Announcing the Banshee Press list for 2023
Mary Morrissy by Colbert Kearney
Dylan Brennan by Liliana Pérez-Brennan
We are thrilled to announce our book publications for 2023: a new collection of poetry by Dylan Brennan, and a novel (our first!) by Mary Morrissy. Read more at The Bookseller. Stay tuned for more information in the coming months, and thanks as always to the Arts Council, whose support makes it possible for us to bring these outstanding titles to readers.
Let the Dead by Dylan Brennan
May 2023, poetry
he’s a milk azure marble under moonlight
she’s a shard of smashed obsidian
they’re the night falling out all around us– from ‘Stories Made Flesh’
Deeply attuned to those things that make and unmake us, Dylan Brennan’s Let The Dead concerns itself with life’s alchemical processes. A couple breathe life into a doomed poppet, a photographer immortalises a corpse, Joyce and Breton rub shoulders on the streets of the poet’s adopted Mexico, where life is a tapestry of ‘delicate anthers’ and ‘disembodied tongues’. These dark meditations are set against poems which consider love, miscarriage, childbirth and the daily miracle of family life.
Beautiful and disturbing by turns, these reflections on Ireland and Mexico’s shared colonial past invoke topographies both real and imagined, where ‘things in the ground have a tendency to grow.’ Let the Dead reminds us of the power of art to shape our perception of history, and of the artist’s responsibility in a time of violence.
Dylan Brennan’s debut poetry collection, Blood Oranges, was published by The Dreadful Press in 2014 and was awarded the Patrick Kavanagh Award runner-up prize. In 2017 he collaborated on Guadalupe & Other Hallucinations, a series of exhibitions and an illustrated e-book, with Belfast-based visual artist Jonathan Brennan. In 2016 he co-edited Rethinking Juan Rulfo's Creative World: Prose, Photography, Film with Prof. Nuala Finnegan (UCC), a volume of academic essays on the work of Mexican writer/photographer Juan Rulfo. In 2018 Ireland Professor of Poetry Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin nominated him as recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award. He lives in Mexico City where he works as a teacher.
Penelope Unbound by Mary Morrissy
September 2023, novel
Closing up now, ladies and gents, he calls, out of habit probably, but he’s looking directly at her. There is no one else. She can almost sense his narrowed eyes and imagine the calculations he’s making about her. A streetwalker? An aggrieved wife? A woman with bad news. A woman who’s owed. But she’s immune to his sort. Jumped-up lockhard.
You can glare all you like, she thinks, but this time I’m staying put till the bitter end.
On their arrival in Trieste in 1904, James Joyce left Norah Barnacle outside a railway station while he went to scare up money. He got embroiled in a fight with a couple of sailors and was locked up for his troubles. A penniless Norah was left alone for almost an entire day and night sitting on their suitcases at the station in a city where she knew no one and where she didn’t speak the language.
In real life, Norah waited for him. This novel asks – what if she hadn’t?
In Penelope Unbound, one of our greatest living novelists weaves a spellbinding speculative history. By unhooking Norah from her famous husband, Morrissy gives her a compelling new voice, with heartbreak and humanity all her own. Sensual, inventive and uproariously funny, Penelope Unbound reimagines a Joycean heroine for the 21st century.
Dublin-born Mary Morrissy is the author of three novels, Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey, and two collections of stories, A Lazy Eye and Prosperity Drive. Her short fiction has been anthologised widely and two of her novels have been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. Her debut, Mother of Pearl, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award and she’s won a Hennessy Award and a Lannan Foundation Award for her fiction. A member of Aosdána, she is a journalist, a teacher of creative writing and a literary mentor. She blogs on art, fiction and history on https://marymorrissy.com/.
