AUTUMN 2023 LAUNCHES
Join G W Colkitto and Robin Thomas launching their new poetry collections Shake the Kaleidoscope & reminded of something.
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In all of Robin Thomas’s work there is a subtlety and wit so contained that it invites re-reading. It takes full immersion to savour the linguistic dexterity and intelligence at work, to appreciate that humour often belies the absolute seriousness of life. In reminded of something, this balance is particularly delicate and the poignancy superbly controlled and utterly affecting. With a yearning that can only come of love and loss, the poems use the simplest of metaphors in the most lucid language to convey memories and emotions so complex and heart-breaking that they are almost beyond the scope of words—a collection that is profoundly moving and exquisitely realised.
Memory, time, love and loss weave through all of G W Colkitto’s poems and in Shake the Kaleidoscope with a resonance that moves us fluidly from yearning to insight. The master of seeing connections, Shake the Kaleidoscope sees Colkitto taking a view across the whole of life: non-linear, sometimes fragmentary, imbued with whimsy and humour, but above all permeable to the scars and triumphs of loss and love. Shake the Kaleidoscope is a major work from an accomplished poet: lucid, accessible, profound.
The event will begin at 7.30 p.m. BST (GMT +1) on Thursday 12 October and will include a Q&A session with the online audience after the reading.
We’re asking you to register so that we can manage the online space and there’s a small registration fee of £2 which you can offset by using the discount code to buy the book (or books if you want to catch up with the whole trilogy), available at the launch. All our registration fees are currently going into a fund to celebrate Cinnamon’s 20th anniversary in 2025. You can find out more on our CP @ 20 page
You can register here and we look forward to seeing you.
Join John Barnie for the launch of Dunes of Cwm Rheidol
Walking the razor edge between grim reality and stoicism, John Barnie once again brings his intelligence, wit and prescient anger to bear on the world we inhabit and the world we are making. In spine-chilling imagery and with a linguistic dexterity that makes words shine, we are taken to a landscape that is exquisite and familiar, yet simultaneously overwhelmed with wreckage and grief. Staring not only into time’s abyss, but into the carnage wrought by human desire for more and more…, these urgent poems carry our collective grief for all that is lost—‘there was no one to grieve / so I walked beside them, taking it on.’ (‘Dead Swans on a Winter Coast’)
The event will begin at 7.30 p.m. GMT on Thursday 2 November and will include a Q&A session with the online audience after the reading.
We’re asking you to register so that we can manage the online space and there’s a small registration fee of £2 which you can offset by using the discount code to buy the book (or books if you want to catch up with the whole trilogy), available at the launch. All our registration fees are currently going into a fund to celebrate Cinnamon’s 20th anniversary in 2025. You can find out more on our CP @ 20 page
You can register here and we look forward to seeing you.
Join Alexina Dalgetty and Omar Sabbagh launching their new fiction titles, The Cleaning Woman’s Daughter & Y Knots.
The Cleaning Woman’s Daughter:
I am Eve. Collector of words. I look them up. I write them down. I knead them into sentences. I am the story.
From the moment Eve’s mum rescues a book from a garbage can, Eve’s life changes. Stories open up worlds. But adulthood threatens all of this with its harshness and betrayals and Eve’s life becomes unstoried—stripped down to the bones of survival.
The stories, though, won’t let go.
An inventive debut that moves through voices and styles, The Cleaning Woman’s Daughter constantly surprises. A novel about the power of story, reading and the part books play in who we become, we travel with Eve as she escapes from an impoverished background marked by prejudice, injustice and loss to become a confident woman immersed in storie
Y Knots
scintillating with intelligence and wit
balancing incisive observation with deep compassion
Here we have a hall of mirrors in which the writer mines his soul for images that reflect back a story, But in interrogating the self, what Omar Sabbagh produces is a an engaging array unique perspectives on all our souls. Sabbagh seems to be, as he describes one of his characters, “an inexorably-thinking man,” but there is a certain rawness and playfulness to the stories which makes the philosophical grounding often quite hilarious. Sabbagh is also a unique chronicler of the Middle East and globalization.
Adnan Mahmutovíc
…the performance of a self breath-takingly prodigious and heterodox. That Sabbagh is able to weave this self into characters whose tussles leap off the page so compellingly shows a master at work.
Peter Salmon
The event will begin at 4.00 p.m. GMT on Sunday 12 November (9 a.m. in Alberta, 8 p.m. in Dubai & 5 p.m. in Paris) and will include a Q&A session with the online audience after the reading.
We’re asking you to register so that we can manage the online space and there’s a small registration fee of £2 which you can offset by using the discount code to buy the book (or books if you want to catch up with the whole trilogy), available at the launch. All our registration fees are currently going into a fund to celebrate Cinnamon’s 20th anniversary in 2025. You can find out more on our CP @ 20 page
You can register here and we look forward to seeing you.