the coloured books

Monday Night at Home

Judy Kravis

You’re listening to Monday Night at Home with Thom Katch, the Dengie arm of The Rather Loose Broadcasting Corporation, his feet facing east, his shoes in the bin, the door ajar, coming to you every Monday from St Mary’s Chapel in the Dengie Hundreds, a listed building in a numbered marsh. We’re on our own here as never before. On a Monday night there’s nothing on nothing off, nothing pending. I feel most like myself on a Monday. I reach into the bag, no commitment, the way on a Tuesday I’d hesitate and by Wednesday I might be raving.

The thirteenth in the coloured book series by Judy Kravis

48pp, perfect bound, 105 x 148 mm, pbk, numbered edition of 201, September 2025

Out on a Limb

Judy Kravis

what does it mean
when you try to grow mint and fail?
what are the basic conditions
for cultivating an invasive plant?
if you fail to meet them
who are you?

The twelfth in the coloured book series by Judy Kravis, an episodic, poetic continuum of observations, questions and dreams.

48pp, perfect bound, 105 x148mm,pbk, numbered edition of 301,
June 2024

How to talk to the inspector

Judy Kravis

What is a stakeholder?
What is a trustee?
Why are you nervous?
Why are we angry?

Confronted with the prospect of 85,000 square metres of solar panels on top of the hill where she lives, a poet/gardener learns how to face off an inspector, a fat boy and a gombeen man in language they can parse, while trying to find her feet, her hands and her words on the land she has tended for many years.

48pp, perfect bound, 105 x 148mm, pbk, numbered edition of 301,
May 2021

These Women

Judy Kravis

These women slip into a space you didn’t know was there, they see shadows where there isn’t even light. Thirty-four swift texts scan the insights and generosity of everyday encounters—in shops, around the home patch, along the road, in town.

48pp, perfect bound, 105x148mm, pbk, numbered edition of 301,
October 2018

oranges in finland

Judy Kravis

Forty-three dreams. Forty-three mornings. Write after breakfast, before the dream disappears. Revise in the evening with the day’s weather, the day’s plot woven in. This is what I do to refresh, like Yuri Geller with a spoon or Federer with a backhand.

48pp, perfect bound, 105 x 148mm, pbk, numbered edition of 300,
May 2016

inside barbara kitten

Judy Kravis

What is Barbara Kitten? Who is she? Candid and cryptic, wilful and funny, with an intense inner life, a well-cultivated garden and an alter ego who keeps a diary. Together, in 150 breathless paragraphs, each just under 6 lines long, they traverse a year of drama and dailiness.
The first volume of the second series of the coloured books.

48pp, perfect bound, 108 x 148mm, pbk, numbered edition of 301,
January 2014

flashes and floaters

Judy Kravis

In the seventh volume of the coloured books, twenty-nine flashes and floaters run across the mind’s eye, flash fiction or less, leaving an unexpected taste and an uneasy murmur somewhere east of satisfaction. A patois for the inner life, and the outer. Sit down, she says, and register the slight palpitation, the light tremolo of where you are now.

48pp, perfect bound, 102 x 148mm, pbk, numbered edition of 301,
October 2012

strangeness

Judy Kravis

Strangeness is a property of some of the more exotic elementary tales, whose lifetime before decay is millions of times greater than expected. A sequence of headlong, breathless, heightened and rooted poems.

48pp, perfect bound, 102 x 148mm, pbk, numbered edition of 201.
October 2011

local

Judy Kravis

Down the hill, where solitude ends and the market place begins; round the hill, the conundrum of the gooseberry people; up the hill, the judge’s horse listens to Fidelio; inside the hill, MacCruiskeen reads the cracks in the ceiling. These are the practico-inert conditions.

48pp, perfect bound, 102 x 148mm, pbk, numbered edition of 301.
October 2011

how to write round things

Judy Kravis

Swift absorption, moments of unease, the state of play on the day, inside and out, knowing life by the days she writes, losing it by the days that get away.

48pp, perfect bound, 102 x 148mm, pbk, numbered edition of 201,
October 2010

the pataphysics of making bread

Judy Kravis

What the baker sees when she kneads, what she hears on the radio, her lurking stories and idle thoughts. At the centre, the morphing loaf. Different yet the same, week by week. With sourdough recipe.

48pp, perfect bound, 102 x 148mm, pbk, numbered edition of 201,
October 2009

bunch of monads

Judy Kravis

One packed universe after another, tiny separate adventures, a high-end hum, intermittent, like morse code. Companion volume to Tell the bees. Another breathless diary zone, in poem form. A monad is the simplest knowable unit of life. Like atoms, only bigger and older.

48pp, perfect bound, 102 x 148mm, pbk , numbered edition of 201.
October 2007

tell the bees

Judy Kravis

‘It would take one bee, working all hours, eight years to make a pound of honey.’ The diary of a writer, teacher, gardener, beekeeper on the eve of a new life. For the diarist with book and pen, unlike the online blogger, it’s a curious move to make the private public. Tell the bees is a tiny novel in which inner life meets everyday life – and ten thousand bees.

48pp, perfect bound, 102 x 148mm, pbk, numbered edition of 201. 
October 2007

the coloured books box set

Judy Kravis

Begun in 2007, the coloured books are the voice of a woman having her say: keeping bees, baking bread, examining local habitats in poetry, diary and narrative. Here is the state of play on the day, inside and out, one packed universe after another, breathless, rooted, cerebral and funny. Each book will fit in shirt pocket. To read on the bus or while stirring the risotto.

106 x 154 x 26mm. Boxed set of 7 volumes: flashes and floaters, local, strangeness, how to write round things, the pataphysics of making bread, bunch of monads, tell the bees. Boreen books, 2007 – 2012

sold out