Announcing the Banshee Press list for 2022
Rosamund Taylor by Ger Holland
David Toms by Derek Foott
We are thrilled to announce our book publications for 2022. Since launching the Banshee Press list in 2019, we have published one quality title a year: Paris Syndrome by Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Gold Light Shining by Bebe Ashley, and I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay by Deirdre Sullivan. Next year, we’re excited to add not one, but two outstanding books to the Banshee stable: In Her Jaws by Rosamund Taylor, and Pacemaker by David Toms.
In Her Jaws by Rosamund Taylor
May 2022, poetry
‘In these haunting, simmering metamorphoses, Rosamund Taylor’s imagination is both intrepid and tender. Spanning the erotic and the traumatic, these poems root through the fibrous dark of our psyche. In Her Jaws is a breath-taking debut.’ – Seán Hewitt
In her debut collection, Rosamund Taylor dares us across thresholds and invites us to glimpse the world as we’ve never seen it before. She boldly charts a journey of survival and transformation with poems on history reimagined, astronomy, sorcery, wild landscapes, talismanic creatures, and queer love. Taylor explores what it means to live in a female body that is not defined by lack, or want, or perpetual suffering, but is possessed by a real and defined sense of erotic autonomy. These poems burn from the inside out with possibility, and there is magic, mystery and reclamation at every turn. In Her Jaws is a landmark debut that extends and deepens the Irish tradition of writing the female perspective, while also breaking new ground.
Rosamund Taylor won the Mairtín Crawford Award at the Belfast Book Festival in 2017, and her poem ‘The Proof’ won the London Magazine Poetry Competition in 2020. Recently, her poems have appeared in Magma, Agenda, Channel, Poetry Ireland Review and on LambdaLiterary.Org. The Banshee team have been privileged to publish Rosamund’s work in several issues of the journal and are proud to be bringing her debut book to a wider audience.
Pacemaker by David Toms
September 2022, memoir
Every time I write about my heart, I write about walking. Every time I write about walking, I write about my heart.
What is it like to be born with a congenital heart defect? What does it mean to live knowing your heart may one day fail you? How do you walk without moving a muscle? In Pacemaker, poet David Toms deftly blends essay, poem and diary in an account of resisting, confronting and living with a rare heart condition. His experience speaks to all of us in its exploration of what it means to live in a fragile yet resilient body, and to keep moving.
David Toms is a writer from Waterford, now living and working in Norway. His poetry collections include Northly (2019), Soma | Sema (2011), and several chapbooks. His creative work has been published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies across Ireland, the UK, the US and Europe, including in several issues of Banshee. This title marks Banshee Press’s first book-length work of creative nonfiction and we are thrilled to be working on it with David.
Stay tuned for more information about these books in the coming months. Thanks as always to the Arts Council, whose support makes it possible for us to bring these outstanding titles to readers.
