarine (2008) and Wild Abandon (2011). His first full-length poetry collection will be published by Faber and Faber in 2019.

The Adulterants is available to buy from penguin.co.uk

Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides – Stephen Dobyns
Penguin, 1999

A modern morality cycle with an everyman figure named Heart at its centre, Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides takes the form of sixty-one episodic poems. Throughout the collection, Heart – who “comes to resemble Charlie Brown as seen by Charles Bukowski” – is foiled repeatedly in his quest for happiness. 

Dobyns’ poetry employs extended tropes, using the ridiculous and the absurd as vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. Originally published by Penguin in 1999, Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides is Dobyn’s tenth collection of poems. A later edition was published by Bloodaxe Books.

Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides is now out of print, but you can still pick up a second-hand copy at worldofbooks.com

Sax Burglar Blues – Robert Walton
Seren Books, 2017

The poems in Robert Walton’s Sax Burglar Blues are clever and keenly observed, ranging from vivid memories of youth to pointed satire. In the title poem, the pleasing complexity of jazz mirrors the poet’s vocation to embody, echo and reverberate the complexities of lived experience.  

As befits a poet born and based on the Severn Estuary, Walton’s land and townscapes are often damp, misty, watery, and recorded with many subtle variations of blue. There are also pleasingly unlikely totem animals, a nod to the mythical man-eating crocodile that infests Bristol Docks, and the surreal lampoon of a canary’s presidential candidacy. Artful and expansive, this is a stunning collection from a newly-revived author.

Sax Burglar Blues is available to buy from serenbooks.com

A Boat Called Annalise – Lynne Hjelmgaard
Seren Books, 2016

Lynne Hjelmgaard’s third collection A Boat Called Annalise evokes life on a sailboat, recalling a journey the poet took on a sailboat to the Caribbean and back to Europe with her husband. The couple’s relationship is poised on tensions, beautifully observed, as masculine/feminine, the need to assert and/or withdraw in the face of the turbulent seascape.

Our guest Rhys Milsom reviewed ​A Boat Called Annalise for Wales Arts Review in 2016. You can read Rhys's review here:  walesartsreview.org/a-boat-called-annalise-by-lynne-hjelmgaard

​A Boat Called Annalise is available to buy from serenbooks.com

The Monster Loves His Labyrinth – Charles Simic​
Ausable Press, 2008

The Monster Loves His Labyrinth offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of poet Charles Simic. Passionate, witty, tender and curious, these notebook entries range from casual jottings to profound observations. Their subject is the vast array of ways in which we human beings try to make sense of our world.

Born in Yugoslavia in 1938, Charles Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990. In 2007, he was appointed US Poet Laureate and received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

The Monster Loves His Labyrinth is available to buy from ​coppercanyonpress.org

The Days After – Rebecca Parfitt
Listen Softly London, 2017

The Days After is the stunning debut collection from our Issue #5 guest Rebecca Parfitt. A moving, close-to-the-bone account of heartbreak,  the poems record the trajectory of a relationship – from passionate infatuation, through tortuous unravelling and, finally, the promise of what will be lived afterwards. The collection was recently selected as one of The Cardiff Review's books of 2017: "...both delicate and powerful....Parfitt has a precise, sometimes devastatingly brittle, quality to her writing."

The Days After is available to buy from ​listensoftlylondon.com

​Watch Rebecca reading some of the poems from The Days After here: crunchpoetry.com/rebecca-parfitt.html

Stanza Stones – Simon Armitage, Pip Hall and Tom Lonsdale
Enitharmon Press, 2013

In 2012, Simon Armitage was commissioned by the Ilkley Literature Festival to write six site-specific poems. Stanza Stones presents a record of the project to carve these poems onto stone along a new trail in England’s Pennine region.

With the help of local expert Tom Lonsdale and letter-carver Pip Hall, Armitage found extraordinary, secluded sites for his words to be carved into stone. Stanza Stones brings together Armitage's six poems and the accounts of Hall and Lonsdale, publishing them alongside colour photographs of the project in progress and the stones in their completed state.

Stanza Stones is available to buy from enitharmon.co.uk 

​We're fiercely proud to be based in our hometown Swansea. Seven of the poets we've featured so far are Swansea residents, and the city and its environs provide the backdrop to many of our videos. Swansea is already a city of culture – the Swansea 2021 team have proved that with their inspirational #SwanseaIsCulture hashtag –but it would be so good for the city and its residents to take the official UK City of Culture title for 2021.​

The Crunch fully supports Swansea's bid to become UK City of Culture 2021. ​Good luck to everyone involved today, let's hope the judges agree that #SwanseaIsCulture!​

We're now on Goodreads, a place for readers to share and discuss books with other readers.

Join the discussion at goodreads.com/group/213818-the-crunch

We're still recovering from The Swansea Fringe – what an incredible weekend! Thank you to everyone who came to our Crunch Omnibus event on Friday evening, and to our four readers Christopher Cornwell, Alan Kellermann, D. E. Oprava and Rebecca Parfitt.

If the recording gods have been kind to us, then a special Fringe edition of The Crunch will be with you very soon!

We're delighted to be involved in the return of The Swansea Fringe at the end of this month, and the line-up for our event has now been confirmed! We're getting the band back together, inviting three of our previous guests to return for a special live omnibus edition.

​Head down to The Grand Hotel on Friday 29th September to catch up with Alan Kellermann (Issue #3), Rebecca Parfitt (Issue #5) and Christopher Cornwell (Issue #6), and also hear the poetry of forthcoming Crunch feature D. E. Oprava. For more information about the event, head over to the Facebook event page.

This is a ticketed event as part of The Swansea Fringe. If you don't have a festival wristband, you can pay £5 on the door. Find out more about day/weekend tickets here: www.tinyurl.com/FringeSwansea

We will hopefully see you on the 29th!

Teint – Zoë Skoulding
Hafan Books, 2016

Teint (or Teint: For the Bievre / Pour la Bievre) is the latest publication in the Boiled String series of poetry chapbooks from Hafan Books. Zoë Skoulding's poems in this collection celebrate and mourn the 'lost' Parisian river La Bièvre – a culverted tributary of the Seine. 

A bilingual publication, Teint includes translations into French from the Parisian poet Jean Portante, whose own work was translated into English by Skoulding and published in In Reality (Seren, 2013). 

Teint is available to buy from lulu.com/hafan 

Cheval 9: The Terry Hetherington Award Anthology 2016 
Parthian Books, 2016

The ninth edition of the Cheval anthology contains a selection of the best poetry and prose submitted to last year's Terry Hetherington Award. The award has become known as one of the most significant awards for young writers in Wales, and counts poets Jonathan Edwards, Natalie Ann Holborow and Jemma L. King amongst its previous winners.  

In addition to publishing the year’s best submissions, the anthology also collects new work by previous winners and commended entrants.

Cheval 9 is available to buy from parthianbooks.com

Tidy Boy – David Hughes
Swansea Poetry Workshop, 1999

A first collection from David Hughes, Tidy Boy reflects upon people's relationships with one another, on being Welsh, and on the city of Swansea and its inhabitants. Many of the poems are written in Swansea dialect, brilliantly capturing the voices and experiences of people rarely heard in poetry. Unfortunately​, Tidy Boy is now out of print, but you can still pick up a second-hand copy at biblio.co.uk

Watch David Hughes read 'Swansea Market', filmed and edited by friends of the Crunch Turnshoe Productions:

Swansea Market – David Hughes

A Dream of Mind – C.K. Williams
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992

A Dream of Mind is a challenging, exhilarating collection, representing an important stage in the evolution of C. K. Williams' work. It's dominated by the long title poem, which explores the materials and qualities of states of consciousness with enormous flexibility and suppleness.

The poetry of C. K. Williams, who died in 2015, has won an essential place in contemporary American poetry. The long lines that characterised his style from the mid-1970s onwards allowed him to make ever more radical forays into what The New York Times called "a unique and inclusive poetry of consciousness." 

A Dream of Mind is available to buy from us.macmillan.com

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