Tuesday June 23 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Join us for another evening of cutting edge poetry.
For this instalment, we are delighted to welcome the legendary James Byrne to the shop to launch his latest collection The Banality of Power (Broken Sleep Books, 2026) Joining him we have the incredible Ziba Karbassi and are delight to welcome back long time friend of Housmans Stephen Watts.
Our Poets:
Ziba Karbassi—born in Tabriz, northwestern Iran in 1969—began writing poems from an early age. Her first book in Persian was published in her twenties and, since then, she has published regularly, with more than twelve books now available, both in her mother tongue and internationally. Forced to leave Iran in the early 1980s with her mother and younger sisters, she has since lived most of her life in London. She is widely regarded as one of the leading poets currently writing in Persian and, to date, her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Karbassi’s densely revolutionary lyrical writing achieves an intensity of space that is almost unique in contemporary poetry, melting the valencies of breath into the depths of meaning. She has performed her work widely across Europe and America. She was Chairperson of the Association of Iranian Writers in Exile, 2002 to 2004 and in 2009 she was awarded the Golden Apple Poetry Prize (Azerbaijan) and served as chair of Exiled Writers Ink from 2012 to 2014 and, in 2012, was chosen by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC, Birkbeck, University of London) as one of fifteen revolutionary poets in a worldwide survey of published writings from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. From 2019 to 2021, Karbassi was a director of the Iranian PEN Centre in Exile, and she continues to work as a committee member and editor with Exiled Writers Ink in London, always passionately and actively committing her life and work for poetry.
Stephen Watts was born in 1952. His father came from Stoke-on-Trent and his mother’s family from villages high in the Italian and Swiss Alps. He spent very vital time—in place of university—in northern Scotland, especially the island of North Uist but, since 1977, has lived mainly in the richly multilingual communities of Whitechapel in East London. Geographies and location (as also their negative theologies) are urgent to his life and work. Recent books include Ancient Sunlight (Enitharmon, 2014; reprinted 2020) and Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds (Test Centre, 2016; Prototype, 2020). A 16mm, 70-minute experimental film—The Republics—was made from the latter by Huw Wahl, 2019. A collected Journeys Across Breath: Poems 1975-2005 was published by Prototype Publishing in 2022 (reprinted 2025) and A Book of Drawn Poems came out with Joe Hales’s Sylvia imprint in 2025. Watts is also a translator, working closely with exiled poets and—inter alia—has co-translated Pages from the Biography of an Exile by the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh (Arc Publications, 2014), Syrian poet Golan Haji’s A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2017) and Reza Baraheni’s Lilith (Tenement Press, 2023). His translation research has been the subject of two exhibitions: Swirl Of Words / Swirl Of Worlds, PEER Gallery (Hoxton, London), and for which he edited a book of that title, and Explosion Of Words with the Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach, which celebrated his 2000 page Bibliography of Modern Poetry in English Translation, at the Straühof Gallery (Zurich) and Nunnery Gallery (Bow, London), in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
Poet, editor and translator, James Byrne was born near London in 1977. His most recent poetry collection is The Banality of Power, which received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Other recent books include Nightsongs for Gaia: New and Selected Poems Arc Publications, 2025) and The Overmind (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). He has co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012) and I am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English (Arc 2019) after spending some time at Cox’s Bazar refugee camp. His publications in translation include working with Libyan poet Ashur Etwebi (Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution, 2022), and Rohingya poet Ro Mehrooz (Poems Written Through Barbed-Wire Fences, 2024). Forrest Gander writes that his poetry is ‘like gulping fire-water shots of the world’. The Banality of Power, launched at this event, speaks back to aggressors, corporate power, beginning with Nazi Adolf Einchmann on trial in a glass cage, asking: who are the Eichmanns now and how we find a way to move forward in a fractured society and form community.
This is a free event, but please RSVP below. Feel free to BYOB.