Smith Doorstop: 24 books

Allison McVety’s first collection, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (Smith/Doorstop, 2007), was the overall winner of the 2006 Book & Pamphlet Competition, and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize 2008. Her poems have appeared in The Times, The Guardian, Poetry Review and...

Allison McVety’s first collection, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (Smith/Doorstop, 2007), was the overall winner of the 2006 Book & Pamphlet Competition, and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize 2008. Her poems have appeared in The Times, The Guardian, Poetry Review and...

The Selected Poem ebooks are a new 'digitalonly' series drawn from the works of smith|doorstop poets published during the last 26 years. Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University and a Writer in...

Catherine Smith’s first acclaimed collection The Butcher’s Hands was a disturbing and exciting book. Lip moves on from its grotesqueries and grand guignol to a fierce, often frantic eroticism, seen, as in the earlier book, through the language of the human body; clothed, stripped, skinned, examined...

If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2011 Book & Pamphlet Competition, chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, and was selected as one of the Independent's Books of the Year in 2012.

Opening a Different Window: A Poetry and Illness Anthology is a collection of poetry written by people with experience of chronic illness. Inspiring, challenging and sometimes funny this anthology can’t fail to move you.

Poets like Cliff Yates only come along every so often, like eclipses or rare migrating birds, and, like an eclipse or a rare migrating bird, Cliff Yates should be gazed at, parked near, and written about. People often talk about poets being fresh, and they mean fresh like bread, likely to go stale....

Overall winner of the 2009 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, chosen by Andrew Motion.

Best known as a writer of crime fiction – notably the 12 volume Charlie Resnick series – and as the mainstay, for two decades, of Slow Dancer Press, John Harvey’s own poetry has perhaps stayed too long below the radar. This, his first collection in sixteen years, brings together the best of...

River Wolton grew up in London and lived in Sheffield for twenty years before moving to Derbyshire. She is a freelance writer and facilitator, and was Derbyshire Poet Laureate 2007–9. This is her first fulllength collection.

Weighing the Present includes poems about family and wider society, often through brilliantly evoked particular details and specific scenes from ‘everyday life’. Short linked poems, which amount almost to sequences, deal with difficult material – elegies for lost friends for instance – while...

Central to the title poem of Voting for Spring is the long human struggle for survival against ice and cold. The poem makes contact with our present climate crisis, as well as suggesting a dimension which is more personal.

Charmed Lives: charmed as in surviving, as in getting away with it, as in possessed, as in fortunate. The lives and moments in these poems are about being vulnerable, getting by and sometimes being at one with the world. This visually evocative and grounded writing is able to cross and recross the divide between the familiar and the strange.

Gerard Benson was born in London and lives in Bradford, where he is the city’s poet laureate. A Good Time is his fourth collection for grownups.