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The Art Squares Bundle

The Art Squares Bundle

£15.00

If you’re looking to get started with the Emma Press Art Squares, we recommend this bundle of beautifully printed titles, on topics ranging from motherhood, to animal life, to surreal femininity. Each book is 20x20cm.

“All are exquisite. Their glad wings

sweeten the water.” –  Menagerie.

This bundle includes One Day at the Taiwan Land Bank Dinosaur Museum by Elīna Eihmane, Menagerie by Cheryl Pearson, with illustrations by Amy Evans, and The Goldfish by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi, with illustrations by Emma Dai’an Wright.

The Emma Press

The Emma Press is an independent publisher specialising in poetry, short fiction and children’s books. We are trying to make publishing and literature as welcoming and accessible as possible.

Description

In the Art Squares Bundle

One Day at the Taiwan Land Bank Dinosaur Museum (2021), a picture book for adults by Elīna Eihmane.

This is a picture book for adults, framed as a bedtime story (and love letter) to the author’s son. It follows the events of the little boy’s birth, and his mother’s struggle with her new role. In stunningly raw writing that cuts straight to the heart, Eihmane tells a story about love and where love comes from. The book is beautifully illustrated by the author, in dark blues and reds, with expressive, blotchy artwork.

“Today you made an anger pile: you threw our laundry, books, coins, toothbrushes, plastic animals and my wet rain jacket into a pile on the floor. You were so angry. I said: Make it as big as your anger. You added chairs, seeds, more clothes, scissors and the Travel Taiwan book. At some point you started to laugh.”

Page count: 40 | Publication date: March 2021 | Paperback ISBN: 9781912915668

Menagerie (2020), poems by Cheryl Pearson with illustrations by Amy Evans.

Menagerie is a collection of poems about animals, divided into three sections: water, earth and air. Some poems examine a creature from close-up, almost allowing the reader to see the world through the animal’s eyes, while the poet is more present in other poems, looking on. The collection invites the reader to reflect on loneliness, love, mortality, and hope.

“I light for the den of hindleggers.

The all-on-ups who flummox and fuss

at our slinkings-in. Keepers of cluckers

who make good our bellies, whose blood-

beaters patter like rain under feathers.

I follow my teeth to the red-to-come,

follow my own gold lights over grass.

Oh, bloodsmell! Oh, flush of rust! A flood

to loosen, a feast of salt when I open.”

Page count: 36 | Publication date: 22nd May 2020 | Paperback ISBN: 9781912915385

The Goldfish (2019), poems by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi, with illustrations by Emma Dai’an Wright.

The Goldfish is a sumptuous, surreal exploration of femininity. The poet inhabits the voice of a goldfish through a series of linguistically experimental poems which plunge us into the glass bowl and invite us to gaze out.

The poems are in turn sensual, spiky, and queasy, as the poet satirizes the patriarchy and issues a rallying cry for women broken down by society. Halfway through the book, the scope opens out to the world beyond the goldfish bowl, via the story of a free spirit passing through customs, a paean “to our white husbands”, and a letter which heals old wounds.

“I enter the white cave filled with white roses and white candles. I think I am alone, lost in this cave of madness. I continue to walk to the vulva space. A space of pleasure, says the whispering voice (I don’t know where it comes from). Look for the crown. I step forward, I turn to the left, then turn to the right, I jump three times and bow my head. I look around and see my shadow shaped in pink. ”

Page count: 36 | Publication date: 26th October 2019 | Paperback ISBN: 9781912915200

Author

  • The Emma Press

    The Emma Press is an independent publisher specialising in poetry, short fiction and children’s books. We are trying to make publishing and literature as welcoming and accessible as possible.

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