Pamphlets
Muscaliet’s pamphlet series captures the very latest in new and exciting creative work from poets, writers and artists. Each pamphlet is collectable, printed as a limited run, bound with richly coloured card covers and endpapers, and showcases words and images on spacious tile-sized pages.
Muscaliet’s first pamphlet series was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award 2022. The judges noted:
‘Muscaliet Press, named after a mythical composite creature, imparts a slightly magical tenor to its pamphlets. They are usually tile-sized and all appear in unlettered and unpatterned covers, whose solid hues are chosen by the authors. The pamphlets often feature interplays of words and images; they are produced in short runs of 80-120 copies. Muscaliet Press exhibits the dignity of an actor who is tiny on the scale of our cataclysmic and cluttered world yet has the courage to bring clarity and beauty into that world, to hold space for its bewilderment, and to explore new creative possibilities.’
Blazing Space — Stephen Collis
32pp, 175mm x 160mm
Cover ‘Rust’, Endpapers ‘Tabriz Blue’ by G.F. Smith
Blazing Space is a long poem begun as an ‘atmospheric river’ hit the Pacific coast of Canada, causing floods and landslides from mountain soils already depleted by summer forest fires. The same week the storm arrived, in November 2021, poets Phyllis Webb, Etel Adnan, and Lee Maracle all passed away. Blazing Space is written in the wake of these disasters, from an office lined with books that had belonged to poet Robin Blaser, from whose marginalia the poem takes instruction.
Itchy — Adam Neikirk
28pp, 180mm x 270mm
Cover ‘Emerald’, Endpapers ‘Adriatic’ by G.F. Smith
The poet is itchy: there’s a nagging irritation that will not be satisfied no matter how much Neikirk writes it out. Through wandering trains of nightly thoughts, uncomfortable real-life situations, and the haunting words and philosophies of the Romantics, we are taken on a journey of hard truths and uneasy revelations; an unsteady reiteration of Neikirk’s own experience that stirs an itchiness in the reader. Could this simply require a change of washing detergent, or will the itch persist…?
Covids — Philip Terry
32pp, 175mm x 160mm
Cover ‘Sapphire’, Endpapers ‘Stone’ by G.F. Smith
Philip Terry’s Covids transports us to a time when we were under strict pandemic lockdown, when take aways were encouraged, exercise was one walk or run per day outdoors, and inept politicians made worsening judgement calls with deadly consequences. In this bewildering mix of confinement and collective responsibility, Terry’s poetry documents the daily inconveniences of lockdown set against the dangerous impotence of political leadership, the very real struggles of frontline workers, and the human tragedy of the lingering spectre of Covid deaths.
Shells of a Distant Sea — David Hayward
28pp, 180mm x 270mm
Cover ‘Cobalt’, Endpapers ‘Stone’ by G.F. Smith
Shells of a Distant Sea was written in early 2021 and is based on a daily walk along a cold and windswept stretch of beach in Île de Ré. Shells is about the objects seen and found during those walks, the rock pools and seaweed clumps, the patterns left on the sand by the night waves. It is about the combination of those objects with thoughts, about the relationship between those thoughts and memory, about not being able to go forward and not being able to go back; about the mirroring of words and images, about walking along a beach and not understanding a thing.
Colours & Tea (Human) — Tomi Adegbayibi
28pp, 175mm x 160mm
Cover ‘Softy – Black on White’, Endpapers ‘Takeo Tela Pine’ by G.F. Smith
Tomi Adegbayibi’s debut pamphlet takes us to a world where colours and tastes suffuse into one another, and where relationships and prejudices mingle with bitterness and sweetness. Through the contrast of the vibrant against the dull, this poetry questions our own judgements, which are often only half-formed and malleable. Profound poetry that is as rich as it is astringent.
Source — Felicity Allen and Simon Smith
28pp, 175mm x 160mm
Cover ‘Chartreuse’, Endpapers ‘Marrs Green’ by G.F. Smith
Simon Smith presents a new translation of Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ paired with details of Bowls, a series of watercolour images by Felicity Allen, following the turbulent and fantastical voyage of Rimbaud’s drunken boat as an escape—however briefly—from the very disturbing realities of Covid, ‘cyber-junk’, and armed insurrections. Source is a journey from sources: from river to sea, from source texts to translations, and from wildly intoxicating spaces to the very raw hangover of the next day.
Eschalator Canticles — Moyra Tourlamain
20pp, 175mm x 160mm
Cover ‘Mandarin’, Endpapers ‘Slate’ by G.F. Smith
For St Francis of Assisi, with sadness…
The Eschalator Canticles converse with St Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures, lamenting a planet that is on the verge of a climate catastrophe while laying bare man’s struggle with himself, and with the society he has has created.
Still Spring — David Herd
32pp, 175mm x 160mm
Cover ‘Mid Green’, Endpapers ‘Natural’ by G.F. Smith
Still Spring interleaves vulnerability, love and language through the first unsettling weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. At times tender, at times breathless, this poetry focuses on the power of words set against silence.
Baikal Zen — Andy Brown
28pp, 175mm x 160mm
Cover ‘Harvest’, Endpapers ‘Forest’ by G.F. Smith
This sequence interleaves eleven short poems of place, with an equal number of treated photographs by the author, which have asemic qualities, in that they use lines and symbols that may look like writing, but which carry no intrinsic meaning in themselves. Each poem, in some way, references writing and/or reading; the accompanying images are intended not only as illustrations, but as images to be read in some way on their own terms.
The title refers to a natural phenomenon in Lake Baikal, Siberia. Rocks falling onto the ice of the lake are heated by the sun. The ice melts, then re-freezes at night, leaving the rocks suspended on tiny frozen waves – a phenomenon known as ‘Baikal Zen’.
Differentials — Duncan MacKay
36pp, 175mm x 160mm
Cover ‘Imperial Blue’, Endpapers ‘Pale Grey’ by G.F. Smith
Differentials offers a variety of content in subject, tone, form and intention, none necessarily more meaningful than another. But within the frame of difference, language seeks out the significant, the insignificant, and the infinitesimal.
Every close dissimilarity initiates divergence against which come the risks of discrimination. Hence the disparate may become the desperate and eventually of necessity simply hidden; hence two splinters the size of a thumbnail wedged into the lintel.
