Adrienne Silcock & Alwyn Marriage 
The Other Side of Sleep 
Narrative Poems

What started as a complaint about the '40-line rule' in much of the poetry world has turned into an anthology that not only breaks that rule, but stomps all over it. Featuring 25 poems which break the rules – these are long, narrative, but by no means traditional poems, by contemporary voices.

Themes both great and small are explored in narrative poems that pack a punch. Human interactions from conversation, storytelling, lending and borrowing, theft, prayer, memory, shopping and a long walk, right through to sexuality, time travel, truce negotiations, disappearance, natural disaster, violence and death are all explored, many of them rooted in landscape and place. These lie alongside equally rooted mythological and historical tales drawn from Greece, Turkey, Africa, Scandinavia and Britain.

What draws all these themes together is the strength of the storytelling. Emotions as diverse as frustration, disappointment, embarrassment, hope, nostalgia, anger, and fear are channelled through spectacular poetry in many different forms into truly satisfying work.

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Cherry Potts is the Director of Arachne Press, for whom she is editor of almost all our anthologies and runs the Annual Solstice Shorts Festival.

Cherry is the author of an epic fantasy novel, two collections of short stories, a photographic diary of a community opera, and has had many stories in anthologies, magazines and online. Her novel of sibling hatred in the 1920s, The Bog Mermaid, won the Quill LGBTQ+ Prose prize 2022.