Chris McCabe and Nine Arches Press at Open Eye Gallery

We’re very excited that LiPS (Liverpool Poetry Space) has announced the start of its autumn programme, and the first event sees the Liverpool launch of Chris McCabe’s new book Hedonism, published by Nine Arches Press. 

Nine Arches Press is one of the UK’s leading independent poetry publishers, and Chris McCabe will be joined by its director Jane Commane for a conversation exploring the creative process of editing and sharing insights into how a book is made. The chat will be followed by a Q&A hosted by Dr Pauline Rowe, one of the LiPS organisers, and preceded by a reading from Hedonism.

Hedonism is described as “McCabe’s sixth and most daring collection” and presents a carnival of characters including Bez from Happy Mondays, Jorge Louis Borges and a medieval pilgrim on a journey to buy a PlayStation. Part-written in Scouse dialect and invented languages, Hedonism, we’re told, “offsets the comic with the elegiac in a haunting and polyphonic work exploring the intersection of grief, place, memory and imagination”.

Chris McCabe’s work spans artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. His work has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. His most recent poetry collection, The Triumph of Cancer is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and he is the editor of several anthologies including Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages and The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (with Victoria Bean). His novels are Dedalus and Mud. He is working on an epic series of psychogeographical prose books documenting the lost poets buried in London’s Victorian cemeteries, the latest of which is Buried Garden, was chosen as a White Review Book of the Year in 2022. His latest book is Dreamt by Ghosts published by Tenement Press.

Jane Commane has been the editor of Nine Arches Press since its founding in 2008 and its director since 2016. Her role includes commissioning and editing all Nine Arches Press publications, working closely with poets to mentor and support their development, organising and facilitating regular workshops and live events, and co-editing (with Matt Merritt and Maria Taylor) Under the Radar magazine. As well as working for Nine Arches Press, she is a poet – her first full-length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018 and she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship in 2017-18. She is also co-author, with Jo Bell, of the creative writing handbook How to be a Poet.

LiPS is an independent organisation whose aim is to offer space for poetry to be shared and experienced around Liverpool City Region, and events this year kicked off in March with renowned poet CAConrad performing in Liverpool for the first time with, in June, Jay Farley and their compelling Broken Sleep Books debut collection-turned-show A [Cupboard] Full of Tomboys. In between, in April, prolific Wirral-based poet Eleanor Rees launched her brilliant book Portents and Portals: New & Selected Poems, out with Cornwall’s fabulous Guillemot Press, “independent publisher of pamphlets and beautiful books”, and was joined by its editor Luke Thompson, who gave an insight into small press publishing (keen readers may remember a similar talk at Manchester Poetry Library). Most recently, LiPS co-hosted the final leg of this year’s annual European Poetry Festival, also at Open Eye Gallery.