The Ireland Chair of Poetry and HOWL New Irish Writing are delighted to launch the cover reveal and pre-orders of the winning pamphlets of Ben Keatinge and Rafael Mendes.
‘The two chosen manuscripts use the scope of the pamphlet deftly. Through interconnected poems, they reach beyond Ireland to explore – both explicitly and implicitly – our understanding of identities in flux.’— The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust, 2025.
Published by HOWL New Irish Writing, Cover Design by Michael Bohan.
Waiting for Goran at the Broz Café, A Balkan Sequence, by Ben Keatinge
‘Ben Keatinge’s Waiting for Goran at the Broz Café immerses us in the past and present of Eastern Europe, attentive to its landscapes and histories in a way that resonates with our renewed sense of the volatility of the region. In their formal versatility these poems draw attention to the boundaries of language and allegiance – ‘borders / based on the shifting, burning / facts on the ground’. History puts pressure on utterance in these poems, reminding us of the limits of knowledge and the importance of what remains unspoken.’ —The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust, 2025.
Pre-orders available now at this link
Published by HOWL New Irish Writing, Cover Design by Michael Bohan.
The Migrant Dictionary, by Rafael Mendes
‘The Migrant Dictionary, by Rafael Mendes, is a sequence that challenges our conventional sense of poetic form. Using the dictionary entry as its shaping principle, it troubles ideas of fixed meanings in a world of instability and change. Chosen words range in tone and implication (‘Arrive’, ‘Border’, ‘Home’) and there are gaps too: letters and experiences not easily defined. Imagined scenes are interwoven with reported events, challenging our assumptions about the limits of racism and structural violence in Ireland. This tension between formal limits and the free imagination is everywhere evident, revealing the imprint of the Irish legal system on the lives of the marginalised.’ —The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust, 2025.
Pre-orders available now at this link
The official launch date for both pamphlets will be announced shortly.
Biographies:
Ben Keatinge was born in Dublin in 1973 and educated at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2022 and received a Dedalus Press Poetry Mentorship in 2021. His poems have been featured in The Irish Times, Irish Independent, Poetry Ireland Review, and anthologies. From 2007 to 2016, he worked as a university lecturer, teaching English literature in North Macedonia while studying Macedonian and travelling extensively. He was also an International Research Fellow at the New Europe College, Bucharest in 2015. Many of his poems are inspired by the history and cultures of the Balkans.
Rafael Mendes is a Brazilian-Irish migrant whose work has recently appeared or has work forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Propel Magazine, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He was featured in Poetry Ireland’s Introduction Series in 2023 and was awarded the 2023 Irish Writer’s Centre/Tyrone Guthrie Centre Lacuna Bursary. He is a PhD candidate in Latin American Studies at Trinity College Dublin.
For press queries or more information please email irelandchairofpoetry@gmail.com
For information on distribution and sales please email howlwriting@gmail.com