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Charles Boyle

@cbeditions.bsky.social

870 followers 540 following 100 posts

Writer and publisher (CB editions, 2007 to now: www.cbeditions.com)

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Nov 22

Season Tickets on the CB editions home page: www.cbeditions.com. There are 75+ books on the website - choose any 6 for £50, or any 10 for £75. UK only; free postage.

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · 1d

CB editions October newsletter, archived on the Sonofabook blog: sonofabook.blogspot.com/2025/10/cbe-...

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Reposted by Charles Boyle

Dan O'Brien @bydanobrien.bsky.social · 28d

My second poetry collection ‘Scarsdale’ is 11 years old today. Still available from @cbeditions.bsky.social in the UK, and Measure Press in the US.

www.cbeditions.com/obrien2.html

www.amazon.com/Scarsdale-Da...

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Sep 8

Separation anxiety: books I’m fond of that might be hard or expensive to replace if I lose them – if I see another copy of the same edition in a charity shop, I often buy it. This is the most recent, bought at the weekend. Some of these duplicates I’ve given away, some I appear to have lost.

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Sep 6

The books, yes, but also the shelves - made yesterday from stiff cardboard, they slot together when going up and fold down flat when down. If I designed for IKEA I'd give them a name like Harald.

Display bookshelves made from cardboard, holding 12 books

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Sep 4

CB editions newsletter, as archived on the Sonofabook blog: sonofabook.blogspot.com/2025/09/cbe-...

Stack of new copies of Ghost Stations by Patrick McGuinnes

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Reposted by Charles Boyle

Caroline Clark @cclarklewes.bsky.social · Aug 29

Many thanks to Nadia Vikulina for her thoughtful and insightful review of Sovetica in the latest issue of Tears in the Fence ed. David Caddy.

The book is available here: www.cbeditions.com/clark

I, Superimposed: Writing the Past of the Other in Caroline Clarks' Sovetica
Sovetica by Caroline Clark, CB Editions 2021 €10
The washed-out pink and green of former identity cards, pages of written-down stories, a peculiar old apparat in which one needs to insert photo-slides and hold them up to sunlight to reveal the slides' images. The thrill of opening Sovetica, Caroline Clark's second collection of poetry, resembles the thrill of discovering a box containing a personal archive. In fact, the book was composed following the poet's discovery of the photographs from the time her husband Andrey was a young boy in a small Soviet town in the late 1980s. The stories that Andrey told her about that time and the photographs that compelled those memories to surface were collected by Clark over the years and subsequently molded into poems, whose mode of diving into the past is honest, caring, translucent, and because of that, arrestingly refreshing.
The steady advancement of time throughout the collection is evident with the imminence of big political changes in the late Soviet Union, finding its resolution in poems at the end of the book. The rupture of the historical timeline, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, arrives with the news on TV which one accepts with a soft feeling of uncertainty: "It was/ As if we have been/ given our freedom." The nonchalant delivery of that line exemplifies how the poems of Sovetica do not form an overarching narrative, harboring sweeping anticipation or resolution, and instead make us experience the stories of the past in a form of a decentralized clutter, growing around various images and photographs. The page with the poems' titles, most often just one word, looks like a collection of charms from the past: 'Radio, "Ticket, "Cabbage, "Boots." It is telling that the collection opens with a poem taking place in a scrapheap, a place of piling discarded objects, yet promising to Andrey and his friends, and by extension to us, a great find…

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Jul 23

Pick'n'mix: CB editions July newsletter archived on the Sonofabook blog: sonofabook.blogspot.com/2025/07/pick...

Pick'n'mix: newsletter July 2025

Pick’n’mix: choose – from any of the books in the photo or on the website – six for £50, ten for £75: see the Season Tickets on the home p...

sonofabook.blogspot.com

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Jul 21

Sheila Ramage ran this bookshed for 45 years. “The loveliest person in the trade” – Marius Kociejowski. I’ll be talking about her (5 mins) at 2pm on Saturday, 26 July in this very place, now the Bouda Gallery (W8 4RT), at an event organised by Steven Fowler: london.czechcentres.cz/en/program/p...

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Jul 18

From the trailer for Four Letters of Love (whose plot features a poetry competition). Helena Bonham-Carter: “What are you doing?” Brooding man: “I’m writing a love poem.” HB-C: “What is the MATTER with everyone in this house?”

Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Jul 9

All the CBe covers 2007-2026 on a poster, free to takers of Season Ticket 2 (10 books of your own choice for £75) on the website www.cbeditions.com

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Jun 22

Endings, signing off, in novels, are so often tacky. I've written about this, I've argued that 'Everyone lived happily ever after' is metafictional. Here's a good one (Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty):

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Jun 21

Sorry about this. I've checked and it works for me ... Maybe if you try a different browser (I'm using Firefox)? This solves the problem sometimes, no idea why.

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Jun 21

Serve cool: bookshelves for another hot day

Pic shows books in fridge and on shelves of fridge door

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · Jun 17

Mended. Since the bones I fractured in my neck in March have now healed, thanks to the NHS, I owed it to this giraffe to put her/him back together.

Pottery giraffe broken in many places, mended

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · May 31

"Run up the colours" - CB editions newsletter, as archived on the Sonofabook blog: sonofabook.blogspot.com/2025/05/run-...

"Run up the colours": newsletter May 2025

Early books, above … 176 Interruptions , scheduled for July, is a revised and expanded edition of 99 Interruptions (published in 2022 and n...

sonofabook.blogspot.com

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · May 23

Nor, back in 2007, did I ever expect this. Thank you.

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · May 23

All the CB editions covers, 2007 to now, on one A1 poster.

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Charles Boyle @cbeditions.bsky.social · May 23

"Umarell": see the Wiki entry: men of retirement age watching roadworks, arms akimbo or hands clasped behind back, offering unwanted advice. Here's me watching a new speed bump being put in in my street.

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Reposted by Charles Boyle

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · May 14

Short reading 🧵from last night. Book 28 of 2025 Reading: Seesaw by Carmel Doohan, from the redoubtable @cbeditions.bsky.social, where else?

Jonathan Gibbs @jonathangibbs.bsky.social · May 13

2025 Reading 28: Seesaw by Carmel Doohan. This one’s been on my shelves for a while. Took me about a week to read it, all told. A difficult, uneasy, intelligent, avoidant, deprecating, antsy, occasionally vicious and often true - *insistently* true - book.

(Novel? Autofiction? Book.)