Forthcoming from Macha Press
morsels
Susanna Galbraith
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.
Susanna Galbraith is from Belfast. Her poems have been published in New England Review, Poetry Ireland Introductions, Propel, Poetry Wales, Berlin Lit, Banshee, Channel Magazine, Cyphers, Tour de Moon, The Tangerine, and Arlen House anthologies. Her essays have appeared in Source Photographic Review, the HU and Stories of TULCA. She was selected for Irish Writers Centre New Voices: North 2025, Seamus Heaney Summer School 2024, Poetry Ireland Introductions 2023 and Stinging Fly Summer School 2021. She was awarded first place in the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition 2021 and has been the recipient of several Arts Council of Northern Ireland Support for Individual Artists Programme awards. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of York and a BA in English from Trinity College Dublin where she was an editor of Icarus Magazine. She is currently the project editor of Abridged, a researcher at Source Photographic Review and associate artist at Kids Own Publishing Partnership.
Releases from Macha Press
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.