Crater Press
We publish, primarily through letterpress, distinctive pamphlets of innovative British poetry.
The Crater Press does not accept any unsolicited submissions.
Crater 71
Full colour exploration of the postcard, 94 pp.
This book draws on a collection of over 600 postcards from the period 1906-10. The postcards, sent by lovers, friends and family, are arranged in three albums by a young woman from Kidsgrove in Stoke on Trent (England) when she worked as a servant in Colwyn Bay in north Wales. They provide direct insights into the lives of both writers and recipient, and the textual and visual material from the collection demonstrates how postcards were a medium of aesthetic expression for working people of the time.
May 2024
Run of 110 £12 + p&p
Crater 69
Deceptively simple, the first sentence of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure” (For a long time, I went to be early), contains hidden puns – such as “de bonheur” (happily) – that startlingly anticipate the ensuing narrative. Across its 1000 variant translations, An Attempt At Exhausting the Translation of the First Sentence of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu playfully raises some of these hidden meanings to the surface for the first time. In doing so, it brings, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “Fortleben” – continued or continuing life – to the translation of Proust in English.
March 2024
£10 + p&p
Crater 68
“This is a big joke. a 20,000 word joke to be precise. The conceit being ‘remove narrative from a novel’ and replace it with ‘flattened versions’ in the form of chapter titles that refer to narratology terminology. As a second tier, I decided to use an Oulipan lipogram-type constraint in which each chapterlet is named after a letter of the English alphabet and does not contain that letter. This is another play on absence. My hope is that the lack of narrative is filled-in by the reader, as I found when I wrote it. Clearly there are protagonists. Although not spoken of directly, there are also the affects of events having taken place. Any implication of story has been generated by chance through the cut-up of archeological reports written by Bethan Bones and other material like lists of adjectives. The lack of the meaning-creating signal of narrative, produces a kind of null, a flatline a drone from which your transcendence may be apparent. Don’t forget to laugh.”
December 2023
£10 + p&p
Crater 66
Vocable is an undoing of memory, a reach for a story beneath the current of received ideas. Vocable is an interrogation into language in the body,
how it vines our dna, and makes memory. it is listening for an undercurrent. What makes itself heard is the quick onset of the apocaplyse that defines our physical experience.
August 2023
£10 + p&p
Coming out of Corroding the Now: Poetry and Science|SF conference staged in Birkbeck College in April 2019, the Corroding the Now anthology collects work in poetry and poetics that comes out of the conference themes and discussion as an openended coming together of forms, ideas and practices that approach poetry, science and SF in the broadest terms.
It incorporates work from:
Charlotte Geater, Jonathan Catherall, Iris Colomb, Suzie Geeforce, Chris Gutkind, Naomi Foyle, Peter Middleton, Verity Spott, Jo Crot, Richard Parker, Josie Taylor, Fred Carter, Kat Dixon-Ward, Liz Bahs, Amy Cutler, Kate Pickering, Pippa Goldschmidt, Astra Papachristodoulou, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, Allen Fisher, Aodán McCardle, Luke Jordan, Stephen Mooney, Robert Kiely, Francis Gene-Rowe, Sasha Myerson, Katie Stone, Matthew Carbery
April 2023
£12 + p&p
Crater 64
A book of responses to Tim Atkins’s NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING IS STILL IN THE FUTURE AND WILL ALWAYS BE including writing from Andrea Brady, Colin Leemarshall, Eleni Sikelianos, Jeff Hilson, Philip Terry, Miles Champion, Robert Sheppard, Carole Birkan-Berz, Iris Colomb, Robert Hampson, Simon Smith, Laura Wetherington, Laird Hunt, Robert Hogg, Stephen Collis, Peter Jaeger, Ágnes Lehóczky and Jaume C. Pons Alorda, nine new and unpublished sections of Atkins’s Nothing and an interview with Atkins by Jonathan Skinner and Daniel Kane.
March 2023
£10 + p&p
Crater 63
NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING IS STILL IN THE FUTURE AND WILL ALWAYS BE consists of meditations upon the state of the world and the role of the poet in our turbulent and increasingly-violent era. Taking the form of reflections upon the experiences of the poets Ovid & Atkins, NOTHING occupies a space in which 21st century horrors—the persecution of refugees and economic migrants, Brexit, Trump, conservative resistance to the long-overdue process of decolonising the canon, questions of poetic agency, encounters with predatory male poets, the global rise of fascism, and life among the everyday demagogues and barbarians—are reflected and refracted through engagements with the exilic experiences and writings of poets across the ages.
March 2023
£10 + p&p
Crater 70
This book, Adam Piette writes, is a spectral zone, inhabited by dreams of rooms, urban spaces, mental spacetimes that offer paper and utopian projects for the homeless being in transit. These prose blocks describe paper squares of print as potential architectural holding-courts for the transitional mind and its selves in hyperreal dream trajectories at several thresholds at once. Each poem has its tutelary spirit, whether it be Boyer, Notley, Robertson, Nelson, Riley or Nemes Nagy, who acts as guide to the mind on its way among the bonds of words, through and by way of the afterlife scripts, negotiating strange solitary hermetic objects in these spaces, suffering with the being on its way the losses and laments of all that have been loved, enduring the difficult ghostliness of the plurality of fractured being within, toughening the failing will when challenged at the borders of the house of the body. Within the prose meditations, the voices accumulate, developing the doubling thematic of the two-in-one from Arendt to the Spirit Duplicator to generate a transient paper identity, the Eleatic stranger who accompanies the hobo-poet as ambiguous twin during their disappearing act, their transformation into organico-abstract word, their journey of self-exile towards the unfinished house of potential form. The Romantic lyric most sedulously dreamt up the poem as local habitation where the embodiments within doubling script can both take place and engender radical re-naming. These poems remember the lyric but build their habitations from the hybrid materia of experimental art, the language of the poetic imagination mashed up with the textures of theory, memoir, ephemera, history and story: from that material are these texts conceived and built, dwellings at the border of memory and nation, of Hungary and the UK, of dreaming and the hyperreal. These poems are sepulchral asylums, mausoleums, mazes for the wandering voice and its scripts. Leave your passports at the entrance, and enjoy the ride.
January 2023
£10 + p&p
Crater 67
Translated with glosses by William Rowe and Helen Dimos. Co-published with Veer Books:
https://www.veerbooks.com/filter/veer-books/Cesar-Vallejo-Trilce-translated-with-glosses-by-William-Rowe-and
January 2023
£18 + p&p
Crater 65
The Crater press is pleased to announce the publication of Ralph Hawkins’s trumpets stuffed with cloth – a brand new pamphlet designed by Tim Atkins and risographed over at Earthbound Press. Atkins writes: “Ralph Hawkins’ new collection of interlinked poems exists happily and equally in a solar system containing the likes of Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth, and Anselm Hollo. His sweet, speedy, sometimes surreal poems crackle with energy and excitement and are proof (if any was needed) that Brightlingsea, England, has long been home to one of the English language’s major poets. Ralph Hawkins’s name should be on the tongue/twitter feed of every writer who understands that poetry is about more than just misery and myself.”
June 2022
Run of 200 £10 + p&p
Crater 58
A new collection of poems from Matt ffytche. The volume is a cylinder roll, a haphazard calendar of the unturning points of this middle life. Years spent unjustly skimming over land and water, keeping account of incomprehensible answers and some of the questions, blinking and erratic. After the third or fourth attempt at object permanence, the poems will no longer be tucked in or lobbed as weapons. They are a catchment for an indefensible season—its anti-ceremonies and its revolutions. Voices will still be at work in their linking: attempts to become one, two or more (confusion about numbers) in the same place, which is always here, but never the same. Even so, the task is to hang tightly to this truant and disconcerting diorama, which is in fact the real thing: what confirms us to earth tables, animal changes and baby steps, an embrace turned outwards.
December 2021
£10 + p&p
Crater 61
Organ Music is an extended riff on the previous decade of Tory rule by way some of its more horribly memorable national occasions – the 2011 London riots, the Thatcher funeral, Brexit, and the beginning of the end of Jeremy Corbyn. It also improvises other historically resonant events like Agincourt, the Falklands War, and the death of David Bowie. Witness (keyboard) history as you’ve never before encountered it (forget Keith Emerson) and discover some of the key figures of the early English organ repertoire like Orlando Gibbons, Christopher Tye and Klaus Wunderlich. Formally rich (it moves between free verse, poets theatre, prose and visual poetry), this is ultimately a book of melancholic exuberance. Fuck you Tory Britain, the organist will see you now!
December 2020
£10 + p&p
Crater 62
A collection of essays, poems, memoirs and other works addressed to the poet Jeff Hilson. An extensive introduction to and elaboration to this poet’s complex work.
December 2020
£10 + p&p
UK, EU, USA only – special deal for £20, free postage
December 2020
£20
Crater 59
Geraldine Monk has condensed her celebrated online advent calendars to their verbal essence. Seasonal oils and familiars are squeezed to within an inch of their lives creating a heady mix of midwinter misrule and unbridled Saturnalian madness. Alan Halsey’s graphics set the poems in transmuted rockform re-envisions of the farthest north.
November 2019
Run of 150 £5 + p&p
Crater 57
With purity of playfulness and razor-edge wit, this novel tells a story of true romance, and also the quest to find a decent place to get a drink. Anarchic, ridiculous, considered and capricious, When Two Are In Love or As I Came to Behind Frank’s Transporter is a unique vision of the peculiarity of attachment – of young sweethearts, passionate lovers and sticking it out until the very end. And just as love dissolves all in its path, here, as you read, the story starts to fall apart in your hands and turns into something else altogether. A kind of 21st century Metamorphoses.
May 2019
£8 + p&p
Crater 51
Photobook containing original poems and translations and versions of classical Japanese poetry. The photos were taken in and around Deep Osaka Street—a working-class neighborhood in south-central Osaka.
Click here for the Deluxe Edition.
December 2018
£10 + p&p
Crater 52
Colin Lee Marshall’s Nidors (2) arrives both as a discrete text and as the second entry in a lopsided trilogy. The “poems” herein sprang their specious little helices from the rebuke for which they were built. However, something of the swarf has escaped via negative poetotaxis and is ready to interrogate the masters in its meat. How will poetry work out its particular roboclasm under the climate of the internet? Skim the phytoplankton of this eutrophic milkshake and leave your notes! Full colour, A4
October 2018
£10 + p&p
Crater 47
If Bird, Then Tree sees birds as one of our most visible signs of connectedness. Less ‘about’ birds than written around them, the sequence explores the world birds find themselves in: the network of relations and conditions they move through, make up and, finally, are made of. If Bird, Then Tree seeks to identify and identify with a nature that capital constantly makes but insistently makes other. Full colour, with paintings by Oliver Baggott and design by Tim Atkins.
September 2017
£12 + p&p
Crater 41
Containing works written between 1992 and 2016. Afterword by Sean Bonney. This book is concerned with the shimmering of the real, where this carries the truth of the world we’re inside of. The concern is political. It includes the need for the destruction of bourgeois reality, the suspension of their law, their forms, and the opening of a space for a new reality. There’s pain and suffering in this but also joy.
May 2017
£12 + p&p
Crater 44
Learn the basics. This is a sequence of poems, reworkings, translations, misapprehensions and prose-poems. Which is which? Only canny investors decide.
February 2017
£5 + p&p
Crater 42
A new collection of poetry from Andrea Brady. The Strong Room collects poems found, co-produced and overheard, as charms against damage. In times of accelerated peril the poem’s fragile stanzas can be a holding space, whose strength is too weak to contain the world, and too strong to resist it. These poems seek to build this paradoxical space of safety, pleasure, anger and danger as an expanding room for everyone who lives in love or fear.
November 2016
£8 + p&p
Crater 40
Marshall writes: “Consider the ‘nidor’ a kind of botched Rabeloycean playground sonnet, chock-full of mis-voltas and other ambifortunate lapses into badsthetics. It aims to get you (wrong); that is to say, it would be a fully ‘trametricist’ form of poetry (and may indeed already be precisely that—for who would know?). [All nidors are decorated, with varying degrees of aleatoric loss or gain.]”
November 2016
£10 + p&p
Crater 34
Tim Atkins’s Koto y yo documents a year in the lives of a father and daughter living in Poble Sec; a working class barrio in Barcelona. Told in luminous poetic prose, the interlinked stories - echoing the Platero y yo stories of Juan Ramon Jiminez - detail the couple’s adventures and encounters as they wander around the streets. The pages are inhabited by the plumbers, hairdressers, bakers, traveling knife grinders, mechanics, tobacconists, waiters, postmen, mangy cats, and itinerant musicians who populate the neighborhood.
Available in hardback, £15, and paperback, £10.
September 2016
Hardback:
Paperback:
Crater 37
A new collection of conceptual cricket poetry by the author of Covers, The Doon and hows its. It’s an elegy to the passing of the Shane Watson era in Australian cricket, as well as an affirmation of the coming of the Whittock era in Australian cricket poetry. “systems based in capital finished watto precedes the utopia in whichll be legend”
May 2016
£10 + p&p
Crater 35
This groundbreaking new anthology prints radical poetry about cricket from around the world alongside a series of specially commissioned illustrations. For cricket fans, for avantists and everyone in between. Contributors include: Tim Atkins; Oliver Baggott; Nia Davies; Ken Edwards; Gregorio Fontaine; Laura Foster Twigg; Chris Hall; John Hall; Alan Halsey; Ben Hickman; Jeff Hilson; Peter Hughes; Peter Jaeger; Antony John; Sarah Kelly; Tony Lopez; Chiaki Matsubayashi; Michaela Meise; Geraldine Monk; Montenegro Fisher; Jèssica Pujol Duran; Andrew Spragg; Edward Suckling; Scott Thurston; Rhys Trimble; Carol Watts; Nick Whittock and Josephine Wood.
March 2016
£8 + p&p
Crater 27
Atkins Collected Petrarch / Petrarch Collected Atkins. All of Petrarch translated / transfigured / transplanted by Tim Atkins - a hallucinogenic, euphoric striptease of a traductory odyssey. 550 odd pages of pure lyric gold. [Not letterpressed.]
June 2014
£16 + p&p
Crater 56
montenegrofisher bring a cornucopia of diverse ritual, political and daily practises in a Babylonian countdown to the feasting. A revolutionary mix of plant-animal-human graffiti with words on space and time. Enjoy the surprises and possible serendipities.
October 2020
Run of 150 £5 + p&p
Crater 60
A collaborative translation by Jessica Pujol Duran and RTA Parker — two colours, letterpress, hand-printed, articulated broadside.
January 2020
Run of 100 £4 + p&p
calls and responses
Crater 53
These sonnets are taken from a longer sequence, exchanged as responses to William Shakespeare’s original sonnets and ensuing dialogues between Emily Critchley and Eric Langley.
Each sequence, which sometimes comprises of one call and one response, but at other times is made up of multiple calls or responses, begins as a ‘reply’ to or revision of a specific Shakespearean sonnet, and is numbered accordingly.
February 2019
Run of 150 £8 + p&p
Crater 50
A special celebratory fiftieth Crater.
January 2019
Run of 100 £15 + p&p
Crater 54
Zoë Skoulding’s Frimaire from her Revolutionary Calendar project.
‘Frimaire’ is the month of frost in the Revolutionary or Republican Calendar, which was used in France from 1793 to 1805 and revived briefly in 1871 by the Paris Commune. Devised by Gilbert Romme and Fabré d’Églantine, the new calendar featured decimal weeks and months renamed according to the seasons, while saints’ days were replaced with plants, minerals, animals and agricultural implements.
This non-advent calendar from The Crater Press, with paintings by Sharon Kivland, opens to reveal poems for the thirty days of Frimaire from Zoë Skoulding’s forthcoming year-long sequence, A Revolutionary Calendar. Open the first window on 1 FRIMAIRE CCXXVII (22nd November 2018). Vive la révolution!
Frimaire 2018
Run of 200 £5 + p&p
Crater 48
Dead in the House of Pound is a map-folded 12-page state of the universe address. Owens: “this moment is as real as anything — that the call truly will come — it has — and it needs to be answered.”
July 2018
Run of 200 £3 + p&p
Crater 46
“Recently I ran across a garrulous mole, who handed me a poetry pamphlet, explaining: ‘We are uniquely positioned to leverage our understanding of the complexities of wealth management in mole families, to grow our business and to provide young moles with knowledge that is the foundation for their understanding to reduce business risk.’ The pamphlet was called Magic Comma Natural. It turns out to be a godsend for moles.” (R. S. Barrett)
June 2018
Run of 150 £6 + p&p
Crater 49
25 windows of anarchy – it’s this year’s Crater advent calendar. NSFW. Full colour.
December 2017
Run of 200 £5 + p&p
Crater 45
November 2017
Run of 150 £6 + p&p
Crater 39
The Tyne and Wear Poems are here and there and often both at the same time. They look different from over here and from over there. Volume 1 of the Tyne and Wear Poems was about getting to know the urban landscape of Newcastle and Volume 3 was about repeated journeys that wore down the moving figure and the thing moved through on repeated journeys over old familiar ground. Volume 2, Gateshead and Back, is about the many connections that the people of Gateshead might have around the world. It came together in a Tyneside flat in the Avenues, with a sink hole appearing just across the road. The poems and images say things about actual and imagined movement through the connections many people might have. Gateshead and Back enjoys mainly unstable ground.
September 2017
Run of 100 £8 + p&p
Crater 36
The Complete Petrarchs of our time and poetics are splendid, but what happens if you dig down and realise version after version of just one sonnet (Petrarch’s third), stuttering in repetition, re-staging it for voice and situation, from a Scouse dog at Christmas to Jimmy Savile beyond the grave; a twittersonnet or a lengthy semantic poetry translation; a French Symbolist version or a Middle English sonnet? Robert Sheppard’s pamphlet is what happens, leaving a performance of humour, excess, variation, and an uncanny undersong courtesy of Petrarch himself. Confusingly folded, full colour
January 2017
Run of 200 £4 + p&p
Crater 31
Koshifuri Crater 31, a new poem by Amy De’Ath, positioned within a great big poster designed by Tim Atkins. Looks great on walls, chastises the Left like a feminist killjoy.
£2 for the poster and £5 for the post (sorry about this). Not at all letterpressed
June 2015
Run of 100
Crater 30
Very long-delayed Sam Walton’s Animal Pomes with illustrations by Aislinn Melville.
December 2014
Run of 100
Crater 28.5
From the Meteorite Light, a 594x594mm poster poem, about the sea and ships and hands - designed by Tim Atkins, not at all letterpressed.
November 2014
Run of 200 £5 + p&p
Crater 29.5
From Koshifuri Ices, Jay Nair’s and Ezra Jet’s Ryanairpithaplanium.
[A collaborative poem by Tim Atkins and Jeff Hilson]
All letterpressed, five colours, folded up like a plane.
September 2014
Run of 150 £5 + p&p
Crater 29
August 2014
Run of 199
Crater 22
The Linnaean Housman.
September 2013
Run of 100 £3 + p&p
Crater 23
Crater Press is delighted to announce the publication of Papa Boop Ndiop and Goat Far DT’s Animal Crater. These writers represent the future. They’re future–Linnaeans and introduce us to all kinds of post–space–age animals in these poems.
June 2013
Run of 200 £5 + p&p
Crater 20
A new and ongoing narrative and non-narrative sequence (not) about the English organ adding obfuscation to an already obfusced instrument. Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) was apparently Glenn Gould’s (1932-1982) favourite composer. Decide for yourselves!
Other sections of ORGAN MUSIC have appeared recently in VLAK 3, Open Letter and Writers Forearm.
July 2012
£3 + p&p
Crater 19
Tom Raworth’s broadside “SHARPENING AGGRAVATION OF PERCEPTION” is now available from the Crater Press. Two colours, fancy French typefaces, handprinted, folded &c.
February 2012
Run of 300
Crater 18
Comments on “gimme your hands”:
“An end to wastefulness, the practice of thrift, is always good for an individual or a nation. If we have to trim down, slim down, tighten our belts a little more, help each other - who knows? It may be that our society will be a happier, healthier place, and we’ll all live richer lives.”
— Stewart Udall, author of the The Quiet Crisis, US Secretary of the Interior, 1961-1969
“I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought / And I ain’t got the power anymore....”
— David Bowie, 1971
“Canadians are putting tigers in our tanks, and new appliances in our homes, at an ever-increasing rate. The days of cheap and abundant energy are over.”
— Pierre Elliott Trudeau, television broadcast, November 22, 1973
January 2012
Run of 150 £4 + p&p
Crater 17
Its twitchy lucubrations sparked by a passage of transformations found in Zhuangzi, the chapter Zhile or ‘Happiness Attained’, John Wilkinson’s poem Ode at the Gate of the Gathering writhes between states of being under pursuit by a malign, cleaver-wielding cook. Which cut will make the final rush? Which bug has eyed its chop? What face shall I peel off or puts me on today? Why did the dromedary go missing? These and other pressing matters are now brought to book, to this impasse, and handsomely so, pressed at the time of maximum axial tilt in the earth’s circuit. By such contingency may you, gentle reader, unsleeve and under cover of darkness give the slip to your enjoining and its bloody managers. Happy New Year.
December 2011
Run of 200 £20 + p&p
Crater 14
In honour of the impending London Ezra Pound conference, Tim Atkins offers 3 Ezra Pound themed Pet Soundz, available on a poetry-poster with a nice blue rendition of Pound by Gaudier-Brzeska on the other side. £3 + p&p, available in unfolded or (cheaper) folded format. Guthrie on Atkins: ‘With Tim Atkins’ poetry, it is all where you find (you have found) he has found and placed the voice. It is all vivid joy and sorrow, distinct again and again in its rolling locale, within its expansive palate contemporary and timeless, completely unleashed and discerning as it turns its attention into forms of each and any place of our worlds.’
July 2011
Run of 200
Crater 55
Set in Atlantis, Jackqueline Frost’s The Third Event is an ethnographic study of the problematic of belonging to both real and imaginary civilizations in rupture. Moving between poetry, essay, and fiction, Frost depicts Atlanteans as suffering from a state of continental non-existence produced by a catastrophe of socio-ecological dimensions. Following an archeologist in her attempt to discover the meaning of the mysterious Third Event, the reader encounters the destruction and loss of a cultural geography that resembles certain dying landscapes of our own Atlantic World. Part 3 is narrated by the archeologist’s ethnographic subject, Pauouelle, creating a lyric departure from the anthropological prose of Part 1&2. Here, Pauouelle renders Atlantis as a “land of marine transgression and of want” “where people have nothing good to eat except fantasies of naked power.”
November 2019
Run of 100 £8 + p&p Out of print
Crater 43
27 poets and artists across 25 windows! Fully articulated full colour A4 advent calendar, with work from: Luke Allan, Oliver Baggott, Sharon Borthwick, cris cheek, David Connearn, Amy De’Ath, Amy Evans, Alec Finlay, Harry Gilonis, Elizabeth Guthrie, Chris Gutkind, Jeff Hilson, Peter Hughes, Peter Jaeger, Frances Kruk, Colin and Yuna Lee Marshall, Dorothy Lehane, Aislinn Melville, nick-e melville, Montenegro Fisher, Jèssica Pujol i Duran, Tom Raworth, David Rees, Andrew Spragg and Steve Willey.
December 2016
£5 + p&p Out of print
Crater 38
Davies’s state of the Brexit nation.
September 2016
Run of 100 £12 + p&p Out of print
Crater 33
August 2015
Run of 60 Out of print
Crater 32
August 2015
Run of 70 Out of print
Crater 28
Sarah Kelly’s TONO is printed inside her paper and can be glimpsed in pieces when the work is held to the light.
July 2014
Run of 101 Out of print
Crater 26
This is John Wilkinson’s two cents:
You will answer for your protein. Opening with pitiless authority “Resistant need now written before unmanned It”, Gwen Muren’s Glitch updates Burroughs and Acker in picking through and apart the biometric appraisals of the security state. Brilliantly inventive and incisive, Glitch announces a writer of outstanding intelligence and attentiveness, each intricate page explosive with genetic potential.
June 2014
Run of 100 £12 + p&p Out of print
Crater 25
August 2013
Run of 100 Out of print
Crater 24
Ezra Pound translated into Gaelic for distribution at the Ezra Pound International Conference in Dublin.
July 2013
Out of print
Crater 21
Robert Hampson is Professor of Modern Literature at RHUL, where he teaches on the MA in Poetic Practice. His ‘Assembled Fugitives: Selected Poems 1973-98’ appeared from Stride in 2000. His most recent publication was ‘an explanation of colours’ (Veer, 2011).
‘out of sight’, like the poster-poem ‘map-loading: 51:31N 00:05W’ (2008), is an exercise in procedural writing and recriture.The single sentence, with its shifting phrasal linkages, responds to recent work by Vanessa Place. It’s also the record of a mis-spent decade.)
August 2012
Run of 100 Out of print
Crater 16
* Centuries hence, despite faster-than-light travel, human interstellar exploration is stagnating.
* There’s not enough money in it for the vast controlling companies such as Zantiu-Braun, now reduced to extracting profits via “asset realisation” — plundering established colonies that can’t withstand Earth’s superior weapons tech.
* Now another Z-B squaddie, trained to use the feared, half-alive “Skin” combat biosuits, which offer super-muscles, armour and massive firepower, all queasily hooked into the wearer’s bloodstream and nervous system.
* Secret plans to make off with a rumoured alien treasure.
* Resistance is unexpectedly tough, thanks to locals such as Denise Ebourn who have mysterious access to neuro-electronic subversion gear far subtler and perhaps more dangerous than Skin.
* Meanwhile, how fictional are the stories about a fabled Empire that ruled our galaxy for a million years before becoming…something else?
* Genuine hopes to avoid bloodshed - while lofty idealism results in chilling atrocities, and even Z-B may be less cruel and monolithic than it seems.
* A breakneck interstellar chase leads to a satisfying finale and an unexpected romantic twist.
“break off me a piece of / your best code”
November 2011
Run of 100 £3 + p&p Out of print
Crater 15
At the apex of modernism in the early twentieth century, Bury in Lancashire was the world centre of industrial paper manufacture. Works on Paper by Tony Lopez is a serial poem looking through the history and language of that technical innovation and place of trade. The poem was written in 2008, first performed at the Text Festival in 2009, and printed on (130gsm) Hahnemuhle old antique laid by Richard Parker in October and November 2011.
October 2011
Run of 200 Out of print
Crater 9
Rhyme Against the Internet is Justin Katko’s eleventh volume of poetry. It is a lyric ode, of 138 lines, distributed across six pages, in preparation for over one year, with an ‘Apology’ for the poem tipped in by the author. Rhyme Against the Internet is a follow-up to Katko’s failed epic, The Death of Pringle, which is imminently forthcoming from Veer Books in London and Flim Forum in the United States.
October 2011
£7 + p&p Out of print
Crater 13
The new Crater, the 13th, is Elizabeth Guthrie’s X Portraits; 10 odd and unsettling lyrical non-lyric realizations of portraits of America and Britain. Accurate representations of modern life! Each copy includes an individual painted iteration by E.G. reminiscent of 3 stoppages etalon’s dropped string measure; they all include a wood block by Dirk E. Lee and are letterpressed, handbound &c. Requires paperknife.
Tim Atkins on Guthrie: ‘Elizabeth Guthrie’s poems - thoughtful, unusual, tender & (of course) tough - do far more interesting acrobatics than so so many of the more - shall we say? - pumped up ones. It is a joy to see her appearing in this latest Crater. Who can say no to it?’
April 2011
Run of 100 £7 + p&p Out of print
Crater 12
Crater Press announces Peter Hughes’s Sabi; 11 v. short, v. splendid poems… the title refers to rust, decay & the constant improvisation which is transformation & staying afloat… including lyricism put through a flanger & then listening to itself with its head cocked. It’s a balloon that’s had its string cut & can never now be turned into a dog.…
March 2011
Run of 100 Out of print
Crater 11
The Crater Press is pleased to announce a new articulated double-sided broadside by Rob Holloway from his sequence-in-progress Flesh Rays. The pamph./side contains 7 brain-squeezers; here’s some explanation:
Crater XI samples from the early stages of Rob Holloway’s new prose sequence ‘FLESH RAYS’ that one day will stretch to 107 such sections. One sentence reads ‘All sun’s got inside breath, soft as a head without a ghost.’ Another, ‘Shift left red sun, I’m cutting out a girl of paper.’, so perhaps it’s all about the sun. Then again, we’re instructed to ‘Rinse roads as if bricks were still wrapped in their towels’ so best we head for the hills. The ‘two Asian women soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie’ mentioned in the section ‘Moulded Books’ are real. ‘Reassembling the central crabapple’ is the ultimate purpose of the sequence.
This is Crater 11 (9 is stalled, but coming). Complementary errata included.
December 2010
Run of 100 Out of print
Crater 10
Millions of colours is the final part of Bardo: forty-nine prose pieces over seven days, a modern rewrite of the Bardo Thodol, the devotional work known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. “Bardo” means an interval or a transitional period. The setting here is the port and old town of Hastings, on the south coast of England. Previous parts of the work in various versions have appeared as Red & green, a pamphlet from Oystercatcher Press (2009), and also in the journals and e-journals Cannibal Spices, Pages, 10th Muse and Veer Away. It is hoped that the whole work will be published before too long.
Ken Edwards is the editor and publisher of Reality Street. His most recent book is Songbook (Shearsman, 2009).
December 2010
Run of 100 Out of print
Crater ∞
Merry Xmas!
Now out, possibly just in time for Christmas, it’s Sean Bonney’s Crater!
Includes 9pp. of ongoing Rimbaud project, cuttable edges, hand pressed/bound / the usual.
November 2010
Run of 200 Out of print
Crater 8
Crater 8 features two poems by the late Robert Rehder. This letterpressed pamphlet is now out of print.
September 2010
Out of print
Crater 1
Crater Press announces Crater 1 — it’s an unusual articulated broadside item featuring 6 poems by (young lion of the avant-garde) Michael Kindellan, and a reversible cover MK poster doodab for your wall when you’re done reading. Letterpressed, hand folded, no paperknife required - available for £4 including postage or £5 if you’re from outside of the UK. Here’s an exemplum:
“Bot. Dic Lindsey”Kindellan’s published Baudelaire translations, Rimbaud translations and a bunch of other beautiful stuff all over the place, including an amazing chap-book (Not Love) from Barque.
that reads like
this glossary:
smaragdinus, prasinus
clear lively
viridis CHLORO, clear
æruginosus, deep to bl/
glaucus, thalassicus
dull to greyish
indicoticus, deepest
cæruleus. lighter
azureus, pure lively
caisus/ lavender
violaceous, ianthinus
toward red
liliaceous.
toward whit
September 2010
Run of 100 Out of print
Crater 7
An A5 broadside featuring a Spanish translation by Jèssica Pujol i Duran of a poem by Richard Parker printed for inclusion with from The Mountain of California …, published in August 2010 by London’s Openned Press.
August 2010
Run of 100 Out of print
Crater 6
Now announcing the second biggest Crater yet! In full Technicolor I’m delighted to present 14 of Tim Atkins’s heralded translations of Petrarch. 14 14ers.
Look, here’s one for free:
Final Sonnet 366
The boys are singing to drive away the noxious birds
Before women it is useful to practice on statues
& now I am here to tell you all that I have discovered
That living is one of the best things—
there where I ripped it
That her eyes couldn’t have been more beautiful—
I just thought they were
Driving my utopian car over the dystopian roads
I go over and look at myself
& look surprised
Because living is one of the best things I go over
I stand there listening to the sunshine burning the grass
My horn a crumpled dream
Earthlings ! Comrades ! ¡ Adiós !
Work out your salvation with diligence
As if everything were still possible
Paperknife required.
August 2010
Run of 150 Out of print
Crater 5
Crater Press is pleased to announce The Stats on Infinity, a wide-format 16 pp. pamphlet featuring one long & scrambled ode, six sonnets and one lyric by Keston Sutherland. It’s handset, hand printed and hand bound.
February 2010
Run of 180 Out of print
Crater 4
Head’s up! It’s the first Crater of 2010, and it’s a grand little broadside from Amy De’Ath: Andromeda / The World Works for Me. There’s a drawing by her too and it’s fantastic. Letterpressed &c. &c.
Praise for Amy:
“Amy De’Ath is the new fire for mortals. She peoples space. She plays tricks with the gods and with her readers. This is personal, and it's hot shit.” — Marcus Slease
Last October Amy started a pretty neat blog, which can be found at http://www.amydeath.wordpress.com
December 2009
Run of 100 Out of print
Crater 3
Crater 3; Acacia Feelings: The Collected Poems of Pao Ling-Hui, from North Hills by Harry Gilonis, is now available for order. It contains 7 of HG’s faithless translations. Confusing folding; no paperknife required. Here’s the blab on PLh:
Pao Ling-hui was an early Sung dynasty poet. Younger sister of the male poet Pao Chao, she probably died circa 464 AD. 200 of his poems survive; her surviving 7 are collected in the later anthology New Songs from a Jade Terrace. Her works based on precursor poems have attracted particular praise.Paypal, cheques and swapsies welcome. Great late Christmas present for poetry loved ones; fantastic gauze stocking filler for a court lady or a servant who complains.
November 2009
Run of 170 Out of print
Crater 2
The second number of Crater’s out right now; the first in a projected mini-series of letterpress broadsides, Crater 2 contains a sequence of five spiffy poems by Jonty Tiplady called Above Shoes By Some Margin, and a block by Edward Suckling.
October 2009
Run of 55 Out of print
Crater 0
An A6 16pp. pamphlet containing poems by Michael Kindellan, Harry Gilonis, Jonty Tiplady, Robert Rehder, Joel Duncan, Francesca Lisette, Sara Crangle, Daniel Kane, Gareth Farmer, Tom Raworth, Stephen Rodefer and Alex Pestell.
September 2009
Run of 58 Out of print
Jeff Hilson, Organ Music:
TLS (Jeremy Noel-Tod)Colin Lee Marshall, Nidors:
Galatea Resurrects (Eileen Tabios)Tim Atkins, Petrarch Collected; Robert Sheppard, Petrarch 3:
Fortnightly Review (Peter Riley)Tim Atkins, Petrarch Collected:
Galatea Resurrects #25 (Colin Lee Marshall)Justin Katko, Rhyme Against the Internet & Joe Luna, Google Song:
Hix Eros 6 (Colin Lee Marshall)Papa Boop Ndiop and Goat Far DT, Animal Crater:
Hix Eros 2 (Anon)Tim Atkins, Petrarch:
Isola di Rifiuti (John Latta)Sean Bonney, For the Administration (After Rimbaud):
Sabotage Reviews (Juliet Wilson)Robert Hampson, out of sight:
The Institute of Electric CrinolinesKeston Sutherland, The Stats on Infinity:
Html Giant (Anonymous)Blackbox Manifold (Adam Piette)
from The Mountain of California …; full length collection of poems about California from the Openned Press. £5.44 + p&p: http://www.openned.com/print/from-the-mountain-of-california-richard-parker.html
China; pamphlet from Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. £5: http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/theknivesforksandspoonspress/HOME.html