Forthcoming: Spring 2026
Dwelling
Máighréad Medbh
Dwelling is a work of excavation: lyrical, archival, and embodied. At its centre is the poet’s great grandmother, likely the subject of eviction during the clearances after the Irish Famine: a figure both spectral and grounding. From her displacement unfolds a meditation on ownership and loss, land and energy, and how memory itself is harvested and converted into power.
This hybrid text moves between poem, essay, and fieldwork, where turbines rise like white demigods over ancestral patches of ground, and wind is an agent of both inheritance and erasure. Through acts of walking, reading, and reimagining, the poet explores how stories and the human trace are preserved — and who preserves them — in a landscape forever rewritten by industry, weather, and the vagaries of history. The reader is drawn into the sense that the past, from ancient myths to emigration stories, is not just subject matter but a living archive that demands an equally compelling, emotionally resonant and formally inventive poetry.
A work of breath and vertigo, Dwelling asks: what does it mean to belong to land that no longer remembers you — or that you no longer recognize?
Macha Press is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, and the Shared Island Civic Society Fund, managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Ireland.
Máighréad Medbh is a poet with nine published books and a reputation for compelling performance. Since her debut with Blackstaff Press in 1990, she has performed widely in Ireland, Europe, the UK and US. Her poetic narrative of the Irish famine, Tenant, was initially published online and subsequently as a print book (Salmon, 1999). She works mostly in long-form sequences or conceptual explorations, and her ecological verse novel, Parvit of Agelast (Arlen House, 2016), was shortlisted for the 2017 Pigott Prize.
Her four-part lyrical story for children, The Rescue, was first broadcast on Ireland’s Lyric FM in 2007, set to music by Fergal Carroll. Other work includes transversions from Galician and Arabic, collaboration on award-winning art films, poems in several major anthologies and many journals, three online novels, and an essay-blog from 2012 to 2020. She has an MA in Poetry Studies and a creative-critical PhD in Experimental Literature from Dublin City University.
morsels
Susanna Galbraith
Releases from Macha Press
morsels is a formally ambitious multi-sequence debut collection from Belfast poet Susanna Galbraith. Galbraith’s innovations on the long poem form range from a chorus of fragmented yet confluent voices held in tension by repetition and verbal slippage, through lyrical meditations on mothering, daughtering and the dynamics of metamorphosis. The title series ‘morsels’ explores the ways language and its absences shape our relationships with one another, with natural environments, and with human and animal bodies. Across three interconnected sequences, Galbraith makes sensitive yet tough-minded forays into unstable, ever-evolving territories: love, death and memory, loss and anxiety, isolation and transformation, and the craft of poetry making.
With a keen ear for the incantatory power of words and the aural complexity of self-referential text, Galbraith’s sequences build meaning via networks of association that are at once formally bold and tantalisingly elusive, profoundly emotive and intellectually sharp. Her experimentation with erasure, structuralist poetics, the folk tale and the poem as visual field is in tune with a voice as fresh and daring as it is assured and elegant.
This publication has been generously supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and also by Belfast City Council.
Crowd Work
Sam Furlong
Crowd Work is the venturous debut by writer Sam Furlong. With candour, its poems detail experiences of a body’s living, materialities it inhabits and shares with bodies and other species. Also, the qualities of pain, and the complexities and contradictions of intimacy.
From densely sculpted sonnets to capacious prose forms and ekphrasis, Furlong’s uses of image and tonal variation interweave voyeurism with masochisms and transfiguration. Devotional gestures are amplified from the private to many-voiced conversations, expressly in the sequence ‘Crowd Work’, an unflinching interrogation of the performative side of identity in stand-up’s public setting.
Radically amatory, this debut performs a body’s wanton poetries. Re-making forms, it renders explicit the means by which ‘Through breaking, we are made.
! All'arme / ? And what... if not
Eilish Martin
A ‘career apex’ poet whose natural home is at once on the margins and at the heart of the hybrid, Eilish Martin’s practice in ! All'arme / ? And what... if not is at once experimental, interdisciplinary and intercultural.
In content and visionary concept, the poetries published in this tête-bêche (head-to-toe) double book bring together lyrical fragmentation and narrative drive, language play, intertextual dialogue and textual innovation with unsettling anxieties and deep care for public and private worlds.
The 96-page collection catalogues some small part of what Martin herself has referred to as the ‘compulsive journey’ of her poetry-making and verbal-visual improvisations across the past ten years.