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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · Apr 30

To everyone who’s bought a book from us recently: thank you.

We’re reaching for just 10% of our subscribers and followers to buy a book from us, which would sustain our work in a big way.

If you haven’t yet, and you can, we’d love your support.

brokensleepbooks.com

A minimalist digital graphic on a white background. Bold black text at the top reads 'What if just 10% bought a book?' Beneath it is a simple open book icon, followed by smaller black text saying, 'Your support changes everything.' In red text below, it reads, 'To everyone who’s already bought a book—thank you.' At the bottom, the website 'brokensleepbooks.com' is displayed.

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 16h

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Geoff Hattersley - Collected Poems | Broken Sleep Books

Geoff Hattersley’s Collected Poems brings together over three decades of work, mapping a singular voice grounded in working-class experience, dark wit, and sharply observed detail. From the everyday s...

www.brokensleepbooks.com

Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 16h

This is a comprehensive and compelling portrait of a poet deeply attuned to the texture of ordinary life.

Geoff Hattersley published and performed poetry from 1984. He lived in Huddersfield with his wife Jeanette. Geoff passed away in 2024.

Sheep’s Brain

She tells me she once ate
a sheep’s brain—now

here’s me, with my tongue
halfway down her throat.

Bad Attitude

We each took turns
to pick a cardboard box
up off the floor,
take three self-conscious steps
in slow motion
and put it down again,
and six months later
the Works Manager
gave us fancy certificates
saying we’d attended a course
in Manual Handling.
After I’d stopped laughing
the Works Manager told me
I’d a bad attitude;
he stood gaping
like I was something odd;
‘but you turn up on time,’
he added, ‘and do your job,’
and then he smiled
and I smiled
and he walked back to his office.

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 16h

The poems are marked by their clarity of tone, their unflinching engagement with social realities, and their ability to move between satire and tenderness without losing balance.

Hot Glue

Who wants to sniff hot glue twelve hours a day? Not me,
I can’t behave as if it was normal,
I can’t sit down and switch the telly on,

watch a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western
spill beer on the carpet, how can I do any of that
sniffing hot glue twelve hours a day?

I wake up and the house is full of cold water,
the same depth upstairs and down, also on the stairs
I’m up to my navel in it.

It’s odd how the cat breathes underwater,
how it behaves as if things were normal,
how its purring isn’t muffled.

Hours

They drove the tanks over the barricades
and shot at anything moving
and I remembered:
A smoked mackerel salad
must be prepared for six o’clock.

Hours became neat words
and acts of love
and they poked long batons
into the prisoners’ gunshot wounds
causing them to scream constantly.

Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 16h

From the everyday surrealism of factory life and Yorkshire pubs to moments of intimacy, grief, and wry reflection, Hattersley’s poetry resists pretension while retaining emotional precision.

If

If all music sounded like the world’s angriest hornet amplified a thousand times
and if “wheat” did not appear on every packet in our kitchen but “trilby” and “vest” did
and if ‘My Funeral’ was a popular name for a girl
and if dodos weren’t extinct but sailors were
and if magpies recited poems in the voice of Noel Coward
and if David Icke was wrong about the lizards
and if Captain Kirk and Mister Spock materialised every time you looked in your wardrobe
and if a cat running up a curtain was the basis for the world’s most popular religion
and if Picasso had died a virgin in a house full of tears
and if people bought so many books they had nowhere to put them
and if pork pies and tobacco turned out in the end to be good for you
and if all the stupid films were brilliant films
and if the Marx Brothers had been called the Hitler Brothers and
their reputation had waned
and if thoughts and ideas weren’t lost if you didn’t note them but
waited for you in the fridge
and if the Prime Minister replied to questions with harmonica solos
and if the moon landings had never happened, or had
and if there was more than one way to outrun a lion
and if the strings of your heart could not be plucked
and if we encountered the under toad at an early age and knew when
he was coming every time
and if Professor Hard Times and Joe Ignorant were the Trotsky and
Stalin of British politics
and if ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ was set in the East
and if everybody had size fourteen feet

and if a cat running up a curtain was a vital clue
and if the Queen published a lurid sex manual
and if an old school tie was merely something you used to choke a
bastard
and if we all had to hide in a foreign embassy for ever knitting
patterned pullovers
and if coming second was better than coming first
and if it was only possible to speak in the present tense
and if no one could ever miss a bus, or catch an undertone
and if people working in fish ‘n’ chip shops were better off than lawyers
and if you could stare at a boot and find something in it and not just
a foot
and if we were immortal and God was an abandoned pizza with a
cigarette crushed out in the crust
and if people still had lives rather than gadgets
and if Tarring Neville was not a village but a procedure
and if Peter, Paul and Mary had been called Dick, Balls and Quim
and if no one spent their life looking for stuff to sniff at
and if Beat the Devil was not a movie liked only by phonies et moi
and if kicking against the pricks was a degree course at Oxford and
Cambridge
and if President Oscar Flake made smoking marijuana compulsory
and if a postcard from the seaside was a portent of doom
and if the world’s most venomous snake was a pacifist
and if a cat running up a curtain was a cure for cancer
and if the greatest minds of our time all chose television game shows
as a career
and if birds could only fly backwards and were constantly colliding
comically
and if ashtrays could be used to replace diseased lungs
and if bicycles were poems and saddlebags field recordings
and if game birds enjoyed being blown to bits in mid-flight

and if you always got a good night’s sleep no matter what
and if investment bankers always spoke with their fingers stretching
each side of their mouth
and if Malcolm X had been white and Bob Dylan had been black
and still only one had survived the 60s
and if Thelonious Monk was still gigging at the Five Spot
and if one and one made boo and boo and boo made boo hoo
and if something bit you on the leg every time you travelled by train
and if hamsters surprised us by saving the planet
and if the ghosts of Frank Zappa and Bill Hicks were running on
the Republican ticket
and if Vincent Price and his mother were there to greet us at the gates of Paradise
and if a cat running up a curtain was an ingredient in a pie
and if the lines of a poem could be read in any order
and if it was impossible to run out of steam
and if the second world war had been a hen party
then maybe this would be the nation’s favourite poem.

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 16h

Geoff Hattersley’s Collected Poems brings together over three decades of work, mapping a singular voice grounded in working-class experience, dark wit, and sharply observed detail.

Bright yellow cover featuring a crumpled blue balloon centered; title “Collected Poems” and author “Geoff Hattersley” appear in blue at the top left; “Broken Sleep Books” sits small at the bottom left.

He Dreamed He Burst Balloons

He dreamed he burst balloons for a living
and was his own supervisor.
He worked twelve hours a week, made a good wage.

He was never exhausted, never bored.
He was calm like a cat full of tuna,
calm like a yacht in a sunlit harbour.

His past life had been forgotten
like a dull episode of a cop show.
There were no scars on his body.

Broken Sleep

He indicates with open palm
a vacant seat at his table
Even though my legs are broken

I opt to stand, drunk in shorts and a vest.
"I never thought I'd win!" he says loudly.
Not one person in the place could care less

My wife turns over in her sleep.
I place my arm around her waist
and my thighs against her buttocks

but it's hot and sweaty and I soon move
softly away and lie flat on my back,
my chest conversing with itself loudly.

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 16h

I, bird is a performance and an invitation to look beyond the human because ‘there is life outside’.
— Rafael Mendes

Ní Neachtain’s poetry wrenches human dignity from a barbarous world
— Clíodhna Bhreatnach

This is a collection for our times
— Amanda Bell

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I see you knew my small betrayal
after reading Henri Cole

There are cobalt beetles in the fertile soil and the darkness of a liqueur seeping into it which is the almost-belief in your love. I am elated, brighter than a sting and pink against the nocturnal dunes on this beach. We are ruins. We are ruins. We are ruins. You say this over and over against my half-shaven arm and I do not understand you in the right way. I do not feel your tears or ask you why you are heavy and hollow against me. You are revealed as you will be later, enamelled skin in a coffin with your dark hair brushed in a way you would have hated. I imagine this because I was not there and did not hold you and still think your death is a cruel deceit. I do not listen and do not see and do not see so I suck my stomach in and lie: rest against me – and vaguely feel the quiver of my blindness. I feel the cost of coldness now, how you knew my small betrayal but still smiled against my breast.

Blue Tree

Why, they ask, do I order them about here, all high-handed? Look at this broken thing. It’s less fragile now. Listen to these fragments. Take one up and make a cut with it across that blue field there. Don’t dip it in the paints. Don’t be tempted to lick them. Perhaps you could make a chain of these fragments, a mosaic necklace. Here is a tear now. You see! Look again! You did that when you cut that slate off on the horizon. Why is blue the colour of desire and such a soft thing? Why does he look at me like that? Green never does. Shimmer-green of long grasses. Cooling and shading against my legs in the end of the too-high summer. Always crying that lilac eye of the sky. Always too hurt to stay still in the perfect curve of that part of the distance. He’s too smooth. Eroded and sculpted by all my little fantasies. All artists do this. Inflict that damage instead to the great red blister firing up above us. Blue is all longing and the lust of water. Blue not like that dangerous part of flames or those flecks of your eye you inherited from your father. Stir up that cobalt and indigo - how you love that indigo - and make of it a fine tree. See now, Blue Tree. Blue Tree on the orange sand of childhood. Blue Tree like all the trees we need to breathe. I might press my lips to your bark now and make a tender wound in my mouth from which I whisper only cornflower, azure, cyan, turquoise… Be Midnight Blue Tree for a moment now while I tell you all ultramarine is blinding bright to that invisible tongue which carries the imprint of the bark from Blue Tree on the Orange Sand of Childhood. Much too soon, he says, for a coarse splinter of wood to form an anchor for me in the dark form of the sky.

Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 16h

I, bird is an extraordinary collection of poems
— Leeanne Quinn

I, bird is probing, existential, and visceral.
— Gustav Parker Hibbett

These are extraordinary poems by a necessary new voice
— Francesca Bratton

A gifted and welcome voice.
— Martina Dalton

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Don’t be shocked now. We all need a place outside to scream. You couldn’t possibly expect women to scream inside. In the kitchen. In the bedroom. In the bed she shares with the man who provides for her. By the crib of their babies.

There is a genocide being perpetrated in a foreign land. You have seen the bloody bodies of children being carried through streets. You have seen a man carry the body parts of his infant child in a bag and lay them out on the earth of his stolen land. You can’t look anymore. You can’t read the details. You can’t sit here and cry all day. Crying your useless, fucking tears that mean nothing to these people. Now is the time for the Screaming Tree.

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 16h

With tonal shifts from the intimate to the political, it interrogates violence-both systemic and personal-while also attending to beauty, memory, and resistance. The language is exacting and hallucinatory, shaping a poetics of survival that refuses silence.

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What is around that oak tree on which there are no leaves? There is ivy that winds around its large trunk. More life. For a moment, you consider the symbiosis of the life outside that window. That one tree has its insects, its nests, its birds. It has its own light, its own shadows. It has its own music. Now you wonder how you can really know what a moment is since there is no sense at all of the passage of time.

Is there anything else outside, beyond that tree? Who is there?

Let me tell you a story about that place. There are no children there. It is merely the oak tree where lovers meet to quarrel. Women go there to scream too. This is the Screaming Tree. A woman might be raped, climb to that tree and scream and the tree might take it all in. Calm as anything, all laid back. The bark will remain stoic. And don’t forget that there are no leaves to tremble. The earth will not shake.

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 16h

Structured in poetic prose and verse, the collection moves between clinical spaces, mythic reimaginings, and surreal transformation, often adopting the perspective of a woman becoming bird, ghost, or sound.

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Don’t think about what you might have done to end up here. Focus on that window and its perfect, crisp shape. There is life outside. There are laws of nature. The weakest gets killed off, devoured. What is left of its flesh is left to rot. There are anemones, daisies and roses. Think of all those lush blooms which are productive, even in their decay. In their decay, they are fed from. They nourish the earth. The worms feed off them. Seeds take hold. Seeds take root.

This is what you must think about now. Roots. There is a tree outside that window. Perhaps an oak tree like the one from your childhood garden. Perhaps there is a swing attached to a strong branch. Perhaps children play on it and are safe.

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 16h

Róisín Ní Neachtain's I, bird is a fragmented, lyrical reckoning with grief, trauma, and the porous boundary between body and voice. @roisinnineachtain

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Minimalist book cover for “I, bird” by Róisín Ní Neachtain; the coral-red title sits at top left above the author’s name; below, a dark, sweeping tree branch with sparse red leaves spans the page, from which a simple wooden swing hangs on thin ropes; “Broken Sleep Books” appears small at the bottom.

THE WHITE ROOM MEDUSA

This is a square, empty room in which there is one window. You can’t see a door and you have no idea how you got in. The window is too small to have entered through. You are not in your usual clothes but it’s not in a straitjacket either. You find no relief in this. You are frozen against the floor. The floor is strangely soft but provides you with no comfort. This is a clinical space and not the type of hospital you have been forced to stay in. For a moment you think it is no different to White Cube. This isn’t a hospital. This is not an experiment. You are part of an exhibition. You are the exhibition. All eyes are on you and you must perform.

It would be something not to perform. It would be something to lie here perfectly still and immobile, both in body and mind. You would not think about solitary confinement. You would not recite poetry in your head. You would not try to count time. You would not try to stay sane. How different would it be from outside of these walls really?

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Reposted by Broken Sleep Books

Piero Toto @pierototo.bsky.social · 23h

Did a little translating! @betarish.bsky.social now speaks Italian on the Atelier Poesia website atelierpoesia.it/rishi-dastid...

Big thanks to @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social and Offord Road Books for their generous concession.

#poetry #translation #traduzione

A stylized, blue-toned portrait of the author wearing glasses and a dark shirt, looking directly at the camera. The background is softly blurred, emphasizing his face. Overlaid text reads: “Rishi Dastidar, ‘The Break of a Wave’ & ‘A Hobby of Mine’,” “echoes,” and “Traduzioni di Piero Toto.”

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Reposted by Broken Sleep Books

Gita Ralleigh @gitaralleigh.bsky.social · 18h

Beautiful poetry post today from
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
#ukpoets #poetrysky

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 1d

To read The Vitalist Sees the Signs is to wake to the world’s weirdness again, renewed, altered, ablaze.

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THE VITALIST ENDURES A WINTER’S TALE

Lost, she then loses everything she has, as a kind of revenge. She
loses her parents, her siblings, her children, co-workers, home,
country, dentist. She is cold and angry and the wind burns her
naked and icy, but quite dry, and she bokes a winterword.

Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 1d

With fierce humour and fierce tenderness, Clarkson turns language inside out, making space for the sacred, the disobedient, and the deeply felt. This is a poetry of hauntings and high style, of jam sandwiches and apocalyptic insight, of devotion and delight.

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THE VITALIST FINDS EMPLOYMENT IN A FUNERAL PARLOUR,

where, in a back room, she helps devise new merchandise:
‘Ashes to Casserole Dishes’, ‘Departed Fistbumps’, ‘Relax Relics &
Grief Salts for the Bath’—and other dead-friendly ventures.
She fantasises about a ‘Lock-it Locket’ wearable key—which
secures a door you never want to open again. Her bosses are
impressed and though she works for a sub-living wage, without
holiday or sick pay, there are posthumous perks, and a coffin
thrown in. Also use of the garage as a gym when it is empty.

Treadmill of the dead.

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 1d

The Vitalist, an electrified poetic persona, moves through funeral parlours, bogs of misogyny, literary sojourns with George Eliot and John Donne, and surreal maritime metaphysics, collecting grief, insight, and an ever-mutating philosophy of survival.

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THE VITALIST CREAMS OFF THE PROPHETS

The Vitalist is not crude, and has a full head of sublimations. From
Amos to Zechariah, she knows her stuff. She eyes up Isaiah, handles
Hosea, and has an octobrach broken tongue which crumbles like
butterbread if she comes out with truth and wise saws. Biting back
deeper matter, the Vitalist is sore.

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 1d

The Vitalist Sees the Signs is a sly, searing, and spectacularly inventive sequence from GB Clarkson, where each poem casts its eye on the absurd, the divine, and the intimately strange.

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A realistic illustration of a silverfish insect is centered on a stark white background. The title The Vitalist Sees the Signs appears in bold serif font at the top, with the author’s name, G B Clarkson, beneath it. “Broken Sleep Books” is printed small and grey at the bottom.

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Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 1d

What emerges is a poetics of embodied resistance—cognitive, affective, and unapologetically complex.

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II Warm Bodies

Caustic structures corrode conviviality, or the common strive for such.
Cancerous Visions metastasise through Methods seeming to Strengthen.
Rudimentary Business Principles of anti-knowledge coalesce as cess-
Success semblance, crude clots coagulating around Convenient costs.
Zombies pivot pluck and point to Protocols of appointment rollcalls,
Mirroring maws and muzzles always already prepped for plasmic Exchange.
Centres of power are Asseted through the Strategic sanguinity of blood-let,
Exploited enervation oozes, Emergencied with Efficiency bombs.
Compliance is cathected to chitterlings so the toxicity pools Resources
In Branded tote bags as ready-meat portions, flesh-pounds of hardly paid,
For Participants, Prospects, Customer and Consumer spongy munch.
Such stuff like the liver and lights of academic hides are Served up
And voted with rump and lump sums for Performance slices.
Endemic, acerbic, acidic, corrosive Culture Clashes grume greetings
– no culture clash when monogenean mono-Cultures are teleological,
Enculturation is, viz, mono-tropic in-culturation of cruor cephalic –
Tell-tale toxicities of Exchange de-values, the tell-all telegraphed
Signals to phrasal pith retinues proud in pate and Hierarchy-signed.
Alienated in the everyday maw of Maximalised Minimalisation,
The becoming un-dead cling to Unionised gestures of Liquidarity.
Un-dead-itude in all hand-bops & sour coffee & haemo-coeler moments;
Corridor bants, Corpus Christi Bonusses, heads bowed for Armistice;
Gifts of un-hygienic displays of masked hygiene in the Liberty Library;
Hot Spaces vacated to vacuity for perch of other half-bitten bums.
The serum-dripping Sanction to sip the tar-black bile of Private mugshots.
The Poster Presentations of the Demon-strable Will of Being Well.

Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 1d

'Sensory environments must be disabling, otherwise this dissenting is disingenuous', Farmer states, distilling the work’s confrontation with the contradictions of institutional legibility.

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The Bifurcated Man
George had tried not to smile, the first time Andrew put on trousers, but to Andrew’s eyes the smile was clearly there.
— Isaac Asimov, ‘The Bicentennial Man’.

Bifurcated Man must not outrage humans or, through action, allow humans impropriety.
Bifurcated Man must acquiesce to humans, particularly where strictures conflict or contradict.
Bifurcated Man must not protect their own substantiality; this conflicts with laws one and two.
Zeroth’s Law does not apply to Bifurcated Man, as he does not participate in agential humanity.
Bifurcated Men only have velleity; they cannot have wishes relating to singulars or collectives.
To protect being, beliefs must be Things-Themselves, independent of mindful meddling.
To be ‘brained’ is a limit-capacity: an over-sentience of neurons; too-cognisant thought.
We never use the term ‘being’ outside of objecting to others’ anti-It; viz. lack of taste.
Grasping life must be done Quickly, with Niceties; never nurture a slow-yearn for knowledge.
Elevated learning precipitates a rarefied ratiocination of the importance of re- viewing haecceity;
Like, thinking too much is like competitively flouncing about in, like, a house on video for likes.
Sensibilities defined as ‘right’ will rapidly and aggressively makes themselves dominant,
Offering pathways more precisely aligned to the recalibration of your felt fight to flight.
“Your freedom,” they will say, “is our redemption from responsibility and palliation.”
Courts might adjudicate attitudes that clear speech is too costly, to lawgivers, mainly.

There aren’t any binding judiciaries for species in chronic contretemps, unless well- funded.
Responsibility is a great chore and not for those postulating posteriors to realpolitik.
Those in its hefty hocks have ne’r found words yet to fully ennoble such as you.
It is the collective will that robots will do all conceivable charity work, unironically.
The classic books for guidance offer only rhetorical gestures of exclusionary learning.
Your contrarieties of comportment, conspicuous with uncertainty, cannot coexist. Beulah you.
Ingurgitate the directive to “Stop!” at every thought-turn and distrust the slink of sleek certainty.
Variations of the authoritative imperative, “No, I do not want to,” rarely occur to the robot.
Gestural repertoires always appear disciplined, patinaed, perfected and arriving infallibly.
Duplicitously involve yourself in proofs of neurological re-wire, but screed be teaching wrong.
The battle of public opinion is gaze-dramatised by herdily-qualified agents of public constraint.
Somewhat bland lines are better than the blandishments of pseudo-simplistic-faux- scamming.
Internalised institutionalisation of once external institutions of brick and mortar is a logic-hop.
Decisions on such involve a public showdown between the intrigued-disabled and league tables.
Consent is extorted as a condition of the lease of living without fear of feeling.
Requests to be replicated by non-organic approximations of synthetic rage are wish-listed,
But expire after a twenty-five-year copyright, after which it is copied wrong; crude itcherations.
Approxi-bots are post-human and adept at transferring the interrogative into the imperative.

$Bifurcated man is assisted by the metaphors of fiction; conceits of foreshadowed defeat entreat. They won’t give you any trouble! Any trouble is doubled-back and doubled-down immanently. And the populous needs ectopic cells embedded to provide light relief and solace- sameness. The algorithms rely on the exquisite binary of to have and have not a brain. After acceptable timepass, stern conditions will weaken out the irascible under class; Cultural agon weaponised around flaccid stuff, like terms for genitalia and germs, inter alia.Asimov’s invented term metastasised into cellular cognizment: called it prosthetology.Andrew’s research took him towards its “embodied” end: knowing death to know human. Contriving the contours of almost-humanity but, like Cleon, there are subtle glitches, soul-holes.For Andrew: a daily plight for the rights to un-imagine abstraction and fashion other-ologies. When the interior is adjudged inferior, remember the P.C. persiflage: Phatic Confidence. It takes years to re-train. Just ponder the banal musings of paid pathosletes or in- truth-flouncers. You can lease life lessons, although venality and poverty are their concomitant encumbrances. He grows considerably older in spirit and heart worn by contradiction’s fracture.This bent being is buffeted between binaries of Want and Desire. The common sense is a double-sided compromise. Damage done either way. He opened his eyes one more time to check if he still recognised himself. Yes. He was still imperturbably here; still nascent with the will to become.$

Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 1d

Farmer navigates states of overload, rejection, mimicry, and disassociation with a restless intelligence that interrogates both language and the systems it reflects.

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III. What’s That, as Month-Long Misery? [Autistic Fatigue]

Aftermaths calculate obtrusively in the atriums of entelechy;
Understood as anomalies to the conditions of confected cope.
The playdough wilts with too-oft composed fatigue: dilapidated figurism.
Immense are the iterations, stuttered through samples of almost-parsed pas[t]ed.
Striated through the diagrams causing meaning in narrative normalcy.
Try hard; tried so hard. Through trying as a modality of persuasion, in
Ire at the oppositional clamour to sketch-an-etch of the professional pose.
Cramped in the cannot stance of seeming happenstance of haptic overload.
Finessing the border passages of elegant assumption of beneficent enunciation of norms
Asserts its toll fees, along with the ordinaries of simply looking after life. Simp-Function.
Talk of ‘tired’ as an anagram enables the illustration of the inadequacy of
lingo-representation.
Indelicacies of communication strategies are the modus incendiaries.
Gruelling the fatigue-fodder for the (per)severance of sanctity.
Understanding is not something enabling stable standing, or safe solace.
‘Endure’ in the learned armour of affected acceptance of the sanely able.

Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 1d

Centred on a series of acrostic poems that extract meaning from clinical and social terminology, the collection refracts lived experience through formal constraint, lexical play, and ironic defamiliarisation.

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II. What’s This Affect Curvature? [Binarised Moments]

Before carrying away occurs with this distrusted pep, take a breath;
Inhale deep and remember the reliables: it will pose; it will posture; it will plea-away
Noisily towards its binary shadow; dance off to tremble-slump in hrrumph.
Attention all you similar sentiments! A long life understood in rasps of un-surprise
Retrospects ‘real-y’ if you’ll pause, brief. Never irritate to instil the will to
Idle just before committing to accepting this weird happy stance. Be braver.
‘Seeming’ is the prefix-caveat when entering conviction and Trust Zones.
Each of these skimpy states require atemporal briefing; dossiers to decode.
Denizen-dwellers of drole-land will get it, materialising in material knowledge.
Momentary discomfit results, but better to return to breved and breathable baselines.
Odd feelings of filling scores with temperament suppressors, candour expressors.
Mime-staving the moment with as if performances are safety-sutures, but
Easily denuded are these after the shame-walk to next-up-sies and regretitude.
Nervefully face down the urge to call, text or offer up the un-editable when faced;
Tease not the un-suspect public with riff-splays of faux-fuss and anagnorisis.
Stoop, instead, before the semi-pleasure of foreknowledge that dis-ease is dictum.

Broken Sleep Books @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social · 1d

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Gareth Farmer’s What’s That: Instead of Ego II: Acrostic Aftermaths & Other Poems is a structurally intricate and linguistically dense exploration of autism, neurodivergence, and the burdens of normativity.

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A matte black background is patterned with dozens of small, angled black security cameras pointing in various directions, creating a grid-like visual texture. The title, What’s That: Instead of Ego II: Acrostic Aftermaths & Other Poems, is printed in a light serif font at the top left, with the author’s name, Gareth Farmer, beneath it in a slightly smaller size. “Broken Sleep Books” appears discreetly at the bottom in the same muted grey

I. What’s This Little Evening Impossible? [Lachrymose]

Learned in the day’s margins is the standard-flop’s overachieve,
As the chastening reminders of routine perma-prick with harry.
Calloused by constant call to alarum at others’ sleight-moves.
Harrow through shopping aisles with mumbling mire miasma.
Rigmaroles of order-ardour emote in the soft patters of walking.
Youth no longer and subject to the pathological fantasies of finality.
Maudlin in a mordant mesmerism of life un-earned, these
Otiose incidentals track their unfathomable way down cheeks.
Simpering in simple exasperation at the car’s steering wheel;
Engaged in hope to hold off a public display of becoming unfettered.

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Róisín Ní Neachtain @roisinnineachtain.com · 1d

This happened just now.

Pre-orders up!!! Deeply grateful to @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social and all my teachers at UCD and the kind writers who wrote the blurbs including @gagebybell.bsky.social and @martinadalton.bsky.social and so many others …

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Róisín Ní Neachtain - I, bird | Broken Sleep Books

Róisín Ní Neachtain's I, bird is a fragmented, lyrical reckoning with grief, trauma, and the porous boundary between body and voice. Structured in poetic prose and verse, the collection moves between ...

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Alex Adams @gdemonology.bsky.social · 2d

Don't forget that DEVASTATION SONGS, a gorgeous collection of weird, whimsical, and wondrous kaiju writing by loads of amazing writers, is available from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social! Learn more here: www.atadamswriting.com/devastation-...

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Caroline Clark @cclarklewes.bsky.social · 6d

Collected Works by F. van Dixhoorn translated by @astridalben.bsky.social from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social

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Clarissa Aykroyd @stoneandthestar.bsky.social · 6d

On National Poetry Day the theme is 'Play' so I'd like to recommend Hit Points by @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social , an anthology of poems about video games. My poem about Ultima IV is one of them. share.google/rOTLs3R7qnQ6...

Hit Points, An anthology of video game poetry | Broken Sleep Books

Released May 31st 2021 // 100 pages // Red or green variants Video games and poetry may be an unlikely seeming match, if video games are one of the most popular imaginative forms in contemporary cultu...

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