The Out-Spoken Beauty of Art-Making

Sometimes I follow a poet-led imprint with as much excitement and sense of the developing adventure as I would follow an individual writer in any genre. One such is Anthony Anaxagorou’s Out-Spoken Press, founded in 2015, a London-based independent publisher of poetry and critical writing. In 2025–6, despite one of the funding blips that strangely afflict the best creative enterprises, Out-Spoken produced six titles. Maya Caspari’s Almost, with Tenderness is the book of a friend and colleague, therefore hard to review, but it genuinely is excellent. Gorgeous yet hair-raising, it interrogates the language of Kafkaesque instruction that may encage us, and plunges into sometimes noisily loving lives lived across territories, and into violent silences. These poems often approach their subject slantwise; ‘Clues’ asks us, ‘Was it you that brought the goats / to gather on the stairs? The hall / balloons are sighing quietly.’ Madeleine Kruhly’s To My Father, Now Dead in Room 318, also is both surreal and precise, pleasingly thick with detail yet sometimes transmuting the father to the generality, the familiarity, of being ‘the man’, while the poetic voice may become an animal burning its own tail. Haia Mohammed’s The Age of Olive Trees is written from Gaza. Ocean-soaked and gloriously ambitious, it charts a continual revival of the spirit. ‘They Choose Victory or Victory’ needs to become a key poem of our moment in history: ‘Even if all doors were closed in their faces you’d find / them searching for hope’s clean window.’ Still a student, Haia is raising funds for her family. Joladé Olusanya, Jabez Incarnate, is absolutely alive. ...