One of my favourite moments in the publishing process, arrival of the first batch of books.

These will be going out to the author, Rob Walton, reviewers, and people who place pre-orders with us. You can do that in our webshop. If you want to buy it elsewhere you’ll have to wait until the end of March.

We first spotted Rob’s lockdown poems on his social media, because we follow him as we publishing several of his stories, and a couple of poems, in earlier anthologies.

After reading the first few aloud to my wife, I thought, this has to be dealt with, and enquired over the number of extant poems and how the creative splurge was going, and made an offer. A doesn’t remember all our author’s names, so when I told her we were going to do the book and she said who? my response was ‘What did you do on your first day back , darling? /Lick Yusuf. (1st June) and she knew immediately.

Then Rob went quiet on me, and on social media, and a tentative email revealed a covid related bereavement, shielding and a blaze of more poetry.

The light-hearted, funny and furiously angry observations of how life is lived in the Covid world remain, alongside the personal grief at how lives are also lost.

This book is dedicated to Rob’s dad, Frank Walton, 1933-2020