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Welcome to our Spring/Summer 2017 catalogue! Including 2016 titles Peepal Tree brings you the very best of international writing from the Caribbean, its diasporas and the UK. Founded in 1985, Peepal Tree has published over 350 books and has grown to become the world’s leading publisher of Caribbean and Black British Writing. Our goal is to publish books that make a difference, and though we always want to achieve the best possible sales, we’re most concerned with whether a book will still be alive and have value in the future. Visit us at www.peepaltreepress.com to discover more. Peepal Tree Press 17 Kings Avenue, Leeds LS6 1QS, United Kingdom +44 (0)1 1 3 2451703 info @ peepaltreepress.com www.peepaltreepress.com 1 Madwoman SHARA MCCALLUM “These wonderful poems open a world of sensation and memory. But it is a world revealed by language, never just controlled. The voice that guides the action here is openhearted and openminded—a lyric presence that never deserts the subject or the reader. Syntax, craft and cadence add to the gathering music from poem to poem with—to use a beautiful phrase from the book, ‘each note tethering sound to meaning.’” —Eavan Boland Sometimes haunting and elusive, but ultimately transformative, the poems in Shara McCallum’s latest collection Madwoman chart and intertwine three stages of a woman’s life from childhood to adulthood to motherhood. Rich with the 9781845233396 / 72 pages / £8.99 POETRY complexities that join these states of being, the poems wrestle with the idea of Print / 23 JAN 2017 being girl, woman and mother all at once. McCallum questions how far we form our identities and who and what else might shape those identities for us. Shara McCallum is the author of four previous books of poetry: The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems, This Strange Land, Song of Thieves, and The Water Between Us. Originally from Jamaica, she lives in Pennsylvania where she is Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry and a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Bucknell University. 2 2017 Spring/Summer New Titles The Pain Tree Olive Senior Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature “...her prose prowess is always on exquisite display.” — Publishers Weekly The Bocas Prize judges commended Senior’s writing for its “command of … every register of Jamaican patwah.” The short stories in this collection, wrote the judges, “hover around a persistent question: What lies just below the skin of everyday life? Lifting the veil — the caul, the face customised to the world’s demands — leads to surprising discoveries about apparently ordinary lives.” Running through the collection is a sharp eye for the polite cruelty of the middle ISBN: 9781845233488 / 296 pages / £9.99 FICTION, SHORT STORIES classes, and in oblique ways these stories are acutely radical, going to the heart of 6 FEB 2017 Jamaica’s inequalities of class, race and gender. The stories range through time, from the pre-war years to the very recent past, touching on the divisions between the old rural Jamaica and its spirit world and the modern, western-centric tastes of the urban middle class. Whilst most of the stories are set in the everyday world, “Flight” in particular opens the “door to enchantment”, with an ending that makes the hairs on your neck rise. Olive Senior is the prize-winning author of a dozen books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Born in Jamaica, she has travelled extensively and has now settled in Toronto. She visits Jamaica frequently and the island and the wider Caribbean remain central to her work. She teaches writing internationally and has read her work and lectured at many international venues over the years. © Caroline Forbes © Caroline 3 Four Taxis Facing North Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw In Trinidad, oil wealth supported the growth of probably the most prosperous and conspicuously consuming middle-class in the Caribbean. But there was a price to pay for the deepened social inequalities that resulted: a deep paranoia rooted in the fear of crime and social upheaval. The stories in Four Taxis Facing North comprise a beautifully written and finely observed portrait of contemporary Trinidadian society, taking us inside the very human lives of both rich and poor – and their infrequent and often uncomfortable interactions. Without losing faith in human capacity for renewal, they offer few comforting illusions. The title story, in the mode of speculative fiction, envisions a nightmare of future possibilities based on the anarchic realities of the present. ISBN: 9781845233471 / 226 pages / £9.99 FICTION, SHORT STORIES In prose of great clarity and a deeply satisfying exactness, deft characterisation and Print and E-Book / 6 FEB 2017 shapeliness of form, these stories present a moral vision that is both necessary and bracing, prophetic but not preachy. With an introduction by Lawrence Scott. Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. She is the author of a novel, Mrs. B, and several academic works. 4 2017 Spring/Summer New Titles Kingdom of Gravity Nick Makoha In their narratives these poems relate to the horrors of the civil war that ousted the brutal tyranny of Idi Amin in Uganda, a war of liberation that brought its own barbarous atrocities. In political terms the poems chart the impact of imperialism and neo-colonialism that lay behind those traumas in the life of the nation. In personal terms, the poems are framed between the contrary pulls of attachment and flight, exile and longing. At their heart is an unwavering curiosity about how people behave in extreme situations, and what this reveals about our common human capacities to indulge grandiose visions, betray them, dissemble, seek revenge and kill. There is no presumption of innocence. There may be flight, but there is no standing aside. The narrator can dream (but is it a dream?) of a “dead man/who has been stung by the invisible bee of my bullet”. ISBN: 9781845233334 / 320 pages / £8.99 POETRY 6 March 2017 The care in the making and shaping of the poems bears witness to the evident fact that for Nick Makoha poetry became “This rock […] a sanctuary from which I can repair the ruins”. Nick Makoha won the Brunel University African Poetry Prize 2015. His pamphlet, Resurrection Man, published in the African Poetry Book Fund’s Seven New Generation African Poets series was awarded the Cave Canem Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady prize. He fled Uganda during the civil war to end the Idi Amin dictatorship. He has lived in Kenya, Saudi Arabia and currently resides in London. 5 Collected Poems 1975-2015 John Robert Lee “John Robert Lee’s Collected Poems 1975-2015 is a testimony to the significance and high quality of contemporary St Lucian literature. His is a voice that has recorded its history, journeyed on its waves, refracted the lucent Caribbean light, its community and the kingdom of God — all with care, lyricism, heart and intelligence. Yet, the yearning in him persists — and that is a hallmark of a fine and committed poet.” — Sudeep Sen, Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions) and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor) These poems tell of a continuing journey and reveal a subtly changing voice. They represent a consistent and rewarding attempt to hold together in one space the things that matter. This is seeking first the kingdom of God; maintaining ISBN: 9781845233334 / 212 pages / £10.99 POETRY the community of men and women who incarnate that kingdom and make life Print meaningful; the beauties of St Lucia’s natural world and its rich traditions of folk- 03 April 2017 culture; and the challenges and demands of poetry. John Robert Lee is one of the group of significant Saint Lucian writers who are the younger contemporaries of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. Others include McDonald Dixon, Kendel Hippolyte and Jane King. His poems are appear in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Poetry Wales, Small Axe, The Missing Slate and many other places. © Davina Lee © Davina 6 2017 Spring/Summer New Titles Pitch Lake Andre Bagoo Andre Bagoo’s poems explore the multiple resonances of the title, where pitch signifies both the stickiness of memory – the way the La Brea Pitch Lake is a place where “buried trees [are] born again” – and the idea of scattering: of places and impressions and the effort to hold them in one vision. There are poems that encompass reflections on art; Trinidad as a fallen Eden; Black Lives Matter; visits to Britain and cows “straight out of Hardy”; poems about finding love in a climate of homophobia; and poems written in response to Trinidad’s disappearing fauna and threatened eco-system. In between the sections of “Pitch” and “Lake”, comes “Black Box”, poems written in response to art works shown at the Caribbean Queer Visualities exhibition in ISBN: 9781845233532 / 72 pages / £8.99 POETRY Belfast, Northern Ireland. 24 April 2017 “Lake”, is a sequence of prose poems, presenting subtly dislocated narratives that, even at their shortest, disrupt the reader’s expectations of where they are heading. In their brevity, these prose pieces offer surfaces, like that of a lake, that invite the reader to wonder what lies underneath but warn that this is not necessarily what is most predictable. Andre Bagoo is a Trinidadian poet and writer. He is the author of Trick Vessels (Shearsman Books, 2012) and BURN (Shearsman Books, 2015) which was longlisted for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.