Beyond Touch listed as a pick of the week for Pride Month

 

Arja Salafranca's poetry collection Beyond Touch, published in 2015 by Modjaji Books and Dye Hard Press, has been listed a pick of the week for Pride Month!

Congratulations, Arja!

Copies of Beyond Touch by Arja Salafranca still available

Dye Hard Press still has copies in stock of Arja Salafranca's poetry collection Beyond Touch, which was published by Modjaji Books and Dye Hard Press in 2015.

Beyond Touch is Salafranca's third poetry collection and was co-winner of the SALA Poetry Award in 2016.

Copies are available at R145, including postage, for South Africa. For overseas orders, the price is R190, including postage. Contact dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

Copies of Arja Salafranca's Beyond Touch still available

Dye Hard Press still has copies in stock of Arja Salafranca's poetry collection Beyond Touch, which was published by Modjaji Books and Dye Hard Press in 2015.

Beyond Touch is Salafranca's third poetry collection and was co-winner of the SALA Poetry Award in 2016.

Copies are available at R145, including postage, for South Africa. For overseas orders, the price is R190, including postage. Contact dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

Beyond Touch is co-winner of the 2016 SALA Poetry Award

Arja Salafranca's Beyond Touch is co-winner of this year's SALA Poetry Award. Beyond Touch was published by Dye Hard Press and Modjaji Books.

Beyond Touch nominated as finalist in the SALA Poetry Awards 2016

Arja Salafranca's third poetry collection, Beyond Touch, is a finalist in the 2016 SALA Poetry Awards. Beyond Touch was published by Modjaji Books and Dye Hard Press in 2015.

Review of Arja Salafranca's Beyond Touch, by Kate Turkington

Published in City Press, 9 August 2015. Arja Salafranca's Beyond Touch is published by Modjaji Books and Dye Hard Press.

Photos from the launch of Arja Salafranca's Beyond Touch at Love Books, Melville

Invite to the launch of Arja Salafranca's Beyond Touch

Forthcoming from Modjaji Books and Dye Hard Press: Beyond Touch by Arja Salafranca

Arja Salafranca's third poetry collection, Beyond Touch, will be published by end of May 2015.

How: a Dye Hard Interview with Joan Metelerkamp

Joan Metelerkamp reading in Grahamstown, July 2014

Joan Metelerkamp is the author of several books of poems, including Stone No More, Requiem, carrying the fire and Burnt Offering. Her poems have been widely published in local and international anthologies, and she has taken part in readings and literary festivals in South Africa, Europe and America. She edited the South African poetry journal New Coin for some years and has also written poetry reviews and essays. She lives on a farm near Knysna. 

Joan’s eighth collection of poetry, Now the World Takes These Breaths, was  published by Modjaji Books in 2014. She was interviewed by Alan Finlay...Read more

Forthcoming title from Modjaji Books and Dye Hard Press: Beyond Touch, poems by Arja Salafranca

Beyond Touch is Arja Salafranca's third poetry collection and is scheduled to be published by Modjaji Books and Dye Hard Press in April 2015.

At the launch of Haidee Kruger's The Reckless Sleeper, in December 2012

In conversation with Haidee Kruger about her poetry collection The Reckless Sleeper, published by Modjaji Books.

Love Books owner Kate Rogan does the intros at the launch.

Gary Cummiskey in conversation with Haidee Kruger at the launch of her new collection, The Reckless Sleeper

Haidee Kruger's second poetry collection The Reckless Sleeper is published by Modjaji Books, Cape Town. The launch was held at LoveBooks, Melville, Johannesburg, on November 29, 2012. Photos by Arja Salafranca.

Invite to the launch of The Reckless Sleeper by Haidee Kruger

The Edge of Things and Arja Salafranca's The Thin Line on display at the Cape Town Book Fair 2012

The Edge of Things: South African Short Fiction, selected by Arja Salafranca, was published by Dye Hard Press in 2011. Salafranca's debut collection of short fiction, The Thin Line, was published by Modjaji Books in 2010. Salafranca was interviewed about her writing at the Anfasa stand at the Cape Town Book Fair 2012.

Independent publishers: how do they survive? Janet van Eeden interviews Modjaji Books' Colleen Higgs

Janet: Can you tell us a bit about your publishing house? What did you set out to achieve when you started publishing and how long have you been going?

Colleen: Four years. I wanted to make a platform available for southern African women’s writing, in particular for writers that were unlikely to find other opportunities to be published, or were writing about issues that would not attract the attention of commercial publishers or even of other indie publishers. I also knew that this might mean I would have to work developmentally with some writers, and find really good editors too...Read more here

The Edge of Things on display at the Franschoek Literary Festival

The Edge of Things, published by Dye Hard Press, together with The Thin Line by Arja Salafranca, published by Modjaji Books, and Glass Jars Among Trees, edited by Alan Finlay and Arja Salafranca, published by Jacana. 

Photo: Arja Salafranca

The Edge of Things, published by Dye Hard Press, together with The Thin Line by Arja Salafranca, published by Modjaji Books, for sale at the Exclusive Books stand.   

Photo: Arja Salafranca

The Suitable Girl by Michelle McGrane

The Suitable Girl is Michelle McGrane's third poetry collection, and is published by Modjaji Books.

As Ian Duhig says, the collection shows "a sophisticated range of reference together with a powerful and moving emotional address. There is great technical range here which includes prose poems alongside sinewy lyrics;elegy jostles with imaginative sci-fi, humour with horror in language which is often gorgeous as it is precise."

Two of the poems are:

The Recalcitrant Muse

Sunlight blisters through moth-eaten curtains.
In her mildewed apartment high above the city,
the Muse stumbles out of bed, stubs her toe
in the kitchen as she fumbles for a cigarette,
reheats last night's coffee and loneliness,
gulps it down dark, bitter, thick with grounds
that refuse to dissolve her tongue's furred lining.

She is late for the morning's first appointment
with a middle-aged divorcee at 52 East Avenue.
It's not all it's cracked up to be, this muse business.
She's tired of being aloof, untouchable.
Give me strong hands, warm flesh, a hairy chest,
a plunging prick, fucking on the formica table.
She could use a drink. A few hours' sleep.
Immortality doesn't pay the bills.

Gallows Bird

St George's channel
through the Dover Strait,
I sailed up the Thames
towards Greenwich.

I'd heard talk
they hanged rovers,
dangled them in cages
at Wapping Stairs.

When the prow nosed
around Blackwall Point,
I saw myself,

bones picked clean,
starlings nesting
in my ribcage.

The Suitable Girl, ISBN: 978-1-920397-26-5, is available for R135 from Modjaji Books.

Ingrid Andersen: the literary shift from print to pixel

Ingrid Andersen was born in Johannesburg, read for a degree in English literature and film and theatre criticism at the University of the Witwatersrand, and is currently completing her master's degree. Her work has been published in poetry journals for 16 years. Excision, her first volume of poetry, was published in 2004 and her second, Piece Work, was published by Modjaji Books in 2010. She is the founding editor of Incwadi, a South African journal that explores the interaction between poetry and image...Read more here

Alan Finlay at poetry discussion panel at BookEx, Saturday November 27 2010

This Saturday, 27 November, 4pm at BookEx: Alan Finlay, author of pushing from the riverbank, (newly published by Dye Hard Press) will be on a poetry discussion panel with Helen Moffett (Strange Fruit, Modjaji Books) and Phillippa Yaa De Villiers (The Everyday Wife, Modjaji Books). The discussion will be chaired by Gary Cummiskey.

The venue is the Sandton Convention Centre, Sandton, Johannesburg.

For more information on BookEX, visit www.bookex.co.za