Shakespeare and Company, New River Press and French Fries magazine invite you to a poetry evening with Greta Bellamacina to celebrate her French Fries cover story and her new books A House is a Dance and Who Will Make the Fire.

Special guest Robert Montgomery, and a presentation of the new books published by New River Press for Autumn 2023 including The Billboards Are All We Are Left With Poetry This Morning and The Signs On The Walls Shriek Like Parrots and the new poetry anthology Albion an Island on the Verge of Madness.

Spearheading a new generation of female poets Greta Bellamacina writes with a liquid musicality and existential complexity, influenced by the French Surrealist poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Her work explores the themes of love, loss, nature, motherhood, depression, identity and war. Who Will Make the Fire is Greta Bellamacina’s fourth collection of poems, it employs metaphors of wind, dawn, trees and fire to explore an interior world. The collection questions what it is to really live, to live with peace and stillness and passion and fire. The collection has been described as ‘A spell binding collection.’ by Nick Cave, and Florence Welch says of Greta Bellamacina- ‘Dreamlike, with bite. Bellamacina’s work is brutal, floral, blood-soaked and knowing, in the way that nature is both cruel and beautiful.’

Robert Montgomery is a well-known British contemporary artist and poet. He makes billboard poems, light works, fire poems, woodcuts, paintings and watercolours. His work brings text art closer to the language of poetry. He represented the UK in the 2012 Kochi Biennale and the 2016 Yinchuan Biennale. His work is in museum collections across the world including the Albright Knox in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. He has had solo museum projects at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, and the Cer Modern Museum in Ankara. His work was recently included in the Musée du Louvre exhibition “La Suite de l’Histoire” in Paris- the Louvre’s first exhibition of contemporary art. His work is hugely popular on the internet, the piece “The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You” has been shared online more than 200 million times. In 2017 he founded New River Press with Greta Bellamacina, which is a platform for experimental new poetry.