You don’t believe in God anymore, but you do believe in Joe.

Join us at EBB for the launch of Galia Admoni’s new book: *Somebody Should Have Pressed Record*, published by Bristol-based press Strange Region. Readings by the author and discussion with poet and novelist Nell Osborne

*Somebody Should Have Pressed Record* is an experimental, narrative poem depicting a woman navigating an emotionally fraught relationship with an imaginary version of Joseph Gilgun (Brassic, Misfits, This is England).

This collection depicts life at the frayed edge of reality, where loneliness grows legs and fingers. Where our intractable desire for companionship leaves stains on the walls, dirt under the nails, and a warm spot in the bed.

Drawing inspiration from the auto-destructive art movement and existentialist fiction, Admoni paints a wild-eyed portrait of modern romance and asks the question: what do we owe to the people we create?

Praise for *Somebody Should Have Pressed Record*

 I’m a long-time fan of Galia’s potent, surprising, fearless and funny work. She’s manipulating and blending forms to create an entirely singular voice and I love to hear it.
- Max Porter (Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny)

 *Somebody Should Have Pressed Record* is a brilliant, caustically funny meditation on lost love and impermanence via the most unhelpful simulacrum of a lover in the form of Joe. But it also reminds us that so much of love is an act of imagination. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever read a collection simultaneously quite so heart-breaking and quite so enjoyable. It’s an urgent kind of invention – a search for the lost key, the right analogy that might make the pain go away; a shockingly familiar refusal to accept that the sadness is what it is; but the intensity of imagination sufficient to create a thousand reasons why it just might possibly be something else entirely.
- Luke Kennard (Black Bag, The Book of Jonah)

 A fascinating and formally inventive text which seems to constantly disintegrate and remake itself before the readers’ eyes; using as its materials the everyday surreal of real life.
- Andrew McMillan (Pity, Physical, Playtime)

 Inventive, tender, dazzlingly original, this collection examines what it means to ‘archive loneliness’, to speak when it seems impossible and to be answered. Once you’re in the world of this book, you’ll want to stay.
- Helen Mort (Division Street, Black Car Burning)

 Galia Admoni creates beautiful, tender poems. Hers is a voice for the fragile, a completely new take on unrequited love, observations of privacy and invention, blending the real world and fantasy, delivering a quiet stoicism that makes this collection a page-turner as you realise you are spending time with someone you are rooting for, wanting to know more about the voice you are seeing on the page. This collection is vital for the world we live in today and delivers a quiet lyrical hope.
- John Osborne (Most People Aren’t That Happy Anyway)

In Galia Admoni’s latest collection, she experiments with form as she has in her previous books, but here she experiments with where we, the readers, are taken, just as she experiments with the sense that she knows more about her readers than she lets on. Here, she creates the perfect balance between claustrophobia, a strange sense of foreboding, and the beauty of love in isolation. Admoni’s writing reflects an ability to slip between form, image, page, obsession, and yet, always surprise the reader in where she takes us. I was fascinated with the diagrams in the book as poems in themselves, and the self-questioning of is this how I am?
Through Admoni’s sense of humour, her use of contemporary surrealism, her observation of compulsion as a study results in an addictive read, leaving the reader to consider: Is the act of reading the book, an example of Auto-Destructive art which frames the book’s narrative? Galia Admoni’s latest collection, *Somebody Should Have Pressed Record*, left me feeling as if I was in a surreal version of Through the Keyhole. This unrest she creates in the book though, is one of joy, and through its multi-form, the collection moves between loneliness, obsession, rooms in a flat, and how this thing called love man-ifests itself into our own lives.
- Wendy Allen (Portrait in Mustard, Plastic Tubed Little Bird)

Nobody pressed record - but if they did what would they have captured? Imaginary friend, figment, daemon - or nothing but stale bedsit air? With pinpoint precision, Galia Admoni slits a hole through feminine city life and slips in an imaginary Joseph Gilgun. Her conjured companion twists to several forms across the collection - lover, father, conscience, ghost and ruin. Together, Galia and her daydreamed sidekick give shape to absence and stare deep into the illusions we show ourselves in order to survive. Nobody pressed record, but this is a collection I’ll rewind and press play on again and again.
- Laurie Eaves (Biceps, Metal Gear Sonnets)

Bios

Galia Admoni is the author of *Sad boys are not my kink* (Dunlin Press, 2025), *Immediately after and then later* (Black Cat Press, 2024) and co-author of *I get lost everywhere, you know this now* (Salo Press, 2024) and *Art Sundays* (Salo Press, 2025). She has poems in Prototype 6, The Rialto, The North and elsewhere. She is also the Head of English at a secondary school in London.

Nell Osborne is a poet, novelist and researcher of experimental writing. In 2024, she published a poetry pamphlet, *Thank You For Everything*, with Monitor Books and co-edited, *Gestures: a body of work*, a cross-disciplinary anthology on gesture and feminist practice, published with MUP. Her first novel, *Ghost Driver*, came out in 2025 with Moist.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less