DarkWinter Press New Release: little town blues by Paul Robert Mullen

DarkWinter Press is happy to announce our latest release, the poetry collection little town blues, by Paul Robert Mullen, available now on Amazon in paperback and e-version for Kindle! You can buy it here!

About little town blues:

little town blues documents Paul Robert Mullen walking the crumbling streets of post-everything Britain with his eyes wide open. This poetry is rooted in places most people overlook: towns running on fumes, where shop shutters speak louder than slogans and silence says everything.

Chip wrappers are relics. Omens, even. The promenade is both graveyard and altar. Mullen writes like someone who’s lived it. These poems burn slow, full of scuffed tenderness. They hum with the unsaid: desire, regret, routine, the weight of being seen and unseen all at once. No forced lyricism. No reach for highbrow relevance. That’s not Mullen’s style. What he offers is stripped-back truth, delivered with forensic care. Think faded seaside towns, charity shops on life support, lost boys in football tops haunting pub corners.

Advance Praise for little town blues:

"little town blues is a love letter to what’s left behind, a record of survival in the face of cultural neglect."

-Alan Parry, Lecturer, EIC of The Broken Spine & author of Neon Ghosts and Peeling Apples

"The salty brine coastline of little town blues is grainy. Sand dunes buffer memories not yet set out to sea and dogs everywhere bark at the shoreline as if to retrieve the town’s former luster, now governed by recall, a ragman, and “a council of ghosts” that Paul Robert Mullen brings to life in this beautifully spumed collection. Here street corners become graveyards for chairs stacked like tombstones, and widows pin curtains back to let in the “north of northern” day. With imagery as fresh as an ocean breeze, Paul walks us, lyrically, past coffee shops, penny arcades, grand hotels, and historic sites that lay claim to Southport. He dusts off their once-lived charming lives to reveal their places in the nook-and-cranny landscape of his youth. And he does it with a poignancy that extends well beyond nostalgia or lament. Really, this is more of a homage to the little town(s) that raised him."

-Karen Pierce Gonzalez, American Poet & Author of Moon kissed, Earth wrought, Vision drunk & Down River with Li Po

"little town blues is an eclectic topography of those small communities across the UK that continue to empty out into urbanity. Victorian promenades, Covid slain high streets, fairgrounds and hotels in decline. With a deft, perceptive hand Mullen catalogs these wee towns, their people and haunts and indomitable hearts in what you couldn’t mistake as anything but a labor of love."

-Jay Rafferty — Irish Poet & Author of Holy Things & All That’s Between Us Is Time

About The Author:

Paul Robert Mullen is a poet, writer, musician, radio presenter, podcast host, lecturer, traveller and sociable loner from Southport, near Liverpool, England. He is the co-founder and now regular contributor of The Broken Spine, an internationally acclaimed press, and a widely published writer across a vast array of international magazines, journals, e-zines and anthologies. He has published seven collections of poetry, including his magnum opus: it’s all come down to this: a retrospective [selected poems & writings 1999-2024], which came out in 2024.