Seven Rooms brings together highlights from Hotel, a magazine for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction & poetry which, since its inception in 2016, provided a space for experimental reflection on literature's status as art & cultural mediator. Co-published by Tenement Press and Prototype, this anthology captures, refracts, and reflects a vital moment in independent publishing in the UK, and is built on the shared values of openness, collaboration, and total creative freedom.

In her first book-length collection of poems to appear in the US, Lesley Harrison looks North to the sea, with the heat of the land at her back, to bring us meditations on whale hunts and lost children, Manhattan sky towers, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia. A poetry of spareness in multilayered depths, of textural silence and aural place, Kitchen Music plunges deep through the strata of language where “weather is body” and an Iceland poppy is “as delicate as birch.” In poems and sequences of poems, Harrison spins folktales into threads of family and gender, engages with the work of the artists Roni Horn and Marina Rees, transcribes John Cage and Johannes Kepler into song and litany, pens a hymnal of bees, and turns to storms, glaciers, and the lapwing life in a field of young barley. As the novelist Kirsty Gunn writes in the foreword, Harrison has “taken up the old white whale of the fixed and masculine narratives and made of its seas and weathers her own Moby Dick, a female poetry ‘in praises / repeated, repeating.’”

In her first Carcanet collection, Lesley Harrison looks North to the sea, with the heat of the land at her back. In her striking inventive arrangements of sound and page, Harrison bring us meditations on whale hunts and lost children, on cities seen and remembered, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia. A poetry which negotiates, line by line and page by page, with white space and silence, Kitchen Music plunges deep through the strata of language where "weather is body" and an Iceland poppy is "as delicate as birch." Drawing on folktales, she threads together images of family and gender, transcribes John Cage and Johannes Kepler into song and litany, pens a hymnal of bees, and turns to storms, glaciers, and the lapwing life in a field of young barley. As the novelist Kirsty Gunn writes in the foreword, Harrison has "taken up the old white whale of the fixed and masculine narratives and made of its seas and weathers her own Moby Dick, a female poetry 'in praises / repeated, repeating.'"

What does northness sound like? The music of Iceland, Greenland, the Svalbard archipelago. Songs of birds and ice and wind. In Lesley Harrison's Blue Pearl, her first collection to appear in the United States, northern landscapes come alive through an intimacy of language that forms a collective sense of place through weather, history, local myths and customs, and childhood fairy tales. Dogs on the shale, eels in the current, a ship strains as it's pulled up by a needle, a whaler unwinds the skin-Harrison's poems voyage forth with visible breath, "as snow falls as light is in paper."

Disappearance is Lesley Harrison's first full-length collection, bringing together new work which examines the coastline and our uneasy, unresolved relationship with the waters that surround us. Around the northern North Sea rim, the coastal margin is constantly being made and unmade by vast weather systems and currents that begin thousands of miles away. Drawing from archives, folk myth and cultural memory, these poems make real our sense of living at the edge of an older, sub-polar world, and the ongoing human process of negotiation with, of giving meaning and scale to, this unstable and ultimately unknowable space.