Dockyard Press


CHAPBOOKS


GERRY LOOSE — TWELVE AIRS

photograph of book. book cover art: two rectangles, the outer line is thick, the inner line half has thick. centred a quarer down the page is the title 'Twelve Airs' underlined by two lines. the topmost line is thin, the line underneath twice as thick as the line above. a few three quarters down the page is 'Gerry Loose'





A simple and plain new chapbook by Gerry Loose, a poet whose texts are as often found in gardens and other natural settings as on the page.

12 Airs contains two short six-poem sequences, one from 2001, the other from 21 years later – a continuity that resonates, making this, according to the author, the closest thing to music he has written.

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GREUM MAOL — NO: POEMS OF URBAN ZEN

photograph of book. book cover art: off-white cover. centred a quarer down the page is the title 'no'. underneath is the subtitle 'poems of urban zen'. three quarters down the page is 'greum maul' inside a cirlce.







i took a vow to save all beings
then one of them saved me

A chapbook containing 31 poems of meditation, impermanence and love.

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DAISHIN STEPHENSON — FROM OUTSIDE INTO THE CAVE

photograph of book. book cover art: off-white background. painting of branchless tree trunk. middle of the cover sits the title 'from outside into the cave'. an inch or so below the title is the author's name, daishin stephenson.







bird tugs worm out of soft ground
worm does not think "this should not be happening."

"from outside into the cave" combines the poetry and visual art of daishin stephenson, writer, painter, photographer, video artist and Zen Buddhist monk.

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DIGITAL EDITIONS


BARRY GRAHAM — FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY

FICTION


BEFORE

book cover art: photograph of city pavement at night after the rain. the pavement sits to the right of a bulding with illuminated exterior lights.







Francoise was "improbably lovely," the type of character you see in movies. Of course, her life was a life, not a movie. But as the narrator, Barry (a writer who may or may not be the author), stunned by the news of her death, tells "her" story, he cannot find the reality of his friend in the dark, romantic film that flickers in his mind. As he searches for Francoise in a nightmare cityscape of desperate sex and casual violence, he finds only reflections of his own loss.

In haunting, cinematic prose, Before examines the impermanence of human connection and probes the arcane links between seemingly unrelated experiences.

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THE BOOK OF MAN

book cover art: white background with book title in all-caps black text. An opaque painting of a bald man with his head cocked to the side sits in between text.





Set in the Scottish Third World hidden inside the First, this novel takes a savagely uncompromising and unsentimental look at the true nature of love and friendship in a city that, like its troubled characters, has lost all its old certainties.

London-based writer and single father Kevin Previn returns to his native Glasgow after an absence of ten years, his homecoming prompted by the death of a friend and mentor, junkie writer Mike Illingworth, author of The Book of Man.

Previn believes he's trawling the streets of Glasgow in order to make sense of his old friend's troubled life and death, but he's on a personal journey, a quest to understand his own childhood brutalities, mental breakdown and lost loves, and the terrifying control the state can exert over the individual. Past and present become one as Previn discovers what he has really left behind.

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THE CHAMPION'S NEW CLOTHES

book cover art: close-up of a pair of hands being wrapped in preparation for donning boxing gloves.




It's an opportunity a journalist and ex-boxer with a complicated personal life can't turn down – joining the camp of the world title challenger, Ricky Mallon, in the run-up to the championship fight. For Billy Piers it's more than work, it's an escape from Karen, loving and beautiful but disturbed, and unaware of what he's going through – that he's in love with someone else, someone who can't decide who she's in love with at all.

Set in the urban wastelands of Scotland in the 1980s, The Champion's New Clothes is about love and friendship, loneliness and violence, from the brutality of the boxing ring to the cruelty that goes hand in hand with love. As Ricky trains for the hardest fight of his life, Billy faces the hardest decision of his. Both men are driven by desire, and both men come to realize that nothing is ever what it seems, and that it is desire that creates the cruelest illusions of all. With wit and acute honesty, The Champion's New Clothes warns: beware of what you want. You might get it.

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GET OUT AS EARLY AS YOU CAN

book cover art: illustration of a person drinking from a wine bottle. In the background stand two people holding hands.








In this searing collection of stories, people try in various ways to escape the violence and depravity of urban Scotland.

A brutalized child rescues his sister in the only way he can imagine. An alienated, drug-addicted boxer fights to live and then lives to fight. A family man slashes faces for money. Lovers, killers, the desperate and the mad search for meaning, or someone to hold, or something to eat, in some of the meanest streets ever rendered in fiction.

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HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR BLUE-EYED BOY?

book cover art: entire image is in blue tint. a close-up of a man's eye with book title and author name beneath.




Andy Saunders knows how to survive. He survived all alone in Los Angeles as a teenager, and he survived in foreign combat zones as a soldier. He survived homelessness on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona, an unforgiving desert metropolis that is the fifth-largest city in the nation.

He's had enough of surviving, and now enjoys life, living with his girlfriend, working as a handyman, teaching martial arts and playing in a punk rock band. But, when a friend falls victim to a contract killing and the police do nothing, Saunders decides to make some inquiries--then finds that he has passed the point of no return, and that the killer is now hunting him. He once again must fight for survival, and the fight will lead him to a truth more awful than anything he has ever known.

The wide open spaces of Arizona turn dark and claustrophobic in this hyperviolent, hypersexual neo-noir tale of seething cruelty and rationalized evil.

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OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT

book cover art: narrow walkway between tenements





"I'm there when it gets dark to kill you if I can…"

The Bogey Man's sinister chant used to scare the wits out of Gary Scott when he was a five-year-old, growing up in the worst part of Glasgow. But now, nearly twenty years later, he's an experienced and, he likes to think, hard-nosed journalist. He's far too preoccupied with real life in all its seedy variety to worry about imaginary horrors. So why does he keep being drawn back to the dark closes and crumbling tower blocks of Maryhill?

As one bizarre and grisly event succeeds another, as the deaths begin to pile up, Gary realizes that he himself is, somehow, inextricably involved. Then, one night, the Bogey Man arrives under his window.

Of Darkness and Light is an elegant story of horror both physical and psychological, a taut and vivid slide into panic.

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ONE FOR MY BABY

book cover art: painting of a man and a woman. the woman is sitting down looking up at the man leaning over her. His hand is on her thigh.






One for My Baby is a neo-noir tale of crime, sex and free enterprise in the contemporary American Dream.

Like many Americans nowadays, Mark Sharpton has had to take a second job to make ends meet. When not performing as a lounge musician, he commits armed robberies.

It's all crime all the time in Phoenix, Arizona. When Mark robs a joint owned by a retired mobster, a witness gets a look at his face. Then he falls in obsessive lust with her, and the mob and the cops team up to get rid of him, aided by the husband of one of his casual sex partners…

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SCUMBO: TALES OF LOVE, SEX AND DEATH

book cover art: close-up of two people kissing.







Scumbo is a Scottish singer and songwriter who's half rock star and half monk. With too much sex, too little love and no money, this punk troubadour searches for a way to live life on his own terms.

In addition to the title novella, this book contains eight dark, funny and compassionate stories of love, friendship, sex and death, set in the urban jungles of Europe and the U.S.A. in the early 1990s. In this world of talking mailboxes, poverty, flowers, guitars, loneliness, beauty and sadness, things are never as they seem – and nor are they otherwise.

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WHEN IT ALL COMES DOWN TO DUST

book cover art: close-up of a set of cannine jaw bones and teeth.







Laura Ponto wouldn't mind watching Frank del Rio be strapped to the executioner's gurney, even if her job is to find mitigating evidence in death penalty cases. Frank is not a client, but a long time ago he did unspeakable things to children – and Laura was one of them.

Now Frank is being released on parole, and they will both learn that their lives are still intertwined. Their story will end in a place even darker than it began in a shattering noir novel of suspense, sex, violence, love and death in the urban desert of Phoenix, Arizona.

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THE WRONG THING

book cover art: Profile of a person wearing a hoodie.




They call him The Kid. He's a killer, a dark legend of the Southwest's urban badlands, "a child who terrifies adults." They speak of him in whispers in dive bars near closing time. Some claim to have met him. Others say he doesn't exist, a phantom blamed for every unsolved act of violence, a ghost who haunts every blood-splattered crime scene.

But he is real. He's a young man with a love of cooking and reading, an abiding loneliness and an appetite for violence. He is a cipher, a projection of the dreams and nightmares of people ignored by the economic boom… and a modern-day outlaw in search of an ordinary life. Love brings him the chance at a new life in the form of Vanjii, a beautiful, damaged woman. But try as he might to abandon the past, his past won't abandon him. The Kid fights back in the only way he knows – and sets in motion a tragic sequence of events that lead him to an explosive conclusion shocking in its brutality and tenderness.

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NONFICTION


KILL YOUR SELF: LIFE AFTER EGO

book cover art: illustration of a faceless person in a suit surrouned by greenery with a city skyline in the background.






No, this book doesn't advocate suicide – it teaches something that takes a lot more courage: that we are always enlightened, and must take responsibility for realizing our enlightenment. It invites us to meet life on its own terms, wherever we are, whoever we are, right now, killing our false sense of self by seeing through it to our true nature.

This is Zen for real life, in the world of relationships, jobs, dirty dishes, teacups and toilets. Zen master Dogo Barry Graham eschews traditional institutions and dogmas and insists instead that we trust in ourselves. Zen is not a system of belief, or a theory about the meaning of life. It is beyond philosophy, beyond religion. It is the gateless gate to freedom from suffering.

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NOTHING EXTRA: NOTES ON THE ZEN LIFE

book cover art: background colour an ombre of dark brown to rust-orange back to dark brown with the title and author name in white.


We live with so much pain and sadness, so much uncertainty and fear – but, if we understand the truth about reality, it doesn't have to be a problem. Zen practice isn't about improving yourself or otherwise changing yourself – or, least of all, finding yourself. It's about no longer identifying with the self, the personality, your story of who you think you are. It's about stripping such delusions away, meeting life as it is without adding anything extra, and awakening to your enlightened nature. And that's what this short book – with some chapters only a couple sentences long – does.

In these notes, personal stories, and answers to Zen students' questions, Zen master Dogo Barry Graham shatters myths about mindfulness and self-discovery and gets to the essence of the enlightened life. He discusses love and sex, attachment and freedom, with references ranging through Moby-Dick, Stephen King's horror novel Pet Sematary, Albert Camus, Descartes, Anais Nin and the TV series The Wire. He shows that your place of meditation is wherever you find yourself, whether cloistered in a temple or commuting to work on a city bus. Your enlightenment, your Buddha-nature, is a practical matter, to be addressed and resolved here and now.

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WHEN THE LIGHT BULB IS BARE: ESSAYS ON HORROR AND NOIR

book cover art: photograph of a window at the end of a corridor. a single red bulb illuminates the space beneath.




Barry Graham's horror fiction has earned him comparisons with Bram Stoker, M.R. James and Stephen King, while his neo-noir fiction has been compared to that of James M. Cain, Richard Stark, David Goodis, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Thompson.

In this collection of essays examining what Graham contends are the two most important and enduring genres, he combines literary analysis with memoir, and shows us that the monsters we imagine lurking in the shadows are all too real. In doing so, he remembers the significance of horror to a child in a Glasgow slum, and discusses artists including Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Robert Mitchum, Paul Schrader, Robert Bresson, George Pelecanos and David Goodis, and books and films including The Exorcist, The Moon of the Wolf, The Conversation and The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

He considers crime fiction as a Marxist art form, and, while sitting in a Scottish courtroom, observing a trial for attempted murder, he realizes he has a met a werewolf.

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WHY I WATCH PEOPLE DIE: AND OTHER FUTILE EXPLANATIONS

book cover art: illustration of a forearm strapped down with multiple IV's inserted into the ditch of the elbow.


This unclassifiable hybrid of harsh autobiography and hard reporting opens with an alienated Barry Graham arriving in Phoenix, Arizona, from his native Scotland in 1995. Plunging into chaotic relationships and empty sexual encounters, he also witnesses two executions and investigates Joe Arpaio, the corrupt and brutal Sheriff of Maricopa County. He investigates the deaths of unarmed young Latino men at the guns of cops, rides along with the Phoenix Gang Enforcement Unit, reports on the criminal trial of Governor Fife Symington, visits and revisits the city's ghosts and legends, and finds refuge and healing in writing and in the practice of Zen.

Graham has staked out the Southwest as his territory, and written about it in a way that no one else has. His is not the Southwest of scenic natural wonders, petroglyphs and ancient Indian civilizations juxtaposed with modern spiritual seekers. His is the Southwest as gritty emblem of 21st Century America, of urban blight and the dispossessed, of the people left behind.

Why I Watch People Die is a report from the edge, a beautiful and terrifying portrait of a civilization in collapse, and a man's relationship to a desolate city that both repels and compels him.

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POETRY


LOVE AND RAIN: POEMS OF THE WAY

book cover art: Hokusai illustration of people walking across a bridge in the rain.






Food on the plate,
tea in the cup –
say your thanks.
Say it to the sunlight,
say it to the rain.

Barry Graham's second book of poetry may be read as a collection of haiku and tanka, or as one long Zen poem.

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TRAFFIC AND MURDER

book cover art: photograph of a dried leaf beginning to curl in on itself.








Barry Graham's terse, resonant poems of urban Zen have been internationally published in anthologies and magazines, and broadcast on BBC radio. This, however, is the first book-length collection of his poetry.

This volume brings together his best poems of two decades, ranging from haiku and tanka to love poems and murder ballads.

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BART LESSARD — FICTION


BLACK BODY AND OTHER STORIES

book cover art: colour fades from black to shades of dark blue to rust-orange to a slow fade to a dark brown-green.




Work in a neglected flower garden unearths a vengeful corpse. A drunken executioner befriends a voice from a bottomless pit. Gangster pals indulge in psychopathic pranks. A hoaxer pretending to be a ghost gaslights tenants into health and happiness until a sadistic exorcist calls. Actors in toon costumes wage a cold war against amusement park security. A woodland enclave conspires to vanish from the map. An assassin plays games with a hotel concierge on the swinging '60s Las Vegas Strip. A wet nurse finds that the infant left to her care is far from toothless.

There goes the ordinary in this new collection by Bart Lessard, home to god, fraud, crook, and devil. In these yarns, frightful and funny dwell side by side or are one and the same. Lessard's books have shown him to be a master of the elegant grotesque whose fearsome imagination rejects all fetters—and this brilliant, audacious volume may be his best to date.

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THE DANSE JOYEUSE

book cover art: illustration of a woman holding a gun with a streetlight behind her overlaid atop a map grid.








Shanghaiing—for sailors on leave in Old San Francisco, a risk ever present. For two young sisters sold into vice, a means to survive. Yva and Julie-Marie's stepfather has tasked them to bring the gospel to the notorious red-light district known as the Barbary Coast. Soon he is kidnapped and the sisters are left to fend for themselves. Thus they turn to crime at the Danse Joyeuse, a saloon and brothel, conspiring to abduct the very customers who would degrade them.

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DEAD MEN'S TEETH

book cover art: illustration of a black bird's foot outstretched to grip a human tooth in its foot.








Auction City, 1830: corruption, smuggling, and graft run wild in the federal trade district, and no less so a dread of the unnatural. Gangs of resurrection men have forced Ned Tittle—coward, snitch, and procurer of human teeth—out of business at the gallows. One night he makes the best score of a career: a thousand dollars' worth of raw material for the denturist. But along the way he becomes a witness and a target for the entire criminal underworld of the young United States—and for something risen up from hell.

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FULL OF DAYS AND OTHER STORIES

book cover art: illustration of a woman with her back facing us.








Mildred Dephane works the graveyard shift on a hospice ward. For nine years she has slept through the daylight to help people die well. But her newest patient shocks her awake. Failing, helpless, over a hundred years old, he reveals child murders that have gone unpunished for a lifetime.

This is the title novella in a collection of stories that defy genre to explore horror, beauty, and crime up close, always with room left for a joke.

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MEN OF BLOOD

book cover art: illustration of a bundle of red arrows, tips pointed down on a green background.







Joaquim Vanderas, murderous degenerate and supreme swordsman, has come to Great Britain, hired by English Royalists to take on the armies of Parliament. He has done so before—years past, in the first outbreak of civil war—and the Roundheads remember his atrocities far better than he himself. Taken prisoner, he faces the noose. A surprise development spares him: Charles Stuart is on the run. The Roundheads' general offers pardon, and Vanderas is only happy to hunt down a king. But on meeting a mysterious Irishwoman he finds that he is not the only pawn among the ranks—nor the most dangerous player on the board.

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RAKEHELL

book cover art: illustration of a bundle of red arrows, tips pointed down on a green background.







He was hired to repel a fearsome enemy. He was worse.

The Thirty Years' War, 1643—the French have taken the Duchy of Lorraine, and the Saint-Empire of the Austrian Habsburgs is in ruins. But the fighting rages on, and Lemuel Vachon, retainer of the ducal house, will do anything to help his lady, Christine de Guise, escape her fate.

Outgunned and outmanned, he hires Joaquim Vanderas, a cruel and degenerate drunkard who is also a professional killer of the highest order. Vanderas makes good on his infamy, cutting a gruesome path through the dangers that await.

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