The fourth title from Analog Submission Press in 2026 is Ford Dagenham's Niche. This collection moves between estuary landscapes, front garden walls, deathbed vigils, and childhood memories that are held together by instinct rather than logic. Dagenham writes with a restless informality — lowercase, unpunctuated, and alive to the absurd and the tender in equal measure.

Niche moves through domestic interiors, estuary edges, cafés, gardens, and memory fragments. When a poem begins for you, is it anchored in place first, or does it begin with a line of language that finds its place later?

You have nailed my approaches. An anchored place or time, or an abstract phrase that tickles. My two jumping off points.

There’s a looseness to the voice that feels deliberate — abrupt turns, tonal slips between humour and something more exposed. How conscious are you of shaping that voice, and do you tend to revise heavily or leave the first shape of a poem intact?

Some poems arrive blatantly intact, others call for wrestling into form. During revisions fresh sprouts appear, I prune them and replant. This can leave the original text more naked than before. The pointless bloating and laboured overstating that often happens during rewrites happily trips some kind of quality control alarm. All part of the process. As regards the shaping of the voice I think I am farming that out to my subconscious.

The “THINGS I WAS GOING TO TELL YOU” sequence runs through the chapbook as a recurring thread. Did you write those poems as a set, or did they arrive separately and find each other?

Well these first showed their faces in the traffic on the way to the hospice as things I knew would make a dying friend smile. I never got to say them and they gelled into a big clot in the following days, calling for partial independence during their subsequent typing.

There’s a poem here—“hero”—where you read advice from an Instagram poetry account and laugh so loudly the birds take flight. What’s your relationship to the wider poetry world online?

Like a weird cousin. I might come to the family gatherings, but if I do, I'll probably be in the shed. Some of the advice knocking around is so on the nose it compels me to do just the opposite. I mean advice is helpful of course, it’s all stuff to bear in mind, but there is something contrary in me that must mock it.

There’s a strong sense of the everyday here—mugs on a tray, a record on, a garden hose warming in the sun—but those moments never feel incidental. What draws you to these smaller, almost overlooked details, and has your attention to the everyday changed over time?

I have always noticed these little things. As a kid on the floor it was a world of shoes and skirting boards, car tires and concrete. Awareness of small details elevates their importance. It is also fair to say I should get out more.

Several poems hold two timeframes at once—“kick” moves between a record playing now and a coastal trip in the 1980s, “berlin wall” places history in a pub car park. Do you think of memory as something that stays put, or something that drifts?

Do I remember giving our budgerigars their freedom when I was four? Or remember being told I did, at the age of six or eight or ten? That's not a pandoras box of worms I want to open. I mean, even some of my worst memories seem rose tinted now. And who would we be without them?

“entropy beige” talks about the urge to make something that wasn’t here before, and calls it unexplainable. Do you still feel that after all these years, or has it changed shape?

The urge has become sharper. It has more outlets. Its reach has widened, like an umbrella opening up over the house. The freedom in painting is very different to the precision needed for leather-crafting but it’s all lamps on the same pole.

“fruit & soul” ends with the admission that what you’re trying to say won’t fit into a dusty old pentameter without losing its character. What does form mean to you, and are there writers, artists, or musicians who sit somewhere behind these poems?

I think of my poems as field reports, as notes from the world. This delusion gives them a sheen of officialdom in my eyes, and makes form secondary. All the writers and artists and musicians I like layer up in me over the years like paint in a rental. However when I run aground, and I do run aground, I always go back to haiku and the beautiful brevity there.

This edition is small, square, physical, and limited. Does the scale and material presence of a chapbook shape how you think about the work?

Being square and including drawings, Niche will ride the fine line between anomaly and the perfect next step. Small, physical and limited — just like spring ephemerals.

If a reader were to start with one poem in this collection, which would you suggest and why?

Either the first, “hero”, or the last, “the garden”. Like bookends, they are similar but are facing different directions. When reading a book of poetry new to me, I often start with the first and last poems. It’s like putting your arms around the whole.

Niche is available in a limited edition of 20 numbered copies. Each chapbook is printed on recycled paper. Copies can be pre-ordered through the press site. Pre-orders include four hand-cut A6 mini broadsides featuring cover artwork from Ford Dagenham's previous Analog Submission Press chapbooks — Bungalow Music, Brevity Post Vol.1, Brevity Post Vol.2, and Wire in the Glass. Printed on assorted coloured card stock. Reverse is blank, hand-stamped with the Analog Submission Press mark.

Launches 20 May.

Pre-order here →