Welcome...

Welcome to the 'hatchings' blog @ egg box publishing, a poetry publisher based in Norwich, Norfolk, run by the poet Nathan Hamilton. This is where we talk about and sell egg box books, but there'll eventually be a few other things to do. In the meantime, have a browse and get acquainted, sign up to leave any comments and get added to our contacts database, buy some books (we honestly wouldn't be upset) and subscribe to our RSS feed. Don't forget to add your email to our mailing list to receive very occasional updates, information and offers.

The University of East Anglia is proud to announce its new anthologies of work from their world-renowned creative writing MA. For the first time, they have been published in three lovingly prepared volumes; a quarter dozen.

You are lime-cordial-ly invited to celebrate their launch with us:

Here are the details of the NORWICH launch:

Tuesday 16th October
UEA Drama Studio, Norwich, 7.00pm,
readings and refreshments

Here are the details of the LONDON launch:

Wednesday 24th October
London Review Bookshop,
14 Bury Place, WC1, 7.00pm,
readings and refreshments

Copies of books will be available on special offer. If you sadly can't make it, then advance copies of the Poetry, Prose & Scriptwriting volumes are all available from us here online. General release date (to Amazon, general trade etc) is NOV 2nd.

"The UEA is a supportive community, a creative muse and a fertile ground – under clear East Anglian skies – to grow the best crop of new writers each year. Sample and enjoy this season's produce."
-- Jeremy Page, author of Salt and The Wake.

"Lehóczky’s chosen form is the prose poem, expertly evoking the slippages between physical and metaphysical worlds. In the opening poem, cathedral becomes universe becomes city and back again, in one of a number of pieces reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The job of the rememberer ... is to see the past in the present, to keep both in view simultaneously - a position nuanced, in this case, by the poet's birth and upbringing in Hungary and later move to England... By deft handling of sentence rhythms and intricate repetition of sound, Lehóczky manages to sustain the momentum in single-paragraph prose poems that last pages. Anyone who is ambivalent about prose poetry should read Rememberer, an exemplar of the form, exemplar of poetry itself."
-- Carrie Etter, Guardian Review

In Waffles, Matthew Welton presses words on a honeycomb iron and serves them crisp with syrup. Readers of his widely admired Carcanet collections, The Book of Matthew and We needed coffee but..., will recognise one of Britain's most original poets seriously extending his range. Vividly working with light and shade, the intricate patternings of this remarkable sequence repeatedly ask us to imagine what's real: 'A real voice on the phone requests a sum of cash. / Real peaches fill my paper sack. A real drawer slams'.

"A galloping iambic beat, like an over-caffeinated pulse, is maintained throughout Matthew Welton's pamphlet. The poems form interconnecting grids of repetition and parallelism, and cadences ricochet as in an echo chamber: "A yellow swallow hollers in / a hollow yellow willow tree" becomes "A yellow yaffle snaffles up / a pile of apple waffles". Constructivist poems can be as joyless as equations, but Waffles is too playful and too curious about the world for that: "I think that what I'm saying with the words I use / is stuff which, by the sound of things, I might not mean." Welton's highly original approach to form has again produced a set of musical, maddening, irresistible poems."
-- Paul Batchelor, The Guardian

"Welton is the single most enjoyable, exciting poet working in and 
with English today."
-- Simon Turner 

"Poems are rarely so curious, precise and committed to their enquiry"
-- Jack Underwood

Waffles by Matthew Welton is the first of Egg Box's new pamphlet series, F.U.N.E.X., featuring new work from the UK's most exciting and talented poets.

Launch event details to follow soon.

Two amazing new releases from Egg Box Publishing this Christmas: prize-winning rising poetry star, Agnes Lehoczky's long-anticipated second collection, Rememberer, and critically-acclaimed Vahni Capildeo's sensational third collection, Dark & Unaccustomed Words, both in wonderfully produced limited edition hardback.


"Vahni Capildeo not only breaks down conventional notions of seeing the world, but re-affirms ideas of the value and worth of individual experiences. This work... underlines what matters above all: the fate of the free self. It is a subversive ocean of diamonds, rubies and bones, raging against limiting forces.”
-- Andre Bagoo, for Newsday (Trinidad and Tobago)


"What I enjoy about Ágnes Lehóczky’s prose poetry is its dialogic lyricism. Her syntax carries the work of caesura and enjambment, shaping rhythmic wholes that take you back to places we’ve never been. The best of poetry does the like, and this is it."
-- Peter Robinson