New Emma Press poetry anthology looks into the future
Award-winning Birmingham publisher the Emma Press is launching Everything That Can Happen: Poems about the Future on 31st January 2019.
Edited by Suzannah Evans, whose debut poetry collection Near Future was published by Nine Arches Press in November 2018, and Tom Sastry, whose first full collection A Man’s House Catches Fire will be published by Nine Arches Press in Autumn 2019, the anthology explores many kinds of future; versions of our world that are recognisable in differing degrees.
The anthology showcases work from 36 poets from across the UK and overseas, selected from nearly 300 submissions. The poems – or perhaps prophecies – explore time, language, changing landscapes, future selves, uncertainty, catastrophe and civilisation. An android fills out a passport form. A space-walker sends a postcard home. The local cricket pitch is lost underwater. Frozen limbs thaw from cryogenic sleep.
The book features illustrations by Emma Dai’an Wright, depicting scenes from her hometown of Bracknell, once a vision of the future when it was designated a New Town after the Second World War.
Suzannah Evans and Tom Sastry, editors, say: ‘This book is profoundly humanistic. It understands how high the stakes are, whether the future in question is that of a single person or the whole of humanity. It is deeply concerned with the question what is it to be human?… This book looks forward with trepidation, not cynicism; with a profound sense of human fragility and an intense engagement with life. It is full of mischief and full of beauty. It contains a spirit which, fortified with a little optimism could transform the world.’
Suzannah Evans lives in Sheffield and her pamphlet Confusion Species was a winner in the 2012 Poetry Business book and pamphlet competition, judged by Carol Ann Duffy. She has had poems published in The Rialto, The North, Magma and The Poetry Review and on the Guardian’s Poem of the Week. As a teenager she had an obsessive fear of the apocalypse which has fuelled many of her poems, and she still doesn’t know whether to plan responsibly for the future or party like it’s 1999. Her debut poetry collection, Near Future, was published by Nine Arches Press in November 2018.
Tom Sastry lives in Bristol which is vulnerable to tidal surges and unlikely to survive a really serious Puritan revival. He was chosen by Carol Ann Duffy as one of the 2016 Laureate’s Choice poets and his resulting pamphlet, Complicity, was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice and a Poetry School Book of the Year. His first full collection, A Man’s House Catches Fire, will be published by Nine Arches Press in Autumn 2019.
There will be a launch party for Everything That Can Happen on Monday 18th February at the Betsey Trotwood in London. The evening will feature readings from the anthology poets and the book will be available to buy. Find more information and RSVP here. An event is also being planned for Birmingham. Information will be added to the Emma Press events page when released.
Everything That Can Happen: Poems about the Future
ISBN 978-1-910139-52-3 / RRP £10.00 / 90 pages / 43 poems / 184 × 123mm
Publication date: 31st January 2019
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