Tapsalteerie (2025)

05/09/2025

Long Field Loop by Rebecca Sharp (2024)

"an extraorinary, utterly unique collection... an antidote to the Anthopocene" - John Glenday

*Longlisted for the Saltire Society's Poetry Book of Year award 2024*

When so much of moving forward includes looking back, the poems in Long Field Loop make space for making amends - a space where land, humans and more-than-humans explore patterns of experience in times of reckoning.

The title sequence looks at a decade (2014-24) of personal and political upheaval through a Scottish lens, a recalibration of hopes and dreams. Set within the wider context of late-stage capitalism, seismic global unrest and climate crisis, Rebecca Sharp's poems consider how we find our feet again, the recovery of values and voice, what we must lay to rest and how we carry on.

Rebecca Sharp is a poet, playwright and interdisciplinary artist from Glasgow, now based in Fife. Her pamphlet Rough Currency (Tapsalteerie 2021) explores the poetics of oil and the imagination, receiving an RSL Literature Matters Award and an Art of Energy Award. Interdisciplinary collaborations have been shortlisted for the Brush & Lyre Prize for Multimedia Poetry and the Scottish Landscape Awards. In 2022-24 she was the inaugural Artist in Residence with the Centre for Energy Ethics, supported by CEE and Creative Scotland; during which time she researched and wrote Long Field Loop. See more at: www.rebeccajoysharp.com.

"Long Field Loop is a cosmos channelled through the rhizomatic structure of everything everywhere all at once. Intimate and expansive, inventive, expressive, this is poetry as a (re) search for meaning and honest implication; and the reader is folded directly into its eco-poiesis. Financial futures and pine needles, tapirs, blanket bog, sea otters, and prehistoric star-gazing parties; Sharp animates the academic with vibrant interconnection and offers new patterns of thought and practice across any imagined divide. Velella velella have never sounded (or looked) so bright." - Samuel Tongue

Pick up your copy here:

https://www.tapsalteerie.co.uk/product/long-field-loop-by-rebecca-sharp/

31/08/2025

Titular poem from Shane Strachan’s 2024 collection Dwams, which was longlisted for the Saltire Society's Poetry Book of Year award.

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In a spectrum of voices across Scots and English, the poems in DWAMS concern themselves with the climate emergency and just transition, rising xenophobia, and with q***r romance and s*x, in a groundbreaking debut collection from North East Scottish writer and poet Shane Strachan. The collection looks anew at the city of Aberdeen and the wider North East region's industrial heritage, moving across time and place, from mountains and farmland to city and sea.

Shane Strachan was awarded Scots Champion at the 2023 Scots Language Awards following his year as the National Library of Scotland's Scots Scriever writer-in-residence. His previous works include the novella Nevertheless (amaBooks), 'The Shelter' staged with the National Theatre of Scotland, and multiple poems and stories in Gutter, New Writing Scotland, Northwords Now, Stand and various anthologies. His poetry has also appeared on BBC Radio 4 and in Aberdeen Art Gallery and V&A Dundee. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Aberdeen where he now lectures in Creative Writing.

"A lustrous bonfire of lexical delight, where sensual shimmers flank blazing political vigour and trenchant tenderness. DWAMS is dazzling, gritty, louche, lilted and gooey — as is true of the writer himself. Full beam fantastic."
- Michael Pederson

"Strachan breathes life and love into every word of Dwams, creating a thoroughly enjoyable read you'll want to devour and savour in equal amounts."
-Len Pennie

Strachan q***rs Aberdeen, breaking down the granite façade to reveal what glitters behind deftly deploying Doric, Scots and English. These poems enriched and challenged my understanding of a place and introduced me to a local history that has wider significance for us all.
– Damian Barr

Read more praise for this stunning collection and pick up your copy here:

https://www.tapsalteerie.co.uk/product/dwams-by-shane-strachan/

22/08/2025

Once I Carried Three Crows (2024) by Rachel Plummer. 🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛

Taking their cue from the natural world, science and science-fiction, the vivid and surreal poems of Once I Carried Three Crows present contemporary myths born from experiences such as the process of ageing, disability, intergenerational relationships, body image and s*xuality. Here we find stories of the woman who married the North Sea, of ghosthouses and of birdhouses, of Iris, the first granny in space, and of the worm that eats memories along with 'half a glass / of iced Chianti.

Following on from Wain: LGBT reimaginings of Scottish folktales, a collection aimed at younger readers (Emma Press, 2019), this highly anticipated new collection for grown-ups proves Rachel Plummer to be one of the most original and exciting poets writing in Scotland today.
Rachel Plummer is a poet living in Edinburgh. They are a Scottish Book Trust New Writer's Award winner (2016) and have published widely across numerous magazines and journals. In 2017 they published a pamphlet of sci-fi poetry with House Press, and in 2019 they published Wain: LGBT reimaginings of Scottish folktales (Emma Press) after receiving a cultural commission from LGBT Youth Scotland. Rachel has two children, three guinea pigs, and entirely too many books.
'Here's a poet working in the space between song and story: someone who can handle both the drive and weight of a fable and the guiding light of a good tune.

'Here's a poet working in the space between song and story: someone who can handle both the drive and weight of a fable and the guiding light of a good tune. Rachel Plummer is telling new myths about love and s*x, transformation and discovery, being and belonging, death and hope, all the while following the bright logic of words' music. These are poems to read your sweetheart in bed at night and poems to curse your enemies: they're magic!’- Harry Josephine Giles

'The imagination in these poems is superb. Plummer's descriptive prowess is shot through with story at every turn: the woods open their arms with offerings and danger; the seas draw close. Most satisfying of all is how these tales are held in music, which runs like a current through this stunning collection!’ - Miriam Nash

Order yours here:

https://www.tapsalteerie.co.uk/product/once-i-carried-three-crows-by-rachel-plummer/

28/07/2025

Bloodsongs by Mae Diansangu

Shifting between English and North-east Scots, Bloodsongs is an ode to matters of the blood: q***r carnality; black rage; the crude power of myth; and how history is felt in the body. Offering retellings of legends and biblical stories as well as perspectives on injustices faced today, Mae Diansangu's radical debut collection marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in Scottish poetry.

Mae Diansangu is a q***r poet and spoken word artist from Aberdeen. She has performed at literary festivals across Scotland and appeared on BBC Scotland's Big Scottish Book Club and BBC Radio 4's Tongue and Talk. Her series of poems "black lives, heavy truths" is part of the National Library of Scotland's collection.

"Diansangu's poems clot beautifully under your skin, the words rolling your tongue to break complicity and silence. These poems bite with wet, sparkling, granite teeth. The coloniser's scalpel turns to mirror. White fragility, heteronormativity and (petro) patriarchy are called out. A dousing of Scottish humour leans in. Ink sings, steeped in defiant voices, as Diansangu splits binaries into multitudes, from misbehaving and 'monstrous' women, to gay Jesus, to childless mothers, to existing while Black. The body is continually evoked in language, shape and sound, pulling form from that slippery, fluid space into a vital debut collection." - Jeda Pearl

"Bloodsongs is a powerful debut packed with poems that delight and sting in equal measure. Diansangu disrupts colonial and heteronormative conceptions of the past by giving voice in Scots and English to q***r, Black and feminist perspectives that have been overlooked for far too long. An essential read." - Shane Strachan

“Bloodsongs is relevant and retrospective with a fresh twist, these poems are anthems of q***rness, love and rage. Savour the calm and the storm as this collection steals your heart and churns it in an emotional washing machine with fierce veracity and tender care. This book doesn’t feel like a debut collection – Bloodsongs has always been here.” – Jo Gilbert

Pick up your copy of this “vital debut collection” here:

https://www.tapsalteerie.co.uk/product/bloodsongs-by-mae-diansangu/

17/07/2025

From Reflections Glimmer (2025) by Jane Burn, Maria Schiza & Rosamund Taylor, Rosamund Taylor's 'World-Renowned Cellist, Yo-Yo Ma' after a photograph by Peter Sagal.

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Reflections Glimmer: poems exploring ekphrasis showcases the work of three poets who each bring their unique perspective to the art of ekphrastic poetry.

Jane Burn's Epigone presents a personal narrative upon grief, loss, mental health and disability, framed by the poems and prose of the writer and polymath Mervyn Peake. The poems in Maria Schiza's Facing explore the intersubjectivity of the self and the otherness found within, through paintings by artists such as Turner, Gaugin, and Alison Watt. And Rosamund Taylor's Brushstroke responds to a range of artistic inspirations, from Stubbs' 'Whistlejacket' to Star Trek: Deep Space 9, examining the primal nature of our creative urge and how it endures in the darkest moments of our lives.

Brought together, the poetry in Reflections Glimmer reminds us of the fundamental importance of art, literature and creativity to our lives, while giving homage to the writers, artists and creatives that inspire us.

Pick up yours here:

https://www.tapsalteerie.co.uk/product/reflections-glimmer/

10/07/2025

'Reading Edwin Morgan to French Hyperpop' from languishing, cute by lan Macartney & Maria Sledmere. 🖤💚

Our most recent publication!

languishing, cute presents a collection of jittery missives that propels the speculative Scottish canon of Morgan, Gray and Mitchison into a maximalist ‘high femme goth surrealism' via hyperpop, Celtic futurism and digital culture.

"Here the poets tend towards e-pistolary contemplations of retro-adolescence, fizzy ecology and mercurial slippy gurlhood to complicate human. It's a leap from body/mind to capital/ digital and back again, flickering, a visit to Silicon Brig-a-Doon you'll want to be the first to Insta." - Richard Price

"Messy as a teenage tumblr, flashy as a strobe light, this is two exceptionally generous poets bouncing off the walls of the backrooms with the energy of a thousand monster energies."
- Dan Power

https://www.tapsalteerie.co.uk/product/languishing-cute/

08/07/2025

Big things ahead for Tapsalteerie! We’ve recruited Disrupted Blue Indie Press Publicity to help us get the word out! Expect more from our social media pages and from Disrupted Blue’s. We’ve got a back catalogue to celebrate as well as exciting projects ahead!

08/05/2025

We've got another belter of a book lined up for you this autumn - 'Weathershaker' by the brilliant Stewart Sanderson, a long-standing Tapsalteerie poet whose writing continues to absolutely blow us away!

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‘Weathershaker, of unknown meaning’ [Scottish National Dictionary]

'Weathershaker' begins with meanings lost, recovered and imagined. Digging into the material and textual record through place names, fictional histories, translations and fragmentary texts, Sanderson’s second full-length collection speaks of the past from an unsteady present. In a small country of big winds and shifting light, where the weather itself is shaken by our actions as a species, these poems turn towards a contingent future while seeking meaning gone astray.

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"In this playful, engaging collection, Sanderson displays his natural gift for bringing the life back into words and the words back into life. His poems seethe with a mischievous intelligence - whether it's a poem generator, a handful of secrets from the God of Silence, or the nine mysterious definitions of the eponymous Weathershaker, he fuses skill, imagination and a ruthless intelligence into something quite unforgettable." - John Glenday

17/04/2025

Cover reveal!!

Introducing 'Dwell Time' by the amazing Taylor Strickland - coming your way late 2025. Exciting times!

'Dwell Time', the full-length debut from award-winning writer Taylor Strickland, begins from the idea that 'dwelling' requires both place and the experience of 'being-in-the-world'.

In taking us from the US to Scotland to Portugal, Strickland interrogates this central notion, along with ideas of non-place and environment to explore our contemporary experience of love, family, language, technology, career, and spirituality.

Ultimately these are poems that advocate for a world against isolation, one in which we go beyond our own witness to embrace another's, and shrink the distance between us.

24/03/2025

Introducing the tremendous 'languishing, cute', a collaboration between Ian Macartney and Maria Sledmere. We're publishing on 17th April but pre-orders are open now - head over to the Tapsalteerie bookshop to get your copy ordered!

https://www.tapsalteerie.co.uk/product/languishing-cute/

This is a real beauty of a collection - genuinely exciting and unique and absolutely one not to be missed. Keep an eye out for details of our launch at the Alchemy Experiment in Glasgow on 24th April too! 🥳

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'languishing, cute' presents a collection of jittery missives that propels the speculative Scottish canon of Morgan, Gray and Mitchison into a maximalist ‘high femme goth surrealism’ via hyperpop, Celtic futurism and digital culture. Here the poets tend towards e-pistolary contemplations of retro-adolescence, fizzy ecology and mercurial slippy gurlhood to complicate notions of Scottish identity, nationhood, ecology, nostalgia and more.

"languishing, cute is the opposite of a flyting — that traditional bare-knuckles fight between two poets. Rather, here Macartney and Sledmere offer their worlds to each other in the gift of friendship and they listen back: it’s not a duel, it’s a jewel [...] At times this is glitch-poetry, funny, para-kitsch and mesmeric. At other times there are the amplitudes of tenderness and self-effacement in a palette of citrus and greenest day-glo." (Richard Price)

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05/09/2025

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