Housmans and both are worse are delighted to be launching two new excellent essay collections, Training Exercises by Danny Hayward and Kingfisher by Matthew Goulish. ‘both are worse‘ publish short prose books that make an engaging comment on the state of poetry and/or poetics, stretches some horizons, pushes out beyond an impasse, heaps up obstructions, or makes life more difficult or liveable in any way that seems compelling, vital, or beautiful. Studies of single authors, histories of communities or forms, manifestos, treatises on metre, philosophies of phonation, provocations of every stripe and blotch, dream diaries, long jokes, spreadsheets or inscrutable swirls of one-dimensional Venn diagrams are all possible: anything that works.