Publisher of innovative poetry, artistic creative writing & other projects

HESTERGLOCK PRESS

Due March 31:

Some people have said this about Postcards From Mental States:

"O gas lips. There's a haze that's not planning for how much caffeine you need, or is it a problem with your eye? Your inner eye? Or, postcard forbid, your inner brain? You have time, so here's a collaboration of extraordinary power value love sight poetry for you to see and read, to resee, that will be your eye for you. It's a vision here, beyond photopoetry, collage, pixel artistry and vispo melt - it's captionpoe too, a great knowing of what's connected. It's also beautiful, and off. It's soft toys hugging delegates and cable toes towards radiators. It's better. It's getting better. Get this, Postcards from Mental States, and you can't complain."
- SJ Fowler

“This intriguing visual homage to the hustle and bustle of city life asks, can an image be a container for one’s complex synapses firing and sparking off all over the place and the answer is undoubtably yes. Here is a collection of city scenes at once familiar and alien, out of focus and timeless, they capture the madness and the frenetic pace of a city’s wonder and menace all at once. Full of the rosiest chicks and windblown sonatas that a city dweller could hope for. Like the sound of dangerous drums this collection is an encapsulation of the unspoken love of place that we may never own or really ever leave.”
- Len Germinara

“POSTCARDS FROM MENTAL STATES lays bare the inspiration of the everyday. Each image blooms from quotidian encounters and day-to-day interactions; the pages leap forward in the day-glo static of thought and collaboration, of conversation and creation. Lewis and Hawkins process the overwhelming influx of information into a suite of captivating 21st-Century thought balloons.”
- Derek Beaulieu

“The vocals still aren’t cracked enough/somehow we have visual”

Vision as a sense is said to dominate human attention, so pairing images with text to act synergistically is a complex art, but Lewis and Hawkins have neuro-hacked into a fluid seam in Postcards From Mental States. The series explores a number of enquiries - how to consider the increasing fragmentation of lived experience paired with increased consciousness of our own neurobiology (rendering inner space a more elaborate and named architecture). How to move away from the monotony of simulacra in an era of hyper-production. It raises questions of the power of the image in the age of cyborgs. At times a hazy fabric of text enables direct gaze between the threads into the connected image so as to enable meaningful passage. At other times, the precision of single words acts as a catalyst for crystallisation of experience in tandem with the visual. Many of the visual poems are a geo-hauntology of mass living overwhelm and detritus but feature (Hawkins’) almost pre-historic figures/ voices to remind us of our evolutionary journey and location. There is a commentary here on contemporary horror that takes courage eg the Chagall-like fantasmagoric realism in assisted death rooms, but this is tonally off-set by both linguistic humour (in measure) and an aesthetic palette that holds a fragile euphoria at its edges. I loved how poetics are seemingly grown within this delicate and coherent work that enabled “To undergo me complete rewiring of the Arc(hive)s”
- Rushika Wick

Published on 31.03.23 by Hesterglock Press. For more info look here

Est. 2012

Editors:

︎︎︎Paul Hawkins
︎︎︎Sarer Scotthorne

Typesetting, art & design: ︎︎︎Bob Modem

We strive to make positive links between non-profit, literary, artistic & political worth rather than corporate, capitalist values of financial return, profit & monetary worth. We prefer revolutionaries. We don’t always get it right, but that’s how we learn.

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Forthcoming in 2023:

Ben Carr & Michael Hinchcliffe - DREICH AIR
Julia Rose Lewis/Paul Hawkins - POSTCARDS FROM MENTAL STATES
Claire Reddleman - PENNINE STREET
SJ Fowler - POETOS & PHOETRY
Lucy Furlong - CLEW (an expanded, second edition paperback)

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