Join Tom Sastry and Julia Webb for their online Double Book Launch, celebrating the publication of You have no normal country to return to and The Telling.

Also welcoming guest poet Daniel Sluman.

on Thursday 26th March, 7.30pm (BST)

This event will be streamed live through the Nine Arches Press YouTube channel and live captioned. Those who register to 'attend' will receive an event link by email on the day of the event.

In You have no normal country to return to, Tom Sastry explores questions of national identity and ‘the end of history'. A blistering, bleakly funny and timely collection, following his Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize shortlisted A Man's House Catches Fire. By turns crisply satirical and questioning, You have no normal country to return to ranges across the legacies of Empire, postwar migration and the current crisis in English identity. It is a book about illusion, and discovering, again and again, that what was once taken for granted was never really there; a guidebook for an age of “enchantments collapsing on themselves”.

"This is a collection perfectly attuned to our times, with much to say about ‘England’s dream of itself’ and ‘how England dies’, as well as hazarding one or two guesses about its future.” – John Greening

The Telling by Julia Webb is a distinctive and acutely-observed collection of poems that unravel the intricacies at the heart of human relationships – an insistent, quietly fierce tour de force from this Forward Prize commended poet. Moving and dark, we uncover the things that go unspoken between people despite their closeness. The Telling follows Bird Sisters (2016) and Threat (2019). In turning her forensic focus on what makes us human, and in particular what it is that glues us together or causes us to come apart, Julia Webb’s poetry examines the wreckage of complex lives to understand where the fault lines and fractures lie. What are the stories that construct our families and relationships, and who gets to tell them?

“Swarming with buzzing sadness, peopled loneliness, and technicolour hauntings." - Caroline Bird

Daniel Sluman is a poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK Disability anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, and his second collection the terrible was published by Nine Arches Press in 2015. He has appeared widely in UK poetry journals and his third collection of poetry, single window, about living with disability and chronic pain, was published by Nine Arches Press in September 2021 and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

Click in to these titles to find out more and purchase a copy:

You have no normal country to return to

The Telling