Holly Pester and Book Works are delighted to announce that Laura Elliott and Gro Pechüle have been selected to publish in the new open submission series called Satirical Strains, guest edited by Holly Pester. These two proposals were selected from a shortlist of eight, including proposals by Ashley Barr, Clea Henry, Emet Ezell, Grace Denton, Hugo Haggar, and Karen Whiteson.

Satirical Strains commissions:

so me killed me by Gro Pechüle 

Gro Pechüle is a Copenhagen based artist. Her artistic practice is transdisciplinary, with poetry, music and images as common elements. She uses performative and conceptual approaches involving, among other things, the clarinet and her musical persona Grow Digga serves as a recurring enigma in her art.

Sitting somewhere between a long prose poem, a personal mythology and a collapsed diary, so me killed me follows the loss of an alter ego after an artists’ social media accounts are hacked and then erased. The book becomes a way to write through a disappearance we don’t yet have a language for. 

Romance is Dead by Laura Elliott 

Laura Elliott writes poetry, short stories, hybrid essays and works in libraries. Recent work can be found in the anthologies Fit Notes: Feminist Writing on Illness and Work (Ache) and Prototype 7. Her poetry has been published widely in magazines such as The White Review, Poetry Review, Poetry London, DATABLEED, Clinic, Zarf, Shearsman and more. Her pamphlets include this is hunting (Distance No Object, 2019), rib-boning (Moot Press, 2019) and lemon, egg, bread (Test Centre, 2017).  

 
Romance is Dead explores the concept of romantic non-monogamy in, with and through the public library. It begins from the perspective of a librarian asked to remove the Mills & Boon collection from a public library in a London borough. 

Shortlist: 

Wet Space: water-closet dramas by Ashley Barr. 

Ashley Barr is a poet and researcher from Boise, Idaho who currently teaches rhetoric in Zhejiang, China. They recently completed a creative-critical PhD at the University of Sussex. They have an MFA in poetry from Boise State University and an MA in sexual dissidence from The University of Sussex. Their creative writing has been published in Fruit Journal, PermeableBarrier, and as the micro chapbook How To Access Spreading Pleasure in Ghost City Press’ 2021 Summer Series. Their essays ‘Avert the Icy Feeling’: Bhanu Kapil and Performing The Life of a Poet in White Spaces won the 2024 Wasafiri Essay Prize and Re-scripting in the Shower: A Theory of the Shower and Creative Practice won BACLS’s 2022 Postgraduate Essay Prize.  

Wet Space rewrites iconic shower scenes – including Carrie (1976), Regency House Party (2004), Network (1976), Psycho (1960), and South Pacific (1958) — with the intention of bringing the shower’s private and privacy-making functions back into social space. 

Glorious Holes by Cleo Henry. 

Cleo Henry (they/them) is a poet and researcher living in London. Their first pamphlet, The Last Lesbian Bar in the Midlands, was published in 2022 by Fourteen Poems and is a melding of pop culture, lesbian community and classics. They have also been published in many magazines and anthologies, including in Ambit, London Magazine, Basket Magazine and by Pilot Press, Cipher Press and Broken Sleep Books. They were recently shortlisted for the London Magazine Poetry Prize. 

Glorious Holes is a hybrid collection about holes and history. It uses a combination of poetry, experimental translation and erotic choose-your-own-adventure to explore what happens when you leave a hole a hole and what you can see (or, indeed, put) through it. 

Wretched Heaven by Emet Ezell 

Emet Ezell (b. 1995, Texas, USA) is a poet and typographer living in Berlin, Germany. Winner of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, Ezell is author of the chapbook Between Every Bird Our Bones and their writing can be found in The American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Vortext. Committed to the local microcosm, Ezell teaches writing workshops at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin and co-curates All Saints Poetry Hour, a seasonal radio show dedicated to the mystical language of poetry.  

Wretched Heaven maps a multi-disciplinary auto-ethnography, combining archival research, family photographs, Yiddish translations, experimental poetry, and prose to build a world from inside the pit of dispossession. 

Grace Denton 

Grace Denton is a visual artist and writer from West Yorkshire, now based in the North East of England. Denton recently completed a PhD which resulted in a film – All Facing in the Same Direction (2023) – and thesis – The Nominally Sovereign Body: A practice-based exploration of the language of self-governance through the prism of ADHD. Denton co-runs Making Time, a weekly online session for neurodivergent artists/freelancers to start the week together and attempt to wrestle control of their time; also The Wardrobe, a clothes bank and safe space for anyone who is trans, non-binary, intersex or genderqueer to get dressed. 

The shortlisted work proposes a series of no-holds-barred visions of art (and how it gets made) in a socialist society, both real and imagined. It asks, given the chance to start again, how would we re-organise? 

Pleasures by Hugo Hagger 

Hugo Hagger is a recent graduate of The Royal College of Art. Hagger’s short form texts (essays and poetry) have been published by; Pilot Press, Sticky Fingers, Deleuzine, Cherry Boy Studios, and Coven Magazine; Berlin. Hagger has shown visual work and performance at Alice Black Gallery, The Artist Room Soho, Thamesmead Arts and Culture Office, Arusha Gallery London, and the Horse Hospital. 

In 2024 he was awarded the RCA Writing Prize for the work in progress shortlisted here; Pleasures. Pleasures is a novel within a novel, one concerned with distortions and substitutions, love triangles and hidden objects. 

In the Direction of the Wound by Karen Whiteson. 

Karen Whiteson grew up in Spain and north London where she now lives. Whiteson’s poetry has been published in numerous magazines and several anthologies. Her radio play Tales for Louis was broadcast on Radio 3, and her short stories have been published in The Edinburgh Review, and in anthologies from Penguin, Aurora Metro, Unthank Books, E.R.O.S. and Prototype Publishing. A MacDowell Fellow, she has taught creative writing in a wide range of contexts including The Poetry School, Centreprise After School Creative Writing Club for Girls, the Royal College of Art (Animation Dept.) and Central Saint Martins. Prior to working as a creative writing tutor she was an Induction Officer at Phoenix House,a therapeutic community for drug addicts, and a team worker at City Roads Drug Dependency Unit. 
 

In the Direction of the Wound is a hybrid novella about art, desire and generational trauma, told through the story of a painter who can no longer paint.  

Book Works is dedicated to commissioning non-conforming works, offering a generative space for writing and writers that don’t fit into easily definable categories withing mainstream publishing. Our open call series is an annual commissioning platform, developed with guest editors who commissions new works exclusively drawn from open submission. Previous series include: New Writing Series (1995), guest edited by Michael Bracewell, which gave David Shrigley and Jeremy Deller their first publicly funded commissions; Semina (2008-2015), guest edited by Stewart Home, which commissioned nine new works including The Dark Object by Katrina Palmer; or Arrhythmia (2022-224), guest edited by Katrina Palmer that commissioned four books including The Wastes by Roy Claire Potter, The Medium by Alice Walter, Black Body Index by Andrew E. Colarusso, and Through the Tinnitus by Kamwangi Njue.