It’s still raining. It has always rained. We are silt dwellers, tide chasers, puddles, floods, mud. The river runs brown topsoil down and out to sea.

Longbarrow Press is proud to announce the publication of This is a Picture of Wind, J.R. Carpenter‘s new full-length collection.

This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered south west England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon. Following the news in the months after these storms, writer and artist J.R. Carpenter was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only perceive indirectly through its affect. The poems that ensued are gathered in this book, accompanied by an introduction by Johanna Drucker, and a poetic afterword by Vahni Capildeo. Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, This is a Picture of Wind attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.

A beautifully produced small-format 128-page hardback, This is a Picture of Wind is available now from Longbarrow Press. You can read an extract from the book here, and order it by clicking on the relevant PayPal link below (major debit cards accepted – no PayPal account required).

This is a Picture of Wind
£12.00

UK orders (+ £2.40 postage)

Europe orders (+ £4.95 postage)

Rest of World orders (+ £6.5o postage)

All orders are carefully parcelled in robust packaging and will be despatched within 24 hours.

J.R. Carpenter has also created a short film to mark the publication of This is a Picture of Wind, in which she reads an excerpt from the book. You can watch the film below:

Over the past few months, Longbarrow Press has developed a series of digital supplements, ranging from introductory poem-samplers to themed selections of essays (including Working Landscapes, which explores the relationship between labour and land, and Soft Borders, which focuses on the relationship between perception and place). We’ve gathered these supplements on a single page of this site; you can read and download them here.

Click here for a full list of our current publications and to order titles.