New Releases from Macha Press
Crowd Work
Sam Furlong
Crowd Work is the venturous debut by writer Sam Furlong. With candour, its poems detail experiences of a body’s living, materialities it inhabits and shares with bodies and other species. Also, the qualities of pain, and the complexities and contradictions of intimacy.
From densely sculpted sonnets to capacious prose forms and ekphrasis, Furlong’s uses of image and tonal variation interweave voyeurism with masochisms and transfiguration. Devotional gestures are amplified from the private to many-voiced conversations, expressly in the sequence ‘Crowd Work’, an unflinching interrogation of the performative side of identity in stand-up’s public setting.
Radically amatory, this debut performs a body’s wanton poetries. Re-making forms, it renders explicit the means by which ‘Through breaking, we are made.’
Sam Furlong is a writer from Dublin who works across genres. They completed an MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, where they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award in 2023. Their writing has appeared in publications including Banshee, Abridged, Propel, Catflap, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Pig’s Back. They have been selected for the National Mentorship Programme and Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series, and read alongside Stephen Rae and Paula Meehan at the Abbey Theatre’s Now We Must Sing: Celebrating WB Yeats.
At present, they are developing a short story collection supported by both an Agility Award and The Stinging Fly workshop scholarship and are Poetry Editor of Frustrated Writers’ Group.
Praise for Crowd Work
Crowd Work elicits an expansive and extraordinary cartography of the body, ‘rendered finally legible’. Here is Barthes’s jouissance, stripped bare to the bone. Furlong’s writing hurts, and is hurt. It takes your delicate face in its hands, presses it seductively against both sides of pain. It tells you where to look. What you see might save you, or break you. It cannot but change you.
- Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe
! All'arme / ? And what... if not
Eilish Martin
A ‘career apex’ poet whose natural home is at once on the margins and at the heart of the hybrid, Eilish Martin’s practice in ! All'arme / ? And what... if not is at once experimental, interdisciplinary and intercultural.
In content and visionary concept, the poetries published in this tête-bêche (head-to-toe) double book bring together lyrical fragmentation and narrative drive, language play, intertextual dialogue and textual innovation with unsettling anxieties and deep care for public and private worlds.
The 96-page collection catalogues some small part of what Martin herself has referred to as the ‘compulsive journey’ of her poetry-making and verbal-visual improvisations across the past ten years.
A poet and artist, Eilish Martin has published two previous collections of poetry, slitting the tongues of jackdaws (Summer Palace Press, 1999) and Ups Bounce Dash (Summer Palace Press, 2008). She has contributed translations to Seán Ó Ríordáin’s Selected Poems (Yale University Press, 2014), and When the Neva Rushes Backwards a bilingual anthology of work by five Russian poets compiled by Word of Mouth Collective (Lagan Press, 2014).
Praise for Eilish Martin's ! All'arme / ? And what... if not
Unconcerned with performing an anxious turn towards meaning, and in its preoccupations with scoring the moment, its journey of making, and the very act of reading - which is to say the deciphering of visual marks on a script - Eilish Martin's ! All'arme / ? And what... if not invites us to consider how poetry in print operates through some of its first principles: the alphabet and punctuation. Its materiality; its privileging of the fragment; the embedded silences; its interdisciplinary urges spotlighting the porousness of borders; and its nod to translation as a transformative and communicative practice - all these are both a call to arms and refreshingly irreverent.
Christodoulos Makris
In this new Macha Press publication, the letter on the page becomes more than just a conventional symbol – it becomes material / a gorgeous 'something’... while the page itself becomes ‘space as invention’, to quote that great formal innovator Georges Perec. This is an exciting new publishing endeavour whose mission is to take seriously the playful, collaborative, and inventive forms and styles being explored in poetry today.
Tara Bergin