Pre-Order! All purchases will be sent on or before the official publication date, 26/03/2022***
Full Colour, Hardback, 210 x 148mm, 200pp
THE BOOK OF PENTERACT presents our biggest project to date - a 200 page, full-colour, hardback anthology featuring 45 of the most exciting poets currently working in the fields of constrained, formal, and visual poetry. This is a casebound edition, with a striking red ribbon bookmark and black and red head and tail-bands.
Featuring contributions from:
Merlina Acevedo, Sacha Archer, Nick Asbury, Gary Barwin, Derek Beaulieu, Gregory Betts, Richard Biddle, Christian Bök, Luke Bradford, Andrew Brenza, Susie Campbell, Marian Christie, Lisa Cooper, Franco Cortese, Clara Daneri, Laura Davis, Lucy Dawkins, Dave Drayton, Anthony Etherin, Teo Eve, SJ Fowler, Mary Frances, Helen Frank, Mark Goodwin, Paul Hawkins, Greg Hill, Tom Jenks, Robert Frede Kenter, Chris Kerr, Laura Kerr, Michelle Moloney King, Alex McKeown, Nick Montfort, Astra Papachristodoulou, Imogen Reid, Katrina Roberts, Petra Schulze-Wollgast, Kate Siklosi, Rachel Smith, Vilde B Torset, Philip Terry, Simon Tyrrell, María Celina Val, Maggs Vibo, & Lori Wike."
Quoted from Penteract Press

From its sinister title we get the clue that this book is not for the faint-hearted, evoking, as it does, an intriguing amalgamation of murder and nostalgia. And this extraordinary tome certainly lives up to its contradictory oxy(moronic) moniker. Being a treatise on the eternal contradictory nature of humanity itself, 42 reflective, titled statements; coupled with a series of illustrative, digitally manipulated visual poems read like a picture-book found under the mattress of an inmate in a psychiatric ward. Begging the question, what traumas has this troubled patient been party to? And the answer seems to be, LIFE! Imagine a library of self-help tomes, lifestyle magazines and science journals, jammed into a liquidiser with several pints of the author's own blood, seasoned with wit and cynicism and you have James Knight’s epic poem… Crossed between a serial killer's frenzied yet meticulous justification of their 'unspeakable' acts and a psychedelic creation myth dreamt up by a being desperate to mock and reveal something primordial/elemental about the cruel reality of existence, this beautifully rendered volume offers page after page of grotesque postcards from a writer who appears to be very close to if not almost over, the edge. As a multitude of universal words/images/themes emerge from this treatise: mouths, teeth, wombs, sperm, lightbulbs, rooks, butterfly-wings, part skeletons, part insects…we enter the nightmarish world of a monster maker, because this is what James Knight is. A skilled technician: he scalpels words, threads together bodies and weaves a realm of magical destruction. Should we take all this seriously? There are games at play. 43 The fact that halfway into it, the first part of the narrative steps ‘Through the Looking Glass’ indicates that there is mischief afoot. Familiar yet strangely different, the reflected text and images that confront us in the second part also tease us. We want to flick back to previous pages, compare notes, check to see if we have imagined things or not and try to decipher the esoteric messages/clues that have already been cleverly concealed within our unconscious minds. And to our amazement, somewhere amongst all this horror, we begin to have fun. Noticing the puns, wordplay and allusions that pepper the narrative, we realise that we too have been 'dismembered' and that our remembered selves and experience are perhaps not quite what we imagined them to be. I urge you, with caution and a healthy dose of curiosity, to cross the threshold and be both delighted and terrified by the weird world that James Knight continues to give life to from the heart of his prolific laboratory."
Afterword by Richard Biddle

Reimagining the great ‘City symphony’ documentaries of the 1920s that visualised human beings as components of a vast industrial machine, this short film gives us a hellish glimpse of a world a century later in which the chaotic principles of casino capitalism have transformed the workspace into an electronic plantation and reduced the horizon of desire to a close circuit of pointless productivity and compulsive consumption." - Bruce Bennett, Lancaster University "In this filmpoem from the Trickhouse studio we pass through the revolving doors of humdrum routine to find ourselves lost in the arcade of the real, where everyone is clapping but no one knows what game they're playing." - Rhiannon Auriol, Daughterhood Zine "Sensational, surreal and strangely mesmerising, LIVESTOCK traverses the glassy veneer of modern work through kaleidoscope archives of stock content, in turn, rejigging the loops of our compulsive present." - Maria Sledmere, Spam Press "Dan Power subverts the sleekly bland visual rhetoric of our corporate masters and asks, 'Are we all just livestock?'" - James Knight, Steel Incisors ~ ~ ~ Directed by Dan Power Footage licensed from Shutterstock and Getty Images Original music by CyberLink Made possible with the support of StAnza Poetry Festival and the Kickstart Jobs Scheme Trickhouse Films, 2022."
YouTube Description

In these intricately made, vibrant collages, ReVerse Butcher uses a variety of materials and tools from glue and scissors to VR and 3-D modelling software. Through her own invention, the kaleidoscopic erasure, rVb toys with perceived realities, linearity, gender, religion and possibly even time itself. There’s a tension between geometric precision and disrupted message; between the treatment of text as an authority one should obey to rVb’s playful cut-ups, distortions, drawings and red-lining. Words are presented forwards, backwards, upside down and sideways. They merge with each other and split apart to disorient the reader, to make the reader take a closer look. Visual poems can be viewed all at once by the eye, then taken in by the brain. You can scroll through and adore the vibrancy, getting a gander at individual isolated words such as “immoral” or “powerful.” Or you can view through the kaleidoscope and see the words move and dance, join and separate. This is kinetic and original work. - Amanda Earl, editor of Judith Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021). Paperback, full colour, 210mm x 210mm. 40 visual poems and an afterword by Lyn Ashby, book artist and writer based in Melbourne."
​Quoted in Steel Incisors

Calligrammes; poèmes de la paix et da la guerre, 1913-1916, by Guillaume Apollinaire; 1918; Paris.

The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph."
Guillaume Apollinaire, in a letter to André Billy

Part exhibition, part festival, FUTURES presents nearly 32,000 square feet of new immersive site-specific art installations, interactives, working experiments, inventions, speculative designs, and “artifacts of the future,” as well as historic objects and discoveries from 23 of the Smithsonian’s museums, major initiatives, and research centers. Of the nearly 150 objects on view, several are making their public debut: an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven rover from Alphabet’s X that could transform agriculture; a Planetary Society space sail for deep space travel; a Loon internet balloon; the first full-scale Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome built in North America; the world’s first controlled thermonuclear fusion device; and more."
​Quoted in Smithsonian Website, 2021

Poem Atlas is an exhibition platform and occasional publisher of books and object poems. It was formed in 2019 to connect individuals to new and established visual poets that toy with form in interesting ways. Our platform aims to showcase the best of object and experimental poetry in the UK and beyond, focussing on the work of poets who explore the performative aspect of tangible poems, and merge poetry and visual art to create unique visual-textual and interactive objects. We have borrowed our name from the hononymous Titan in Greek Mythology who was condemned to stand at the edge of the world and hold the entire sky in his arms until the end of time. A bit like the Titan Atlas, the poet has the potential to be the beholder of extraordinary things, such as object poems, that can attribute for some of the most exciting forms in contemporary poetry."
​Quoted in Poem Atlas Website

In my piece "Scapegoating in the Silver Age" I experimented with a hole created by using cheap paper in a watercolor creation. I decided to optimize the mistake and never looked back. It's fun to see these pieces experimenting with stitching. It reminds me a lot of work, but especially work by artist Susie Campbell. "
​Maggs Vibo

The following represents scans of my recorded coughs after being diagnosed with Covid-19. Each 3 second interval was printed atop vellum and melded with letter transfer poetry to describe my symptoms, concerns, and general exhaustion over the course of the recovery."
Quoted in Ice Floe Press, 2022.

Big gratitude to everyone who's given Hem a follow this weekend. Our first release is stunning, and we're excited to be able to preview it tomorrow."
Quote by Richard Capener, 2022