Charles Boyle

But there are still plenty of copies from the original (2008) print run ...

CB editions February newsletter - it's been a bad month - as archived on the blog: sonofabook.blogspot.com/2026/02/cbe-...

My thanks to David Caddy @tearsinthefence.bsky.social for permission to post Nadia Vikulina‘s full review of SOVETICA (from issue 82).

@cbeditions.bsky.social

Available here: www.cbeditions.com/mcguinness.h...

Happy publication day to Farah Ali (www.cbeditions.com/FarahAli.html). Glasses will be raised at @burleyfisher.bsky.social this evening, all welcome.

Cartoon of Mickey Mouse from a 1956 comic saying: "Better get some work done!"

First CB editions newsletter of the year, archived on the Sonofabook blog: sonofabook.blogspot.com/2026/01/cbe-...

Available here: www.cbeditions.com/mcguinness.h...

"If you see something that doesn't look right, speak to staff or text the British Transport Police. See it. Say it. Suck it."

My mother's notebook of Christmas past For 46 years, Charles Boyle's mother kept details of every Christmas present she gave. He explains why he'd brave a burning building to save her list

I wrote about this notebook before (14 years ago!): www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Page 1 of the notebook in which my mother recorded every Christmas present she gave, and how much it cost, 1957 to 2003 (she died the next month). The recipients included her hairdresser, the milkman, the postman, the paper boy, the dustbin-men and “Tony’s boy” (toffees, 2s. 6d). She did good.

'Telegraphy' at Burley Fisher Books, on January 15.
Lara Pawson (of Spent Light) and I will be there.
Come by.

6:30pm
400 Kingsland Rd, London E8 4AA
burleyfisherbooks.com/products/lau...

@cbeditions.bsky.social

2016 by Sarah Hesketh was named in the Guardian as a Poetry Book of the Year. Booksellers ordering in from Gardners are told “Publisher out of Stock”. The book's in stock both at the distributor and here, within arm’s reach – order from the CB editions website and I’ll post within 24 hours.

Random re-assembly: a wall with a fresco in a 12th-century monastery in Puglia, Italy, that collapsed after an earthquake; a local street corner, re-laid after roadworks.

Teeth: On negative reviews One of the funniest episodes of last month was a friend telling me that, coming on the Tube, he’d read one of the Poems on the Underground ...

On negative book reviews: "a whiff of iconoclasm, of smashing a statue in a church": sonofabook.blogspot.com/2025/12/teet...

CBe newsletter December 2025 Christmas. Presents. Books are even easier to wrap than bottles. See the home page of the website and bear in mind the Season Tickets: 6 b...

CB editions December newsletter, as archived on the Sonofabook blog: sonofabook.blogspot.com/2025/12/cbe-...

Something wrong with "soccer"? I doubt I'd give the time of day to any elevated intellectual kind of person unless they were invested in at least one form of sport.

Photo of author next to poster of Billy Bob Thornton

Last Sunday I went to a Leicester Square premiere of the new series of Landman which stars Billy Bob Thornton and I've written about why I'm a little obsessed with that man here: sonofabook.blogspot.com/2025/11/bill...

Carry-on case with attached bag for yoga mats

With a neat new bag for carrying yoga mats and cricket bats CB editions is off tomorrow to the Indie Book Fair at Bath Central Library organised by the wonderful Peirene Press.

Where to start with: Paul Bailey The novelist and poet, who died a year ago, left a huge body of work distinguished by its melancholy wit and warmth. These are some of the highlights

Good piece by @john-self.bsky.social on Paul Bailey, who died a year ago, who happened to live down the road and was the best of neighbours, whose last 2 books are published by CB editions: www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

10 years today since my poetry collection New Life—a companion to War Reporter—was published by @cbeditions.bsky.social in London (and not long after by @hangingloosepress.bsky.social in Brooklyn) 🙏🏻 Here’s a lovely review in The Rumpus therumpus.net/2016/01/29/n...

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

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...

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.

Display bookshelves made from cardboard, holding 12 books

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.

Stack of new copies of Ghost Stations by Patrick McGuinnes

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

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…

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

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...

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

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...

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?”

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