A round of drinks like no other. For every age in a woman’s life a cocktail. For every cocktail, a poem.
Sticky, risky, sexy poems, coloured with Campari and Curaçao. Have one on us.
Clare Pollard has published five full collections of poetry, most recently Lives of the Female Poets (Bloodaxe, Autumn 2025). Her poem ‘Pollen’ was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2022. She has been involved in numerous translation projects – including translating Ovid’s Heroines, which she toured as a one-woman show with Jaybird Live Literature – and edited Modern Poetry in Translation for five years. She is currently artistic director of the Winchester Poetry Festival and in 2024 published the children’s novel The Untameables (The Emma Press) and her second adult novel The Modern Fairies (Fig Tree).
Illustrator Zoë Taylor has made drawings for numerous magazines and fashion houses. Her comic, Joyride, published with Breakdown Press in 2016 was recently shown at the Pompidou Centre’s ‘Comics on Every Floor’ exhibition. Her new book, Mirror Vault Secret Door is available from Foot Books.
French 75
Glamour!
The word itself is an enchantment.
What could be more glamorous
than Harry’s New York Bar in 1920s Paris?
Fuck yes Paris.
You do know Ernest Hemingway and Rita Hayworth drank there?
That James Bond lost his virginity after visiting Harry’s Bar?
I’m wearing heels.
I’m out out and it’s a cold clear night of stars.
You need lemon juice and sugar-syrup but the main thing is
there is gin in your Champagne.
Is it like being shelled by a French 75mm field gun?
Isn’t for me to say,
but it feels risky
in the right way,
as the sparkles form tiny spiral stairways
that I tensely ascend.
Each Handbook is published in an edition limited to 25 copies, and priced at £12.50. We’ll be selling them at the books’ launch and at The Free Verse Book and Magazine Fair on 26th April 2025. If you’d like to order copies, please email us and we can sort out PayPal and postage.