Lucy Mercer

excellent song

An Elegy for My Neighbor, Renee Nicole Good Fellow poet Danez Smith memorializes the Minneapolis mother's call to witness

“Poet, I don’t know if your eyes searched the sky for clouds, for blue, for stars, for God, but I know that you were an example of one of God’s best instructions: Love Thy Neighbor.”

Fellow poet Danez Smith on their neighbor (our neighbor) Renée Nicole Good.

It has been consistently strange over the years to see the real time narrativisation, hagiography and at times demonisation of a friend, who was wonderful, flawed, human! Like us all- most of the time I can’t engage w it but this new film I think is the spirit of what he would (might?) have wanted

YouTube video by Justin Barton - Topic On Vanishing Land - Chapter One

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTOy... you can listen to On Vanishing Land here

Mark taught at goldsmiths - not an FE college.

But I think he would have really liked the premise of this film. He was happy when his and Justin Barton’s On Vanishing Land was screened at The Showroom in Ldn - we all went. He was totally fascinated by landscapes.

The best!!

We do not have to consume the shitty cake or crime plots baked for us by corporate entertainment, or live off tragically meagre cultural crumbs. Small presses show us there is so much more out there...
👏👏👏

Amazing!! Great news ✨

from @marc-fischer.bsky.social (Public Collectors) excellent pamphlet Who Shares The Restroom Code With ICE Agents?

Love the pamphlet, thank you for making it!

'One extraordinary literary event this year was when small presses and writers helped to successfully pressure the government to waive biometric checks that were blocking students trapped in Gaza from taking up their scholarships at UK universities'.

Great piece, plus excellent list of TBRs...

Public Collectors mentioned! cc @marc-fischer.bsky.social

Thank you Alice ✨

Absolutely agreed with this. I think that we need to be bolder about pointing out that much adult 'culture' seems actually to be written for children. Plus this article introduced me to many great small press titles which I now want to read ......

Sharing some end of year lists, like this one from @lucymercer.bsky.social -- I will be looking up some of these to find out more. #books

Thanks Ian! ✨

Yes that would be great! Lmk when here :)

An excellent read about excellent reads & the excellence of reading actively, acutely & awarely. Indie presses as in pressing for change, for an end to genocide, for liberation.

ah thank you 💖

It’s so good! And also such an important addition to literature about translation especially when talking about class in the industry (everyone read Fair)!

Shitty Cakes, Endless Crime The year in reading: In 2025, small presses in the UK stood up against a dominant culture of dumbing down and selling out

Wrote about books for the Year in Review for Art Review @artreview.bsky.social

On corporate publishing, small presses & the many excellent books that were published in this otherwise cursed year 2025

artreview.com/shitty-cakes...

Thank you Matthew! And I love plastic :)

Shitty Cakes, Endless Crime The year in reading: In 2025, small presses in the UK stood up against a dominant culture of dumbing down and selling out

Lovely to get a mention in Lucy Mercer’s year in review (despite my book publishing next month). This is a really interesting and expansive article, discussing issues as well as books and publishing.

artreview.com/shitty-cakes...

it’s free on audible if you would also like to do this

Listening to Martin Jarvis reading David Copperfield for hours has been one of the joys of my year if not life tbh, 10/10 highly recommend

Don’t invest in AI, invest in the future of the book Why the publishing industry must back small presses, rather than LLMs.

"Small-press publishers are the spirit that animates our literature. ... They are vital for the literary ecosystem in that they take risks on books that larger publishers would not..."

#booksky #literature #reading #AI #smallpress via @thebookseller.com @lucymercer.bsky.social

Alice Oswald, The Art of Poetry No. 119 “You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed. It’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poem has to exist.”

two of our very best; Rachael Allen interviews Alice Oswald for Paris Review 💖
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/8...

Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium: A Forgotten Treasure at the Intersection of Science and Poetry An elegy for time and the mortality of beauty, composed with passionate patience and a sensuous cadence.

Emily Dickinson's herbarium – a forgotten treasure at the intersection of poetry and science www.themarginalian.org/2017/05/23/e...

Life-Giving, Imaginative and Underfunded: Small Press Publishers in Crisis A recent letter co-written and signed by small press publishers has highlighted the significant pressures they face, threatening them with closure and potentially damaging the literary ecosystem ir…

Up now on @literaryhub.bsky.social; an in-depth interview with small press publishers on what they do and how they do it, how they differ from commercial publishing in content & form, on funding, their impact on literary communities, & some excellent book recommends🎄

lithub.com/life-giving-...