Charles Boyle

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

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):

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.

Pic shows books in fridge and on shelves of fridge door

Serve cool: bookshelves for another hot day

Pottery giraffe broken in many places, mended

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.

"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...

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

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

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

"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.

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

Shock horror, the new pope is a man.

That seems a good reason to agree to the interview. What a very strange piece.

The Silly Season The non-story so far … A man announces he’s setting up a press that will ‘focus on literary fiction by men’. He says he plans to publish th...

Blog post about THAT new publisher: sonofabook.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-...

Me (with ancient author photo) on style, English puritanism, advice and Invisible Dogs: auraist.substack.com/p/was-updike...

CB editions will have a stall at this fair on Saturday: do come and chat, buy or haggle.

Last call to stream — must “close” April 22! —this reading of my adaptation of The Other Jack by @cbeditions.bsky.social. Directed by James Dacre, performed by Jasmine Blackborow & Nathaniel Parker, and produced by @csvich.bsky.social for the @lorteltheatre.bsky.social 🙏🏻 lortel.org/the-other-ja...

Just a week (well, six days) left to stream this reading of The Other Jack via the @lorteltheatre.bsky.social — directed by James Dacre & produced by @csvich.bsky.social, starring Jasmine Blackborow & Nathaniel Parker, and based on the book by @cbeditions.bsky.social 🙏🏻 lortel.org/the-other-ja...

Just 6 days left to stream for free a reading on Vimeo of @bydanobrien.bsky.social's stage adaptation of these books: register here: lortel.org/the-other-ja...

Screenshot from a reading of the stage adaptation by Dan O'Brien of The Other Jack, based on the book by myself (CBe, 2021). The reading can be streamed free on Vimeo until 22 April – you’ll need to register with the Lortel Theatre (lortel.org/the-other-ja...), who will send a link.

YouTube video by Marc Nash Recent Reads Early April

My #Booksky #Booktube lates video, reviewing 4 novels, 4 poetry collections & a hybrid work. Authors include Robert Perisic, Bolano, Vincent Delecroix, @cbeditions.bsky.social Natalie Diaz, Fredericke Mayröcker, Nick Laird www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7e5...