Throughout this collection, opposites collide — reality and delusion, political activism and apathy, friend and enemy, life and death. These poems cut away at convention and simmer with unsettling, dramatic images. Ironic and humorous, complex and engaging, you can't do without The Opposite of Cabbage.

Rob A. Mackenzie was born in Glasgow. He studied law and then abandoned the possibility of significant personal wealth by switching to theology. He spent a year in Seoul, eight years in Lanarkshire, five years in Turin, and now lives in Edinburgh where he organises the Poetry at the Great Grog reading series. His pamphlet collection The Clown of Natural Sorrow, was published by HappenStance Press in 2005 and he blogs at Surroundings.

At the heart of Andrew Philip's wide-ranging first collection is a beautiful and deeply moving exploration of loss and discovery. Philip addresses the death of his first child with intense, tender, inquisitive poetry, alive to the wonder as well as the hurt of the world we inhabit.

Andrew Philip was born in Aberdeen in 1975 and grew up near Falkirk. He lived in Berlin for a short spell in the 1990s before studying linguistics at Edinburgh University. He has published two poetry pamphlets with HappenStance Press — Tonguefire (2005) and Andrew Philip: A Sampler (2008) — and was chosen as a Scottish Poetry Library New Voice in 2006. The Ambulance Box is his first book of poems.