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Releasing 2026.
Some books feel like an open wound.
Here, set down in exquisite poetry, is a young man’s story told with such devastating intimacy that reading The Map of My Vanishing feels like an act of trespassing - for inside is one’s own exposed and beating heart.
Our protagonist’s journey begins brightly – a young boy standing at the edge of the world, eager and expectant, studying its beauty, revelling in the potential within himself. But drenched in feeling, he finds our world a violent home. Slowly, the body weakens, and the mind turns inward.
What follows is both brutal and beautiful: a spectacle of suffering, a study in soul, poetry as both wound and salve. The autopsy is performed in devastating precision; deeply personal, and in so being, strikingly universal. At once painful and breath-taking: The protagonist’s journey through joy, loss, and self-doubt will leave you changed.
In clear reverence for the writers who raised him – Plath, Sexton, Nabokov, Woolf, Pessoa – James transforms his most private journals into a study of the modern mind at its most honest. It feels like a diary that was never meant to be shared. The Map of My Vanishing is fearless; this is poetry that does not flinch.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard James is a British poet whose work interrogates melancholy, identity, and existence through an enchanting confessional style. Inheriting the tradition shaped by Plath, Woolf, and Sexton, James’ poetry uses formal precision and emotional intensity to reshape private experience into a universal meditation on living and peace, and articulating a contemporary queer perspective that is both unflinching and necessary.
Releasing 2026.
Some books feel like an open wound.
Here, set down in exquisite poetry, is a young man’s story told with such devastating intimacy that reading The Map of My Vanishing feels like an act of trespassing - for inside is one’s own exposed and beating heart.
Our protagonist’s journey begins brightly – a young boy standing at the edge of the world, eager and expectant, studying its beauty, revelling in the potential within himself. But drenched in feeling, he finds our world a violent home. Slowly, the body weakens, and the mind turns inward.
What follows is both brutal and beautiful: a spectacle of suffering, a study in soul, poetry as both wound and salve. The autopsy is performed in devastating precision; deeply personal, and in so being, strikingly universal. At once painful and breath-taking: The protagonist’s journey through joy, loss, and self-doubt will leave you changed.
In clear reverence for the writers who raised him – Plath, Sexton, Nabokov, Woolf, Pessoa – James transforms his most private journals into a study of the modern mind at its most honest. It feels like a diary that was never meant to be shared. The Map of My Vanishing is fearless; this is poetry that does not flinch.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard James is a British poet whose work interrogates melancholy, identity, and existence through an enchanting confessional style. Inheriting the tradition shaped by Plath, Woolf, and Sexton, James’ poetry uses formal precision and emotional intensity to reshape private experience into a universal meditation on living and peace, and articulating a contemporary queer perspective that is both unflinching and necessary.