The annual book of poetry from the Forward Arts Foundation, The Forward Book of Poetry 2025 has now been released and it was our pleasure again, to design the epub version of the book.
As written about in other previous posts on the yearly Forward ebook, making poetry work properly in epub is always something of a task. The structure of some poems definitely make them read better in a fixed layout format, but Forward prefer the ebooks to be in flowable format. This helps a great deal with accessibility, as text can be increased or decreased to a size suitable to the reader (whereas fixed only has pinch and zoom); but increasing font size (or even changing the font style) does mean that some lines will break, ruining the poets preferred structure. But this year, to our pleasant surprise, none of the poems had odd styling that required new coding beyond what we had already in our CSS.
Perhaps the only poem to give a little trouble was Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return by CAConrad, and this was only due to the positioning of the poem. In the print version, the first stanza is fixed to the bottom of the page. Whilst in a flowable epub this can work at lower font sizes, the moment a reader increases font size, the last few lines would be pushed onto a newer page, creating a huge amount of whitespace. With permission from Forward, we simply got around this by positioning the poem nearer the top
We are not great readers of poetry here at Ninja Beaver. Politics or history is more on our bookshelves these days (along with far too many graphic novels), and modern poetry does seem to be a bit obsessed with bodily fluids. But every year of the Forward Book of Poetry does bring forth a few poems that we find challenging or fun – What I Mean When I Say He Went Peacefully by Kelly Micheals was one such poem. That did resonate.
Included again this year was the Jerwood Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed. This is for poems not actually in the print or epub version of the book, but performed by the poets via YouTube. Again, a QR code in the print version led readers to the Forward site with the videos and the epub version did the same, but also with links to each of the poems separately or the main Forward site. The QR code in the epub was also made clickable, just in case people were reading the ebook on their mobile phones and not able to scan.
As said, to work on the book per year is a pleasure and a challenge. It is one that we hope will continue.
The Forward Book of Poetry 2025 from The Forward Arts Foundation and published by Faber is available now in print from all good bookshops and online from Amazon.
