50 Numbered/signed copies

£150 plus shipping

LAST COPIES

Expanded edition, including 'new' and unpublished poems not found in the first edition.

144 pages. Pinched Crown format, approx. 7”/175mm wide, 10”/250mm tall. Handbound at the Tangerine workshop with acid-free boards, conservation glue and hemp cord; foil embossed front cover artwork; colour title page. ISBN: 978-1-917085-09-0

Quarter bound with Lana mid-blue paper covered boards and cloth spine; front cover artwork embossed in black; acid-free text paper and endpapers. Full colour illustration by Christoph Mueller on Mohawk paper and forms part of the 3-page ‘stepped’ front endpapers — the other page colours being crimson and mid-brown; crimson back endpapers.

Specially commissioned introduction by David Keenan (For the Good Times, winner of the Gordon Burn Prize; This is Memorial Device, winner of London Magazine Prize; also Monument Maker, a Rough Trade Book of the Year)

Specially commissioned artwork by Christoph Mueller (regular contributor to Mineshaft; also New Yorker front cover 2021; Rolling Stones artcards)

New 'Publisher's Note' by Michael Curran

EXTRAS:
1) 'Death in Los Angeles' chapbook. Previously unpublished poem from 1965, sent to Charles Bukowski, who wrote his 'version' in response. Both poems published here for the first time.
2) Unpublished photographs. High quality prints of photos, housed in a custom, embossed envelope: Wantling in Military Barracks, 1953; Wantling (close up), 1972); Wantling & Goat, 1972; Wantling & Cat (1973, colour)


SIGNED BY DAVID KEENAN & MICHAEL CURRAN

SOME COMMENTS ON IN THE ENEMY CAMP (2015)

“Sentences flow over lines and across stanzas, raising questions while dragging you ever onward through squalid yet stunning tales; always with rhythm, rarely rhyme. For many who approach this outstanding collection, the brew may prove too strong.”
— Alan Bett, The Skinny

“…a brilliant gathering of poems. It deserves a wide audience.”
— Ian Seed, Stride

“There are poems here that read like Denis Johnson, poems full of beauty, poems full of sass and wisdom, poems that examine shortcomings as well as any poem Ray Carver ever wrote, poems about Korea, jail, drugs, love, the universe, poems that are reflective, keen, poems that turn a stern eye on themselves.”
— Bookmunch

“Wantling’s casual mastery of technique hoodwinks the reader. Many of the poems employ rhyme and half-rhyme but Wantling’s attention to form is hidden in the dark intimacy of his verse.”
— The Manchester Review

William Wantling (1933-74) was a veteran of the Korean War and a heroin addict who spent five and a half years in San Quentin Prison, where he first taught himself to write. Upon his release in 1963, under the G.I.Bill, he entered higher education, obtaining a BA and MA in English Literature. A contemporary of Charles Bukowski – with whom he had an unusual and ultimately destructive friendship – Wantling was widely published in the vibrant US poetry scene of the 1960s and 70s, including an appearance in the twelfth edition of the prestigious Penguin Modern Poets series. Whilst maintaining a high profile in the independent press scene, important literary figures such as Edward Lucie-Smith, Walter Lowenfels and Cyril Connolly regularly supported and promoted his work. Christopher Logue, writing in the Times Literary Supplement in December 1967, declared Wantling’s collection The Awakening his recommended book of the year. Wantling was a university lecturer when he died of heart failure on May 2nd 1974, aged 40 years.

David Keenan is the author of six critically-acclaimed novels; the cult classic This is Memorial Device, which won the London Magazine Prize; For the Good Times, which won the Gordon Burn Prize and was shortlisted for the Encore Award; The Towers The Fields The Transmitters, Xstabeth, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award; Monument Maker, which was a Rough Trade Book of the Year and Industry of Magic & Light. He is also the author of England’s Hidden Reverse, a history of the UK’s post-punk and Industrial music scenes. He has been writing about music since he was seventeen years old, most consistently for The Wire, and between the years 2004-2014 he co-ran the cult Glasgow record shop Volcanic Tongue.