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East Bristol Books, Old Market Street, Bristol (2026)

04/10/2026

Sat 17th! Huge double header celebrating 2 essential poetry collections that rework lyric traditions from the standpoint of political & personal affiliations, revealing selfhood as fractured, striated & self-translated: 's *Girling* (Fitzcarraldo Editions) & Ghazal Mosadeq's *The Book of Advice* (UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE)

ON *GIRLING*

In *Girling*, her open-hearted debut collection, Eve Esfandiary-Denney wrestles with the boundaries between living and death, history and the present, and how these are preordained for us in the fabric of our DNA and in our geographical or cultural environments. Philosophical, funny, pertinent, ecological, global and intimate, this is a collection of poems for the contemporary moment, a book deeply personal yet communal in its intention, beginning from a personal history then resonating outwards, ending on a note so gorgeously hopeful, as ‘life’ moves towards the speaker, ‘gloriously close’.

ON *THE BOOK OF ADVICE*

The Book of Advice*, an experiment in self-translation, stems from the andarznameh tradition of classical Persian literature, a form that moves between verse and prose as it engages invented or familiar sayings and folktales. Originally written in Persian between 2018-2020, the book now speaks in both English and Persian, opening at once from the back and the front, in a voice both distanced and familiar. The vicissitudes of the everyday preoccupy its intimately impersonal speaker as she wrestles with the inadequacy and mobility of language.

Bios:

Eve Esfandiari-Denney’s debut poetry pamphlet, *My Bodies This Morning This Evening*, was published by Bad Betty Press in 2022. She has been shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize, Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Award, the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Performed) and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition.

Ghazal Mosadeq is a poet, editor and translator. She is the founder of Pamenar Press, an independent publisher of poetry, translation, hybrid and critical writing. Her latest collections are *If*, a pamphlet with Tripwire, and *The Book of Advice*, published by Ugly Duckling Press.

26/09/2026

Over 2025/26 we ran a series of book events that we called Climate Talks, in collab w/ Adam Corner, as a way of trying to string together an ongoing conversation on the climate crisis, big stuff like oil & petro chemicals, and exporting environmental costs from rich to poor countries; but also the politics of green populism, class, cost of living & everyday life, energy transition & local communities.

Thanks to , Marianna Dudley, nic_diasporas, Sasha Josette, Adam Hanieh, Sean O'Brien, Laurie Parsons, Adriana Suárez Delucchi, Adam Corner, Rob Bryher & Becca Massey-Chase for speaking or chairing at these talks.

However, much like the conclusion of each iteration of COP, we didn't solve it yet! So we'll have to go again. In 2026/27 we've teamed up with University of Bristol's Centre for Environmental Humanities to put together another round of Climate Talks, the first of which will be announced very soon!

24/09/2026

Suddenly this is tonight! Just a few spots left for Alice Butler's launch of Close Writing in convo w/ Nell Osborne.

In *Close Writing*, Alice Butler reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved q***r feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure.

In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared “beloved," reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.

BIOS

Alice Butler is a writer and interdisciplinary scholar who specialises in the intersections of recent and contemporary feminist and q***r art, writing, and theoretical practices. She teaches in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art. She is co-editor of *Gestures: A body of work* (Manchester University Press, 2025). She is currently at work on a new book that explores the lives and afterlives of stockings and pantyhose in 1970s–80s feminist art practices.

Nell Osborne is a poet, novelist and researcher of experimental writing. In 2024, she published a poetry pamphlet, *Thank You For Everything*, with Monitor Books and co-edited *Gestures: a body of work, a cross-disciplinary anthology on gesture and feminist practice*, published with MUP. In 2026, she published her first novel, *Ghost Driver* with Moist Books.

16/09/2026

*Next Tues 22nd! Link in bio*

Poet Alycia Pirmohamed on her memoir *Shorelines*, in conversation with Bernardita Muñoz, local writer and community organizer.

As a young Muslim woman Alycia Pirmohamed grew up with her body as racialised and her faith as seemingly dangerous. Her affinity to the natural world – the mountains, elk and pines of her childhood – conflicted with feelings that she was unwelcome in these landscapes. By contrast, the stories of her parents’ homeland – the monsoon winds, red clay roads and abundant korosho trees – felt painfully distant. Across interrelated pieces that move from Midwestern Canada to East Africa, the Pacific Northwest to the British Isles, the award-winning poet traces the legacies of migration and memory on her life, examining the idea of homeland and the mythmaking it demands. She creatively resists the expectations of nature writing and memoir, at times choosing to withhold as much as she reveals.

‘*Shorelines* fell over me like a wave pools around a body in water. Tender and quietly incisive, Pirmohamed’s poetic prose makes visible sensations, meanings and forgotten inheritances in the aches and unexpected joys of migration. Here is nature writing alive in its attention to movement, to loss and to the ethics that shape our encounters with the world and one another’ - JESSICA J. LEE, author of DISPERSALS

Bios:

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. She is the author of the pamphlets *Hinge* and *Faces that Fled the Wind*, as wel as the collaborative pamphlets *Second Memory*, co-authored by Pratyusha and *this too is a glistening* with Jessica J. Lee, Nina Mingya Powles and Pratyusha.

Bernie Munoz Chereau is a writer, academic, psychologist, gardener, mother and community organiser. She has published more than 30 books in Chile and elsewhere. In 2025, she published *Herbs yourself: a year at the community garden* (Mugwort Press), a personal account of growing a community around a herbs garden in Kingswood.

15/09/2026

A joy last week to host Alice Hattrick on Fancy Work, in convo with the brilliant tillydubuisson. A speculative investigation of the q***r artistic life of May Morris (daughter of William) through Alice's embroidery practice as a hybrid mode of life writing that allows the unpicking and unravelling of social expectations. May's relationship with the gender-nonconforming MF unfurls from archival fragments of a "minor" life preserved by happenstance, pushing against linear models of narrative reconstruction.

So much of the conversation was illuminating, but one thing that stood out was Alice talking about their experience of dying fabric with plant due, that, say, hawthorn produces different colours at different times of year, and that dying is a way of freezing time or being rhythmically in time, in the way the arts & crafts movement returned to medieval artisan time, trying to relearn old stitches that had been lost, working out how they were done by pulling out thread.

08/09/2026

Next Tuesday 15th! Visionary ecopoetics & airs on folk ballads!

Huge double poetry launch of Jay Gao' * The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber* (Carcanet Press & imogen_cassels ' *Hares On The Mountain* (Tenement Press). With support from local poets Tom Nutting and Caleb Parkin

The Books:

Part ecopoetic inventory, part dream vision, Jay Gao’s *The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber* is an experimental book-length serial poem on the arboreal. Rewiring nature and language, this collection is an inventory for dreaming treely, dispersed across a commons-place of grafting and cruising, racial and q***r desires, diasporic entanglements and renewal. These serial poems arrive at the hewn nation of the unthought like an invasive species addled by contemporary contaminants. Alternating between leafy lexical snippets and branching hypermetrical lines, the book turns sylvestral form and grammar over towards a visionary ecopoetics.

Cassels’ *Hares on the mountain* engages with the folk ballad of the same name, to offer an observational suite of airs obsessed with the act of looking and watching as a transformative play, examines the dealer’s hand to portray the habitually wounded. These poems are an active ‘watching’ of the wounded as she goes out and sets her stall for wounding in kind; and an effort to convey what she finds—or subsequently forges—in her finding. In a merger of tenses—of foresight, hindsight, and presentism— *Hares on the mountain* mimics the want and will of a song to walk, stroll, and wander—to drift in a leisurely and aimless way between contexts, whilst remembering and/or misremembering something of its true self as it travels—to observe the tidal drift of change engendered by climates and elements and objects in a landscape of good / bad emotions until the season is over, and the subject repairs itself to a new winter.

*Link in bio as ever*

07/09/2026

Last summer redux! The final fling of an uncomfortably hot summer, launching Samatar Elmi's new collection on Kulvert, Agen Bien Fou, with support from Nell Osborne reading new work Séances Near Me, forthcoming from SPITE PRESS. So distinct in tone and affect, yet both unsparing and political, in their own ways. An excellent evening.

Nell then chaired the Bristol launch of 𝔾𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕒✨'s Somebody Should Have Pressed Record, on Strange Region, a long-form experimental text about the speaker's parasocial relationship with Joseph Gilgun, why not. It's as odd and brilliant as that sounds.

04/09/2026

🍁 (early) autumn nights! 🍂

Ebb lates are back next week: it's another stacked line-up featuring thoughtful book talks, fiction in translation, launches of the most vital new poetry publications, political discussion, and everything in between. Tickets for everything are on Headfirst or via link in bio.

Late Oct-Dec will follow in due course, but some of those events - including the long postponed & mega exciting evening with Don Mee Choi in Nov - are live as well.

01/09/2026

Next Thurs 10th! Alice Hattrick on *Fancy Work* (Fitzcarraldo Editions ), a groundbreaking hybrid of biography and art criticism that rethinks embroidery as a form of resistance, in conversation with tillydubuisson

What can a scrap of embroidery tell us about how to live? How can the past help us imagine unconstrained lives when not all traces remain? To explore these questions, Alice Hattrick turns to the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle, including her father William Morris; her mother Jane, an artist’s model and embroiderer herself; and MF, May’s gender non-conforming partner of twenty years. Through this q***r encounter with the Arts and Crafts movement, Hattrick shifts attention from dominant narratives of design towards intimacy, labour and domestic life.

Looking to May – alongside others who have found in textiles a means of resistance – Hattrick traces connections between these histories and their own q***r identity, family ties and precarious working conditions within an ableist society. Expansive in thought, form and time, *Fancy Work* together archival fragments, domestic spaces and ongoing sites of struggle, insisting on the political force of often overlooked acts of defiance.

‘This illuminating, expansive and intricately connected book on embroidery made me giddy with the ideas and knowledge it reveals. In detailing so diligently the histories, practices and techniques of needlework, insights into craft as a whole open up. *Fancy Work*** shows how fluency in non-linguistic forms enriches language, sharpens political thought and articulates some of the most radical ways of living.’ — Holly Pester

Bios:

Alice Hattrick is a writer and lecturer based in London. *Ill Feelings*, their non-fiction book on chronic illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021. They teach at University of the Arts, London.

Tilly Du Buisson is the author of *Needlework. From Domestic Oppression to Artistic Expression* (Rova, 2025), a book reclaiming needlework as a subversive medium to address broader social issues.

30/08/2026

Penultimate recap! This time, two excellent short fiction events, with on her mordant new collection Diamond Life (HeloisePress) & Gillian O’Shaughnessy Greensmith on her Western Australian collection Salt City Runaway at the unofficial fringe event for the Bath Flash Fiction festival. Connecting both evenings, Bristol author reading from her brilliant flash collection Cold Toast and chairing Anna's event with insight & levity, respectively.

Lots of takeaways from both evenings with knowledgeable audiences: what stayed in the mind above all was the discussion of the formal demands & differences of short, very-short, flash, micro, etc, and the connotations of these labels in a UK publishing context strangely hostile to short-form writing (unlike other places). And the way formal constraints make flash adjacent to prose poetry, but also definitely something distinct. Thanks to everyone involved!

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