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brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Broken Sleep Books
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
5.3K followers 2.9K following 370 posts
Award winning indie publisher | Poetry | Essays | Fiction | Lay out your unrest | Widening access to the arts | Editor: @godzillakent.bsky.social | For reviews: stuart@brokensleepbooks.com | Founded: 2018

Website: brokensleepbooks.com
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brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Authors include Will Alexander, Scout Tzofiya Bolton, Geoff Hattersley, Martin Hayes, Rishi Dastidar, Rhian Elizabeth, Aaron Kent, Shane McCrae, Rushika Wick, Richard Skinner, Maria Sledmere, Stuart McPherson, Daragh Fleming, and more!

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November 6, 2025 at 10:18 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
It offers a sharp snapshot of contemporary literature while reflecting a working-class ethos & a commitment to degentrification, community power & accessible culture. A vibrant, dynamic & award-winning independent press distilled into one compelling volume.

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November 6, 2025 at 10:18 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
These poems probe and worry syntax into a frank and absorbing poetic
— Jack Underwood

Jake Wild Hall’s voice has a clarity that will break you
— Clare Pollard

painful and beautiful to read
— Caroline Bird

A welcomed return from Jake Wild Hall.
— Yomi Ṣode

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November 6, 2025 at 10:14 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Hall balances absurdism and sincerity with remarkable control, moving between domestic & digital, sacred & profane. What emerges is a lyric mode that is generous, self-questioning, and defiantly alive to the emotional contradictions of contemporary manhood.

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November 6, 2025 at 10:14 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
The poems resist singular narrative arcs, instead offering refrains, fragments, and abrupt tonal pivots that echo the dislocation of memory and the loops of online life.

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November 6, 2025 at 10:14 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Lose yourself in it and retrace the steps you never took, this is a poem that understands that any convulsion of desire is part of a greater game of absence.
— David Spittle

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October 31, 2025 at 2:13 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
The book is both critique and enactment of representation: a work pursued by its maker, stalked by its forms, and shadowed by Christine. Elle is a hauntological lyric, a summoning that won’t let the archive lie still.

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October 31, 2025 at 2:13 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Blending procedural method with pulp volatility, Sheppard mines and retools the idioms of violence, sex, media, and myth, threading the ghosts of Buñuel, Jeff Keen, and the tabloid unconscious into a shattered, many-voiced delirium.

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October 31, 2025 at 2:13 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
From start to finish, language in Divided Tongues is used as a tool of egress: brought down like a whip, drawn through us like a saw, or saved for a final spear-thrust to the side.
— Kirsten Irving

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October 31, 2025 at 2:05 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Davidson Roberts’ gift is for letting a story tell itself, while a clarifying music emerges to redeem or illuminate the journey.
— Sean O’Brien

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October 31, 2025 at 2:05 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
With motifs of exile, fractured lineage, & cultural inheritance, Roberts interrogates the weight of language as burden & possibility. The result is a poetic landscape where borders, geographic, linguistic, emotional, are repeatedly crossed & contested.

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October 31, 2025 at 2:05 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Drawing on scriptural echoes, historical figures, and contemporary disaffection, the poems assemble a polyphonic lyric that shifts between reportage, lament, and surreal invocation.

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October 31, 2025 at 2:05 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Visceral and precise
— John Campbell

Hassan writes from a space that nobody else stands in; a space borne of deep understanding and lived experience.
— Tusiata Avia

opened my eyes to the extraordinary power of slam poetry.
— Lynda Chanwai-Earle

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When they tell you they are sorry The muazzen calls you to pray on the radio you wrap your limbs in cotton sheets walk through the crowd with your hands in your mouth waiting for the gun White supremacy is a song we all know the words to but never sing out loud Let’s not jump to conclusions we don’t know all the facts Wait for the police statement the Prime Minister’s press conference Stop using divisive language this is a time for mourning Finger pointing will get us nowhere why does everything have to be about race He’s not even from here we are bigger than that We feel so awful that this would happen in our beautiful little country We are so sorry you had to see that this isn’t what you came here for This isn’t the New Zealand we know and love Please come and talk on our show tomorrow no don’t bring that up amen
October 27, 2025 at 2:07 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
With tonal dexterity and narrative precision, Hassan dissects the personal impacts of structural violence while preserving a grounded lyric voice. This is a work attentive to grief, satire, inheritance, and the quiet weight of diasporic memory.

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There are bombs over Gaza again, are you watching? I don’t like the post even though I’m tagged in it, today I am witless on a bus to meet a soul mate who isn’t, in the most liveable city that isn’t, wearing Nikes despite my best intentions hey, they’re anti-Trump but pro-sweatshops, it’s five o’clock and I’m on the wrong bus home, the cars pile up to flee the free market’s spleen, thank god it’s Friday but the bombs are still dropping on a Palestine that isn’t, I am a reporter but feel silent, making news about house prices and a US president that isn’t, talking about a Muslim ban that isn’t, I am a Muslim on a bus leaving Auckland and I’m trying not to read the news, talk to friends in Denver who pray in terminals not made for our skin and I tweet about Kanye and check my follows check my new shoes in the glass waiting for the wrong bus, I wear Palestinian colours by accident and no one notices, wear a beard by accident and hope I don’t have to travel soon, watch the skyline shrink and thank god for a hot meal and Netflix, for a soulmate at a bus stop in a home that isn’t, I don’t think about Israeli jets ruffling the nights feathers, I don’t think about when my life is ending I don’t think about where I’ll meet my soulmate if my house is bombed, if my car explodes, if they build walls in our living rooms and we have to hold hands through the cracks, if we never see each other again because of a security policy, though a part of me wonders if it would make breaking up easier
October 27, 2025 at 2:07 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Structured around refrains of migration, loss, racialisation, and belonging, the poems shift across geographies—from Aotearoa to Cairo to Istanbul—interrogating identity in the wake of empire, terrorism, and assimilation.

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When they tell you to go back to where you came from Tell them about the moon how she eats at your skin watches you pray and fast and cry while the world sleeps how she gives birth to herself and dies and you wish upon her children how you wander her night plant cardamom in your friends’ eyes cumin in their teeth zaatar on their brow lick the rest off your fingertips it tastes of visa-on-entry heaven with no random checks round the iftar table everyone speaks of politics and God trans rights and colonialism we forget we didn’t speak the empire’s tongue once When they ask you why you speak so well for an immigrant Tell them about your grandmother’s laugh how you never quite knew whether she was story or myth the upper lip in your conviction or a song ringing in your bones drifting through the kitchen window with the fried shrimp and newspaper voodoo dolls tell them how you have always been a voodoo doll your feet licking the flames the stove top eye a television screen a news bulletin an open casket the needle pushing and pulling through your skin every puncture a question played by an accusation every bullet hole an answer you have to fill with silence with religion with Xanax and daytime television
October 27, 2025 at 2:07 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Formally unstable & ideologically untethered, this work spirals around its own impossibility, issuing recursive proclamations, cancelling itself, & insisting on its singularity at every turn. It is a text as trap, provocation, & joke, all of them serious.

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the anticulturalist believes in whatever is convenient at the time for the anticulturalist and the anticulturalist alone For this reason it also resists labels including its own anticulturalist notes that culture is spread by force and fad; postmodernism by archness and arrogance that has collapsed under its own definition anticulturalist is referrent to nothing aside from the individual that created and controls it It is not a state of belief but of denial of the concept of externality. the other is never central to anyone but itself. thus, there is no Other There is only Self anticulturalist notes and states that every man may be an island and the island is self-created by each individual’s personal dictatorship which is also self-created and always in flux
October 27, 2025 at 1:55 PM