In Transit

Poems of Travel

Sarah Jackson, Tim Youngs, Sarah Jackson, Tim Youngs

• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781910139943
• eBook ISBN: 9781910139387
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Travelling from one place to another is never as simple as getting from A to B. Whether you're sailing in a stately cruise liner or running for a grimy commuter train, your mode of transport affects the way you look at the things around you. Travel can even make us question who we are at home: will we be the same person at the other end of the journey?

The poems in this anthology look at the ways in which travelling can change us, whether we enjoy or endure it. They take in not only day-trippers and business travellers, but characters who are forced to voyage against their will, as well as those with no choice but to stay put. Whatever your destination, this book is a companion for the journey, exploring the nuances of the strange state of being in transit.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Sarah Jackson is the author of Pelt (Bloodaxe, 2012), which won the Seamus Heaney Award and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). She is an AHRC Leadership Fellow, a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University.

Tim Youngs is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University and the author and editor of several books on travel writing. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Magma, The Interpreter’s House, Poetry Salzburg Review and Stride. His debut pamphlet, Touching Distance, was published by Five Leaves in 2017.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Zayneb Allak has travelled and worked all over the world. At the time of going to press, she’s daydreaming about travels in Colombia. In her real life she’s a lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. Her debut pamphlet, Keine Angst, was published by New Walk Editions in 2017.

Baiba Bičole, a prominent Latvian poet since the 1970s, was born in Latvia but left as a refugee during World War II and has lived in the United States since 1950. She is the author of six collections of poetry and has received major Latvian literary awards.

Sharon Black is originally from Glasgow but now lives in the Cévennes mountains of France, having previously lived in Japan after catching the travelling bug in her late teens. She has two collections: To Know Bedrock (Pindrop, 2011) and The Art of Egg (Two Ravens, 2015). www.sharonblack.co.uk

Jeanette Burton has an MA in Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University and teaches English at a sixth-form College in Nottingham. This is her first published poem.

Nancy Campbell’s books include Disko Bay (shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016) and How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic (winner of the Birgit Skiöld Award). Her memoir, The Library of Ice, will be published by Scribner in 2018. She is currently the Canal Laureate.

George David Clark’s collection Reveille won the 2015 Miller Williams Prize and his new work can be found in Agni, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review and elsewhere. He edits the journal 32 Poems and lives with his wife and their four young children in Washington, Pennsylvania.

Claire Collison is a writer, visual artist, breast cancer survivor and artist-in-residence at The Women’s Art Library. Her work has been published widely. She came second in the Resurgence Prize and second in the Hippocrates Prize. Claire performs a life modelling monologue, ‘Truth is Beauty’.

Anna Kisby lives in Devon, UK. Her poetry is widely published in magazines and anthologies, she won the BBC Proms Poetry competition 2016, and she was commended in the Faber New Poets Scheme 2015-16. Her debut pamphlet All the Naked Daughters is published by Against the Grain Press (2017).

Jo Dixon is a poet and critic living in Nottingham. Her poems have appeared in a range of poetry publications, including New Walk, The Interpreter’s House and Furies (For Books’ Sake). Her debut poetry pamphlet, A Woman in the Queue, was published by Melos Press in 2016.

Andy Eaton was born in California and raised throughout the United States. He lives in Belfast and teaches in Oxford. His poems are published widely in places such as Copper Nickel, Ploughshares and The Yale Review. A pamphlet, Sprung Nocturne, was published by the Lifeboat Press in 2016.

Charlotte Eichler’s poems have appeared in magazines such as Blackbox Manifold, PN Review, The Rialto and Stand. In 2017, Poetry London awarded Charlotte a year’s mentoring with Vahni Capildeo. Her first pamphlet, Their Lunar Language, is coming out with Valley Press in 2018.

Rosie Garland is a novelist, poet and singer with post-punk band The March Violets. With a passion for language nurtured by public libraries, her poems have appeared in Bare Fiction, New Welsh Review, The Rialto and elsewhere. She won the inaugural Mslexia Novel Competition.

Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor and has published two pamphlets, two collections, and two novels. Her poems have been published widely, and she runs a Poetry School seminar in Plymouth. www.rebeccagethin.wordpress.com

Rich Goodson has been teaching migrant and refugee teenagers for the last twenty-one years. His debut, Mr Universe (Eyewear), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice in 2017.

Susannah Hart is a London-based poet whose work has been widely published in magazines and online. She is on the board of Magma Poetry and her first collection is due to be published by Live Canon in 2018. She’s also a keen traveller who loves learning different languages.

Fiona Larkin’s poems appear in journals and anthologies, including Magma, The North, Envoi and Under the Radar, and Best New British and Irish Poets 2018 (Eyewear). She has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway.

Shara Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert’s Wife. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and Colgate University’s O’Connor Fellowship. She co-edited A Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice.

Nick Littler is a poet and songwriter from Exeter, now living in Cardiff, where he is trying and failing to learn Welsh. His poem ‘Frank’ will appear in the forthcoming Emma Press anthology of poems about Britain.

Lila Matsumoto’s publications include Urn & Drum (Shearsman), Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls Press) and Allegories from my Kitchen (Sad Press). She teaches poetry at the University of Nottingham and co-runs Front Horse, a magazine and performance night of poetry, music, and art.

Colleen J. McElroy lives in Seattle, Washingto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other Titles from the Emma Press
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Editors' Foreword
• Contents
• Vantage point
• Always pleasing this quarter sun
• Beijing
• Catherine spread the map on the bed
• Japeth's stuff
• Sleeper
• Balloonist
• Family Reunion, March 2001
• Walnuts
• Short Stay
• Square Dancing the Adriatic
• South
• Creeks and Culverts of New Zealand
• Taverna
• Alligator
• The Girls from Maynard's
• The Long Flight Home
• Travelling on the 10.21 with Tom Hardy
• [Watford Gap]
• Postcard
• West Highland
• Empty Quarter
• The Sight to See
• France
• Halfway to Voronezh
• Train to Cambridge
• Epicentres
• The romance of men in boats
• Reading the Water
• Quayside
• Men in Water
• Herring Gurl
• Aboard the Grey Ghost
• Чайак
• Stopper on the Poacher Line
• Dual Gauge
• Copenhagen to Stockholm
• Georg Rides the U-Bahn
• Thirty-Eight Thousand Feet
• Red-eye
• The Crow and the Dove Take Your Shape
• Uptown
• Walking
• Portrait of my father as Joseph Cornell
• Return
• If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now
• The Blue
• In Dyeliva
• La Pive
• Gods, Cabo de São Vicente, Portugal
• Little Blue Truck
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editors