Annette Greenaway’s Big Fish Little Fish Cardboard Box is a surreal, eccentric and at times beautiful collection of poems, which Annette submitted to me after I put a call out for submissions on a couple of poetry websites. This was the ideal collection to release as our first ebook. I wanted Philistine Press to offer something different and unique, and this collection of poems is exactly that.
The site went live in March 2010. It all happened very, very quickly. The period of time from my initial decision to launch the website and the release of Big Fish Little Fish Cardboard Box was only a matter of weeks. I didn’t really know what I was doing, or if it would work out, so thank you to Annette for placing her faith in me and my crazy ideas.
Luckily the whole thing snowballed out of control and here we are – still relatively unknown but doing OK.
A sample poem by Annette Greenaway:
Happiness
He doesn’t know much about her.
She doesn’t know much about him.
Both are more comfortable not knowing.
They’ll never analyse it out loud,
So we have no way of knowing
Whether they prefer to keep up the mystery,
Or just can’t be bothered to care too much.
He doesn’t care much about her.
She doesn’t care much about him.
Both are pretty pleased with this arrangement.
Complicated folks, who know what it’s like to suffer unbearable pain,
And withstand unbearable joy,
Often feel envious.
There is security in their blandness.
They will not notice when the world ends.
Happiness, of a kind.
Andrew Oldham's Boneyard 