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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Sep 7

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Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain: extract from ‘Grief is a Thing in Pleather’

Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing atRoyal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of two books of poetry,Retroviral* (Veer, …

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Sep 7

as an inevitable eventuality, as ‘You will crash, or / You will run out of gas’, Bussey-Chamberlain perceives the drop dead pride in the ‘buzz of flies’ who linger at both endings of the crash and empty fuel tank. (4/4)

Blurb by @marbledmayhem

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Sep 7

is not handsome, a buzz of flies’. Echoing Dickinson’s ‘I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - (591)’, this poem rewrites the fly as the omen of Death’s ego. As Caroline Hogue wrote in 2015, the blowfly ‘pollutes everything it touches. Its eggs are maggots. It is as carrion as a buzzard’. Framed (3/4)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Sep 7

from Alena Smith’s Apple series Dickinson, Bussey-Chamberlain’s collection reimagines Death’s identity in the age of the incel. Interpellated into the poem, ‘When your engine finally gives out Death pulls up, kicks his / door wide open, says Ride or Die. You choose both. Close up / his face (2/4)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Sep 7

This week Osmosis is so excited to be featuring an extract from the forthcoming collection 'Grief is a Thing in Pleather' by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain! Writing back to Emily Dickinson’s figure of death in ‘because I could not stop for death’ alongside Wiz Khalifa’s character (1/4)

*

When your engine finally gives out Death pulls up, kicks his
door wide open, says Ride or Die. You choose both. Close up
his face is not handsome, a buzz of flies. There’s a
waterproof hat in the back, wide rimmed and when a fly stops at
your ear you ask it, why do you stay?
To be as regal as the buzzard one day it replies as if
the bounty hunter can confer carrion pride to everything he touches
*
You will crash, or
You will run out of gas
Both are an ending.
*

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 31

Her critical work includes two monographs, The Feminist Fourth Wave: Affective Temporality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Queer Troublemakers: Poetics of Flippancy (Bloomsbury, 2019). Her debut novel Bone Horn was published in June 2025 with Cipher Press. (5/5)

Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 31

Lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of two books of poetry, Retroviral* (Veer, 2018) and {Coteries} (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2017), and the co-author of House of Mouse with SJ Fowler (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2017). (4/5)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 31

palimptext method, Denise Riley’s Time Lived Without Its Flow, Randy Schilt’s And The Band Played On, and The Dead Poet’s Society, to challenge conventional renderings of death, grief, citation, alongside the banality of bodies and their upkeep.

Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain is a Senior (3/5)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 31

with grief, where Death becomes an embodied figure who runs both literally and figuratively through the text. Borrowing from Emily Dickinson’s figure of death in ‘because I could not stop for death’, this collection mixes Wiz Khalifa from Alena Smith’s Apple TV series Dickinson, Waldrop’s (2/5)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 31

This week, interrupting our typical weekly Featured Writing schedule as we’re incredibly announce Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s latest collection will be forthcoming from Osmosis Press this October 2025!

This collection is a consideration of and a writing through what it means to live (1/5)

Grief is a Thing with Pleather by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain in white writing on a black background surrounded by white drawings of flies.

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 24

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Samuel Haecker: omnicultural revolution

Samuel Haecker Samuel Haecker is a multilingual poet, musician, and translator. He grew up across the US and Germany and speaks all matter of tongues, purportedly. His work has been published in Dr…

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 24

health, and the convivial practices of writing; ‘aiming for fingers splinterless’, the lyric appears as ‘health without instruments’.

Blurb by @marbledmayhem.bsky.social

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 24

‘wir kommen wir kommen wir kommen’. Combining Spanish, German, and English, the poem ‘se comen la hora’ of its shape echoes the face of a clock, the rays of the sun, and the flower blooming in the heat. ‘[Q]uerida patria me mato las manos’, Haecker writes, entwining concerns around labour, (2/3)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 24

This week in the Osmosis Featured Writing series, ‘la máquina se turna’ in the ‘omnicultural / revolution’ by Samuel Haecker. This visual poem revolves, subverting the linear conventions of poems written in English; ‘caressing mouths fed regrowth’ are ‘littering rejuvenation’ as (1/3)

omnicultural
revolution

trial
decomposed fathers littering rejuvenation
wir kommen wir kommen wir kommen
caressing mouths fed regrowth
valórame las artificias de hierro
brain
cycle printed formalities
niemandsland begraben außerhalb
stamen
molten steel shaped of nettles
puestos de lata se comen la hora
paranoia
blooms are machinist suns
bringe das Land es schwimmte alleine
circuit
boarded up aiming for fingers splinterless
querida patria me mato las manos
string
extensions of artificial honesty
pflanzlich geschmolzen ohne Riss
wool
is health without instruments
boca adolorida la máquina se turna

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 17

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EK Myerson: what happens when a list takes on water?

for klh i sent my friend klh a photograph of a Liberty print armchair – datable to 1988 from the care label sewn to its wicker woven base – which i had found on the side of the road, upended on top…

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 17

‘a thin metal laser-cut flower with engraved design’, ‘a small white armoire glued with shells’, and ‘a bearded ram’s head with neck extending from an ammonite shell’, in other words, an image of ‘shipwreck modernity’.

Blurb by @marbledmayhem.bsky.social

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 17

takes on water and tilts to one side’. This tilting, careening, heeling, or inclining to one side occurs as the question is answered and repeated between ‘08:52am, 5 June 2024’ and ‘11:57 5 June 2024’. We find ‘the apparitions of the miraculous medal’, ‘Aleppo soap’, (2/3)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 17

This week, Osmosis is ‘upended on top of a green sofa with its seams burst’ in this hybrid experimental text by EK Myerson titled ‘what happens when a list takes on water?’. ‘[N]ow this is a list with legs’, they write, referring to listing as the ‘nautical term to describe when a vessel (1/3)

[3] I spent yesterday afternoon drawing these images in biro on a sheet of spare paper, which I had torn and folded into a rough fortune teller. Origami fortune tellers were very popular when I was in primary school but I hadn’t made one in years, so I had to google the template. These are the hidden fortunes of my Zodiac square:
Pisces I: “reality is…the skin of an egg” – Etel Adan, Surge
Taurus II: “the spread of unscheduled eating as an aspect of modern life” – Sidney Mintz
Taurus III: “the committee of management have, in one act, labelled their course both philanthropic & cosmopolitan” – Frederick Douglass
Capricorn IV: “Resonance is a biscuit / snap it into / and dunk it in your tea” – Bhanu Kapil
Capricorn V: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience” – Edward Said, Reflections on Exile
Aquarius VI: “processes of substitution, opposition, replacement & transformation amount to the very mechanism of industrial capitalist modernity” – Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds
Aquarius VII: “Should the novel that is never published still have been written? Of course it should” – Phyllida Barlow
Pisces VIII: “To make matters worse, I’ve never been able to keep my glasses clean” – Fred Moten, Black & Blur

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 10

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JD Howse: Picture of Gray (1922), Henry Scott Tuke

The intermittent spread of drifting cargo ships and the spinning of wind turbines dotting the horizon line broke the stillness of the water’s surface, but the hill was as close to silence as they’d…

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 10

himself, he ceased to be what he was expressing, and instead became free of it, became just a body, without any thoughts trapped inside of it’. (8/8)

Blurb by @marbledmayhem

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 10

wrought things that could be expressed as objects; words spewing out of him onto pages to purge himself of thoughts, and in turn become something entirely other than what he thought to start with. This was part of the problem, or else, this was his salvation; that in expressing (7/8)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 10

Between such proliferated surfaces,Joseph writes, ‘until the nibbled edges of his fingers began to bleed. He remembered thinking that even if nobody would ever read it, he wouldn’t stop. That it was the only way for him to exist; thinking about things over and over again until they were finely (6/8)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 10

reality, ‘Picture of Gray (1922), Henry Scott Tuke’ introduces us to the skin of queer desire, longing, crisis, and love. Much like the words of Susan Howe’s ‘Spontaneous Particulars’, here screens are the ‘meteors, mimetic spirit-sparks […] taken at hazard from piled up cultural treasures’. (5/8)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 10

virtue of its existence, or lack thereof, being called forth and dismissed again and again by observation and description’. Meditating on the TV screen, the black mirror of our phones, social media, dating and hookup apps, and the repetition of bodies through the relative social immersion of (4/8)

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Osmosis Press @osmosispress.bsky.social · Aug 10

Howse writes, ‘where the impermanence of a body was mirrored by the impermanence of the understanding of a body. All things hold back into nothingness there, only to reveal themselves again in infinite reiterations, each one the same while at the same time being different purely through (3/8)

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