Modern and contemporary poetry

This new gift edition is a must-have for Pam's many fans - and for anyone who enjoys beautifully crafted stories and poems to make you laugh and make you think.Pam Ayres is one of our most widely-adored poets throughout the world and is nothing less than a national treasure. Her work is popular with fans of all ages, and her wry observations on the peculiarities of modern life will raise a smile from even the most hardened cynic.

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Book Synopsis'Someone recently said to me, in reference to my poetry podcast, that you'd think poetry would be more popular than ever, in the twenty-first century, because people don't have a lot of time and 'novels are often quite big while poems are often quite small'. I referred them to Doctor Who's Tardis.'Frank Skinner wants you to read more poetry. Wait, wait - don't stop reading. Whether you're a frequent poetry reader or haven't read any since sixth form, Frank's infectious passion for language, rhythm and metre will win you over and provide you with the basic tools you need to tackle any poem.In this short, easy-to-digest and delightful book, Frank guides us through the twists and turns of 'Pad, pad' by Stevie Smith, a short, seemingly simple poem that contains multitudes of meaning and a deceptive depth of emotion. Revel in the mastery of Stevie Smith's choice of words, consider the eternal mystery of the speaker of the poem and be moved by rhyming couplets like you never have before.Give it a go. You never know, you might even enjoy it.

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Book SynopsisCBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN SPRING 2023Feminist poems both serious and absurd that question our obsession with productivity instead of with care. Continuity Errors questions the privileging of work and productivity over rest and care from an ecological and feminist perspective. Written before and immediately after the birth of her first child, these poems try to imagine the future her son will inherit. Encounters with an unusual cast of characters – including lonely cryptids, unrepentant grifters, and persistent ghosts – provide incomplete answers, and while the continuity errors keep multiplying around her, Wright pauses to consider whether our devotion to innovation is keeping us stuck."Catriona Wright's Continuity Errors is a book of snaking moves and sneaking intellect, a book of style and fortitude and sass. Wright's always sharp and often eerie interrogations lead us through a world of cryptocurrency, grunt work, predictive policing, extinction, haute cuisine, billboard ads, smoke breaks, breast pumps; these are poems for our moment of onslaught and bewilderment that, having had the world forced down their throats, spit back." – Natalie Shapero, author of Popular LongingTrade Review"These feminist poems include the serious and the absurd and interrogate our collective obsession with productivity and work instead of with care. Wright’s lyric, prose, and persona poems are all located within the domestic sphere of childbirth and child care, using different voices to explore these issues." – Cassandra Drudi, Quill & Quire '2023 Spring Poetry Preview'"Capitalism, climate change, feminism and the gender binary — Catriona Wright’s Continuity Errors responds to these topics with dry humour and a vivid parade of aliens, robots, fae, and more though is still incredibly serious in its message." – Shaylyn Schwieg, CAROUSEL Magazine"Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright is excellent! I found the writing to be entrancing, truthful, and transformational." – Emma Sikora, Porter Square Books"Like a post-industrial feminist Rodney Dangerfield, the speaker in the poems of Continuity Errors can’t get no respect." – David Starkey, '31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2023,' The California Review of Books"The super real, feminist, and sharp-edged poems of Catriona Wright’s Continuity Errors are at turns an 'embodied presence / in virtual environments,' a 'fever / dream of escape,' a 'walk through the cemetery,' and 'a scathing assessment' of our time." – Jami Macarty, NewPages.com

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Book SynopsisWritten over three seasons in a Vermont cabin, these poems act as a reflecting pool, casting back mortality, consciousness, and time in new, crystal-clear light.Trade ReviewPraise for Ron Padgett “Padgett’s plainspoken, wry poems deliver their wisdom through a kind of connoisseurship of absurdity.” —New Yorker “Deeply pleasing to read.” —The Paris Review Daily “Wonderful, generous, funny poetry.” —John Ashbery “Reading Padgett one realizes that playfulness and lightness of touch are not at odds with seriousness. . . . As is often the case, leave it to the comic writer to best convey our tragic predicament.” —New York Review of Books “One of the motivations driving the poems is the poet’s desire for knowledge, which he pursues without making any grand claims for this yearning. It is Padgett’s craving that animates his writing, and keeps him alert to the small and easily dismissed moments that make up our everyday lives.” —Hyperallergic “Ron Padgett exposes the interconnectivity of past and present, the ways our conception of self is defined in relation to others, and how our inescapable sentience and use of language is what both connects and estranges us from the world around us.” —3:AM Magazine “Padgett exercises his poetic license with the purity of his intent despite the tongue in cheek sparkle of his eyes. Among the many adjectives used to describe Padgett’s poetry, the most telling is almost never used: subversive.” —Black Bart Poetry Society “The poet makes superlative use of the directive writing consciousness—often automatic pilot—to tap the unconscious for memory, vision, emotion, and the unexpected and indefinable. The poems speak backwards and forwards in time, to self, to family and friends, to poetic technique, to the birds caged in the chest. It is so lovely.” —Alice Notley “Ron Padgett makes the most quiet and sensible of feelings a provocatively persistent wonder.” —Robert Creeley “How to Be Perfect should remind us of how long Ron Padgett has managed to stay perfectly balanced on a tightrope of irony despite his verbal giddiness and the uproariousness of his imagination.” —Billy Collins “Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems is 810 pages long, and every page is a good time. . . . By turns (or all at once) sweet, hilarious, moving and mind-bogglingly imaginative. This book is for anyone who likes writing or who thinks it’s interesting to have a mind (or simply a forehead).” —Wall Street Journal, “12 Months of Reading: Richard Hell’s 2013 Picks” “This collection of poetry infuses life and images of nature. In entry after entry, I found rustic language and a voice worth noting.” —Dr. J Reads “Although it wasn’t a requirement for this award, I can think of no other poet I’ve read over the past 40 years who embodies Williams’s spirit and his great heart’s aesthetic. . . . I’m willing to put money on Padgett, in two or three generations (it takes that long) to be counted among the best poets of his generation, to be counted among the best American poets, period.” —Poetry Society “Coffee House Press has released a vehicle for everyday space travel: Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems. . . . Forty-five years after Great Balls of Fire, Padgett’s poems still fuel our capacity for joyful incomprehensibility and subsequent mobility of thought.” —Poetry Magazine

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Book Synopsis“Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it.” —DAN BEACHY-QUICK Taking its name from the Roman goddess of wisdom and her companion bird, Owl of Minerva turns astonishingly precise attention to the physical world, scouring it for evidence of the spiritual as the poet travels through such places as Appalachia, New England, Venice, Spain, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest. Along the way, Pankey ponders mortality, religious narratives and iconography, the continued press of childhood on the present, and the simultaneous violence and beauty of the natural world. At the book’s core are three ambitious poems titled “The Complete List of Everything,” which together offer an extended vision of American longing and connection—as well as a window into the sort of compendium of images and moments a sustained devotion to poetry can yield. “The hope was to construct // A coherent totality of meaning from odds / And ends,” Pankey writes, and so much of this book is about the difficult work of constructing meaning from the available material all around us. This book is an extraordinary example of lyric-meditative journaling—a large and profound collection by a brilliant poet writing at the height of his powers.

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Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2021 Housatonic Book Award in Poetry “The thin knife that severed your tumor,” writes Brooke Matson in these poems, “it cleaves me still.” What to do when a world is split—terribly, wholly—by grief? When the loss of the beloved undermines the most stable foundations, the most sacred spaces, of that world? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles themselves, all the knowns previously relied on: light, religion, physical matter, time? Often borrowing voices and perspectives from its scientific subjects, In Accelerated Silence investigates the multidimensional nature of grief and its blurring of boundaries—between what is present and what is absent, between what is real and imagined, between the promises of science and the mysteries of human knowing, and between the pain that never ends and the world that refuses to. The grieving and the seeking go on, Matson suggests, but there comes a day when we emerge, “now strong enough / to venture out of doors, thin // and swathed in a robe,” only to find it has continued “full and flourishing and larger than before.” Sensual and devastating, In Accelerated Silence—selected by Mark Doty as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize—creates an unforgettable portrait of loss full of urgency and heartache and philosophical daring.

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Book SynopsisA Library Journal Best Book of Poetry of 2021A collection born of polyphony and the rhythms of our cosmos—intimate in its stakes, celestial in its dreams.Tethered to Stars inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire. With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Fady Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human: “We are other worms / for other silk roads.” The solemn, the humorous, the erotic, the transcendent—all of it, in Joudah’s poems, steeped in the lexicon of the natural world. “When I say honey,” says one lover, “I’m asking you whose pollen you contain.” “And when I say honey,” replies another, “you grip my sweetness / on your life, stigma and anthophile.”Teeming with life but tinged with a sublime proximity to death, Tethered to Stars is a collection that flows “between nuance and essentialization,” from one of our most acclaimed poets.Trade ReviewPraise for Tethered to Stars“This is what we have had to do, amid pandemic, grief, political chaos, fires, human rights disasters: continue on with our lives. Doing chores … taking walks … teaching kids … trying to stay steady. In his brilliant forthcoming book, Tethered to Stars, Fady Joudah writes about the mysterious cosmos swirling with intricate linkages — as his phone is pinging. Ah, yes, Jerusalem, the Holy City! Right now, let’s call all our cities holy. Let’s hope our trees continue to communicate, whatever humans can or can’t accomplish.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, New York Times Magazine “True to its title, Joudah’s collection of poems musically connects the body to the Earth and the Earth to the stars . . . It’s earthy and ethereal, as we are.”—Houston Chronicle “Joudah centers his fifth poetry collection on the 12 star signs and other astrological phenomena, blending his physician's penchant for precision and the poet's ear for lyricism . . . What shines most brightly here is Joudah's ability to render extended imagery that plays out over several poems. An uprooted oak in one poem creates a place to plant olive pits in another. Dandelion and sunflower florets populate the pages. Butterflies lay eggs in lemon trees and enchant speakers from afar . . . Another stellar entry in this poet's expansive body of work.”—Booklist “This is a treatise on cosmic unity that does not shy away from grief, but that yearns for the immense, abstract sense of possibility, believing that ‘a heart remains a heart in its beyond’ . . . The clarity of Joudah’s imagery is countered by a complex choral voice that feels at turns analytical and biblical in its rise and fall. Each poem seems to be spoken from various perspectives, the roving voices echoing and replacing one another in their observations until both the speaker and addressee dissolve. ‘You’ll be everywhere,’ one poem closes. Joudah offers a nuanced vision of what connects man to the cosmos in this deeply searching book.”—Publishers Weekly “The poems in this brilliant book themselves stand beside our own sadnesses and grow large in our imaginations, like trees. . . These poems, many among Joudah’s finest so far, are as intimate as the night sky.”—McSweeney’s “So much of Tethered to Stars grapples with what is difficult to understand. From the nature of stars to racial tension, mortality, and his own cultural heritage, Joudah uses his lyricism to attempt to uncover life's mysteries. This collection deals with these complex and inexplicable topics, and yet it does so in a way that never abandons its tenderness, curiosity, and admiration for the beauty of the world.”—The West Review “The poems in Fady Joudah’s Tethered to Stars reflect a poet’s pinnacle, where readers experience the vision of a virtuosic poet who possesses multiple registers and allusive riches, transforming them into a polyphonic symphony.”—Deema K. Shehabi, Michigan Quarterly Review Praise for Fady Joudah “Joudah’s poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”—The Guardian “A luminous aesthete who thinks in nuance, in refinements.”—Louise Glück “Joudah has been writing essential poetry for some time . . . forging a lyric that works at the crosscurrents of reportage, myth, and dream where falsely imagined boundaries―of gender, nation, family―fray and unfold. . . . Joudah’s gifts for articulating the intersections of bewilderment, tenderness, rage, and grief are fully alive.”―Mary Szybist “If you love poetry, or simply wonder what powerful poetry is and what it can do for you, then the poems of Fady Joudah are waiting for you.”—Rowan Ricardo Phillips “With a quiet certainty, Joudah names those ordinary things that hold everything in focus, grounded in a fabular mystery that resonates in the twenty-first century.”—Yusef Komunyakaa “Joudah’s poems defy classification, not because they perplex, but because of their remarkable power of synthesis. His mode is the lyric, with its concinnity and necessary music, but his lyrics compress, contain and then liberate the matter of narrative: allegory, fable, folktale, parable, documentary. He is a superb, seductive storyteller.”—Marilyn Hacker “Joudah examines his subject with an eye both clinical and caring, alert to the symptoms we don’t recognize or won’t admit we have. His language is like crystal: patterned, prismatic, sharp.”—Evie Shockley “Joudah is uniquely capable of crafting language that moves fluidly between lyrical abstraction and clinical precision . . . Like the stars its title invokes, Joudah’s latest is mysterious and ruminative.”—Library Journal, Starred Review “Joudah’s mission is perhaps to spiritualize our minds, and to catch the heart in its deepest modes of thinking, and the outcome is lyric of the highest order.”―Khaled Mattawa “Joudah uses language both rich and fiercely honed to consider the sweeping universe and our sometimes troublesome place in it.”—Library Journal “A doctor, Joudah reads bodies like texts, illuminating their stories . . . [and] bringing a loving precision to his descriptions.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune“Joudah’s poems are driven by a delight in all aspects of language. . . . [This] is the work of a restless poetic mind whose inventive and capacious poems bring wonder and skepticism and incandescent language to bear on questions of human experience.”—The Rumpus “Supple . . . We often say that poetry transforms, but Joudah’s verse also transports.”—The Millions “Joudah is a remarkable poet of great intellect and vision. . . . [His] thought-provoking and imaginative juxtapositions shine.”—Arkansas International

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Book SynopsisFrom Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a “child who won’t ever get born”: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. “You think your one life precious—”And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces “inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us.” And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. “Don’t worry, baby,” Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. “We’re okay.”Trade Review“Fagan leans into descriptions of the world that pay tribute to what it is, not what it could or might be. ‘How will I choose,’ she writes, ‘between Heaven & Sorry.’ This vibrant book resides in that in-between, honoring the loss that comes with love.”—Publishers Weekly"I drank Kathy Fagan's Bad Hobby down in one gulp, as I suspect you will, Reader. I can't imagine that anyone could set this book down with poems still unread. Fagan's subject is loss—the death of one parent, the receding of the other into dementia's distances: 'I said like, as in: like we kill time. / I mean metaphor, as when time kills us back.' 'The art of losing,' as Bishop wrote, is mastered here with intelligence, wit, tenderness, and a blending of the personal, historical, and etymological. Reader, prepare yourself for wonderment. Take time. Drink up."—Maggie Smith“Bad Hobby is an exquisite and excruciating book of continual epiphany and insight. The poems are gorgeous, or they’re stony, or they’re both; they astutely examine caregiving, memory-making, the inscrutability of childhood, the inscrutability of old age, and how on earth to exist in between. In this tenuous time, I’m so grateful for Fagan’s brilliant excavations of hospitals and pastures and classrooms and dreamscapes and how a body learns to live and to die.”—Natalie Shapero“The poems of Bad Hobby seem familiar because they are familiar. We recognize ourselves in these lines and stories. We see ourselves as children, adults, and the elderly.”—Tweet Speak BlogPraise for Sycamore“It’s hard not to fall in love with this book, with its bravado and vulnerability. Kathy Fagan’s mind is endless with depth and truth—her thoughts like songs, her heart and wit twin birds flying in the air of the pages, landing on the tree limbs of her lines. How fierce and immense to imagine living in her grove of sycamores, hardy, odd, and gorgeous. There, we are bigger than ourselves—we are each other too, living and remembering within each other’s shadows, limbs, sky. Sycamore is a book a reader clutches to her chest, eyes closed for a moment in bliss and recognition.”—Brenda Shaughnessy“Sycamore is a complex and layered poetic consideration of the mortality of relationships, of the body, of eros, and, most generally, of the moments in time we momentarily inhabit. These are timeless poetic themes, but what Kathy Fagan does with them is stunningly original. From the cryptic and fascinating ‘Platanaceae Family Tree’ that opens the book, Sycamore is erudite and referential and nonetheless consistently welcoming as we navigate Fagan’s inventive structures and nuanced wordplay. This collection gives us a full view of the human heart and mind simultaneously in action.”—Wayne Miller“Kathy Fagan’s poems are pitiless, sensual, mythic, and steeped in elucidative mystery. I admire her sleek armor of language and landscape: she may ‘dress defensively’; however, ‘all that pristine weather / and footwear later to discover: dead is still dead.’ Fagan’s sleights of hand reveal yet withhold, out of mercy, hard-won beauty and pain: ‘Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more.’ Sycamore is one of the most inventive, vulnerable, and moving collections I have read in years.”—Randall Mann“Kathy Fagan’s poems burn like halos, and if sycamores could bow, they would bend to kiss her hands for rendering them in such haunting light, in such daring reach. Don’t miss this beautiful, knowing book.”—Barbara Ras“Sycamore, Fagan’s dynamic fifth collection of poems, explores the loss of a loved one through the singular and deeply personal voice of one woman and, in so doing, evokes the gut-wrenching effects of grief through vibrant, ever-evolving images culled from the natural world.” —Kenyon Review“Sycamore delights as much in its close inspection of the natural world as it does in the auditory pleasures of its language. ‘Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more,’ the speaker recites, and we know we are in the hands of a gifted word master. ‘Though they are not a choir . . . not Kabuki,; the trees become a temporary stand in for love, for her ‘amours,’ providing the solace and steadiness necessary to stage a rebirth.”—Boston Review“Sycamore burns like ice, with a seemingly cool crystalline surface nonetheless hot to the touch. . . . Fagan’s flinty, well-crafted poems abound with texture and verve, and make an excellent companion for meteorological or existential cold snaps.”—Publishers Weekly“Fagan erects a veritable forest in her fifth collection. Austere and elegant, the first poems call forth a cold, still world inhabited by ghosts. . . . Still, though, there is substantial hope. Trees grow, emotions thicken, and, structurally, poems melt: shorter, tenser lines ultimately give way to sprawling ones.”—BooklistTable of Contents1 Dedicated Forest Stray Animal Prudence Cooper’s Hawk Farm Evening in the Blue Smoke At the Champion Avenue Low-Income Senior & Child Care Services Center AccuWeather: Real Feel Keelson Dahlia Foreshortening Cognition My Father Bad Hobby 2 Empire Fountain The Rule of Three Helvetica Omphalos The Ghost on the Handle Predator Satiation AccuWeather: Episodes of Sunshine The Supreme Farewell of Handkerchiefs Birds Are Public Animals of Capitalism Personal Item The Children “Where I Am Going”/“I Dare to Live” Topless Mint Morning 3 Latecomer What Kind of Fool Am I Conqueror School AccuWeather: Windy, with Clouds Breaking Window Trace Wisdom Aftermath My Mother Ohio Spring Jingo Snow Moon & the Dementia Unit Scarlet Experiment Lucky Star Inactive Fault, with Echoes Notes Acknowledgments

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Book Synopsistender gravity charts Marybeth Holleman’s quest for relationship to the more-than-human world, navigating her childhood in North Carolina to her life in Alaska, with deep time in remote land and seascapes. Always the focus is on what can be found by attention to the world beyond her own human skin, what can be found there as she negotiates loss—the loss of beloved places, wild beings, her younger brother. “do not think,” she says to her mother, “that i love a bear more than my brother. / think instead that i cannot distinguish / the variations in / the beat of a heart.” Inevitably, solace is found in the wild world: “step back toward that joy-sap rising, step back / into the only world that is.” In a narrative arc of seeking, falling, and finding, we hear in Holleman’s exquisitely attentive immersion clear reverberations of Mary Oliver, of Linda Hogan, of Walt Whitman. These poems of grief and celebration pulse in and out, reaching to the familiar moon and out to orphan stars of distant galaxies, then pull close to a small brown seabird and an on-the-knees view of a tiny bog plant.Trade Review"The poems range from kayak-level considerations of ocean life to close looks at a wetland sundew to views of the moon, comets, and the cosmos. They are, however, more than observations and celebrations of nature; they interrogate questions of life and death, responsibility to human and non-human beings, and the contradictions we all live with. "—Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News"Again and again Holleman interrogates humanity’s preoccupation with itself, panning out to remind us that the larger world does not bother itself over these momentary matters. However, there is also a delicate emotional undercurrent running through tender gravity—Holleman is not simply reminding us about the death of glaciers and the warming of the planet. Gradually the poet permits a small glimpse into a personal tragedy—the loss of her brother, a victim of gun violence—and it becomes clear that she is taking solace in this larger sense of cosmic indifference." -- Erica Reid, The Colorado Review

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Book SynopsisAt times scorching, at times brimming with awe and desire, this debut book of poems resonates with a brilliant new voice.When Justine Chan worked as a park ranger at Zion National Park, she chose to retell a Southern Paiute folktale for her weekly evening program on coyotes. The more that long, hot summer unfolded, the more time she spent alone in the desert, the more she retold the story, the more the story became her life. And in that space, she began to write.Should You Lose All Reason(s) is unafraid of looking hard– back, down, towards, around, forward, at the stories we tell, at herself, at the desert, at the sun, at everything. In conversation with the Southern Paiute folktale, she weaves together a triptych of poems, poems both always on the move and stuck, in exile, in wilderness. Drawing from her experiences serving in AmeriCorps, working as a park ranger, and traveling across the United States, she explores race, loneliness, stories, hauntings, family, landscapes and cityscapes, climate change, survival, music, resilience, the West, and America itself.Trade ReviewJustine Chan's long poetic narrative, Should You Lose All Reason(s), embraces a search for belonging in an American landscape and in an American family with linguistic force, passion, and love. People talk about identity all the time, but Chan shows us how to occupy it and hold it in your heart.–Shawn Wong, author of American Knees Justine Chan's poems are epic-sized, much like the sweeping, cinematic landscapes she writes about. I'm always on the lookout for diverse, alternative experiences about "The West." Multi-storied and multidimensional, where myths come to life and people turn into stars, Chan's imaginarium is dazzling.–Tiffany Midge, author of The Woman Who Married a Bear Justine Chan's beautiful book, Should You Lose All Reason(s), howls with song, with nourishment, with "bright red bougainvillea spilling over fences." Through the power of Chan's anaphora, these poems echo across lush landscapes, with "ladders made of juniper trunks." Chan's lines ask us to wonder and wander, pulling us into visceral ecologies and mythologies that echo with parenthetical ache: "(Sometimes) I (still) can't shake it." As a fellow Asian American poet, I found this a collection that asks us to look, especially at ourselves – and with a tenderness that we are not often given.–Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City Justine Chan's debut collection is a mesmerizing tour of the vacancy and fullness across and between deserts and cities. A rapid and exciting lyrical chronicling, the book holds close questions on individualism and family, stasis and movement, flight and loss. It is a humble, acute call towards relationships and how each of us are always near to some and far from others.–Greg Bem, author of Of Spray and Mist Justine Chan's Should You Lose All Reason(s) is an aching and exhaustive elegy. The poems in this gripping debut seem to suggest if you can just name it, it won't be lost.–francine j. harris, author of Here is the Sweet Hand

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Book SynopsisA Plucked Zither explores what happens to language and thus emotions and relationships under conditions of migration, specifically refugee migration from Vietnam, and its aftermath. Crisscrossing between making a home in the U.S. and home in Vietnam, the speaker tries non-linear, multilingual voice(s) that demonstrates the disparate nature of memory and the operation of other ways of knowing. Efforts to speak reflect the severing created by historical forces of war and imperialism, while speaking makes connection possible and remains tied to that very history. Vuong leans on the anti-war Vietnamese singer and songwriter, Trịnh Công Sơn, for a poetic lineage on grief, longing, and justice. Rather than being sunken with loss, the speaker(s) move with it, leaping across gaps.Trade Review"In this work of poetry, Vuong unbinds what gets lost while carrying the aftermath from Vietnamese voices that have been longing to breathe after the disruption from wars, migration, and silence. In other words, through the trajectory of these poems, Vuong’s speaker processes and dwells on the migrant’s emotional experience. These poems cross paths with images on how migration distances mothers from their children and how that separation creates not only a familial distance, but an origin distance from a migrant’s birth land." — Emily Velasquez, Soapberry Review"A Plucked Zither is a bold collection where Vuong presents an "anti-map" of herself and of the children of Vietnamese migrants. Vuong's poems demonstrate how the shared experiences of the 1.5 and second generations of Vietnamese Americans continue to "make and remake" them—they are not so easily defined, whether by white America, their relatives, or in their personal turmoil to define their own relationship to Vietnam." —Cathy Duong, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network"Poems like these are as two-sided as Vuong's title instrument: zither plucked and plucked, played upon and snatched away. For every touch of warmth and musicality, she admits something of the unknown or apparitional." — Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation

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Book SynopsisPoems considering self, masculinity, and culture through the spectacle of professional wrestling. In this stunning debut, John Belk looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs. Belk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus “Buff” Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us. The Gardens of Our Childhoods is the winner of Autumn House Press’s Rising Writer Prize in Poetry. Trade Review"In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, Belk transfers the Bard's comment that 'All the world's a stage' from the theater's stage to the comic, violent, vulnerable, and wild ring of WrestleMania. This is a book of searching, tender, open, moments. Life is beautiful but not without its dangers. Belk knows this is true and does a fine job guiding us down the garden path." -- Matthew Dickman, author of Wonderland"To say that the bulk of these splendid poems is about pro wrestling is to say that Robert Frost wrote mainly about sound agricultural practices. When Belk says that seeing a gladiator’s spectacular move is like being kissed unexpectedly by someone you have a crush on, he reminds us how life and art and sport work: we script them to the degree we can, yet there’s always a surprise. No matter who we are, our dreams are what unite us, for everything we do is about 'coming together / & leaving,' about hoping 'to be known, to / be touched, to be less lonely than before.'" -- David Kirby, author of Help Me, Information"With the pageantry of professional wrestling as his lens and southern American boyhood as his vantage, Belk shows us 'something beautiful / made by a boy with all his heart' in his earnest, dazzling debut collection. The Gardens of Our Childhoods charts the slim line between masculine strength and vulnerability, asking us what it means for—and costs—this collection’s vast cast of characters to commit to tenderness in a world waiting to stomp on their backs and toss them out of the ring. After all, 'who would expect a large man born of noonsun & sinew to be delicate'? Belk powerfully summons legendary pro wrestlers, communes with their families, and invokes his own beloveds in a book that moves deftly between the spectacle of stage makeup and the quiet of newly planted irises: beauty performed and beauty deliberately tended to." -- Rachel Mennies, author of The Naomi LettersTable of ContentsTable of ContentsTrash 1Perry Saturn makes ends meet after a failed tour with New Japan Pro-Wrestling 3The Death of Owen Hart 5Buff Bagwell’s Mother 6incantation [Fraxinus ornus] 7Perry Saturn fell in love with a mop 8The Cauliflower Alley Club 9Stasiak & Sammartino 10Stasiak & Sammartino II 11The Gardens of Our Childhoods 12Marcus Bagwell’s Mother 13letterlocking 17Angle of Regard 18a business without heart or conscience 20Hermeneutics 21bar trivia: good things have to happen to someone 22WrestleMania XVI & suicide 23Stone Cold Steve Austin’s Mother 24definition of the continental shelf 25The Undertaker’s American Badass Phase 26dead letter office 27bar trivia: no wrestler has ever used an Annie Lennox song as entry music 28Jimmy Snuka’s Mother 29John Cena’s Spinner Belt 30poem about a dying mall 31Perry Saturn at a bed-&-breakfast in Katonah, New York, before a January sunrise 32My love wants a chicken named Eleanor of Aquitaine 33Razor Ramon 34Blackjack Mulligan’s Mother 35The time Vince McMahon tore both his quadriceps while sliding angrily 37shipletters 38Madison Square 39Hacksaw Jim Duggan’s Mother 40The Fingerpoke of Doom 41one two skip a few a hundred 42bar trivia: Venice has been sinking for years 43Perry Saturn wonders 44Good Endings 45Ultimate Warrior’s Mother 46fanletters 48for once the best option is the easiest option 49The Mouth of the South 50Perry Saturn becomes the first wrestler to board the International Space Station 51at the top of this space elevator 54the young immortal plane 55Olive Saturn & the Third Plutonian Resettlement Operation 56The Fancy 58Acknowledgments 61Thanks 63

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Book SynopsisThere are trans people here in the past, the present, and the future. H. Melt’s writing centers the deep care, love, and joy within trans communities. This poetry collection describes moments of resistance in queer and trans history as catalysts for movements today. It honors trans ancestors and contemporary activists, artists, and writers fighting for trans liberation. There Are Trans People Here is a testament to the healing power of community and the beauty of trans people, history, and culture. Trade Review“H. Melt’s matter-of-fact, precise, cartographic poems perform necessary care work for the trans people and places they attend to and yearn toward. Deeply grounded in the plain, bountiful fact of trans worlds—and insisting on our worlds to come—this book offers all who need it a map to a world ‘forever in bloom.’”—Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of Dispatch“There Are Trans People Here is an ode to trans joy, resilience, and communal care. A trans-utopian manifesto for a world that ‘let[s] us be beautiful / on our own terms.’ Melt’s verse is bold, stark, and uncompromising. Threading elements of familial narrative, memoir, and queer history, they trace through-lines from our past to a brighter, queerer future.”—torrin a. greathouse, author of Wound From The Mouth Of A Wound“These poems meld individual resilience with collective resistance to illuminate the everyday beauty of trans lives in refusing the lure of conditional inclusion to instead challenge dominant institutions of oppression, demand structural change, and remake the world.”—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door

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Book SynopsisRimming the Event Horizon gyrates a mutinous poetics of revenge, purposing contingency as a major mechanism of racialisation but also as a source of resistance and refusal, of material and imaginative possibility. It is not really a punitive poetics but rather, 'a constant, experimental exercise of antagonism,' a brutally disruptive 'xenogenerosity' (Harney & Moten). This is a collection of many rotations, revolutions and revolts, from the lick of the cyclone to the whirl of a dervish; the flick of a dragon's tail to the ultra-slow swirl of galaxies or precarious life circling the drain. Traversing metastable topologies of gender and race as complicitly mattered but also 'out of control,' Rimming the Event Horizon intra-venes in a universe(s) that must simultaneously avenge, and take revenge on itself. Looping the line between life and death, it dangles us over the edge headfirst, tongues out... "Sabeen Chaudhry's Rimming the Event Horizon is an index of "oracular horrors," both "asymptomatic" and "vicious animal". This is a work of devastation in the present but also "one of many aftermaths." Chaudhry invites a reading of the poem as "bruised verticality." A livid ghost shares space with wrecked daughters at the rim of a well. Is this the portal? "LICK CYCLONE" is the instruction. In this way, a reader's opacity weakens. There's nowhere not to look." -- Bhanu Kapil For Fans Of: Momtaza Mehri, Jen Calleja, Lola Olufemi.

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Book SynopsisWith less content in my life I am infinitely more content Against the backdrop of a sibling’s death, an eating disorder, and a few very dismal dating relationships, Villa Negativa looks for laughter behind darkness: the intruder who politely removes her shoes, the fabricator whose closest relationship is with fibreglass, the anorexic who sends the Diet Coke back because it tastes too good. Meditative and mischievous, confessional and philosophical, sincere and sly by turns, Sharon McCartney’s seventh collection articulates an essential truth of self-knowledge—that “to perceive something, we have to be able / to stand away from it.”Trade ReviewPraise for Sharon McCartney “Part satire, part self-examination, and far more layered than it first appears. Working largely in free verse… moving between levity and sincerity in a short span… The collection is brilliant: short, sharp, and eminently readable. Although it is a quick read, it is a deeply satisfying one.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “So much is revealed in so few words … It’s a book that feels light, but its delivery is heavy, and worthy of contemplation … McCartney is merciless in exposing vulnerability, but also builds an intimacy integral to Metanoia‘s achievement.”—Quill & Quire (starred review) “McCartney has written exceedingly rhythmical poems … and this is one of the reasons she holds a place of high esteem in the Canadian poetry scene for me … There’s a ton to empathize over, rage against, or even pshaw in disdain towards, usually in the face of some sad sack male character … “Agonal and Preterminal,” the third piece, perfectly sketches a painful portrait of an era of institutionalization, medicalese and the hush of shame.”—Marrow Reviews"The poems are satirical as the speaker examines herself, her life and her relationships ... the presentation is raw and empowered with many emotions like fear, sadness and, yes, even anger. Yet, within the words and emotions, the speaker delves into many of the deeper meanings of life, and death."—Arc Poetry Magazine “You don’t read these poems, you feel them: Hammer in the head, shod foot on the throat, stiletto in the heart. It’s those combos of wild, piercing insights (or unusual but poignant images); yep, that’s what makes it good for you–or kills you, laughing.”—George Elliott Clarke

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2023 J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award • Winner of the 2021 Confederation Poets Prize • One of The Times' Best Poetry Books of 2022 • A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022 • Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry"...a trans-mystical work of love and change..."—Ali Blythe, author of HymnswitchThe mystics who coined the phrase ‘the way of affirmation’ understood the apocalyptic nature of the word yes, the way it can lead out of one life and into another. Moving among the languages of Christian conversion, Classical metamorphosis, seasonal transformation, and gender transition, Luke Hathaway tells the story of the love that rewired his being, asking each of us to experience the transfiguration that can follow upon saying yes—with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul, with all one’s mind, with all one’s strength ... and with all one’s body, too.Trade ReviewPraise for The Affirmations"Mainstream poetry counts as nonconformist compared with popular culture, but it nevertheless develops its own conformities. For something completely different, look to publishing beyond these shores. Luke Hathaway, a Canadian trans poet, offers just such a point of difference. Influenced by John Donne and George Herbert, and above all by TS Eliot's Four Quartets, Hathaway constructs small marvels of what one poem here calls 'loving jugglery': a feast of transformations."—The Times"These are masterful, musical poems about faith and transformation, by one of our best contemporary poets."—Jason Guriel, for the Globe and Mail"There is a feeling of it being out of time [...] he has always been a master of the formal [...] anyone who likes deep poetry that is alluding to other things in previous literatures is going to love this book."—CBC The Next Chapter"The depth of references offers opportunities for entry and distance alike. Ranging freely across centuries of works, sacred and secular, Hathaway’s book, published last week, is as deftly conversant with John Donne as with Auden, as expert in its command of music, metrical and lexical as the maritime landscape. [...] The object [...] of The Affirmations, is not simply reifying what has come before, but challenging, re-imagining, and reclaiming what has been made into a tool of oppression."—Ploughshares"Hathaway’s poetry collection arrives at just the right time. The Affirmations’ silvery, dew-laced spiderweb of intricacy and intimacy connect us simultaneously to myth, futurism and matters of the heart."—The Tyee"Luke Hathaway has captured how we survive and thrive by chance, by lucky accident. These spare lines take the reader on a profound journey with the speaker."—Brecken Hancock, 2021 Confederation Poets Prize judge"This is a book that will be read and reread by those attuned to its pleasures. For myself, I can only say it could have gone on forever; once I entered the mental world created by The Affirmations, I never wanted to leave it."—Able Muse"This time around, Hathaway delivers the story of 'the love that rewired his being' through lyrical poems that lean into the possibilities presented by small-f faith and transformation."—The Coast"Hathaway seems to explore the boundaries of poetic form as it relates to an operatic storytelling, pushing at the edges of older forms with a new hand, and a new eye, and seeing what just might be possible."—rob mclennan"The Affirmations evocatively asks us to examine this imperfect world in a way that leaves us vulnerable with each other and the earth, alongside Luke."—Shalan Joudry, author of Elapultiek‘Like his biblical namesake, [Luke Hathaway] offers his own accounting, and so heralds a trans-mystical work of love and change. Driven equally by philia, eros and agape, his poetry pushes for more: more darkness, so you’ll attend your light; more light, so you’ll attend your darkness."—Ali Blythe, author of HymnswitchPraise for Years, Months, and Days “[Years, Months, and Days] is carried by Jernigan’s obvious respect for her sponsoring material and by her superb ear.”—New York Times “Exquisite ... deeply resonant ... There’s often a metaphysical cast to her forthright observations, which makes them both evocative and poignant.”—Toronto Star “[This] small and beautiful book should be on your bedside table even if it is as heaped as mine. Just 4” by 5” and fewer than 70 pages, the book consists of untitled, spare, and simply-worded poems which evoke the cycles of life, the seasons, and human longing for meaning and connection. The poems expand in your head, opening your mind to matters beyond the day-to-day.”—Arc Poetry Magazine

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Nelson Ball Prize, 2023Shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman AwardMinimalist poetry for maximalist times.Sheets: Typewriter Works extends the minimalist explorations of Cameron Anstee’s first collection, Book of Annotations. Prompted by receiving the Olivetti Lettera 30 typewriter that belonged to poet William Hawkins after his death in 2016, the works in this book explore how small poems operate through the freedoms and constraints of the typewriter as both a decaying machine and a mode of composition. Through engagement with writers and artists like Jiri Valoch, Barbara Caruso, Leroy Gorman, Cia Rinne, William Hawkins, Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi, and Norman McLaren, Sheets: Typewriter Works re-embeds the minimalist poem in the typewritten page.Trade Review"Reading Sheets is a strange and wonderful experience. At times, composed fragments are isolated outbursts, constrained by the machine itself; on other occasions, inspiration flows freely over multiple pages. By its end, what begins as a whisper – ‘after years’ – crescendos over sixteen pages before closing on the cyclical refrain – ‘after years / years’. The cacophonous conclusion implies the continuation beyond this period of productivity and experimentation that the pamphlet captures, leaving the reader pondering the possibility of what is to come."—The Poetry Review"Sheets: Typewriter Works is at once an enigmatic gift and feat of curiosity. Anstee composes the 'eternal etcetera' in this collaboration between a poet and his late friend’s Olivetti Lettera 30 typewriter. Sheets embodies a poet forwarding through language with love, carrying on through grief without backspace, tilting the page, pinning the voice. This collection is testament to how the language of love and grief can hold—and is itself—poetry."—Archibald Lampman Jury Citation"Master of the abundant small, Anstee makes space ring and strikes up the thingness of every word in this collection of the underinked, the overinked, the visual rhythm, the taptaptapestry, lovingly spooling back to past typers and out towards you."—Susan Holbrook, author of Ink Earl"Sheets: Typewriter Works furthers Anstee’s poetic explorations into and through the minimal, but through gestures that extend both the act and result of writing—both composition and erasure—into the deeply physical. The effect is striking and immediate... [...] There is a meditative kind of breathlessness to these understated gems, one that allows each poem to sit, not as a complete thought, but as individual gestures as both moments in space and as part of a lengthy, open-ended and even life-long sequence."—rob mclennan“I was intrigued by how the micro transcription of an event in time—like a fly landing on the page of a book—opens into reality at large.”—Aram Saroyan, author of Complete Minimal Poems

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Book SynopsisCarolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero’s church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand. By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forché to return home, asking her to ‘talk to the American people, tell them what is happening to us. Convince them to stop the military aid.' A week later he was assassinated (and is only now being made a saint). Back in the US, Forché gave readings and talks about US-backed oppression in Central America, but found publishers and critics uncomfortable with the startlingly different poems of her second collection, poems relating to torture, murder, injustice and trauma. When the book appeared in 1981, at a time when the conflict in El Salvador had finally forced its way into public awareness, it won her immediate recognition. Briefly available in Britain from Jonathan Cape in the 1980s, it was reissued by Bloodaxe to coincide with the publication by Penguin of Carolyn Forché’s long awaited memoir of those times, What You Have Heard Is True: a memoir of witness and resistance (Penguin, 2018) followed by a new collection from Bloodaxe, In the Lateness of the World (2020). The Country Between Us has sold tens of thousands of copies on the US, where it has never been out of print. It won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets.Trade ReviewHer collection of poems The Country Between Us (1981) has been reissued to accompany the memoir. It was a bestseller at a time when many Americans were increasingly aware and ashamed of US-sponsored brutality in its “backyard”. It’s fascinating to see how the two works qualify and complement each other across the intervening decades. -- Lorna Scott Fox * Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsIN SALVADOR, 1978-80 11 San Onofre, California 12 The Island 15 The Memory of Elena 17 The Visitor 18 The Colonel 19 Return 23 Message 25 Because One Is Always Forgotten REUNION 29 Endurance 31 Expatriate 33 Letter from Prague, 1968–78 35 Departure 36 Photograph of My Room 39 On Returning to Detroit 41 As Children Together 44 Joseph 47 Selective Service 48 For the Stranger 50 Reunion 52 City Walk-up, Winter 1969 54 Poem for Maya OURSELVES OR NOTHING 52 Ourselves or Nothing

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Book SynopsisSpiritual orphanhood, the loss and protection of innocence – from the first estates of Dublin to the karmic wastes of northern China – lie at the heart of this new collection by the eminent Irish poet Harry Clifton. Herod’s Dispensations shows his work now reaching beyond middle age, to revisit – in meditations on death and migration – the territories of the Far East from his early years, in the light of a new nomadic age. Harry Clifton has published nine other books of poetry, most recently The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012), The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 (2014) and Portobello Sonnets (2017).Trade Review'There is so much history in Harry Clifton's poems, so much geography, landscape, cityscape, repeopled precincts of the imagination, so much human drama and comedy; so many people, mythic, unlikely and hauntingly real. And all of it is limned with a masterful formal dexterity and an apparently limitless cultural curiosity' – C.K. Williams.; 'The poems begin with something seen, remembered, or suddenly known, or a melancholy feeling about time passing, or complex emotions about love, and then they take a longer view, or hold their breath while a new tone, filled with sonorous risk and odd wisdom slowly seeps into an end-line of a stanza or a new section of a poem… There are moments when you hold your breath… and you sit up in pure delight… there are a number of poems in this book that will be read as long as any poems are read anywhere… The last poem, "Oweniny, Upper Reaches", filled with soft, haunting cadences and strange, ambiguous musings on solitude, memory and the meaning of things, is a masterpiece. It displays Clifton’s reticence and technical skill against the need to let the poem soar into a truth that emerges from the gap between the words, and then it allows the words themselves to glide up and out in all their hushed and controlled beauty' - Colm Tóibín, Irish Times on The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass.; `His dazzlingly accomplished book is arguably the first great work of Irish poetic post-modernism… His is a universe of aftermaths, hauntings and returns, in which even God…dreams of becoming flesh again… an Irish voice that is utterly contemporary in its restless movement through time and space’ – Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times on Secular Eden.Table of Contents9 To the Next Generation 10 Redesdale Estate, 1956 12 Endgame 14 The Accursed Questions 15 After Mao 16 Across the River 17 Ruins 19 Daytime Sleeper 21 The Egg-wife 22 Therese and the Jug 24 Before Christ 25 A Flight into Egypt 26 Pity and Terror 28 Art, Children and Death 29 Disfavour 31 The Stage-door 32 The Achill Years 34 Horace 35 The Bible as Literature 37 At Racquets 38 The Pit 40 Wreckfish 42 The Dry-souled Man 44 Trance 46 Auden in Shanghai 47 Anabasis 49 from Red Earth Sequence 54 Zhoukoudian 56 Come and See Us Sometime 57 To the Philippians 58 Toronto Suite 59 Ballinafull, 3 July 2014 60 Death’s Door 61 Goodbye to China

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Book SynopsisJane Hirshfield’s urgent new collection is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. Her poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time's and lives’ dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees. The poems of Ledger record riches, both abiding and squandered, and mourn our failures. They confirm, too, the continually renewing gift of the present moment, summoning our responsibility as moral beings to sustain one another and the earth’s continuance. Finally, it is the human spirit and the language of poetry – loyal instruments of recognition, humility and praise – that triumph in this stunned, stunning accounting, set forth by a master poet whose voice is tonic and essential, whose breadth of inclusion and fierce awareness rivet attention. Hers is a poetry of clarity and hybrid vigour, drawing deeply on English and American traditions but also those of world poetry. The poetries of modern and classical Greece, of Horace and Catullus, of classical China and Japan and Eastern Europe all resonate in Jane Hirshfield’s structures of thought and in her sensibilities. Indelibly of our time yet seated in the lineage of poetic discovery, these poems are meant to endure.Trade ReviewA profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings… It is precisely this that I praise in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield…In its highly sensuous detail, her poetry illuminates the Buddhist virtue of mindfulness. -- Czeslaw Milosz * Prze Kroj (Poland) *From the opening poem, “Let Them Not Say", to the closing, “My Debt”, the masterful ninth book [Ledger] from Hirshfield is an account of how “We did not-enough” to save the world. Most poems are no longer than a page, though some are considerably shorter (“My Silence” is only a title). They are set against a page and a half of prose in the middle of the book about “Capital” which, for the writer, is language “as slippery as any other kind of wealth”. Through this juxtaposition, Hirshfield urges a reckoning of human influence on – and interference with – the planet. In “As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us", she begins: “As things grow rarer, they enter the ranges of counting” and ends, underscoring humanity’s obliviousness: “We scrape from the world its... wonder.../ Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness.” Hirshfield suggests that people are unable, or unwilling, to comprehend their role in their own destruction: “If the unbearable were not weightless we might yet buckle under the grief.” Hirshfield’s world is one filled with beauty, from the “generosity” of grass to humanity’s connection to the muskrat. This is both a paean and a heartbreaking plea. * Publishers Weekly *Poems of quiet wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it it to be human. * The Scotsman *Her poetry is a rich and assured gift… an extraordinary intertwining of cherished detail and passionate abstraction…The poems’ realised ambition is wisdom. -- Alison Brackenbury * Agenda *Table of Contents11 Let Them Not Say * 15 The Bowl 16 I wanted to be surprised. 18 Vest 20 An Archaeology 21 Fecit 22 Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and a Full Moon over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes 23 As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us 24 Description 25 Ants’ Nest 26 A Bucket Forgets Its Water 27 Questionnaire 29 You Go to Sleep in One Room and Wake in Another 30 Chance darkened me. 31 Some Questions 33 Today, Another Universe 34 The Orphan Beauty of Fold Not Made Blindfold * 37 Now a Darkness Is Coming 38 Words 39 Homs 40 She Breathes in the Scent 41 A Folding Screen 42 Practice 43 Cataclysm 44 Paint 45 Heels 46 Cold, Clear 47 Capital: An Assay 49 Falcon 50 Spell to Be Said Against Hatred * 53 Advice to Myself 54 Notebook 55 In Ulvik 56 O Snail 57 Branch 58 Without Night-shoes 59 The Bird Net 60 Corals, Coho, Coelenterates 61 To My Fifties 62 Brocade 63 Interruption: An Assay 65 My Doubt 67 My Contentment 68 My Hunger 69 My Longing 70 My Dignity 72 My Glasses 73 My Wonder 74 My Silence * 77 A Ream of Paper 78 Lure 79 A Moment Knows Itself Penultimate 81 Bluefish 82 Almond, Rabbit 83 The Paw-paw 84 Musa Paradisiaca 85 It Was as if a Ladder 87 Like Others 88 Husband 89 Wild Turkeys 90 Nine Pebbles 90 Without blinking 90 Like that other-hand music 90 Retrospective 91 Library book with many precisely turned-down corners 91 Now even more 91 Haiku: monadnock 92 A strategy 92 Sixth extinction 92 Obstacle 93 They Have Decided 94 Things Seem Strong 95 Dog Tag 96 Biophilia * 99 Amor Fati 100 Snow 101 Kitchen 102 Harness 103 Rust Flakes on Wind 104 Pelt 105 Wood. Salt. Tin. 106 I Said * 109 Ledger 110 In a Former Coal Mine in Silesia 111 Engraving: World-tree with an Empty Beehive on One Branch 112 (No Wind, No Rain) 113 On the Fifth Day 115 Page 117 My Confession 118 Ghazal for the End of Time 119 Mountainal 120 My Debt 125 Acknowledgements

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Book SynopsisSeán Ó Ríordáin (1916-77) was the most important and most influential Irish-language poet of modern times. He revitalised poetry in Irish, combining the world of Irish literature with that of modern English and European literature, thus adding to the Irish tradition from the other side. His poems ‘seek to answer fundamental questions about the nature of human existence and the place of the individual in a universe without meaning’ (Gearóid Denvir). Many of Ó Ríordáin’s poems came out of his struggle with the isolation, guilt and loneliness of life in mid-century Catholic Ireland experienced in Cork, the native locale also of the poet Greg Delanty, translator of Apathy Is Out. Ó Ríordáin’s poems have been translated by many poets, but until now no single writer has translated the majority of the poems. This collection gives a much more unified sense of Ó Ríordáin’s work, catching the poetry’s verve, playfulness and range and also ‘the music you still hear in Munster,/even in places where it has gone under’. It includes the dark, sorrowful poems Ó Ríordáin has usually represented with in anthologies but also poems of exuberance and celebration, notably ‘Tulyar’, one of the funniest satirical critiques of the Irish Church’s attitude to sex which matches any similar attack by Patrick Kavanagh or Austin Clarke. Seán Ó Ríordáin renewed poetry in Irish by writing out of the modernist sense of alienation, fragmentation and identity, but he also saw beyond Modernism’s confines to the connective matrix of our world.Table of ContentsClár | Contents 9 Preface 11 Introduction (2005-2017) an Eireaball Spideoige (1952) | from A Robin’s Tail Apologia 20 | 21 Apologia An Dall sa Studio 22 | 23 The Blindman in the Studio An Leigheas 24 | 25 The Cure An Cheist 26 | 27 The Question A Sheanfhilí, Múinídh dom Glao 28 | 29 Old Poets, Teach Me your Call Bacaigh 30 | 31 Beggar An Peaca 32 | 33 The Sin An Doircheacht 34 | 35 Darkness An Stoirm 36 | 37 The Storm Sos 38 | 39 Rest Cláirseach Shean na nGnáthrud 40 | 41 The Old Harp of Ordinary Things Do Dhomhnall Ó Corcora 42 | 43 To Daniel Corkery Adhlacadh mo Mháthar 46 | 47 My Mother’s Burial Na Fathaigh 50 | 51 The Giants Cúl an Tí 54 | 54 Behind the House Malairt 56 | 57 The Swop Cnoc Mellerí 58 | 59 Mount Melleray An Bás 64 | 65 Death Ceol 66 | 67 Music Oileán agus Oileán Eile 68 | 69 An Island and Another Island Saoirse 78 | 79 Freedom Siollabadh 84 | 85 Syllabling an Brosna (1964) | from Kindling A Ghaeilge im Pheannsa 88 | 89 O Irish in My Pen Rian na gCos 90 | 91 Footprints Claustrophobia 94 | 95 Claustrophobia An Feairín 96 | 97 The Maneen Seachtáin 98 | 99 A Week Reo 100 | 101 Cold Snap Na Leamhain 102 | 103 The Moths In Absentia 104 | 105 In Absentia An Moladh 108 | 109 The Praise A Theanga Seo Leath-Liom 110 | 111 O Language Half Mine Fiabhras 112 | 113 Fever Tost 114 | 115 Silence Tulyar 116 | 117 Tulyar An Lacha 118 | 119 The Duck Colm 120 | 121 Colm An Gealt 122 | 123 The Mad Woman Bagairt na Marbh 124 | 125 Dread of the Dead An Dá Ghuth 126 | 127 The Two Voices Soiléireacht 128 | 129 Clarity Catchollú 130 | 131 Catology Duine 132 | 133 People File Arís 134 | 135 Return again an Línte Liombó (1971) | from Limbo Lines Línte Liombó 138 | 139 Limbo Lines Súile Donna 140 | 141 Brown Eyes Ceol Ceantair 142 | 143 Local Music Cloch Scáil 144 | 145 Quartz Stone Aistriú 146 | 147 Transformation Tar Éis Dom É Chur go Tigh na nGadhar 148 | 149 After Sending Him to the Doghouse Solas 150 | 151 Light Bás Beo 152 | 153 Live Death Obair 154 | 155 Work Ní Ceadmhach Neamhshuim 156 | 157 Apathy Is Out Dom Chairde 158 | 159 To My Friends Mise 160 | 161 Me from Tar Éis mo Bháis (1978) | from After My Death Clónna Uber Alles 164 | 165 Forms, Above All Údar 166 | 167 Author Barra Na hAille, Dún Chaoin, Lúnasa 1970 168 | 169 Clifftop, Dunquin, August 1970 Gaoth Liom Leat 170 | 171 A Dithering Wind 175 Note on the translator

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Book SynopsisDiana Anphimiadi is one of the most widely revered Georgian poets of her generation. Her award-winning work reflects an exceptionally curious mind and glides between classical allusions and surreal imagery. She revivifies ancient myths and tests the reality of our senses against the limits of sense. Boldly inventive, prayers appear alongside recipes, dance lessons next to definitions. Her playful, witty lyricism offers a glimpse of the eternal in the everyday. The poems in this selection have been collaboratively translated into English by the award-winning British poet Jean Sprackland and leading Georgian translator Natalia Bukia-Peters. A chapbook selection of their translations of Anphimiadi's work, Beginning to Speak, was published in 2018 and praised by Adham Smart in Modern Poetry in Translation for capturing the 'electricity of Anphimiadi’s language' which 'crackles from one poem to the next in Bukia-Peters and Sprackland’s fine translation'. Georgian-English dual language edition. Co-published with the Poetry Translation Centre.Table of ContentsIntroduction Sleeping Beauty Poet in the Shower Prayer Before Bathing Iphigenia Helen of Troy Eurydice Persephone Medusa Cassiopeia (Three Back to Front Songs) Dance Lessons (3/4 Time) Studies Lesson Silent Writing Pompeii Soul Autism: Beginning to Speak Mute Braille Because Prayer Before Taking Nourishment Retrospective Why I No Longer Write Poems Winter Loss Dogs Bond Gardening for Beginners The Snake in the Yard Centaur etc Lost Upside-Down Immune Deficiency The Trajectory of the Short-Sighted Surrogate The Choice Tears in the Glass Evening Children The Forest Near the Window Exchange of Prisoners Entertainment Orchestra Reaping Song July Fair Copy Endangered The Second Coming About the Authors

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Book SynopsisThe Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year 2017Velkom to Inklandt is a collection of poems in which Sophie Herxheimer brings to life the voice of her German Jewish Grent Muzzer Liesel, whose somewhat abrasive but eminently humane perspektiff she's been unable to forget.Liesel came to live in Britain in 1938, with her young family. Her husband was one of many scientists saved by the speedily set up Council for Academic Refugees.Playing on the difficulties of the English lenkvitch and vokebulerry, the poems tell of an immigrant's attempts to fit in and make her home in a new country at war with her own.This fascinating sequence addresses alienation, survival, friendship, marriage, motherhood and loss against a backdrop of a London which has almost disappeared but at the same time remains straynchly familiar.

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Book SynopsisAlison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares, and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's Selected Poems begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behind great Shires and Percherons. Her acclaimed early poem, Dreams of Power, gives voice to a little-known woman from the past, Arbella Stuart, and her still-contemporary choices: safe solitude, fashionable London, dangerous love. Her song-like poems draw on years of experience of bookkeeping and manual work in industry, of VAT, of trichloroethylene on `a thrumming lorry'. The poems take readers to northern China winters and the damp heat of Hanoi. And always the countryside returns: its mud, its huge hares, its stubborn sun. After nine books, major prizes and national broadcasts, the rush of Brackenbury's poems are a work in wonderful progress, full of surprises and renewals.Trade Review`Alison Brackenbury loves, lives, hymns and rhymes the natural world and its people like no other poet.’ - Gillian Clarke (National Poet of Wales)

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Book SynopsisNineveh takes its modernist bearings from Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan and Yehudah Amichai; but also, merrily, from John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Zohar Atkins’s poems offer humour and hospitality alongside deep learning and enigmatic, mystical theophany. The division between secular and religious is blurred, the two coexist in a generous exchange. The Bible is near at hand but rendered unfamiliar in the combination of anachronism with classical allusion. The poems produce jarring, contemporary Midrashim – interpretative retellings of canonical tales. Cain and Abel appear as business executives, Ishmael is a Palestinian dying in an Israeli hospital, Rachel and Leah are the projected identities of a demented Jacob, and God is a perfectionist who procrastinates by binge-watching TV. These poems are for intellectuals disenchanted with intellectualism and for seekers and sensualists in search of a renewing approach to language. Scholar and rabbi, Atkins has learned that poetry and not erudition offers a securer saving power.Trade Review'The poems in Nineveh take ancient clay and sculpt vigorously innovative shapes: how very refreshing to plunge into a collection which re-thinks historical Jewish religion and culture with such subversive, witty originality. `Revelatory’ is not too strong a word.' - Carol Rumens

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize 2021. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020. Deformations includes two large-scale works related in their preoccupation with biographical and mythical narrative. 'Welfare Handbook' explores the life and art of Eric Gill, the well-known English letter cutter, sculptor and cultural figure, who is known to have sexually abused his daughters. The poem draws on material from Gill's letters, diaries, notes and essays as part of a lyrical exploration of the conjunction between aesthetics, subjectivity and violence. 'Pitysad' is a series of simultaneously occurring fragments composed around themes and characters from Homer's Odyssey. It considers how trauma is disguised and deformed through myth and art. Acting as a bridge between these two works is a series of individual poems on the creation and destruction of cultural and mythical conventions.Trade Review'Dugdale proves herself a powerful voice by writing about visual art, poetry, and history, 'in reverse'' - Antony Huen

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Book SynopsisSince C.H. Sisson's ground-breaking Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1984), Christina Rossetti's readership has burgeoned. Almost a century ago Ford Madox Ford claimed her as 'the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced', and - as Valentine Cunningham recently declared - she now sits at top table with Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Barrett Browning. Feminist and queer scholars have since laid claim to Rossetti; but her Anglo-Catholic faith was never incidental to the power of even her most secular poems and is at the heart of her imaginative work. As an Anglican priest and poet, Rachel Mann in her selection appreciates Rossetti's ambition while attending, too, to recent scholarship that focuses on the religious, feminist and fantastical elements in her work.

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Book SynopsisThis dual language edition is reissued as a Carcanet Classic. Pablo Neruda wrote the poems in Los versos del capitán as a celebration of his love for his third wife, Matilde Urrutia – a love affair that is itself celebrated in the acclaimed film Il Postino. Originally published anonymously in 1952 to spare his second wife’s feelings, this bilingual edition is the book’s first publication in Britain. Brian Cole’s translations display all the qualities of vivid imagery, sensuousness, simplicity and passion for which Neruda’s poetry is famous.

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the ASLE-UKI Book Prize for Ecological Writing 2021. A new collection of poetry from one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. In her formidable and clairvoyant new collection, Runaway, Jorie Graham deepens her vision of our futurity. What of us will survive? Identity may be precarious, but perhaps love is not? Keeping pace with the desperate runaway of climate change, social disruption, our new mass migrations, she struggles to reimagine a habitable present - a now - in which we might endure, wary, undaunted, ever-inventive, 'counting silently towards infinity'. Graham's essential voice guides us fluently 'as we pass here now into the next-on world', what future we have surging powerfully through these pages, where the poet implores us 'to the last be human'.Trade ReviewA mesmerising American voice; one wants to hear its continuation' - The New Yorker; 'We should be grateful to Jorie Graham for her own heroics of perception, even if they show up our ordinary insight.' - Gwyneth Lewis, Times Literary Supplement

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Book SynopsisThe Poetry Bug is a book of powerful poems that will capture the imagination of primary school-aged children; it recognises humanity’s never-ending quest to understand ourselves, others and the world around us. Above all else, The Poetry Bug is playful. It recognises that people of all ages are explorers who need to navigate our world through word play, self-expression and humour if we are to understand it at all. In a world of seriousness, standardised tests and conformity, The Poetry Bug brings much-needed light relief that will brighten up even the dullest of days.

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Book SynopsisBecky Varley-Winter’s striking debut explores themes of daring, danger and risk in poems that are packed with imagery from the natural world. Complex, hypnotic, memorable – this collection introduces a significant new voice.

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Book SynopsisA timeless, visionary collection of poems from one of China's most acclaimed poets-now available in English for the first time in a generation and featuring a foreword by his son, contemporary artist and activist Ai WeiweiOne of the most influential poets in Chinese history, Ai Qing is mostly unknown to Western readers, but his work has shaped the nature of poetry in China for decades. Born between the fall of imperial Manchurian rule and the establishment of the Communist People's Republic, Ai Qing was at one time an intimate of Mao Zedong. He would eventually fall out with the leader and be sentenced to hard labor during the Cultural Revolution, when he was exiled to the remote part of the country known as "Little Siberia" with his family, including his son, Ai Weiwei. In his work, Ai Qing tells the story of a China convulsing in change, leaving behind a legacy of feudalism and imperialism but uncertain what the future will hold. Breaking with traditional forms of Chinese poetry, Ai Qing innovatively adapted free verse, writing with a simple sincerity in clear lines that could be understood by everyday readers. Selected Poems of Ai Qing is an extraordinary collection that traces the powerful inner life of this influential poet who crafted poems of protest, who longed for a newer, happier age, and who wrote with a profound lyricism that reaches deep into the heart of the reader.

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Book SynopsisPresenting the best poems from the nationwide Places of Poetry project, selected from over 7,500 entries Poetry lives in the veins of Britain, its farms and moors, its motorways and waterways, highlands and beaches. This anthology brings together time-honoured classics with some of the best new writing collected across the nation, from great monuments to forgotten byways. Featuring new writing from Kayo Chingonyi, Gillian Clarke, Zaffar Kunial, Jo Bell and Jen Hadfield, Places of Poetry is a celebration of the strangeness and variety of our islands, their rich history and momentous present.

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Book Synopsis*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE*Following her recent Odes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet gives us a new collection of poems that sing of a woman’s intimate life and political conscience. The atom bomb, Breaking Bad, the cervix, Trayvon Martin, her mother’s return from the dead: the peerless Sharon Olds once again takes up subject matter that is both difficult and ordinary, elusive and everywhere. Each aria is shaped by its unique melody and moral logic, as Olds stands centre stage to account for her own late romance and chance wisdom, and faces the tragic life of our nation and our planet. ‘I cannot say I did not ask / to be born,’ begins one aria, which considers how, with what actions, with what thirst, we each ask for a turn, and receive our portion on earth. Olds delivers these pieces with all the passion, anguish, and solo force that make a great performance, in the process enlarging the soul of her readers. ‘Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I’ll be reading her till I die’ Fiona BensonTrade ReviewSharon Olds goes where many poets would fear to tread and others not dream of treading. Like a curious child, she wanders past No Entry signs on to private land… Arias is a phenomenal achievement, the most moving collection of her career, the most open of books. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month* *On my Christmas list? Sharon Olds’s Arias. Olds is a supreme poet of the body; I’ll be reading her till I die. -- Fiona Benson * Guardian, *Books of the Year* *A generous collection… sexy, pained, conversational, always bringing the reader along for the ride. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * Telegraph *

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Book Synopsis**SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE****SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE**The poems in Ephemeron deal with the short-lived and transitory - whether it's the brief, urgent lives of the first section, 'Insect Love Songs', the abrupt, anguished, physical and emotional changes during secondary school, as remembered in 'Boarding-School Tales', or parenting's day-by-day shifts through love and fear, hurt and healing, in 'Daughter Mother'.The long central section, 'Translations from the Pasiphaë', gathers these themes together in a blistering, unforgettable re-telling of the Greek myth of the Minotaur, as seen from the point of view of the bull-child's mother - the betrayed and violated Pasiphaë. The familiar legend of the dashing male hero slaying the monster in the labyrinth is transformed here into a story of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary cycle of violence, power and the abuse of power. At the centre lies Pasiphaë calling for her son: 'They took him away from me/and they killed him in the dark, for years.'Telling uncomfortable truths, going deep into male and female drives and desires, our most tender and vulnerable places, and speaking of them in frank, unshrinking ways - these poems are afraid, certainly, but also beautiful, resolute and brave.Trade ReviewBenson retells the Greek myth... in a long-lined, novelistic sequence of rare psychological plausibility: yes, you think, yes, that's exactly how it happened. * Telegraph, *20 Best Poetry Books of 2022* *Benson's third collection Ephemeron is split between nature, motherhood and Greek myth. But few poets write on these themes so brilliantly; Benson's urgent compassion makes us care. * Daily Telegraph *A new collection of Benson's wise and vivid work is a real occasion... exciting...fully inhabited and multi-faceted. * Guardian *There have been a number of impressive reshapings of classical tales in recent years, and it is a bold poet who would risk comparison with Alice Oswald and Anne Carson, but Benson's 'Translations from the Pasiphaë' earns its place alongside their works ... In Ephemeron, Fiona Benson's capacity for capturing bodily sympathy in verse manifests as something like a superpower. * Literary Review *There is a gorgeous, sunbleached quality to much of this writing, which stuns and scorches. It will be a pleasure to see which cycles of myth Benson takes on next. * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book Synopsis**SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2021**A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, 'one of the poetry stars of his generation' (Los Angeles Times).'We sleep long, / if not sound,' Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, 'Till the end / we sing / into the wind.' In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South - one poem, 'Kith', exploring that strange bedfellow of 'kin' - the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. 'Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don't know / are his dead.' Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering, precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them - of us - poetry can save.Trade ReviewOne of the most important poets of his generation... There appears to be no format in which Young does not shine. * Washington Post *Kevin Young perfectly illustrates poetry's enduring vitality. * Entertainment Weekly *Keeping up with him is like trying to keep up with Bob Dylan or Prince in their primes. Even the bootlegs have bootlegs. -- Dwight Garner * New York Times *One of the poetry stars of his generation. * Los Angeles Times *

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Book SynopsisYou may take my ballsBut I will lick what remainsAnd then, dear, your faceImagine if your dog could talk to you. Better still, imagine if it could express its innermost feelings in poetic form. This hilarious, insightful book confirms what we've all long suspected - that inside every dog is the soul of a poet. From retrieving sticks to rivalry with cats; from cold winter walks to endlessly chasing tennis balls, no stone of a dog's life is left unturned.With a delightful photo alongside every haiku, this is the perfect gift for any dog lover.

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Book SynopsisFull of wry intelligence, and a sideways perspective that digs beneath the surface of things, Robin Thomas's second collection is creative, witty and warm. Never predictable, leaning on images from art, the cadences of jazz and remarkable moments, whether from history or life, there is an unswerving pressure on language and a sense of mischief that can turn out to be unnervingly serious. This is accomplished, confident work.

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Book SynopsisIn all of Robin Thomas’s work there is a subtlety and wit so contained that it invites re-reading. It takes full immersion to savour the linguistic dexterity and intelligence at work, to appreciate that humour often belies the absolute seriousness of life. In reminded of something, this balance is particularly delicate and the poignancy superbly controlled and utterly affecting. With a yearning that can only come of love and loss, the poems use the simplest of metaphors in the most lucid language to convey memories and emotions so complex and heart-breaking that they are almost beyond the scope of words—a collection that is profoundly moving and exquisitely realised.Trade ReviewPoems are like rooms. One might feel safe in such a room and, at first sight, the poems of Robin Thomas employ an architecture which is reassuring. […] Yet walls shake and windows crack and the ‘homely’ formal qualities of these well-made poems belie a mystery, a strangeness, a reckoning. — Julian Stannard;Robin Thomas’s is a fragile world, whose unexpected strengths derive from his elastic, unsentimental grasp of reality. It’s not surprising that I find myself smiling with recognition as I read Robin Thomas’ view of the universe … after all, ambiguity and contradiction are embedded in comedy of the most serious kind. — Janice Dempsey;Occasionally I seize upon a single poem sent to me, or discovered by accident, and rejoice in its particular oddness or specialness or combination of the two. Robin Thomas's poetry evokes this response with its extraordinary quirkiness, quaint combination of wild and everyday wisdom, the way the clues are always in the margins, chuckling as they wait to be found or found out. Thomas is the master of irony and juxtaposition, never obvious, always surprising. — Wendy Klein

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Book SynopsisWalking the razor edge between grim reality and stoicism, John Barnie once again brings his intelligence, wit and prescient anger to bear on the world we inhabit and the world we are making. In spine-chilling imagery and with a linguistic dexterity that makes words shine, we are taken to a landscape that is exquisite and familiar, yet simultaneously overwhelmed with wreckage and grief. Staring not only into time's abyss, but into the carnage wrought by human desire for more and more..., these urgent poems carry our collective grief for all that is lost-'there was no one to grieve / so I walked beside them, taking it on.' ('Dead Swans on a Winter Coast') And alongside the losses, cultural and ecological, there is also vision, searing and politically acute. Prophetic in the tradition of Robinson Jeffers, but with the lyric compression of William Carlos Williams, whose words provide the epigraph for this collection, Barnie imagines his quiet rural homeland occupied and brutalised in the central sequence, 'Occupied': 'the safety net / so full of holes you couldn't catch a whale in it [...]/ I knew the days of iridescence were lost for ever.' ('Iridescence') While in 'M.A.D.: The Sequel' rhymes skip along with an irony reminiscent of William Blake's use of nursery rhyme metre to convey horror. As the world is incinerated we hear: 'cry if you must / there was no one to gather / the heart's dust.' Never for the faint-hearted, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol is John Barnie at the height of his powers, writing poetry that is heart-breaking and true. Never for the faint-hearted, Dunes of Cwm Rheidol is John Barnie at the height of his powers, writing poetry that is heart-breaking and true.

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for Costa Poetry Award 2020Shortlisted for Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020Shortlisted for John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2021Poetry Book of the Month - The Telegraph May 2020Included in Books of the Year 2020 - The TLS November 2020Juana of Castile (commonly referred to as Juana la Loca – Joanna the Mad) was a sixteenth-century Queen of Spain, daughter of the instigators of the Inquisition. Conspired against, betrayed, imprisoned and usurped by her father, husband and son in turn, she lived much of her life confined at Tordesillas, and left almost nothing by way of a written record. The poems in Citadel are written by a composite ‘I’ – part Reformation-era monarch, part twenty-first century poet – brought together by a rupture in time as the result of ambiguous, traumatic events in the lives of two women separated by almost five hundred years. Across the distance between central Spain and the northwest coast of England these powerful, unsettling poems echo and double back, threading together the remembered places of childhood, the touchstones of pain, and the dreamscapes of an anxious, interior world. Symbolic objects – the cord, the telephone, eggs, a flashing blue light – make obsessive return, communication becoming increasingly difficult as the storm moves in over the sea. Citadel is a daring and luminous debut.Trade ReviewReviews'So much fire comes to life in snapshots on these pages ... The images are electrifying. Something marvellous occurs: a domestic scene becomes “a blow to the head / enough to knock the earth from its orbit.” I love this book.'Ilya Kaminsky 'Martha Sprackland's poems are virtuosic in their timing, texture, and detailed evocation. From poems of the hospital to poems of the shore, this is a fierce and fresh debut that rings with courage and intelligence. Citadel will seize you by the heart and lead you into deep and resonant territories, and when you return you will find yourself changed, strange to yourself, and wondrously enriched.'Fiona Benson'[Citadel] is keenly responsive to questions of place and displacement... Sprackland’s painterly visions linger long in the memory.'Aingeal Clare, The Guardian For previous work: 'Sprackland’s words pierce through the mundanity of the everyday, creating intense emotional landscapes [...] With Milk Tooth, Sprackland continues to establish herself as one of Britain’s finest young poets.' Robert Greer, The London Magazine For previous work: 'Sprackland refreshes the domestic and mundane in poems which are outwardly calm, but lit from within to reveal unusual visionary angles.' Eric Gregory Award Judges 2014 For previous work: 'Martha Sprackland is already a formidable technician. The sonnet is moved through quatrains and and a kind of terza rima, and there is deft and adept free verse. The result is a calm, taut surface to the poems which belies the heightened, sometimes gothic nature of the subject matter.' Ian Pople, The Manchester Review For previous work: '[A] commanding teller of the strange stories of others . . . Sprackland's best poems have the power of an irresistible tide.' Alison Brackenbury, PN Review For previous work: '[V]iolence or (in this case) "terrible dynamism" is figured with a tender precision . . . Sprackland forces a wonderful fascination upon her readers.' Edwina Attlee, The Poetry Review'Citadel – despite its surface of smooth, confident lyricism – is a very strange book... Even the strangest descriptions have a rightness about them: “The bright/ metallic snip like a speckled thrush tapping/ a snail against a stone” is how Sprackland hears the sound of a man clipping his fingernails. How could anyone resist that?' Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph'Martha Sprackland has filled the pages with sharp, delicious and multi-layered verse. To meld the symbolic with the historic into an interior dreamscape of pain and glory is no easy task. Citadel is elaborate, robust, pleasurable, and built to last.'David Morgan O'Connor, RHINO Poetry'Sprackland’s poetic process depends on the conversations held with an extreme figure from history, whose own voice has been long hidden, but without ever succumbing to biography or retelling. The end result is pleasingly strange; a collection which defies the limits of physics to find a timeslip between centuries old inner-city Spain and the north-west coastal towns of 21st century England.'Hannah Whaley, Dundee Review of the Arts'The most arresting book that I’ve read this year is Martha Sprackland’s 51 pages of poetry, Citadel (Liverpool University Press). I’ve returned over and again to this little work of perfect art: the language is so lithe, exact and rich; the painterly images such a joy; the sensibility so fine and rare. Citadel has a careful, agile, flowing structure: many poems in the voice of a sixteenth-century Spanish queen, and others in Sprackland’s own. Her luxuriant conjuring eloquence about objects, places and emotion reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s.'Richard Davenport-Hines, 'Books of the Year' in The TLS'Citadel is extraordinary. A chameleonic debut... I am deeply moved by this book, its tenderness and its violence.'Jack Solloway, 'Top 10 books of 2020' in Voice Magazine'These history-inspired works shine with a dark brilliance, with Sprackland’s rigorous scholarship combined with an artist’s eye.'Bidisha, The Poetry Review'Sprackland has the dizzying ability to jump-cut from past to present and back again quickly and to feel absolutely in control while doing it. [...] That gradual accumulation of change over centuries shows that small moments can make a big difference, and this is amplified by the sheer act of leaping into a pond or pool unlocking a “winter lived through and unbound”. I felt the water on my own skin reading this and was uplifted. [...] This collection is in many ways a catalogue, its own Hunterian collection, if you will, of the human body and mind. [...] What rings through the collection is a feeling of strength and of bearing things, of going on regardless, that sense of ‘devotion hopeless as any other’. [...W]hile we can’t see "exactly where everything will go", it seems that Sprackland has built a solid and impressive launchpad for the future. She deserves her plaudits.'Mat Riches, The Friday Poem'Such a moment[s] of profound emotional, physical and psychological experience must be the origins of the identification between two individuals so remote in time and Sprackland catches the paralleled shift of innocence to pained maturity in the brilliant final line: “Our little beds, bars of autumnal light falling through the curtains”.'Martyn Crucefix

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Invitation to View, Peter Scupham's hugely welcome new book, which he was dissuaded from calling 'Curtain Call', often guess and puzzle, offering possible and impossible interpretations. Some respond to fragments of the past, personal and historical, which haunt the present. All business is unfinished business: one can be caught out by a sudden phrase, or the look back of a landscape once seen sporting a different disguise. Invitation to View is framed by poems considering possible visitors to the poet's 400-year-old house long after he and his partner have left it behind; it is haunted by the variety of the efforts and gestures they have made in bringing house and garden alive. Time will do its best to modify and forget all that they leave. Many gestures were theatrical: poetry picnics, productions of Shakespeare... the dead welcomed with the living. Tom Stoppard's words from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead can provide an absent epigraph: 'Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.'

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Book SynopsisWhen his partner suddenly died, life changed utterly for Paul Stephenson. Hard Drive is the outcome of his revisiting a world he thought he knew, but which had been upended. In poems that are affectionate, self-examining, sometimes funny and often surprised by grief in the oddest corners, the poet takes us through rooms, routines, and rituals of bereavement, the memory of love, a shared life and separation. A noted formalist, with a flair for experiment, pattern and the use of constraints, Stephenson has written a remarkable first book, moving and, despite everything, a hopeful record of a gay relationship. It is also a landmark elegy collection.Trade Review'Hard Drive approaches the elegy through a kaleidoscopic, inventive and genuinely moving use of form... Stephenson looks death in the eyes, and holds his nerve like few others.' - Seán Hewitt; 'A brilliant and innovative formal poet, Stephenson here applies his great gifts, with heart-breaking clarity and bravery, to the most unfaceable of subjects. The result is a beautiful hymn to the human capacity for love.' - Jonathan Edwards; 'This is poetry for anyone who has ever lost someone... poetry that celebrates and mourns those deep connections that we make in life.' - Niall Campbell; 'Paul Stephenson brings all the tender mechanisms of language to sustain the weight of grief: this is an extraordinarily moving and accomplished collection.' - Penelope Shuttle

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Book SynopsisMargaret Tait (1918–1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. 'In a documentary', she wrote, real things 'lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens.' If film, for Tait, was a poetic medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing happen. Sarah Neely, Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, draws on Tait’s three poetry collections, her book of short stories, her magazine articles and unpublished notebooks to make available for the first time a collection of the full range of Tait's writing. Her introduction discusses Tait as filmmaker and writer in the context of mid-twentieth-century Scottish culture, and a comprehensive list of bibliographic and film resources provides an indispensible guide for further exploration.

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Book SynopsisA Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2024. In her second collection, Mann wrestles with the questions and possibilities raised when trans identity, faith and the limits of myth and language intersect and are tested. Eleanor Among the Saints is a study in the queer joy found in counter-factuals and fantasy, shaped through the prism of the disputed story of Eleanor Rykener, a medieval trans woman, seamstress and sex worker.Trade Review'All poetry has something to do with bodies being transformed - whether in violence and grief, or in hope, in embrace, in miracle. Rachel Mann's brilliant collection is about these transformations, realised for us here with exhilarating verbal energy and emotional subtlety, a poetry that is solid and fluid at the same time, as bodies are.' - Rowan Williams;'Rachel Mann weaves an intricate web of language to examine the intimate relationship between the transforming, transformative body, between sexuality and spirituality, between religious ecstasy, fear and love. When Eleanor 'John' Rykener - a trans person living in medieval England - says 'I am not code for another's sins' she becomes utterly contemporary and timeless at the same time and we would all do well to listen.' - Kim Moore;'Nobody else could have written this: poems formed in the space where divinity, the body, trans identity and history fold together. A singular, sensational collection.' - Andrew McMillan

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Book SynopsisA celebrated French bestseller, this novel in verse that captures the mundane and the beautiful, the blood and sweat, of working on the factory floor in the processing plants and abattoirs of Brittany. Unable to find work in his field, Joseph Ponthus enlists with a temp agency and starts to pick up casual shifts in the fish processing plants and abattoirs of Brittany. Day after day he records with infinite precision the nature of work on the production line: the noise, the weariness, the dreams stolen by the repetitive nature of exhausting rituals and physical suffering. But he finds solace in a life previously lived. Shelling prawns, he dreams of Alexandre Dumas. Pushing cattle carcasses, he recalls Apollinaire. And, in the grace of the blank spaces created by his insistent return to a new line of text – mirroring his continued return to the production line – we discover the woman he loves, the happiness of a Sunday, Pok Pok the dog, the smell of the sea. In this celebrated French bestseller, translated by Stephanie Smee, Ponthus captures the mundane, the beautiful and the strange, writing with an elegance and humour that sit in poignant contrast with the blood and sweat of the factory floor. On the Line is a poet's ode to manual labour, and to the human spirit that makes it bearable. Praise for On the Line: 'Poetic and political, lyrical and realistic, Joseph Ponthus' spirited elegy is at once surprising, captivating and affecting' Télérama 'It is not every day that one witnesses the birth of a writer' France 5 La Grande Librairie 'A work that is powerful, clever, benevolent, optimistic even. Essential reading' Causette 'Be prepared for a battering of the senses with vivid, grisly prose' France MagazineTrade ReviewPoetic and political, lyrical and realistic, Joseph Ponthus' spirited elegy is at once surprising, captivating and affecting * Télérama *It is not every day that one witnesses the birth of a writer * France 5 La Grande Librairie *A work that is powerful, clever, benevolent, optimistic even. Essential reading * Causette *Be prepared for a battering of the senses with vivid, grisly prose * France Magazine *A lasting gift to the French – and now the English – literary landscape. You don't need to be a poetry aficionado to be stirred by the understated beauty of Ponthus's writing, and Stephanie Smee's superb translation, nor to be moved by the world that Ponthus paints and probes. A world in which the vicissitudes of factory life are illuminated with wit and wisdom, and joy can be found twinkling where you least expect it * European Literature Network *Writing from real-life experience, Ponthus details the drudgery, exhaustion, frustration, horror, stress, satisfaction and occasional joy found working in an industrial food factory. Using an experimental style that's half verse, half prose, he makes this refrigerated, sanitised, fluorescent-lit world feel beautiful, even romantic. I found myself dropping the book into my lap for minutes at a time just to process just how fucked-up his experience is. This is a powerful – but not preachy or guilt-tripping – window into an ugly, opaque system we're all part of * Broadsheet *

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Book SynopsisAn epic poem touching on issues of racism, intolerance and environmental destructions from Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri. There is much to celebrate in the human journey so far – art in all its forms, advances made in the fields of technology and medicine and, for many of us, the miracle of freedom. But there is also much to regret – racism, intolerance, the destruction of our environment, the reality and the legacy of slavery. In this long, sustained consideration of the state we find ourselves in, Ben Okri invokes the past to explain the present, and sings out a message of hope. The future is still ours to make. This epic poem, an anthem for the twenty-first century, first appeared in The Times in January 1999. Its message could hardly be more relevant to our present condition. Discover this revised edition of an inspiring and extraordinarily tender work. 'Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three – literature, culture and vision – are profoundly interwoven' Ali SmithTrade ReviewPRAISE FOR BEN OKRI: 'Ben Okri is that rare thing, a literary and social visionary, a writer for whom all three – literature, culture and vision – are profoundly interwoven' Ali Smith. 'Where fiction's master of enchantments stares down a real horror, and without blinking or flinching, produces a work of beauty, grace and uncommon power' -- Marlon James on The Freedom Artist

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Book Synopsis'Ruminative and enigmatic . . . powerful' Simon Armitage'Tenderly inquisitive . . . a powerful poetry of witness . . . full of discovery' Alycia Pirmohamed'Majella Kelly offers so much: ecstatic lyricism . . . emotional excavation and virtuosic skill' Kathryn Maris The astonishing poetry debut exploring hidden histories, mythical landscapes and self-discovery in the face of limits on women's bodily autonomyIn 2017, the presence of a mass grave was confirmed in a disused sewage system in Tuam, County Galway. In it were the bodies of infants - wards of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, where from 1925 to 1961 the children of unmarried women were sent to live their lives in the care of nuns. Their deaths were the result of a conservative culture which, under the influence of the Church, took a prurient interest in women's private lives and bodies.In The Speculations of Country People, her hauntingly lyrical debut collection, Majella Kelly reckons with that legacy. She traces the journeys of women in our own day, from controlling relationships to sexual reawakening and new happiness. The speculations of the title are in part those of gossip, the chatter of small communities everywhere; but they are also those of a local, very Irish mythos, in which pagan and Christian - and truth and legend - blend and blur.Here, then, are hares and selkies, a seductive 'master otter' of 'fabulous elegance' who might carry a woman away in the night; here is the last man on Omey Island; here a retired stuntman, dragging his bed of rusty nails along the beach. And here - quiet, against the beauty and loneliness of the Connemara landscape - are the little bones that wash up on shores or stick from the earth to speak of what has been.Trade ReviewThis tenderly inquisitive book . . . oscillate[s] between an intimate interiority . . . and a powerful poetry of witness. Along with its strong, lyrical voice, the book's sections are held together by evocative personifications of the natural world . . . Kelly attends carefully to the histories she writes about . . . [The section on the Tuam Mother and Baby Home] is a poetic inquiry, where skilful and moving language is a tool of investigation. Kelly probes at difficult questions of religion, legacy, grief, and the responsibility of memory and memorial. The poems are lucid with their remembering . . . full of discovery, [The Speculations of Country People gifts] us with the wisdom that the list of places we are from is not fixed, but rather textured with the continuous possibility of finding home in new people and new places -- Alycia PirmohamedMajella Kelly offers so much: ecstatic lyricism, historical fiction, genealogy, cultural observation, emotional excavation and virtuosic skill. Her poems have drive, empathy, pathos and joy -- Kathryn Maris

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