Listen to the audiobook

"Don’t go over the hill, or look too long into the well, or go carousing with strangers, or you’ll never never never never come back. With the haunting quality of nursery rhymes but the complexity of a dark and smoky wine, these poems brood on absence and abandonment, outcasts and anomalies, monstrosity and mistakes.

At the heart of the collection are a suite of tightly focused, often impressionistic character studies ranging from cannibals to schoolgirls, but Irving also finds space in the shadows for desperate love songs to pilots and robots, satiric odes to tyrants and deft engagements with popular and literary culture. Whether turning the features of a pinball table into an emotional debris field or recounting unnerving sexual encounters, these are rich and rangy poems of a defiantly unusual character that linger in the mind as much for their controlled dissonances as their uncompromising subject matter."

Matt Haigh

D.A. Prince, Sphinx

"This pamphlet is full of characters in trouble. The energy that drives the poems won't settle for resolution, only the sense that however bizarre the action or injury, it has you by the throat and isn't letting go. This is, as they say, something else."
More information

Chris Emslie, Sabotage Reviews

A micro-collection of co-authored poems written according to the rules of various tabletop games, including dominoes, battleships and jenga.
Now unavailable

Co-written with Jon Stone under the pseudonyms of Eve Bishop and Roy Marvin (can you get all four references?), this is a mixture of collaborative and individual pieces that study the speculative phenomenon of the sentient robot, playing with Asimov's rules, as well as notions of function and failure, memory and maintenance.

Sabotage Reviews

Megatron

Blasting into the future, across alien worlds and distant galaxies, fantastic technologies and potential threats to humanity, Where Rockets Burn Through brings science fiction and poetry together in one explosive, genre-busting collection.
More information

In response to statements made by US presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Sarah Crew and Sophie Mayer present beautiful binders full of outspoken poems by writers who identify as female, trans, intersex or gender-neutral.
More information

Catechism: Poems For Pussy Riot is a communion of the visual and lyrical; rhymed, satirical and experimental poetry in tribute to political prisoners of conscience, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.
More information

Following A Slice of Cherry Pie and We Don't Stop Here, tributes to Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive respectively, The Private Press release their poetic homage to David Lynch's sinister Blue Velvet.
More information

Welcome to a strange new world in which a poem can be written using only one vowel, processed through computer code, collaged from film trailers, compiled from Facebook status updates, hidden inside a Sudoku puzzle, and even painted on sheep to demonstrate Quantum Theory ...
More information

Sadly sold out, Herbarium was a hand-bound collection of new poetry inspired by the herbs grown in London's Urban Physic Garden.
More information

City State showcases the work of twenty-seven London writers between the ages of 16 and 36. From hyperlinked walks of Battersea bombsites and guerilla gardening projects to jagged urban lyrics and dark hymns to the East End, City State presents a confident, entertaining and truly diverse snapshot of the best new poetry from London.
More information

Birdbook: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland (editor/contributor), April 2011
£5.00, 158pp

Korsakoff's Paper Chain (editor), November 2010
£5.00, 76pp

Pocket Spellbook (editor), October 2010
£5.00, 46pp

Obakarama (editor), December 2009
£5.00, 40pp

Coin Opera (editor/contributor), December 2009
£5.00, 48pp