Independent Publisher of Poetry
Based in Birmingham
Sonnets for Hooch: Summertime Social
Mau Baiocco // Kyle Lovell // Maria Sledmere
[100 pp. // A5 // Perfect-bound // Run of 100 ]
Sonnets for Hooch: Summertime Social is the sophomore offering of a four-part pamphlet series of sonnets attuned to the weirding seasons. Structured around 22 intervals of the day and its explosion, from golden hour to gloaming, breakfast to millennium, this bumper book of sonnets is full of clandestine snacks and wavy moments. In celebration of wasting time, biting into the lemon of attention and trading intimacies, this is a long, sweet hit of lilac to whet your utopian appetite. An ‘affordable metaphysics of care’ imagined at the scale of the world as ‘a dream governable / by beginning’, ‘a rare green / species of hooch’ and ‘this hypersonnet’ of ‘a lifetime on tape’. The poets of Summertime Social find comradeship in IDM producers, dedications to friends, calorific density and dreamwork; the brevity of the sonnet form affords ‘a sun net cutting over unfinished’. You want to ask, where does the sun set on the internet? What does it mean to be ‘rat ascendant’”? Here on the ‘skylark octave’, the hooch poets have really come into their own.
UK: £8 (incl. P&P)
EU: £12 (incl. P&P)
Lemon Bloom Season and Summertime Social
2 Book Bundle
UK: £12 (incl. P&P)
EU: £16 (incl. P&P)
NOTE: Please contact us at ‘fathomsun [at] gmail [dot] com’ if you would like to purchase multiple copies, or for it to be sent outside of the EU.
Praise for Summertime Social
Three poets went into the woods directly after lunch, or was it the hour they call witching, or most literary that twilight which is time itself. The first dandelion sonnets in bloom, the yellow celandines of yesteryear in full flourish. The buds of hooch spirit rising like pale corn, as if to be harvested in the leap of life, the wide open door. Will you have this glass of lemon brew, spiked with what is desire itself, a mock sort of shyness, sweeter than young love in summer. Drink up.
— D. H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
I know I’m more Lana than Lana, but this is more Hooch than HOOCH!!!!!!!!!!
— Elizabeth Lemonade, Melancholy Consultant at SMOOCH™
hurricane / orison
Gloria Dawson
[28 pp. // saddle-stitched // run of 50]
SECOND PRINTING
UK: £5 (incl. P&P)
EU: £5.50 (incl. P&P)
Sonnets for Hooch: Lemon Bloom Season
Mau Baiocco // Kyle Lovell // Maria Sledmere
[56 pp. // A5 // Perfect-bound // Run of 100 ]
Sonnets for Hooch: Lemon Bloom Season is the first of a four-part pamphlet series which writes sonnets attuned to the weirding seasons. What started as an internet joke about alcopops and longing became a keystone for exploring adolescent malaise, nostalgia and resilience, the politics of civic space and moments of euphoria and friendship amidst the daily grind of crisis. And why not use the form of the sonnet, little song, to riff on all this, given that we wanted to make poetry ~pop again? Lemon Bloom Season is a collaboration between emergent and established small UK poetry presses (Mermaid Motel, Rat Press, Fathomsun Press) and three writers whose work intersects with a post-internet, hyperpop and sweet-sour neon flavour, dressed up in fancy lyric garms.
UK: £6 (incl. P&P)
EU: £9 (incl. P&P)
NOTE: Please contact us at ‘fathomsun [at] gmail [dot] com’ if you would like to purchase multiple copies, or for it to be sent outside of the EU.
Praise for Lemon Bloom Season
Like a liquid prisoner pent in glass, I once thought the sum total of human ingenuity was Fanta Grape. And then I read this collection, the perfect expression of what it means to write your poems in the mouths of your friends (as I think Derrida said). You know the part of a poem that stays at the bottom of the bottle, collects as crystallising residue? If you read these poems out loud for long enough, the sounds train your tongue to flicker in there like a lizard and the why of the world just fizzes and melts.
– Colin Herd, author of You Name It (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019)
Of all sciences, is our Hooch poet found at the highest. For they doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any person to enter into it; nay, they doth as if your journey should lie through a fair orchard—at the very first give you a cluster of lemons that, full of that taste, you may long to pass further.
– Sir Philip Sidney, author of An Apology for Poetry
When put to our focus group, seven out of nine consumers agreed that the tasting notes for Lemon Bloom Season were long, smooth, and ‘distinctively yellow in its language’. One consumer attempted to quote Roland Barthes. Another consumer attempted to put forward a new theory of ‘Bitter Poetics’, before being given some more Lemon Bloom Season sonnets. Everyone was glad.
– Philomena Zest, SMOOCH™ CEO
Kyle Lovell // In the Debt of Love
SOLD-OUT
[28 pp. // saddle-stitched // run of 50]
[Free PDF Edition // In the Debt of Love]
To purchase a copy of In the Debt of Love, we kindly ask that you donate £4 to the Poet’s Hardship Fund, then send the dontation receipt and postal address to “fathomsun [at] gmail [dot] com”. Alternatively, if you have a monthly donation to the PHF set up, or cannot afford to donate right now, please contact us and we shall ensure that a copy gets sent your way.
Composed of original work from eleven authors, Pomes & Joys is a hybrid anthology that celebrates the poetry work of Anna Mendelssohn (1948 – 2009).
Known as an avant-garde poet, a painter, and a former poltical activist, Anna Mendelssohn did not show much interest in publishing her work during her lifetime. In spite of this, her poetry had found an attentive audience among the experimental poets of East Anglia since the late 1980s. Since then, that audience has quietly grown, up to the point that an archive of her materials was established at the University of Sussex in 2015. Two years later, the first symposium on Mendelssohn was held at the same university.
It was upon this rising wave of interest that the anthology first took shape. We hoped to bring together numerous friends, acquaintances, and strangers in this publication, all under the banner of having been influenced by Anna Mendelssohn’s poetry. Pomes & Joys is the result of that project, and we could not be any happier with the result. This diverse collection of work is testament to a remarkable poet and the resounding impression her work has left upon its readers. It’s a shared celebration of the poet’s resolute belief in art’s freedom to resist against the structural forms that seek to oppress it. At its heart, it is a small offering of pomes and joys to the memory of Anna Mendelssohn.
Featuring poetry from Charlie Baylis, Stephen Emmerson, Callie Gardner, Paul Hawkins, Linda Kemp, Tom Snarsky, Vicky Sparrow, and Florence Uniacke. It also includes essays from Sara Crangle, Joey Frances, and Lotte L.S..
Published on 18th May 2020
PDF (Digital purchase only) // 45 pp. // £2.50
All proceeds from the sale of the PDF are donated to the Estate of Anna Mendelssohn
Fathomsun Press 