@brokensleepbooks
Award winning indie publisher | Poetry | Essays | Fiction | Lay out your unrest | Widening access to the arts | Editor: @godzillakent.bsky.social | For reviews: stuart@brokensleepbooks.com | Founded: 2018 Website: brokensleepbooks.com
reaper in a headlock is funny, clever, and quietly profound
— Romalyn Ante
These poems move like fables told through cracked windows
— Bobby Parker
reaper in a headlock is the bold, inventive, new collection from Simon Alderwick
— Paul Whelan
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By turns surreal, funny, and devastating, reaper in a headlock is a book about trying to outlast the inevitable, and learning, again and again, what it means to stay in the room.
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A poem can be a love story written on post it notes, a boxing gym lit by cuss words and velcro, a fable made of coinage and stained glass, or a river that carries the dead and the living in the same current.
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Across sequences of fatherhood, belief, boredom, addiction, grief, and the uneasy modern noise of ‘culture’, Alderwick’s lines slip between tenderness and bite.
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These are pieces rooted in the everyday, a fridge note, a kids’ kite in a storm, a late night drink, a hospital room, yet they keep opening onto stranger, wider weather.
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Book cover for reaper in a headlock by Simon Alderwick. A pale, foggy grey background fades darker towards the bottom. Hanging from the top centre is a large fish hook on a thin line, catching the back of a limp, suited figure who dangles diagonally, arms and legs slack. The title and author name sit in muted grey serif type at the top-left, and ‘Broken Sleep Books’ appears small at the bottom-left.
In reaper in a headlock, Simon Alderwick writes poems that move like breath, sometimes prayer, sometimes punch, always human.
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*yawns*
*stretches*
I have a new book on the way! Home to My Cats, a chonky pamphlet of poems about (as the title might suggest) kittens and Taylor Swift, will be published by @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social in April 2026, and is available to preorder.
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Throughout, language is not just medium but battleground, a place to reclaim the body, the name, the right to speak, and the right to be misunderstood on your own terms.
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These poems carry family voices & childhood textures, but they also burn with queer tenderness & defiance. A public swimming pool becomes a site of longing; a passport control becomes a theatre of suspicion; a phone screen becomes intimacy & distance.
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Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç writes in a shifting, multilingual music where German, Turkish, Arabic, and English collide and braid, refusing the neat borders that states, headlines, and even poems try to enforce.
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Book cover for Prinzenbad by Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç, translated by Özgecan Kesici-Ayoubi. A dark, moody photograph of a black brick wall fills the background. A pale crescent moon shape sits slightly below centre, as if painted or projected onto the bricks. The title and author details appear in white serif type at the top-left, with ‘Broken Sleep Books’ in smaller text near the bottom-left.
Set in the charged atmospheres of Kreuzberg, airports, waiting rooms, bedrooms, and prayer spaces, Prinzenbad moves through hunger, desire, surveillance, inheritance, and the everyday violence of being read as ‘foreign’.
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Urgent, darkly inventive, and startlingly tender in its refusal to look away, Balloons is a collection of pressure and release, of what swells, what ruptures, and what refuses to go back to its original shape.
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A North Sea undertow runs beneath hospital language, domestic spaces, religion, schoolrooms, news bulletins, and the algorithmic present, where power keeps shifting its mask and the self must keep learning how to survive it.
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Book cover for balloons by Alex Innocent. Minimal black text in the top-left on a white background, with ‘Broken Sleep Books’ centred near the bottom. The artwork is a soft, pencil-drawn abstract scene of overlapping translucent balloon-like forms and ribboning lines, with two simplified, nude human figures intertwined amid swirling, shaded shapes.
In Balloons, alex innocent writes into the body’s most private rooms and the world’s most public violences. These poems move through the absurd theatre of modern life, with a voice that is at once forensic and ferociously alive.
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Since it's the international day of the verse-novel (I made that up) it's apposite that I remind folk of my ELLE from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social : more here: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2025/10/my-n...
Screenshot of Drop-In article by Daniel Hinds on Nigel Kent's website
I dropped in to @kent-nj.bsky.social website to discuss a poem, 'Death by Earth', from my debut @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social collection New Famous Phrases as well as the wider collection. This is the most I've talked in prose about my poetics, so please give it a read! Link to the article below.
The cover of MOUNTEBANK by Tom Snarsky, out March 31st from Broken Sleep Books.
hello everyone! today is #smallpoemsunday and it’s also the first day of March, the month at the end of which my new book MOUNTEBANK will be out from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social :)
each day in March I’m planning to share a #soapboxpoem, a small series of poems(/etc.) named for the origin of the…
…I’d also like to thank @godzillakent.bsky.social at @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social for all his work making this book a reality, including the cover design which is absolutely a dream. I’d also be remiss not to include where you can preorder MOUNTEBANK: www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page... 🎭
Broken Sleep Books February Launch Emily Barker Matthew Kosinski Olly Todd Megan Pattie Laurie Eaves Dominic Hoey brokensleepbooks.com/events Friday 27th February: 2000 (8:00pm) start All books available to order from brokensleepbooks.con
ONLINE LAUNCH: Pay-what-you-want tickets are still available for our February launch event. Come along for great readings from Emily Barker, Laurie Eaves, Dominic Hoey, Matthew Kosinski, Olly Todd, and Megan Pattie!
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“There is such a clear, purposeful and precise cadence to this book-length suite. Carpenter captures deep listening, slowness and the pause across an incredibly sharp lyric” — thank you @robmclennan.bsky.social @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social robmclennan.blogspot.com/2026/02/jr-c...
The result is writing that keeps breaking open its own claims, attentive to what is displaced, erased, and unsaid, while insisting on the poem as a live, subversive space where meaning remains in motion.
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Formally, these poems move in compressed lyric bursts and quick shifts of register, braiding ecological unease, gendered politics, eros, ancestry and metamorphosis.
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From its opening gestures, the work positions itself against paternalism and poetic gatekeeping, seeking a “greatest possible openness” where subjectivity slides away from the author even at its most intimate.
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Abstract painterly cover with a vivid yellow background disrupted by sweeping teal, green, black, and white glitch-like brushstrokes; title “Subverses” appears in black at top left with author “Mirko Boncaldo” in blue beneath; “Broken Sleep Books” sits small at the bottom left.
Subverses by Mirko Boncaldo is a collection that treats the poem as a site of refusal, resisting authorial entitlement and inviting interpretation as a shared, destabilising game.
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A monochrome 8-pack of square stickers with bold white line art & text, handmade by Emma Kennedy. Each design is clean, high-contrast, & built around a rallying slogan. Rounded squares made for anywhere that could use a little resistance in black & white.
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bho Moladh Mòraig Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair O dastram, dastram, Dastram Mòrag! Rìbhinn bhuidh’, bhasdalach, Leac-ruiteach ròsach; A gruaidhean air lasadh Mar an lasair-chlach dhathte, ’S a deud mar a’ sneachda, Cruinn-shnaighte ’n dlùth òrdugh; Ri Venus cho tlachdmhor An taitneachdainn fheòlmhor, Ri Dido cho maiseach, Cho snasmhor ’s cho còrr rith’; ’S e thionnsgain dhomh caitheamh ’S a lùghdaich mo ràithean, A’ bhallag ghrinn laghach Chuir na gathan sa ’m fheòil-sa.
from Praised be Morag translated by Taylor Strickland Delirium! Delirium from her, a girl blonde, lurid: how she snuffs out her own flint-spark glow, and in one white bite hewn from snow. As sex and excess, as body and beauty, so Dido, so Venus, so Morag ravishes my seasons, my genius spent. A girl with sharp agency can pierce the heart clean through.
O dastram, dastram,
Dastram Mòrag!
Rìbhinn bhuidh’, bhasdalach,
Leac-ruiteach ròsach…
—Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, bho “Moladh Mòrag”
in DASTRAM/DELIRIUM, @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social 2023
#ValentinesDay #Gaelic #poem #poetry #C18
#BookWormSat
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@brokensleepbooks.bsky.social Now isn’t this a beautiful thing
Man holding a copy of ‘My Ear Is Full Of Milk’, an anthology from Broken Sleep Books
Text of a poem ‘They’re Still Completing the Jigsaw Puzzle’ by Tim Kiely
Shot of text from inside an anthology of poetry and prose from Broken Sleep Books
🎥 and now for the latest bucket of suds I’ve gotten myself into - an anthology from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
🙏 thanks to @aaronkent.bsky.social and @simonbarraclough.bsky.social for this opportunity!
📚 get your copy of ‘My Ear Is Full Of Milk’ now!
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My hand holding a copy of None of Us Will Be Okay, a novel by Liza Costello. The cover illustration is a detail from a painting, perhaps a watercolour, of a townscape with a colonial mission or cathedral in the distance.
Book haul 5/5
None of Us Will Be Okay by Liza Constello. This is my first ever book from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social , a press I've been curious about.
On the Ramblings today, I explore two fascinating poetry collections from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social for #readindies - more here! kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2026/02/09/i...