Support the87press 2022

About the87press

the87press is a South-Asian, Non-Binary, and Neurodiverse -led small press based in South London, UK. Founded in 2018 by poets Azad Ashim Sharma and Kashif Sharma-Patel, the87press has published 22 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction (6 of which are forthcoming in November 2021), hosted 30 live/on-line events, and published extensively through their interdisciplinary e-journal theHythe. In the era of COVID 19, the87press continued to develop and grow its catalogue alongside experimentations in non-fiction publications, collaborations with Camden Art Centre, and a forthcoming music and poetry event with Cafe Oto. 

Thanks to the generosity of our community with our 2021 crowdfunding campaign, we’ve been able to produce 8 books, fund over 20 commissions for our e-journal, promote a free-lance member of staff to a more permanent position, provide a plethora of events both on-line and in-person, design a new website, cover our printing costs in the wake of Brexit-induced paper shortages and the on-going ramifications that has had on distribution networks. 

Supporting food banks, the poet’s hardship fund, raising mutual aid money, and providing students with free books during the pandemic have become the altruistic hallmarks of a radical small publisher looking to participate in meaningful change within the culture sector in the UK. An example of this political practice most recently arrived in the form of a new website which saw the87press divest fully from WIX in support of the Boycott Wix campaign and in support of Palestinians at home and in diaspora. 

Inspiring innovation and attempting to redistribute wealth in the publishing industry requires a regular source of income which is increasingly hard to rely on via traditional routes as the post-pandemic literary market continues to favour larger publishers with more access to marketing and distribution resources. This crowdfunding campaign will be invaluable in our ongoing efforts to secure public funding from Arts Council England and continuing to give new writers the opportunity to publish debut works as well as showcase a broad range of cultural production via our e-journal.

About this Crowdfund

the87press is looking to raise £20,000–£30,000 to support their work in 2022. 

2022 will see the press publish 8 new books and commission 33 artists/writers for online publications via our e-journal theHythe and our online members area theHythe+, in addition to a regular event series with 9 installments between March 2022 and January 2023. 

This event series will include 2 collaborations with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, a poetry workshop and summer poetry festival at Camden Art Centre, and a big book launch party at Cafe Oto. Money raised from this crowdfund will be put towards design and printing costs of all the books plus commissioning of artists / payment of poets at events (day rate of £200). 

We are offering a wide range of book bundles in exchange for your donations, on a sliding scale between £25 and £200. Our main target of £20,000 breaks down to 200 x £200 donations. 

Can you help us by donating and sharing this crowdfund to friends and family who might be interested? You can also support the press with an annual donation of £20 by joining theHythe+ subscription for exclusive online publications here.

the87press thanks you in advance for taking the time to read through the crowdfund, learn about the books we are publishing in 2022 and the artists we are commissioning, and for any support you have the capacity to lend us.

2022 Book List

All books will be published in November 2022.

1. Fran Lock: White/ Other

Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog whisperer, the author of seven poetry collections and of numerous chapbooks, most recently Contains Mild Peril (Out-Spoken Press, 2019). Fran has recently completed her Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London, titled, "Impossible Telling and the Epistolary Form: Contemporary Poetry, Mourning and Trauma". She is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters and she currently teaches at Poetry School. Fran is currently working on 2 books for the87press.

White/ Other is a strange hybrid beast – part poetry, part polemic, part sectarian graffiti – a long lyric essay that grapples with the complexities of writing and living from the position of the absent subject: that is the white working-class “other” within neo-liberal culture. White/ Other is memoir remixed, cut up and spliced with passages of cultural analysis and moments of feral lyric riff to ask what it means to be politically reviled, socially abjected, and economically disenfranchised, alive at the sharp end of everything, language included. EXTRACT: One of the unique joys of being a “white, other” is that you present an opportunity for nice, white middle-class people to comfortably indulge both their racism and their classism without ever having to admit to the existence of either. They don't see your class because you do not present to them like a “typical” working-class person according to the tropes they themselves invented, or because they do not believe the class system exists. They filter class out  of their world-view in ways that remove the experience of class-based oppression from black and minority ethnic people, while refusing to acknowledge the roll racism plays in the perception and treatment of white working-class others...

2. Jessica Widner: Interiors 

Jessica Widner is a Doctoral Candidate in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis explores carnal hermeneutics and phenomenology in modern and contemporary women's fiction. Her fiction has appeared in Gutter Magazine, The Cardiff Review, and Spartan Lit. She lives in Edinburgh. Interiors is her debut novel. 

One day in April, the body of Owen Beausoleil, a poet, is found washed up on some rocks in a coastal city. As the investigation into his death begins, three people find themselves haunted by him – Noah Lund, the history professor who found the body; Lolita Hammershøi, a ballet dancer, and Owen’s best friend; and Billie Tian, a psychotherapist, and Noah’s wife. As the three of them become bound up in the mystery of what happened to Owen, their lives begin to interweave in both expected, and unexpected ways. Told in three different perspectives, this novel explores themes of loss, desire, and the potentials of collective life.

3. Laura Doyle Péan: Yo-Yo Heart (translated by Stuart Bell).

Laura Doyle Péan: They are a poet and an activist, currently studying law at McGill University. Born with a love for literature, they have worked in bookstores and also have a degree in communication and cinema from Cégep Limoilou. Yo-yo Heart is their first book.

Two female lovers separate. Alone in her apartment, surrounded by books and memories, the narrator learns to heal her wounds as the days pass by. Written in the form of a personal diary, the collection Yo-yo Heart is made up of five parts, each a rite of passage, as the voice moves through the main stages of grief.

Stuart Bell is a literary translator. His previous translations include ‘They Stole Our Beauty’ (2019), ‘The Softest Sleep’ (2020), and the poetry collection 'Bird Me' (2021). He is a senior editor for the South London Cultural Review which launched its inaugural issue 'Moving Impressions' in 2021 via the87press.

4. Gareth Farmer: Kerf

Gareth Farmer is an autistic writer and academic based in Shefford, UK. His academic work focuses on poetry, poetics and literary aesthetics and he has published a number of poetry chapbooks, pamphlets and books, most recently, Strategic Forms: or, 74 Questions; 92 Solutions (2021) and Diurnal Sweigh (2018). 

'Kerf' are the sawdust, particles or pieces irrevocably extracted from wood by the blades of cutting implements. Failure to calculate blade thickness when cutting wood can throw off project measurements exponentially. Thin-kerf blades are most accurate for fine woodworking, but they can warp and need careful maintenance. Thick-kerf blades are labour saving but are brute and lack finesse. The poems of Kerf write through themes of woodworking, craft and labour, but these poems also analogise 'kerf' as social and cultural remnants and as examples of disjecta membra. Embedded in and around these themes, the poems in Kerf also explore the author's own, as well as others', experiences of autism and neurodivergence, particularly as manifested in feelings of isolation and in experiences of violence and rejection, but also from the angles of positive and negative obsessions, focus and distraction.

5. Danny Hayward: All Talk

Danny Hayward has published books of poetry with Materials, Veer, Shit Valley and others. His writing has been translated into French and Serbian, and his critical writing has been published by Art Forum and Commune. Recently his work has been included as a part of the 'Illiberal Arts' exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and a volume of his essays on poetry will be published in autumn 2021 by Punctum Press. He maintains the out-of-print poetry pdf archive Free Trials.  

A new long poem for half a voice on the subject of despised knowledge and political invisibility, published alongside a selection of shorter poems and essays dealing variously with the merging and commingling of smartphones and human bodies, the role of elegy in the mid-2000s, the social basis of fascism in the 2010s, social class, and the symbolic dysmorphia of the British high street. All of the work collected here circles around two central relationships: between politics and knowledge, and between poetic language and speech.

6. Rogelio Braga: Is there rush hour in a third world country? (translated by Kristine Ong Muslim)

Rogelio Braga is an exiled playwright, novelist, essayist, publisher, and a political activist from the Philippines. Before he left the archipelago in 2018, he had published two novels, a collection of short stories, and a book of plays. Braga was a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council for theatre in Southeast Asia in 2016. Miss Philippines, his first play written entirely in English, is currently under development as commissioned by the Yellow Earth Theatre in the United Kingdom. He lives in London.

Is There Rush Hour in a Third World Country is the first collection of short stories by Rogelio Braga, an author and playwright who had been forced to leave the Philippines because of repeated and often highly coordinated harassments and threats from the Duterte government. An excitingly original and powerful new voice, Braga writes stories of the working class that hold up the ever-tottering global capitalist structures of power. In Is There Rush Hour in a Third World Country, a call center employee still has to contend with her performance metrics even as a military coup rages outside her building, an old man trying his luck to find work in Manila has a violent encounter with a rampaging elephant, overseas contract workers coming home to the Philippines only to be beset by the baggage of those they have left behind. These are extraordinary stories of people in extraordinary circumstances.

Kristine Ong Muslim is an author, translator, and anthologist who grew up and continues to live in a rural town in southern Philippines. Her books of fiction and poetry include The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and Lifeboat (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015). WhiteTrain will publish a German edition of her book, The Drone Outside. She co-edited the British Fantasy Award-winning anthology People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (2016), Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021), and several other forthcoming anthologies. She is also the translator of at least eight bilingual editions, including Marlon Hacla’s Melismas (Oomph Press, 2020) and Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles’s Twelve Clay Birds: Selected Poems (University of the Philippines Press, 2021) and Three Books (Broken Sleep Books, 2020). Widely anthologized, Muslim’s short stories were published in Conjunctions, Dazed Digital, and World Literature Today and translated into Bulgarian, French, Polish, and Serbian.

7. Dawn Hart: Strength in Petticoats

Dawn Hart's life took an unexpected turn in her 30's,which effectively put her writing on hold. She has returned to this path and now, in her late 50's is enjoying this form of expression. She has been writer in residence at Oval Underground Station and Heathrow Airport-the latter inspired writing having been published by The Liminal Residency. Her debut novel Strength in Petticoats was shortlisted and highly commended by the Adventures in Fiction first novel competition (2020). Strength in Petticoats is her debut novel.

Strength in Petticoats tells the interwoven stories of Lillibet, a female Bolivian wrestler, and Emilio and Emiliano, twin Mexican Lucha Libre wrestlers. Amidst carnivalesque and politically charged atmosphere of South American wrestling, Hart’s debut novel grapples with the love story of these feisty, charismatic, and unique characters whose pursuit of acceptance in a chaotic world leads to tragic ends. 

8. Mau Baiocco: pore/print

Mau Baiocco is a poet, writer, translator and essayist from Caracas, Venezuela and currently residing in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Their scattered interests include socialist imaginaries, dreams, cooking, desire, submerged radical traditions and learning about the microscopic and macroscopic processes which make us. They hold a Masters degree in Poetry and Poetics from the University of York and recent work can be found at SPAM and in the mutual aid poetry zine Ludd Gang. A poetry pamphlet is forthcoming in winter 2021 from Monitor. They are also currently writing a yearlong collaborative sonnet collection in installments, 'Sonnets for Hooch' with Kyle Lovell and Maria Sledmere. Mau is a host of the occasional radio show 'Selections from the Baroque' on No Bounds Radio.

pore/print is Mau Baiocco's debut collection. Part a work of memory and remembrance of adolescence spent in post-revolutionary Caracas, part a work of creative translation, self-translation, dreaming and tripping on the morass of language and form, pore/print extols its readers—in a sincere communal inflection—to 'take everything'.

The Hythe

The Hythe is an online journal for digital poetics showcasing poetry, essays, sound and video works. Previous contributors have included Nisha Ramayya, Sascha A. Akhtar, Amy De’Ath, David Grundy, fred spoliar, Keston Sutherland and many more. Below is an indicative list of future commissions:

Maria Sledmere is editor-in-chief at SPAM Press and a member of A+E Collective. Publications include Chlorophyllia (OrangeApple Press) and neutral milky halo (Guillemot Press). With Rhian Williams, she co-edited the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Her debut collection, The Luna Erratum, is forthcoming also from Dostoyevsky Wannabe, and this summer she presented an exhibition, The Palace of Humming Trees, at French Street Gallery in collaboration with Jack O’Flynn and Katie O’Grady.

Kyle Lovell is the editor of Fathomsun Press and is based in Birmingham. Their poems have appeared in publications including Blackbox Manifold, Pamenar Press, and woe eroa. Their debut pamphlet, 'Each Sharper Complication', was published by legitimate snack in 2020.

Anthony (Vahni) Ezekiel Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Capildeo's eight books and eight pamphlets include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, November 2021) and The Dusty Angel (Oystercatcher, 2021). Their interests include plurilingualism, traditional masquerade, and multidisciplinary collaboration. They are Writer in Residence and Professor at the University of York, a Visiting Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

Robert Kiely is the author of the poetry collection simmering of a declarative void (2020) from the87press. He has also written Incomparable Poetry, an essay on the financial crisis of 2007-8 and Irish literature (2020), which is freely available online. His latest essay 'really existing satire' available on the Cambridge Literary Review website is about Verity Spott's book from the87press, Hopelessness - check it out. Rob was until recently Poet in Residence at Uni. of Surrey and is currently a member of the Veer publishing collective.

Bhanu Kapil is the author of six full-length collections of poetry and experimental prose. Currently, she lives in Cambridge, England, where she is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College. In 2020, she won a Windham-Campbell Award for Poetry from Yale University and a Cholmondeley Award (also for poetry) from the Society of Authors (UK). Her newest book, How To Wash A Heart, was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 2020 and won the TS Eliot Prize.

peter gizzi’s recent books include Now It’s Dark (2020) and Archeophonics (2016). Also in 2020, Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems came out from Carcanet. For more info: petergizzi.org