Stewed Rhubarb Press

30/09/2025

All the plants I have half-grown by Linden K McMahon (2024)

From the inevitable anxiety of ecological crisis, the ecopoems in All the plants I have half-grown follow the strange, uncomfortable, glorious, glittering threads that link us to our ecologies, carefully pulling us through the magic of q***r kin-making and towards a sense of reciprocity and belonging.

Linden K McMahon is a writer, performer, and arts & nature connection facilitator - they write about human connections with ecologies, utopian dreams, belonging, and q***r joy.

"I have rarely read poems that try so honestly to enter into relationship with the non-human: plants, birds, fungi, land. McMahon's poems are acts of connection, committed to imagining better. 'The words link [us] to the lives that swirl around us', knowing this work is tricksy and incomplete and doing it anyway. The poems are full of play and song and mourning: a mourning that is active, that goes out to plant and grow." - Miriam Nash

"These poems have good rich soil under their fingernails. Speak to an intimate relationship with ecology, Linden McMahon is singing through the hard and rewarding work of growing a world of kinship, of reciprocity. With deep love and furious heartbreak, the lyrics here map out ways of knowing the world and each other that offer precious hope. There's wide-eyed wonder here, but earthly knowledge too. The writing refuses cynicism and embraces a bodily experience of reality. Like all the best gardens, this pamphlet is full of flowers and thorns, full of rich scents and tangled roots, and is always growing towards the sun." - Harry Josephine Giles

Read more and pick up your copy over at our website:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/all-the-plants-i-have-half-grown-by-linden-k-mcmahon/

23/09/2025

In Wolf's Skin (2024) by Titilayo Farukuoye

A memorandum of strength, fierceness and love, speaking to the importance of standing for a world you want to live in...

Contemplating power and heritage, In Wolf's Skin offers a means to articulate some realities of our colonial legacies. This pamphlet is a memorandum of strength, fierceness and love, speaking to the importance of standing for a world you want to live in. It is a love letter to Black women, all of us whose identities face marginalisation and those who bear witness and speak up, as we continue to collectively raise our voices for liberation.

In Wolf's Skin weaves heritage, culture and language across central and northern Europe from Scotland, Austria and Norway reaching to Nigeria and Cameroon, providing space for multilingualism, multi-tradition and
-heritage lives, identities and forms of being beyond any expected norm.

Titilayo Farukuoye is a writer, educator and organiser based in Glasgow. Their work addresses social justice and community care and is informed by dreaming and the radical imagination. Titilayo co-directs the Scottish BPOC Writers Network (SBWN) and is a winner of the 2022 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.

'These poems document life in a world that regards you as a wolf. In poem after poem, I recognise how a right to exist here is questioned, how we are asked to apologise and retract in the face of ever-present danger. And yet, the poems don't stop there; they also show us how others (from ancestors to characters we've never met) can help us forgive and connect, how we find a way to breathe and live in - and even love - our flawed world! -Marjorie Lotfi

'A window into the contemporary legacies of a fierce black feminist poetic forged in the 1980s. These are poems that acknowledge and affirm the presence of their readers, fluid and generous, they invite us to witness an artful defiance of the strictures of race, class and gender! - Lola Olufemi

Pick up yours here: https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/in-wolfs-skin-by-titilayo-farukuoye/

12/09/2025

Our author Ian Macartney reads at AFK SPAM zine & Press in Glasgow this Sunday 14th September! ☀️

Summer may be over but do not fear.. AFK returns at this Sunday 14th September and this time it’s a special collab with our good pal, the micropress Sincere Corkscrew. For this one we’re taking a hybrid/ prose/ performance slant. Think words, drones, electronics, a celtic flair.

Free entry. Doors and start time slightly earlier for his one - doors at 6 for 6.30 sharp start.

The readers:
Ian Macartney
Madeleine McCluskey




The performers:x


Takes place in the upstairs bar, unfortunately not wheelchair accessible.

Bring all pals!

12/09/2025

Now open for pre-order: Blue: A Lament for the Sea by Liz MacWhirter. 🌊 🌊 🌊

Blue: a lament for the sea is one woman's journey through the interstices of land and sea, grief and love. The medieval Gaelic myth of the Isle of lona escaping an apocalyptic flood infuses. MacWhirter's contemporary lyric epic. Words unravel from deep time to the Anthropocene and our collapsing ecosystems, asking: what is hope in these times?

"In haunting, melodic lyric, MacWhirter turns language itself into a 'thin place' of remembering, reckoning and renewal." - Jenn Ashworth

"A powerful work of mourning and hauntings. At once elegy and call to arms, this is a spellbinding meditation on margins and oceanic longing that leaves the reader changed." - CJ Cooke

"As our world grows bluer, through sea level rise, floods, and storms, we need to listen to poets. In phrases that capture oceanic movements and both medieval and contemporary seascapes, 'Blue' charts our ecological grief and abiding connections to water and rock, humans and seabirds, surf and tides. Listen to these voices!" - Steve Mentz

'''Blue' carries its weighty material easily, in a free, slim, slender verse, immediately accessible, emotionally buoyant in a challenging narrative of discovery and disclosure ... The lyrical exploration that the poem enacts is fraught and yet beautiful: its tone is exactly as its subtitle discloses, a 'lament', a keening, and yet it is wide-eyed at the colour and vividness of the visual, and the spiritual substance lona provides." - Alan Riach

Liz MacWhirter is a writer, speaker and theologian. Her debut novel, Black Snow Falling (Scotland Street Press, 2018), gained a Carnegie Medal nomination, and her poetry is published by Lucy Writers, Yale GCRE, Theology in Scotland and 4M Netlabel. Liz has spoken at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and at the Universities of Yale, Oxford, and St Andrews. Her PhD,
‘When Hope Takes Flight,' explores theopoetics and trauma (University of Glasgow). Liz spends as much time as possible in nature, hiking around her home in the Border hills.

Pre-order here: https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/blue-a-lament-for-the-sea-pre-order/

03/09/2025

A poem from Love & Other Cancers (2024) by Olivia Thomakos. 🩷💙

The poems in Love & Other Cancers are deeply personal yet universally resonant, deftly exploring the struggles of our life journeys as we discover ourselves and navigate familial, friendly, and romantic relationships through seasons of illness, loss, and change.

''Love And Other Cancers' stretches the mind's eye with a language of deep attention and meticulous, hopeful curiosity. Here are poems of stillness and longing, of piecing things together, of tricks of the light."
- Tessa Berring

"A moving, rich and assured debut pamphlet that flows through a circuit of veins containing cancer, clinics, incomprehensible doctors, musical notation [rests] and (I didn't say it) love. Any poetry that invokes 'buzzards' is alright with me."
- Nicky Melville

"Olivia Thomakos' 'Love & Other Cancers' offers musicality and excitement throughout. 'Earth peels like an orange' on one page ('Molting'), while 'Your sundial ancestor calls' on another ('A Love Letter'). Thomakos' writing feels conversational and confessional but also controlled and measured. There is a lightness to it and yet nothing feels written simply for the sake of it. An assured debut, and one I'm excited to read again."
- Sean Wai Keung

Olivia Thomakos is an Ohio-born writer, teacher, and editor. Her poem ‘What You Wish For’ won the 2022 Grierson Verse Prize. She is Poetry Editor of Origin Stories: An Anthology of Beginnings and Managing Editor of Tiny Flames: Voices from Ukraine, both with Forest Publishing. Her poetry can be found in Gutter, Berfrois, and elsewhere. www.oliviathomakos.com

Pick up your copy here:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/love-other-cancers-by-olivia-thomakos/

27/08/2025

sun-drunk by lan Macartney (2024)

☀️🧡🌅 ☀️🧡🌅 ☀️🧡🌅 ☀️🧡🌅 ☀️🧡🌅

sun-drunk is a pamphlet of poems that are meant to be read out loud, of summer jobs/kisses/ wanders, for performance/protest, warm-hotfruity-and/or-sultry. These are poems drunk not just on the sun, but on every emotion which whirs underneath its glow - even in the bright light of winter months. Some of these poems were commissioned for stage, some for screen(s), and others have never appeared before.

Ian Macartney can be found online at ianmacartney.scot. Previous publications include The Infinite Fury and other stories (Strange Region), Turtleshell (Saló Press) and Shale Bings (Broken Sleep Books). His work has been featured in The Poetry Review, PROTOTYPE, The Scotsman and The Guardian.

"Encompassing hedonism and a deep desire for connection, sun-drunk fizzes with a fierce creativity as well as a sense of humanity and physicality that envelops the reader in its passionate embrace."
- Ricky Monahan Brown

"This is gorgeous poetry. Not an adjective I would normally deploy in any critique. But there is nothing 'normal' about Macartney's collection. It performs the remarkable feat of yoking an absolutely contemporary sensibility, encrusted by the jargon of internet and social media, to a kind of high and flighty rhetoric that gives some of these poems an ecstatic and exhilerating energy. There is also a plainer speech here and some very moving love poetry. In sun-drunk you will find a veritable orchestration of syntax, wise to its virtuoso techniques but unwilling to relinquish and often productive of genuine tenderness. A rare achievement."
- David Kinloch

Pick up your copy of sun-drunk here:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/sun-drunk-by-ian-macartney/

22/08/2025

👇👇👇🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿✍️✍️✍️

19/08/2025

Poem by Jeda Pearl from Hunter's Voices (2024) edited by Alan Riach.

Hunter’s Voices is an anthology of poems responding to paintings and objects in the gallery and museums of the Hunterian Collection at the University of Glasgow. Some of the finest poets of contemporary Scotland, writing in English, Scots and Gaelic languages, and in a variety of poetic forms, take us into the Hunterian spaces. Their poems are complemented by beautiful reproductions of paintings and objects from different centuries and around the globe.

Hunter’s Voices is not only a showcase for the Hunterian Collection but also questions the priorities of museum and gallery acquisition. It celebrates the priority of educational resources and the aesthetic brilliance of works of art but also explores the enquiries and themes raised by the collection as a whole. And it is a demonstration of the ways in which poetry works to open an interrogation of the silence such objects and paintings normally reside within. It is a form of redress.

Edited by Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, and featuring poetry from Lesley Benzie Colin Bramwell, Lynn Davidson, Gerrie Fellows, Bashabi Fraser, Anne Frater, Jane Goldman, David Kinloch, Hannah Lavery, Liz Lochhead, Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, Lindsay Macgregor, Pàdraig MacAoidh / Peter Mackay, Peter McCarey, Jeda Pearl, Richard Price, John Purser, Samuel Reilly, Alan Riach, Stewart Sanderson Ian Stephen, Em Strang & Samuel Tongue.

Pick up your copy here:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/hunters-voices-edited-by-alan-riach/

Background is Judith Collins' PAOLOZZI.

01/08/2025

!! Event Cancelled !!

We've had to put off this reading for another time - apologies for any inconvenience folks!

*****

Eloise Birtwhistle’s debut pamphlet, Splenectomy, is framed around the experience of an unnamed in-patient being treated post-surgery on a hospital ward. From there, this extended poem puts the body and its histories under a scrutinizing lens to study our physical and mental agency. We tenderly explore human and non-human physiology; move between ancient and modern understandings of ourselves; and dive under deep water. With wonder, precision, and a distinct intimacy, Splenectomy renders blood and bile anew.

Stewed Rhubarb Press was founded in 2013, winning the Callum Macdonald Award for its first pamphlet, The Glassblower Dances by Rachel McCrum. Since then, they have launched 4 collections, 3 anthologies including the national Covid remembrance book "I Remember", and published 34 pamphlets from writers ranging from Edinburgh to the Appalachian Mountains, including playwright Jo Clifford, Scottish spoken-word poets Dr HJ Giles, Colin Bramwell, Marjorie Lotfi, Hannah Lavery, and David Kinloch.

Stewed Rhubarb Press is known for its passionately diverse list, authentic appreciation of the spoken-word scene, and high production values. Its mission is to treat spoken-word poetry with the enthusiasm and respect it deserves.

Eloise Birtwhistle's poetry has been published in journals including Gutter, SPAM Zine and New Writing Scotland. She won a 2023 New Writers Award and was a Finalist of the 2019 Mslexia and Poetry Book Society Women's Poetry Prize. A previous recipient of a St Mungo's Mirrorball Clydebuilt Apprenticeship, she now co-ordinates the Clydebuilt scheme. She has led creative writing workshops for organisations including Glasgow Women's Library, Lothian Health Services Archive and the Inverclyde Homeless Centre. Eloise loves football and currently works for the LGBTQIA+ charity LEAP Sports Scotland.

https://facebook.com/events/s/splenectomy-by-eloise-birtwhis/1254047256193709/

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/splenectomy-by-eloise-birtwhistle-pre-order/

30/07/2025

Huge thanks to Stuart Kelly for this review of Eloise Birtwhistle in The Scotsman!

🙏🙏🙏🙏✨✨✨✨🙏🙏🙏🙏✨✨✨✨

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/splenectomy-by-eloise-birtwhistle-pre-order/

https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/book-reviews-dm-black-dantes-paradiso-robert-crawford-old-world-eloise-birtwhistle-splenectomy-5228159

22/07/2025

Endless Blue by Laura T. Fyfe ( Laura Fyfe )

Charged with sensuality, spirituality and sass, Endless Blue is a vivid exploration of the space between sky and water, the horizon line between the ephemeral and the eternal. These expansive poems encapsulate Laura Fyfe's term as Stirling Makar, considerably broadening her poetic range while remaining firmly grounded in her working-class roots.

Laura T. Fyfe is a poet and writer who lives in river deep, mountain high Stirlingshire. She facilitates writing workshops and communities across Scotland, and supports writers worldwide.

"Endless Blue takes us from the moment a fossil footprint is formed, through the very different but almost complementary constructions of female and male identities, then oot into the endlessnesses hinted at in its title. These are poems open equally to deep time and spatial vastness. However, the key sense throughout is of a freedom beyond the limits of those identities we impose on ourselves. The pamphlet positions its ain freedoms in particularities of place, perception, and memory: those points at which the world sees us as much as we see it, and sees us whole."
- W.N. Herbert

“Laura Fyfe’s language spurs and soars into a tender blue, sometimes as ‘gentle / as a moth wing / holds air’, and sometimes with biting scars, like ‘watermark lines around our bruises’. In her poetry, textured blue-grey memory glides between form and formlessness: ‘seagulls drift above the memory of endless summer’ and ‘memories like pipe-smoke’ are inhaled in their powdery, heavy, black materiality. As one scales and crests this pamphlet, one finds in it audacious hope, soft wisdom, and stunning Scottish landscapes come to life. Her ‘Slow-Beating Heart’ is a fitting tribute to Stirlingshire from its wonderful Makar, and poems like In Concert and Taps Aff will sound stunningly incantatory to global readers reading Scots poetry. From the blue of the innermost eye of a fire to that of slowly healing bruises, Endless Blue is a fantastic read for the diverse shades of blue it has to offer.”
– Nikita Parik, Charles Wallace Fellow, Author

Pick up your copy here:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/endless-blue-by-laura-t-fyfe/

15/07/2025

From Eloise Birtwhistle’s Splenectomy, our most recent publication!

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Eloise Birtwhistle's debut pamphlet puts the body and its histories under a scrutinizing lens in a study of our physical and mental agency. This extended poem weaves ancient with modern; clinical with natural; human with non-human; deep sea with air. Using wonder, precision, and a distinct intimacy, Splenectomy renders blood and bile anew.

"From hospital ward to Sulu Sea; from Hippocrates to Joni Mitchell, Splenectomy is a deep dive into what it is to be cared for as a patient and what is required to care for our planet and its peoples. Eloise Birtwhistle is a young poet of considerable potential and remarkable vision." - John Glenday

"In Splenectomy, language glides as effortlessly as a body into salt waves. Eloise Birtwhistle crafts scenes that glimmer hypnotically from the depths of the sea to the anaesthetic fuzz of a hospital bed. The poems in this pamphlet are expansive and iridescent, full of bright breath and evocative gestures." -Alicia Pirmohamed

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Pick up your copy here:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/splenectomy-by-eloise-birtwhistle-pre-order/