Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisHotel Raphael, Rachael Boast’s fourth collection, charts a journey through heat, drought and pain, and describes not only the reality of chronic illness, but living with it at a time of global crisis.Raphael is the patron saint of travellers and pilgrims, and also of healing; in the search for remedy, we pass through the balm of landscape, and brush against the worlds of artists, writers and filmmakers, whose angels broadcast to us from other rooms. We also encounter the biblical figure of Job, who poses the question of a terrible forbearance: how much suffering can we take, and what can we realistically change?While we fight to relieve our own pain, address the planet’s ecological imbalance and make efforts, large or small, to right its shocking injustices, we must also simply find a way through. Hotel Raphael sees Boast compose an extraordinary travelling song, one that shows us how to bear our pain without trying to erase its source.

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Book SynopsisAlan Gillis – one of the most admired Irish poets of his generation – addresses some of the most pressing concerns of the age: how can we live at the centre of our contemporary paradox, disconnected and hyper-connected as we are? A poet of thresholds and crossings, Gillis finds his answers in the suburbs and edgelands, at the hesitation before the doorstep or the gate. The Readiness sites itself at the heart of our human contradictions, and explores their meaning. These poems form a series of bad dreams and clear visions that speak to the chaos and fragility of both self and society: the childhood innocence that persists into the resignation of adulthood; the beauty of nature in an age of environmental ruin; the terrible isolation of contemporary life – and the live-streamed, advert-laden over-wiring that springs from its digital commons. It does this with a formal confidence, a dry wit and often astonishing lyricism that marks Gillis as one of the most individual and vital poetic voices now at work.Trade ReviewFizzing with vernacular and bounding rhythms, yet also precisely lyrical, the poems in The Readiness frequently run away with themselves, attempting to keep up with, and make some sense of, the often digital babble and information overload of our age. . .The Readiness impresses, but more importantly moves and surprises, given Gillis’s ability to combine dry humour with insight, vibrant description with direct address, and contemporary relevance with lasting concerns * Ben Wilkinson *

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Book Synopsis'The best collection I've read in ages: every poem contains something unexpected and unexpectedly powerful. This is serious, modern, ambitious and bold work – the kind of poetry you hope to find, and rarely do' – Nick LairdJohn Ashbery called Timothy Donnelly’s previous collection, The Cloud Corporation, ‘The poetry of the future, here today’. The Problem of the Many sees Donnelly, one of the most influential poets of his generation, focused less on the future than the end of history: these richly textured and intellectually capacious poems often seem to attempt nothing less than a circumscription of the totality of human experience. The book contains the already widely praised ‘Hymn to Life’, which opens with a litany of what we have made extinct; elsewhere, from an immediately contemporary vantage, Donnelly confronts the clutter and devastation that civilization has left us as he strives towards a beauty that we still need, along the way enlisting agents as various as Prometheus, Jonah, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, NyQuil, Nietzsche, and Alexander the Great.The Problem of the Many refers to the famous philosophical problem of what defines the larger aggregate – a cloud, a crowd – which Donnelly extends to address the subject of individual boundary, identity and belonging. Donnelly’s solutions may be wholly poetic, but he has succeeded in speaking as deeply to these profound and urgent issues as any writer currently at work.Trade ReviewThe best collection I've read in ages: every poem contains something unexpected and unexpectedly powerful. This is serious, modern, ambitious and bold work - the kind of poetry you hope to find, and rarely do -- Nick LairdOmnivorous, fast-forward, bull-in-a-china-shop poems that deliver more beauty per minute than can comfortably be withstood. If Whitman had had a young kid and a Brooklyn apartment, too many bills, and a stack of takeout menus in the top drawer of his Ikea desk, he would have written these poems. * New Yorker *Donnelly is a poet everyone should read. * Guardian *Dramatic tension, humor, lyrical profundity. This is an utterly ingenious and proudly inclusive voice . . .a sensibility so urgent we find ourselves momentarily re-inventing the term Poet. -- Carol Muske-Dukes * Huffington Post *A Stevens of the Anthropocene -- Douglas Crase * Artforum *

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Book SynopsisIan Duhig’s effortlessly fascinating and endlessly quotable verse has had a shaping influence on UK poetry for more than thirty years. This eclectic gathering of Duhig’s best work draws on material from his acclaimed debut, The Bradford Count, to the present day: the book collects a number of fine new pieces, including an elegy for the late Ciaran Carson. Duhig is contemporary poetry’s social historian; he has wise and powerful things to say about the relationship between community and family, racism and justice, place and folklore, music and language. For Duhig fans, the book will offer a mesmerising retrospective of the career one of our most highly regarded poets; for those yet to discover him, New and Selected Poems represents a marvellous introduction to a radical social conscience, an archivist of strange tales, and one of the most skilful writers now at work.Trade ReviewThe most original poet of his generation -- Carol Ann Duffy * Guardian *'Duhig telescopes topical allusions, scholarly references and coarse humour into tightly-shaped, surreal poems which burst open with explosive moral force' -- Alan Brownjohn * Sunday Times *'His poetry is learned, rude, elegant, sly and funny, mixing gilded images, belly-laughs and esoteric lore about language (including Irish), art, history, politics and children's word-games' -- Ruth Padel * Independent on Sunday *. . .one of Duhig's charms is that, for all his learning, he retains humility -- Kathryn Gray * Magma Review *Ian is a one-off, a true original. -- Jackie Kay * Herald *

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Book Synopsis“Where does all the grief go when it’s not tugging at your wrist?” Enyegue’s debut collection is an ode to girlhood, to Blackness, to generational trauma, sexual assault, and mental health. This collection does not aim to heal anyone who reads it, but instead help them confront their own healing. Rather than sugar-coated bullets that enter you lightly, these poems are designed to hurt. They are for the girls with difficult names, the boys with softness at their core, and the people with neither. They are meant for the people who are Black, and the people who are not—because we are all tethered together by the heaviness of the human experience.

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Book SynopsisIn a Southern land, where the veil of time and space has worn thin, twins with otherworldly ways are born to a stone carver and his wife. As they grow into themselves, the landscape and its histories will rise up to meet them and change their whānau forever. Cave art leaps from walls, pounamu birds sing, legends become reality, and history becomes the present in this verse novel by Ruby Solly (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu). The Artist brings to life the histories of our great Southern iwi through the whakapapa of its characters and the rich world they and their ancestors call their tūrakawaewae—their place to stand, their place to sing.Trade Review“For readers with an interest in innovative poetry -- in New Zealand literature, Indigenous literature, Maori literature -- this book is significant and needed. The Artist is an ahuru mowai, a shelter made from poetry, and is to be celebrated for its craft and heart, and for its whakapapa.” - Robert Sullivan, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books“A mesmerising verse novel that weaves together the history and traditions of Southern iwi. Solly's evocative storytelling brings to life cave art, pounamu birds, and legendary tales. This enchanting book immerses readers in a rich cultural tapestry, celebrating the whakapapa and heritage of its characters.” - Avenues Magazine“Deeply evocative -- cave art leaps from walls, pounamu birds sing, legends become reality, and history becomes the present.” - Neil Johnstone, Wellington City Libraries

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Book SynopsisKen Smith (1938-2003) was a major voice in world poetry, his work and example inspiring a whole generation of younger British poets. His politically edgy, cuttingly colloquial, muscular poetry poetry shifted territory with time, from rural Yorkshire, America and London to the war-ravaged Balkans and Eastern Europe (before and after Communism). His early books span a transition from a preoccupation with land and myth to his later engagement with urban Britain and the politics of radical disaffection. The pivotal work marking this shift was his long poem Fox Running (1980), brought to recent attention when an archive recording of him reading it was broadcast by BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please in 2016. His Collected Poems brings together poetry from four decades, including all the work from two earlier retrospectives, The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 (1982) and Shed: Poems 1980-2001 (2002), together with the posthumously published You Again: last poems & other words (2004). The book is introduced with essays by Roger Garfitt and Jon Glover. Publication coincides with his 80th birthday and with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Bloodaxe’s first title, Ken Smith’s Tristan Crazy (1978).Trade ReviewKen Smith brought an original and memorable voice to poetry in Britain. He spent his writing life not so much swimming against the tide as ignoring the stream’s existence… He was one of those by whom the language lives.’ – Sean O’Brien, Independent

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Book SynopsisNegative of a Group Photograph brings together three decades of poems by the leading Iranian poet Azita Ghahreman. Born in Mashhad in 1962 and based in Sweden since 2006, Ghahreman is the author of five highly acclaimed collections. Her poems are lyrical and intimate, addressing themes of loss, exile and female desire, as well as the changing face of her country. Negative of a Group Photograph runs the gamut of Ghahreman’s experience: from her childhood in the Khorasan region of south-eastern Iran to her exile to Sweden, from Iran's book-burning years and the war in Iraq to her unexpected encounters with love. The poems in this illuminating collection are brought to life in English by the poet Maura Dooley, working in collaboration with Elhum Shakerifar. Farsi-English dual language edition co-published with the Poetry Translation Centre.Trade ReviewThese poems are a wonderful mixture of the bodily, the earthy and the transcendent, the metaphysical; they have lyricism and a sense of elegy and a wonderful sense of defiance. -- Boyd Tonkin * Judge, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation *

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Book SynopsisTess Gallagher’s new poems are suspended between contradiction and beauty. Is, Is Not upends our notions of linear time, evokes the spirit and sanctity of place, and journeys toward discovering the full capacity of language. Gallagher’s poems reverberate with the inward clarity of a bell struck on a mountaintop and hover daringly at the threshold of what language can nearly deliver while offering alternative corollaries as gifts of its failures. Guided by humour, grace, and a deep inquiry into the natural world, every poem nudges us toward moments of awe. How else except by delight and velocity would we discover the miracle within the ordinary? Gallagher claims many Wests – the Northwest of America, the north-west of Ireland, and a West even further to the edge, beyond the physical. These landscapes are charged with invisible energies and inhabited by the people, living and dead, who shape Gallagher’s poems and life. Restorative in every sense, Is, Is Not is the kind of book that takes a lifetime to write – a book of the spirit made manifest by the poet’s unrelenting gaze and her intimate engagement with the mysteries that keep us reaching.Trade Review'The book itself is dedicated to two great loves (the American writer Raymond Carver, and the Irish painter and storyteller, Josie Gray) and its narratives echo through time... Beneath all the places, stories and loves, this poet finds that deep resonance of common essence. There is beauty and grief and humour here; there is a gentle wisdom; there is a quiet, incremental insight that sings us awake. I treasure these poems.' - Jane MeadTable of ContentsRecognition 1 i In the Company of Flowers 5 Almost Lost Moment 6 Ambition 7 Your Dog Playing with a Coyote 9 Ability to Hold Territory 10 Blind Dog/Seeing Girl 12 Doe Browsing Salal Berries 14 ii Little Inside Out Dream, 17 Dream Cancel 19 Stolen Dress 21 Glass Impresses 23 Hummingbird-Mind 25 One Deer at Dusk 26 iii Correction 31 Sully 33 Retroactive Father 36 Earth 38 The Seemingly Domesticated 39 Reaching 41 Right-Minded Person 44 In the Too-Bright Café 45 iv Let’s Store These Hours 51 Season of Burnt-Out Candelabras 53 The Branches of the Maple 56 Yet to Be Born Weather 57 I Want to Be Loved Like Somebody’s Beloved Dog in America 59 While I Was Away 63 v Without 67 Deer Path Enigma 69 The Favorite Cup 70 What Does It Say 71 vi Bus to Belfast 75 Is, Is Not 76 As the Diamond 78 During the Montenegrin Poetry Reading 81 Curfew 83 Eddie’s Steps 84 Four-Footed 86 The Gold Dust of the Linden Trees 88 Blue Eyelid Lifting 91 vii Button, Button 95 Breath 99 To an Irishman Painting in the Rain 100 Encounter 102 Planet Greece 103 Cloud-Path 105 viii Oliver 109 A “Sit” with Eileen 112 Remembering Each Other While Together 115 Opening 117 Word of Mouth 118 Daylong Visitor Caress 123 March Moon Three Stars 125 Afterword: Writing from the Edge: A Poet of Two Northwests 127 Notes 135 Acknowledgments 139

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Book SynopsisIreland. Night. A grotto to the Virgin Mary illuminates a deserted road. Overhead, the soundless roar of the Milky Way’s glittering traffic reminds us of a past that runs parallel to our own uncertain times. Olives ripen in a Portuguese valley. The sound of gunfire approaches a Paris café. Irish women revolutionaries march towards their future. Tigers prowl through County Leitrim's rural townlands, whose old names emerge like neon signposts from the dark: Red Marsh, Small Watery Place, Round Hill of the Boys. Róisín Kelly’s Mercy is an attempt to reconcile her Catholic background with her pagan heritage, transcending the limits of a world in which everything is connected. Both intimate and political, this powerful debut collection combines a passionate exploration of self with an awestruck confrontation of wilderness. Róisín Kelly was born in west Belfast, raised in Leitrim, and now lives in Cork. Her pamphlet Rapture (Southword, 2016) was described by Leanne O’Sullivan as ‘fierce and mysterious, beautiful and compelling’.Trade ReviewRóisín Kelly hauls the mythological up into the contemporary world in this fiercely tender collection. Love and loss are laid bare again and again under constellations new and old, in skies above Greece, Portugal, America, France, and Ireland. Kelly’s intelligence and wisdom ignite each of these poems, whether funeral pyre or beacon in the dark light. Mercy burns with ruthless beauty. -- Zsuzsi Gartner * author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives *What is striking about Kelly’s writing is that she intentionally situates herself within Ireland’s literary tradition, frequently drawing on Yeatsian images like the rose. She is unswerving, however, in her desire to draw romance and realism together, and Kelly revives the symbols of old so that they might be re-spoken in a brazen, drunken voice… Kelly’s poetry is at once tender and savage, steeped in tradition yet brave in expression — she takes readers where they don’t want to go, a feat that most writers attempt, but few achieve. -- James O’Sullivan * Los Angeles Review of Books *Unafraid of sentiment, these twenty poems meditate on lost love, longing, and the tendency of intimacy to arrive as an utter surprise, and dissolve just as swiftly. -- Grace Wilentz * Poetry Ireland Review (on Rapture) *This brief collection shows remarkable emotional range. Kelly leaves the reader afloat on a tide of colour.’ -- Alison Brackenbury * PN Review (on Rapture) *Table of Contents9 Mercy 10 Leave 11 Mars in Retrograde 12 Tom Barry 13 Chameleon 15 Penelope 16 Domínio Vale do Mondego 18 Guarda 20 A Massage Room in West Cork 21 Rapture 22 In America 23 Mary Anne MacLeod 25 Mar-a-Lago 27 La Chalupa 28 At a Photography Exhibition in New York Public Library 29 Rose 30 Glenveagh 31 Storm Warnings 32 Paris, 13 November 2015 34 Tropical Ravine House in Belfast Botanic Gardens 35 Eden 37 The Cave of Melassini 39 Ithaca 41 Oranges 43 Easter 44 Miracle at Standing Rock 46 The Unicorn Children 47 Tigers in Leitrim 48 Poem for a Friend’s Unborn Baby 50 Northern Lights 51 Cosmic Latte 52 irish coffee 53 Mercury in Retrograde 54 Ophelia 56 Amongst Women 59 Wedding Below the Perseid Meteor Shower 60 Tuam 62 Granuaile 64 Notes

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Book SynopsisThe two searching sequences that bookend this collection are not so much elegies as unfinished conversations with friends no longer living – friendships lost or neglected, with their closeness and distances sensitively mapped. This is Philip Gross’s writing at its most hospitable, lit up by a sense of personal address, both tactful and deeply engaged. The sea that is always in sight, between us and beyond us, is more than a metaphor. It is another conversation – with the real sea of this planet, used and abused and in need of our care. Between the Islands is Philip Gross’s 26th book of poetry, and his 11th from Bloodaxe.Trade ReviewAt the heart of all of Gross's collections has been his deep enquiry into and fascination with the nature of embodiment and existence – what water is and does in The Water Table, the role of language, and speech especially, in identity and the self in Deep Field and Later. Now in Love Songs of Carbon Gross tests and feels his amazed way through the mysteries of the multiple manifestations of love and ageing... Such exactitude of feeling and image is typical of all Gross's work, and no less inventively in this new collection. Characteristic too is his focused, sustained approach across the whole book: Love Songs of Carbon asks to be read as a song-book, to use the terms of its presentation, curated for the reader to turn and return to. From poem to poem, pace and metrics quicken and still and quicken again as the book progresses. -- John Burnside & Jane Draycott * PBS Bulletin *Table of Contents11 Edge States 14 Erasures 15 Nocturne with a View of the Pier 23 The Age of Electricity 24 Touched 25 A Wave… 28 Shag, Rampant 30 Himself 32 Firepower 34 Pyroglyphs 37 Three Fevers and a Fret 40 Equator 41 Southern Cross 43 The House of Innumerable Things 45 Canberra Rising 48 The Day of the Things 50 The Floes 51 Restoration 54 Bay Laurel 56 A Kind of Rapture 57 Sea Koan 59 How He Lay 60 Flugelhorn on a Pembrokeshire Beach 62 Dear Barber 63 Of the Silence at the Heart of Pyrotechnics 64 Between the Islands 79 Towards a Line from Guillevic

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Book SynopsisBlending the sacred and the everyday, Amali Gunasekera’s second collection The Golden Thread is a search for grace through the deep process of transmuting emotional trauma into peace. She takes up Muriel Rukeyser’s famous line: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’ Her book’s central sequence, Nine [Miscarried] Methods, considers the challenge of asserting a woman’s equal status within a patriarchal objectified culture. Approaching the polemic or the existential with a gentle touch, this is poetry as lyric essay, mysterious and shapeshifting as sunlight on water. Formally, the poems explore the instability of the lyric ‘I’ and the addressed ‘You’. Often there is no static vantage point; instead, the ‘I’ and ‘You’ are verbs in a state of becoming. Their very unfixity reflects dynamic systems in the natural world where elements are constantly interacting and altering their natures. These poems also respond to Wilfred Bion’s notion of ‘Thoughts Without a Thinker’ and Carl Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’: through a rich symbolic system they simultaneously hold two dimensions of time; the linear Chronos of our material world, and the vertical Kairos or spiritual time. Thus, the field of this collection is holographic, in search of new co-ordinates, always beholden to something just beyond sight. Amali Gunasekera was born and grew up in Sri Lanka. She works in the field of Archetypal Psychology. After living in Mozambique, Kenya and India, she is now based in Cumbria. Her first collection, Lotus Gatherers, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016 (under her former name of Amali Rodrigo).Trade ReviewAmali Gunasekera's second collection is a beautiful examination of the separateness and union of "I" and "You", rooted in an English pastoral tradition reminiscent of Wordsworth and the Lake Poets. Myth, the natural world, the ephemeral beauty of music or the filter of light on a wintry morning, unite to articulate love for the "Beloved". These are masterful poems of intimacy and joy leading to places of stillness and wisdom. -- Shash Trevett * PBS Bulletin *What makes [Gunasekera] a truly remarkable poet? In part, it's the breadth and intelligence of her vision (and broad and intelligent it certainly is, taking us to Japan, Kenya, the North Pole; from Kintsugi and Ikebana to whirling dervishes and meteor showers); in part, the deftness with which she can work that vision into a world we can marvel at, but also recognise. This is a world of paradoxes - exotic and familiar, a deeply spiritual world which delights in passion; that celebrates love, but does not hesitate to focus on unsettling histories of gender violence. Lotus Gatherers is an astonishingly sensual book, in the literal sense – these are poems we can feel; poems we can hear resonating on the page, aromatic poems, laced with breathtaking imagery; poems we can hold up to our lips and taste. -- John Glenday * on Lotus Gatherers *The first full collection from [Amali Gunasekera] – a poet who has lived between Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Kenya and India – is both formally sophisticated and impressively diverse, reflecting the breadth of cultures and traditions informing its contents. -- Daisy Lafarge * The Poetry Review *A native of Sri Lanka, [Gunasekera] writes complex iridescent poems that sidestep any routine post-colonial interpretation...This is beautiful work, unlike anything out there, wonderfully alive and so deserving of wider attention. -- Conor O'Callaghan * Poetry, The Reading List *Table of ContentsKasturi Mrugam 11 I Reading James Merrill at Curwen Woods 14 Worry Doll 20 Beloved 28 Variation on the Fact of Spring: One for Sorrow Two for Joy 35 II from Nine [Miscarried] Methods 48 III Spiegel im Spiegel 56 Bend in the River 63 Variations on the Fact of Spring 69 The Great Pause 80 Bonsai 89 Notes 93

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Book SynopsisWhere Richard Skinner’s previous pamphlets, Invisible Sun and Dream into Play, were primarily concerned with the play of light and playfulness respectively, White Noise Machine is mainly concerned with sound. A white noise machine is a device that produces a noise that calms the listener, which in many cases sounds like a rushing waterfall or wind blowing through trees, and other serene or nature-like sounds and Skinner has used this idea to try to create this effect in many of the poems.

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Book SynopsisCoffee Days, Whiskey Nights is a collection of poetry, prose, and aphorisms that juxtaposes the hopefulness a brand new day can bring with the lingering thoughts that keep us up into the late-night hours. A lot can happen between the first sip of coffee and the last taste of whiskey, and this book takes a look at the way a single day can change our outlook on everything from relationships with others, to our relationships with ourselves, and everything in between. Ultimately, it illustrates that no matter how hopeless we may feel at the end of a day, a new one is only a few hours away.

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Book Synopsis'A soothing collection to comfort and inspire in those quieter moments of reflection and searching' Cecelia AhernEvery Day is a Fresh Beginning: Meaningful Poems for Life is a stunning collection of poetry chosen by Aoibhín Garrihy to uplift and inspire, delight and comfort. These powerful verses will guide you through the stresses of modern life, touching on themes such as friendship, love, home, parenting, and grief. With lines of classic and contemporary wisdom taken from a wide range of poets including Emily Bronte, W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Anne Casey and Jan Brierton, this anthology will bring joy to every reader.'It's mind-blowing how ordinary words in the hands of poets can create such powerful magic. As a lover of language Aoibhín has gathered the most beautiful collection of poetry. Now I just need her to read it to me every night!' Kathryn ThomasTrade Review'It's mind-blowing how ordinary words in the hands of poets can create such powerful magic. As a lover of language Aoibhín has gathered the most beautiful collection of poetry. Now I just need her to read it to me every night!' -- Kathryn Thomas'A soothing collection to comfort and inspire in those quieter moments of reflection and searching' -- Cecelia Ahern

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Book SynopsisThe latest book by the Sarah Maguire Prize-winning poet and translator Brian Holton, Hard Roads an Cauld Hairst Winds is a collection of Scots translations of poetry by Li Bai and Du Fu, two of the most renowned poets of Ancient China. By bringing two of the world’s great poets – from the oldest continuous literary tradition in the world – into the library of Scots writing, Brian Holton creates a text as valuable in its own way to the literary tradition as Lorimer’s wonderful ‘New Testament in Scots’. Published in stunning hardback with calligraphy by Chinese artist Chi Zhang, Hard Roads an Cauld Hairst Winds was the beneficiary of a Scottish Book Trust Scots Publication Grant.Trade Review‘What a wonderful book this is. Brian Holton is the living master of literary Scots, and though 1300 years separate their times from ours, Holton’s translations of Li Bai and Du Fu speak to our own age. They are perennial poems of love and war and exile, youth and age, by turns wistful, moving, vivacious and sad. Brian Holton’s Scots is playful and unforced. Translating directly from the Chinese, he demonstrates the vigour and subtlety of which Scots is capable, relishing a language as well-resourced and malleable as any other. These are beautiful lyric poems.’ Kathleen Jamie; ‘It is a singular stroke of imaginative genius to translate the poems of Du Fu and Li Bai into Scots, one which, perhaps, only Brian Holton is capable of. His longtime familiarity with and comprehensive knowledge of these ancient yet still-intimate texts, together with his deep knowledge of the border ballad tradition and its foundational role in Scottish literature, has created a curious and compelling hybrid realm, in which the reader’s imagination dwells as vividly as in a work of historical fiction, Ossianic forgery, or compelling fantasy.' Bill Herbert; 'Published in a fine pocketbook-sized bilingual hardback edition Hard Roads an Cauld Hairst Winds brings into synthetic Scots the work of two great 8th century lyric poets, Li Bai and Du Fu. Holton is a scholar of and specialist in the Chinese language, and the work is a really welcome addition to the repertoire of published literature in the Scots language. The poems are delight to read and that has no doubt been facilitated by the particular ease and grace with which that countrified peasant nature of Scots (as noted above) can carry the lyrics from 8th century China. Holton speaks of the ‘hamelieness’ of Scots in reference to this point, and one can’t but feel that modern English might indeed strike a tone to knowingly distant from the culture here to bring these ancient Chinese poems alive. The important point about Holton’s expertise in both languages – Chinese and Scots – here, is that these are not adaptations, whereby some anonymous translator has put the Chinese into some basic English (or Scots) and Holton as poet has then jazzed them up. What we have here are ‘versions’, as Holton calls them, calling on a citation from fellow poet Don Paterson to define such ‘versions’ as ‘trying to be poems in their own right’.' Bella Caledonia

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Book SynopsisLaura’s third collection with Flapjack Press is a rallying call for action and challenges inequality, oppression and division with passion, objectivity, empathy and humour. This is socially conscious and uncompromising poetry, which explores the slippery and inconclusive condition of language, the power of ideology and the process of myth-making, addressing the wellbeing of a diverse nation governed by a political and social elite and their culpability.Trade Review"This is Taylor at her best. Her energy, anger and passion are apparent in every word. Her writing is urgent, powerful and her punches land. A must-have collection. Buy this book." Emma Purshouse, poet laureate for Wolverhampton; "Poems to have a beer with, to sit round a fire and keep warm with, to rage against the system with, to take to the streets with." Steph Pike, poet; "Tongues of fire in a time of plague. Raging against conspiracy theorists, defending the vulnerable, the homeless, the old, the hardest hit in the worst of times. A supremely clever working-class poet." Attila the Stockbroker, poet & musician; "If there was an equivalent of Masterchef for cooking words into exquisitely tasty and surprising dishes, then Taylor would win it. Hot. Flavourful. Authentic. Instant pleasure with a long, lingering aftertaste." Janine Booth, poet & writer; "At times forceful, at others lyrical ... crosses from personal to political and cross-examines who we were and who we have become." Winston Plowes, poet; "This is Taylor's best yet. Her language is lush and confident, and her range is limitless ... wise, honest, funny, angry, mature and assured. This book is the tonic we all need." Cathy Thomas-Bryant, poet & writer

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Book SynopsisGrammar of Passage details a German family’s quiet lives as they are pulled into the gathering maelstrom of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Monika Cassel’s attention to detail in this début, tempered with a deep empathy brings individual moments to vivid life, deftly demonstrates how poetry can excavate and reinvigorate history.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in The Past Is a Dangerous Driver is inspired by Neal Mason's fascination with the past, not only in the way it exists as general history but also as it is formed by one's own personal recollection. Through his poems, Neil links the past to the present, in a way that puts events in a new light and exposes discovery of hidden complexities. History is no longer seen as being made up of facts and artefacts but instead it is presented as the manifestation of the human spirit. The poems also conjure up an eclectic view of Britain, its values, history and even future. The title of collection is a hint that the past does affect the present, not always for the best, but its influence needs to be acknowledged.Table of ContentsAfter Dunwich Derelict Classroom The Long Campaign 7th December Holiday Romance Martello Tower Wooden Ruler Mendel, Shopping Affinity Reflected on Water S.S. Saxon Star The Figure Not as a Medal Slowing Down World War II Bomb Lineage Journal of a Tree The Stratagem Breakages Submersion The Grand Nitrator The Museum of Lost Art The Pied Piper SPQR Contiguity

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Book SynopsisIain Morrison's debut collection I'm a Pretty Circler is experimental without being intimidating; conversational without being casual; and outrageous without shedding tenderness. Within its pages, Emily Dickinson rubs shoulders with drag queens, while nineteenth-century German composers are as likely to be referenced as dating apps. Morrison balances punchy, patterned short poems with longer more conversational or collaged works that explore ways in which sex, class, technology and religion intertwine in contemporary Britain.Trade Review"A vast and vigorous vivisected joie de vivre. Although the poetry always flows forth according to its own autonomous and inimitable sprung algorithms, it is also incisively open to the world's detritus, including voices that are carefully unassimilated into the poet's voice. But no matter who or what it makes present, it is all made out of music: mostly, it erects a lattice of stents within the pre-existing musicality of speech. This is life, writing (noun, verb), ever infectiously brave in its self-probing and self-enabling: shucking off your hackles as it sucks off its shackles. Mobile, shrewd, obstinate, grand, and sexy, singing not only with its mouths but with its wounds." - Jow Walton

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Book SynopsisAn unsentimental, forensic account of the breakup of a marriage, told without rancour and with a humanitarian resolution. An exceptional first book.

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Book SynopsisKevin Crossley-Holland’s name will be familiar to readers of all ages for his historical novels, his re-telling of the Norse myths and his many volumes of poetry. Previously published by the late Enitharmon Press, he is a very welcome newcomer to Arc with his twelfth collection – his first for six years – inspired by the “heavenly squelch” of his own north Norfolk where “the word on the tip of your tongue may be sacramental”. As Ronald Blythe puts it: “His language has been honed by the Norfolk and Suffolk climate itself, and has the polish of split flint.”

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Book SynopsisIn its geographical sweep - from Israel / Palestine westward across Europe, then circling back to Greece - No Cherry Time reflects a personal tale of alienation, departure and quest. Fine-tuned to the natural world, sustained by its fragile continuities, the poems play out a restive music. As the focus comes to settle on Greece, it is above all the Mediterranean ("sea between the lands") that buoys the imaginative spirit, blurring East and West. It brings back a "world still wide, blissfully unknown".

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Book SynopsisMPT’s spring issue, ’The Fingers of Our Soul‘, includes a focus on bodies guest edited by Khairani Barokka and Jamie Hale, featuring signed languages such as ASL, BSL, LSF and BISINDO, Anthony Price’s translation using the medium of eye-gaze, and Salma Harland on the blind poet al-Maʿarrī. Poetic forms include dagli from Filipino poet Stefani J Alvarez and the picture-poems from Hoshino Tomihiro. Also: long poems from Geet Chaturvedi and Shooka Hosseini, Andrew Nielsen’s version of Du Fu in tribute to Roddy Lumsden, and Dzifa Benson reviews Maria Stepanova’s War of the Beasts and Animals. All this and more in the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation: for the best in world poetry read MPT.

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Book SynopsisMPT’s summer issue, ’The Previous Song: Focus on Somali Poetry’ includes new poems by Asmaa Jama and Hibaq Osman, translations of Amran Maxamed Axmed and Xasan Daahir Ismaaciil ‘Weedhsame’, an introduction to the lyrics of Qaraami - the popular music of Somali culture - and Ayan Salaad’s translations of Ali Osman Drog’s womens’ songs. Also: new translations of Tove Ditlevsen, Meret Oppenheim and Mona Kareem, poems in response to the invasion of Ukraine, and Olivia McCannon translates Louky Bersianik’s Cold War sequence ‘Ruins of the Future’. All this and more in the ground-breaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation: for the best in world poetry read MPT.

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Book Synopsis‘Measureless Melodies’, MPT’s April issue, highlights Vietnamese poetry in translation, in a jam-packed issue including translations spanning centuries of verse, with work by Hồ Xuân Hương, Nguyệt Phạm, Hàn Mặc Tử, Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, Chế Lan Viên, and both a poem and essay by Nhã Thuyên, the latter speaking poetically to the resistances and resiliencies of the Vietnamese language. Plus: an interview with Najwan Darwish and Kareem James Abu-Zeid on ‘attunement’ in their collaboration, and winners of the Stephen Spender Trust Prize and the MPT/YPN Young Poets’ Challenge—Jonathan Bastable’s translation of Joseph Brodsky, and Kexin Huang’s poetic self-translation of her name, respectively. We also have a self-translation by Dzifa Benson, coincidentally centred on naming conventions, and translations of César Dávila Andrade by Jonathan Simkins, Barbara Gruszka-Zych by Halina Maria Boniszewska, Fabio Franzin by André Naffis-Sahely. This and much more in our new issue of the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation: for a poetry magazine belonging to the world, read MPT.

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Book SynopsisAlan Riach’s The MacDiarmid Memorandum is a work of epic, category-defying scope; blending biography and national history, poetry and prose; an intimate portrait of an old friend and mentor, and a political manifesto calling for revolution. Riach’s poems begin with MacDiarmid’s childhood in Langholm and his first attempts to navigate the Scottish landscape. We travel from the Borders to Shetland, from Edinburgh to rural Lanarkshire. The poems map a nation where nature is inseparable from political history. They explore a peculiarly Scottish kind of consciousness, willing itself to be free yet bowed under the weight of self-suppression. There is confrontation on various fronts. MacDiarmid experienced trauma, divorce, breakdown, wildness and later, domestic affection. At the same time, Scotland endured two world wars, each triggering a continuing renaissance of Scottish artists and intellectuals, struggling to regenerate international recognition and self-determination. Alongside Riach’s poems, the book includes reproductions of paintings by the artists Alexander Moffat and Ruth Nicol, focusing on some of the landscapes, friends and associates MacDiarmid knew most closely through his long life, plus a frontispiece portrait by William Johnstone and a song-setting by Ronald Stevenson.

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Book SynopsisThese poems were written to accompany the Los Caprichos images, originally published by Francisco Goya on February 6th, 1799. The images are part of the original `Prado' manuscript, republished by Dover Publications in 1969. Excerpts from this sequence first appeared in Ambit, Buenos Aires Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, Granta, The Common, Long Poem Magazine, Morning Star, Poetry Review and on University of Liverpool's `Citizens of Everywhere' blog. The author is grateful to the editors of these publications. A brief selection also appeared in Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo Press, 2015).

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Book SynopsisThese poems were written to accompany the Los Caprichos images, originally published by Francisco Goya on February 6th, 1799. The images are part of the original `Prado' manuscript, republished by Dover Publications in 1969. Excerpts from this sequence first appeared in Ambit, Buenos Aires Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, Granta, The Common, Long Poem Magazine, Morning Star, Poetry Review and on University of Liverpool's `Citizens of Everywhere' blog. The author is grateful to the editors of these publications. A brief selection also appeared in Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo Press, 2015).

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Book SynopsisFor younger years and ageless imaginations, this collection pulls together the most fitting pieces from Ash’s two Burning Eye releases, plus others. In 2018, Ash saw eighty-eight different schools, the majority of the pupils being too young for either Slinky Espadrilles or Strange Keys. This collection is for them.

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Book SynopsisOn Reflection: Moments, Flight and Nothing New attempts to grapple with the complexities of our present moment. Personal and imagined stories appear as fragments of everyday scenes forming a narrative of self-discovery. Vignettes accompanied by photography explore life's contradictions, trauma, and the ways in which we navigate the fluidity of cities. The poems move back and forth in time and across Europe, highlighting a range of experiences and perspectives of our modern society as a series of snapshots. In each, we catch a glimpse of ourselves, demonstrating how such moments and characters influence our journeys. Written from the consciousness of a British Ghanaian, the collection is a love letter to the lived and shared experience of those struggling and learning about the various intersections of their identity. Through the voice of Akos and other characters, Wiredu reaches to understand the significance of history, its effect on an evolving African diaspora in Europe, and finds hope in the present as she proposes an optimistic dialogue about the future.

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Book SynopsisA lyrically bardic first collection from accomplished poet, Sarah Lipton-Sidibeh; Spanning the ages across Britain's colonial landscape, Sidibeh explores not only the body, but the body politic. With unflinching intimacy, Sidibeh illustrates the vagaries of ageing and loving in a body caught by endless possibilities and boundaries. Through the same critical eyes, she undresses Britain's colonial past and criminal present, laying bare society's ills and inequities; A comprehensive collection of humanity's collective struggles and radiant joys, The First Collection is an ambitious accomplishment.

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Book SynopsisThis poetry collection explores the competing nature of the soldier's identity found in a civilization that worships and fetishize the myth of the warrior, serving as both an instruction manual for those with no military experience whatsoever and as confirmation for Soldiers the world over that their creation was inevitable, their use foreordained. Each poem and work of flash fiction elucidates the steps in which soldiers are created followed by their subsequent lives in the aftermath of their utilization as warfighters. The work demonstrates the ways in which society may turn a blind eye to the wars around them, to the destruction taking place in their name, to the layers of emotions that define the identity of the modern warfighter and his search for something more. The work gives voice to the struggle to understand actions before, during, and after combat both for the participant soldiers and for those far removed from the military fray while seeking to rewrite the ways in which we understand modern civilization and its continual march towards destruction.

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Book SynopsisNchéfù is Igbo for forgetting, misplacement. These are poems of a child born in the age of decolonization, and specifically in the very aftermath of the sort of destructive civil war colonial policy made inevitable in the exploited parts of the world. These are poems of a child who was raised as his parents were compelled through a whirlwind of global travel, who eventually came to realize he must first forgive himself his muddled identity before the great rivers of his bloodline will forgive him.

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Book SynopsisFrom the seclusion of the Scottish isles to the urban vigour of Manchester to the lowlands of East Anglia, Anna Percy observes an ever-changing world wherein change is sometimes imperceptible. This passionate and enticing meditation of ecopoetry also explores modern feminism and its societal perception, whilst thematically embracing sensuality, mental health and wellbeing, love and loss. Contains adult themes and strong language.Trade Review"A vivid evocation of place and a celebration of life and the body. Her work suggests the oneness of self and environment; that separation is an illusion." - Steve O'Connor, poet & educator; "Raw as a fresh cut, yet finely crafted as a Grecian sculpture, this collection fills the void unfilled by every pithy self-help book and half-baked love song. Anna's finest work to date." - Genevieve L. Walsh, spoken word artist; "A signature understanding of imagination and skill. I feel invited into a quiet place of crowds and their secrets, knowingly held and softly told." - Gerry Potter, poet & playwright; "Anna is a fabulous, feminist fighter whose new collection takes you on a journey into self-exploration and change. A wonderful addition to her poetry legacy." - Shirley May, poet & founding director of Young Identity

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Erika Meitner’s fifth collection of poetry plumbs human resilience and grit in the face of disaster, loss, and uncertainty. These narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls and gun culture, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with what it means to be the only Jewish family in an Evangelical neighborhood and the anxieties of raising one white son and one black son amidst racial tensions and school lockdown drills. With a firm hand on the pulse of the uncertainty at the heart of 21st century America and a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society and never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.Trade Review“In her graceful fifth collection, Meitner (Copia) displays a sense of urgency informed by parenthood in this strange and particularly turbulent American moment.” —Publishers Weekly “Meitner has created a keen social record of, and commentary on, our persistent human atrocities, but she also admirably transcends the dire in a search for salvation.”—Booklist “This is a book that really is dealing with raising kids in difficult environments and also kind of facing down the epidemic of gun violence in this country — which makes it sound like it might be kind of a depressing book. But what really impressed me about it is how beautiful and tender it is. It's really just a live wire. She's a Jew in Appalachia raising an African-American adopted son. She is and isn't at home. She's kind of meditating on these things but she does so in this very incantatory, almost prayer-like way.” —Tess Taylor, NPR Books "Erika Meitner is the quintessential 21st century storyteller bearing witness from the vantage point of a social critic with heart, humor, and an incomparable voice. Holy Moly Carry Me is an urgent document of our complex ties with the past, and the dangers of letting histories, private and public, repeat themselves. She reminds us that “We are under the care of each other and sometimes we/ fail mightily to contain the damage.” This collection is Meitner at the height of her powers." —Carmen Giménez Smith "Holy Moly Carry Me is a triumph! In these formally dexterous poems Meitner vibrates wildly between the song & the document, exploding the shadowy space between history & memory. The opening poem tells us, “There are holes in all of these stories—open-mouthed gaps in the fence, a singing presence.” The voices in this books fill those gaps with a brilliant & difficult noise. In this necessary unprecedented book Meitner has assembled the materials of our apocalyptic present & past and invites us in to revel & quake with her." —sam sax “In the stunning, exact, and haunting book Holy Moly Carry Me, Meitner’s strong signature voice is on full display, but with a complex empathy for the violent, messed-up world. These are powerful poems that wonder, ache, fear, question, delve into history, and somehow never stop praising the human capacity for survival.” —Ada Limón "Reading one of Meitner’s poems feels like having an intimate talk with a close friend over dinner; revealing the details of romantic encounters, and musing about the value of poetry. She’s often wryly funny, and always tender."—Huffington Post

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Book SynopsisPoems that traverse and question the lines between human and animal behavior. Experimenting with time, language, and transgressing boundaries, the poems in absolute animal lean into Nabokov's notion that precision belongs to poetry and intuition to science. Rachel DeWoskin's new collection navigates the chaos of societal and mortal uncertainty. Through formal poetry, DeWoskin finds sense amid disorder and unearths connections between the animal and the human, between the ancient and the contemporary, and between languages, incorporating translations from poems dating as far back as the Tang dynasty. From sonnet sequences about heart surgeries to examinations of vole romance and climate change, absolute animal investigates and moves across boundaries and invites us to consider what holds life, what lasts, what dies, and what defines and enriches the experience of being human. Trade Review"DeWoskin’s second poetry collection, absolute animal, subtly exposes the thin line separating humans from other living things, those inarguable similarities to the earth and how they lead us to long for its connection. She has a way of questioning and erasing the distance we insist is there. . . . Throughout her persistent, startling collection, the poet also fuels meaning into womanhood, and everything that’s lost or gained from being female. . . . absolute animal is a graceful reminder of why links to other living things matter and why examining the human experience is one of our only respites from what we cannot change." * Chicago Review of Books *"The first poem of DeWoskin’s newest poetry collection absolute animal gets at the heart of our modern world. . . . A trio of sonnets about a father’s heart surgery, including the Newcity-published 'arrhythmia,' uses classic heartbeat iambic construction to force us to think about our own heartbeat, each our personal ever-present reminder of the thing both keeping us alive and whose malfunction promises our end. So much attention is paid to the ways we try to abstract and guard against this mortality, as in 'dressing,' in which DeWoskin’s speaker discusses the armor she chooses to wear before a meeting with an oncologist as if goth chains and locks could protect her from potentially terminal news. But the micro is macro in this collection, and the hubris in conquering our biology is as misplaced as it was in conquering our planet. The stint, staple, or wash station can forestall, but it can’t save us forever." * Newcity *"DeWoskin has helped me listen across registers. absolute animal is filled with sestinas, split sonnets, and translations of ancient Chinese poets; the variations are apt for a collection whose references span 'tick atari basement aliens' and Li Bai’s 'waving moon.' DeWoskin's gaze is one that listens. She brings each of her subjects into a 'moment of closeness' with the body, with beloveds, and with the often violent world. . . . Inside of DeWoskin’s sometimes frightening, often joyous poetic landscape, I can hear across epochs, language, and species. I am left feeling animal: vulnerable, 'crazed with light,' listening and full of song." * Arrowsmith Press *"This is no maudlin collection. The lists’ momentum serves a distinctive voice and humor, as does the order of poems: 'chemical peel' is followed by 'taxidermy'—both parenting poems of sorts. We learn that 'rodents have perfected monogamy'; the poem 'ways to love and leave you' begins, 'trick question: do prairie voles love?' . . . Yet what could be more 'animal' than our mortality, more human than our cognizance of it . . ." * Harriet Books *“An urgent, vulnerable time capsule into the future, DeWoskin is witness to the beauty here and now. She is asking, Why should we lose all the beauty we have witnessed along with ourselves? Does beauty get lost in extinguished memories? Where does beauty go to live? A response is that beauty lives in absolute animal, and DeWoskin’s gift to us is that beauty can live on in us too, if we choose.” -- Mukoma wa Ngugi, author of "Unbury Our Dead with Song"“The momentum of the poems in absolute animal sustains a fever pitch across the pages. A master of the switchback line, DeWoskin unleashes the ferocity, the poem’s heart matter, while harnessing tumult through form and rhyme. . . . These poems wrestle between what is feral and what is tame, what is unfettered and what is domestic. This is a ravishing book of poems that dazzle and shine.” -- Elise Paschen, author of The Nightlife“‘We’ve all been ancient before, aware of what we can’t know,' writes DeWoskin in absolute animal, a volume that grapples with the most critical issues of human existence and our current historical moment with a stunningly original imagination and a muscularity of language. Whether wrestling with the isolation of the pandemic, or climate change, or women’s health, or global relations, the poems speak with an elegant ferocity. The paradox of the volume’s title understands well how much animal inhabits us as humans and how much we resist that knowledge. Many of the poems reinvigorate the sonnet form in a kind of lyric scream that bears witness to and rages against both our mortality, and the ruin human presence continues to inflict upon our planet. And yet, all of the poems love fiercely, without reservation, beyond grief and the grave. DeWoskin’s brilliant collection celebrates living with tenacity, a deliberate joy that I find thrilling, consoling, and for which I am deeply grateful.” -- Robin Davidson, author of "Mrs. Schmetterling: Poems"“Tender, probing, philosophical and brilliantly wrought, DeWoskin’s poems meditate on boundaries and metamorphoses, on the gaps, real and imagined, separating us from our natural home. What does it mean to be the creature who creates the language by which we define our world? ‘While I was writing this, everything changed,’ notes DeWoskin as she explores impermanence, and the paradoxes of living in time: ‘we made time, time made us.’ Accepting the fluidity of being, however, liberates the imagination: ‘let me be not in a garden but wild, giant, omnipotent.’ Sestinas, sonnets and golden shovels are just a few of the containers DeWoskin deploys to suggest that shape-shifting and formal change may well be our only constants, and a clue to our essential nature. Haunting. Gorgeous.” -- Askold Melnyczuk, author of "The Man Who Would Not Bow: And Other Stories""In her ravishing second book of poems, absolute animal, DeWoskin collapses binaries: Mind/body, self/other, human/ animal, past/present blur and collide in lines both prescient and gripping. The opening poem, anthrosphere, aptly names the world ‘a map of small blue trouble.’ The poem demands an answer to the unanswerable, ‘ask anthro how it came to cover bio,’ The experience of reading the book ignites brain and body in the speaker’s urgent search for beauty in the midst of the horrors of the environment and the self. And the poet delivers in lines both surprising and quotidian, ‘bright broccoli in the trash, I cherished that first lie, / my baby, three: how did that get there anyway?’ Like the prairie vole, the ladybug, the turkey vulture, that appear in these pages, we’re trapped in our biology. Yet the body can connect; our minds terrify and betray us. In her poem ‘some girls’ she writes, ‘hush the tempting clatter of bone / that wants to be exposed for one slow moment let your body be home.’ The only certainty is that the ‘home’ of our flesh will vanish. Miraculously, Dewoskin eschews nihilism and relishes joy in verse of startling imagery, emotional depth, and precision.” -- Thea Goodman, author of "The Invented Mother"Table of Contentsanthrosphere attention the animal question sestina for the snake in a man-made lake ways to love and leave you social hour vole when we say they hunt unseasonable chemical peel taxidermy heathkit tv 1980 my dad’s socially distant heart surgery his meds arrhythmia feel it if these days i keep falling back estrangement poem on returning (by he zhizhang) on the eve of government exams to secretary zhang (by zhu qingyu) climbing white stork tower (by wang zhihuan) halfway (by li bai) drinking alone under the moon (by li bai) snapshots of what’s called for some girls dressing let me be vanity a surgeon sawed me open, sewed me up double body, hot lasagna taunting the turkey vultures with love tiny staples fear chance, chicago sunset/sonnet airplane landscape, 1992, true story landing dream view from above your death tenacity acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisCarol Shields received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. Yet she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career. This collection includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields’s death in 2003.Trade Review"The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields will send Shields's followers back to her novels with a new understanding of their metaphoric and imagistic richness. Scholars and those familiar with her work will be grateful that the book has awakened them to another side of a writer of such renown." Lorna Crozier, University of Victoria and author of Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)"The poems in this book are witty, sparked by Shields's signature interests in gender, class, and the frames of subjectivity; they are smartly formal and, like her novels, often subversively feminist. It is intriguing to see the kind of breadth that Shields brought to multiple projects throughout her poetic practice and this book has the ring of a well-kept secret." Tanis MacDonald, Wilfrid Laurier University and author of Mobile“Nearly twenty years after [Sheilds’] death, we have the welcome edition of her Collected Poetry. With the annotated addition of unpublished poems, Stovel’s volume reveals the intricate web of Shields’s humane creative intelligence.” British Journal of Canadian Studies

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Book SynopsisMaria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution.Trade Review2021 is the year of Stepanova. * The Guardian *Stepanova's voice is a multipotent anthology of epic, lyric, and pure spell. She turns myth back into memory, heroes into humans, and her country’s rush from one catastrophe to another into language. No translator who reads Stepanova's work thinks, ‘I can do this.’ This is a book prepared by people who believed in a poetic miracle and this miracle happened—to the English language above all. -- Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and ResurrectedA volume of Maria Stepanova’s work in English translation is long overdue, but this one, rendered by a dream team of the best translators and poets working today, has been worth the wait. The Voice Over offers a worthy tribute to Stepanova’s multiple achievements: a rich selection of texts from Stepanova’s poetry and translations of Stepanova’s essays, both illuminated by Irina Shevelenko’s expert introduction and commentary, framing Stepanova’s writing with sophistication and insight. -- Kevin M. F. Platt, founder of Your Language My Ear translation symposiumMaria Stepanova is among the most visible figures in post-Soviet culture. * Los Angeles Review of Books *[Stepanova's] work is defined by fluent phrases expressing complex thoughts, the fusing of different styles, a carefree command of all possible metrical feet, and a great sense of empathy. * Poetry International *Stepanova’s brilliance is matched only by her legendary difficulty. Rather than write in free verse, she sticks to the metric strictures of classic syllabotonic Russian poetry and fills traditional forms with a dizzying mix of references and registers, drawing on everything from Slavic folklore to social media. * Poetry Magazine *Stepanova is finally receiving the attention she deserves in the Anglophone world. Subtle and erudite in its treatment of politics and history, her work is a much-needed antidote to the crude depictions of Russia that have filled the English-language media in recent years. * Harper's Magazine *Each book [The Voice Over, In Memory of Memory, and War of the Beasts and the Animals] casts light on the others, revealing overlapping themes. Their simultaneous appearance gives English-speaking readers a singular opportunity to become familiar with a major Russian poet and thinker. * Times Literary Supplement *This ambitious collection provides English-language readers with a systematic introduction to the work of one of Russia’s most important contemporary poets . . . [The] explicit discussion of translation strategies within the volume will give readers a great deal to think about and highlights current trends and points of debate in literary translation. The translations included in this volume are of very high quality and might together make a wonderful primer for a course in literary translation. * World Literature Today *An exceptional introduction to [Stepanova's] work, the product of intensive collaboration, creative endeavour, and serious scholarship . . . essential reading for anybody interested in poetry today and in contemporary Russian culture. * Translation and Literature *Table of ContentsPrefaceBibliographic NoteIntroduction. “Speaking in Voices”: On Maria Stepanova’s Literary Creation, by Irina ShevelenkoPart I: The Here-WorldA Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a RusskiThe North of sleep. Head’s in a pillow cradleAhoy! Beyond the azure’s tempestAdieu, until one branched floor higherFor you, but the voice of the straitened MuseThe BrideThe PilotThe morning sun arises in the morningAs Danaë, prone in the incarce-chamberIt is certainly time to stopEven bluer than the toilet tiles(a birthday on the train)(half an hour on foot)July 3rd, 2004The Women’s Locker Room at “Planet Fitness”Sarah on the BarricadesThe Desire to Be a RibBus Stop: Israelitischer FriedhofZoo, Woman, MonkeyPart II: Displaced PersonAnd a vo-vo-voice aroseIn the festive sky, impassivable, tinfurledSaturday and Sunday burn like starsIn every little park, in every little squareMom-pop didn’t know himMama, what janitorA train rides down entire RussiaOrdnance was weeping in the openThe A went past, Tram-TraumWell I don’t sing Kupitye papirosnThe light swells and pulses at the garden gateIn the village, in the field, in the forestA deer, a deer stood in that placeThe last songs are assemblingMy dear, my little LibertyThere he lies in his new bed, a band of paper round his headDon’t wait for us, my darlingDon’t strain your sightFour OperasIn Unheard-of SimplicityDisplaced PersonPart III: SpoliaSpoliaWar of the Beasts and the AnimalsToday Before Yesterday (excerpt)After the Dead WaterIntending to LiveAt the Door of a Notnew AgePart IV: Over Venerable GravesThe Maximum Cost of Living (Marina Tsvetaeva)Conversations in the Realm of the Dead (Lyubov Shaporina)What Alice Found There (Alisa Poret)The Last Hero (Susan Sontag)From That Side: Notes on SebaldOver Venerable GravesNotes

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Book SynopsisMaria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution.Trade Review2021 is the year of Stepanova. * The Guardian *Stepanova's voice is a multipotent anthology of epic, lyric, and pure spell. She turns myth back into memory, heroes into humans, and her country’s rush from one catastrophe to another into language. No translator who reads Stepanova's work thinks, ‘I can do this.’ This is a book prepared by people who believed in a poetic miracle and this miracle happened—to the English language above all. -- Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and ResurrectedA volume of Maria Stepanova’s work in English translation is long overdue, but this one, rendered by a dream team of the best translators and poets working today, has been worth the wait. The Voice Over offers a worthy tribute to Stepanova’s multiple achievements: a rich selection of texts from Stepanova’s poetry and translations of Stepanova’s essays, both illuminated by Irina Shevelenko’s expert introduction and commentary, framing Stepanova’s writing with sophistication and insight. -- Kevin M. F. Platt, founder of Your Language My Ear translation symposiumMaria Stepanova is among the most visible figures in post-Soviet culture. * Los Angeles Review of Books *[Stepanova's] work is defined by fluent phrases expressing complex thoughts, the fusing of different styles, a carefree command of all possible metrical feet, and a great sense of empathy. * Poetry International *Stepanova’s brilliance is matched only by her legendary difficulty. Rather than write in free verse, she sticks to the metric strictures of classic syllabotonic Russian poetry and fills traditional forms with a dizzying mix of references and registers, drawing on everything from Slavic folklore to social media. * Poetry Magazine *Stepanova is finally receiving the attention she deserves in the Anglophone world. Subtle and erudite in its treatment of politics and history, her work is a much-needed antidote to the crude depictions of Russia that have filled the English-language media in recent years. * Harper's Magazine *Each book [The Voice Over, In Memory of Memory, and War of the Beasts and the Animals] casts light on the others, revealing overlapping themes. Their simultaneous appearance gives English-speaking readers a singular opportunity to become familiar with a major Russian poet and thinker. * Times Literary Supplement *This ambitious collection provides English-language readers with a systematic introduction to the work of one of Russia’s most important contemporary poets . . . [The] explicit discussion of translation strategies within the volume will give readers a great deal to think about and highlights current trends and points of debate in literary translation. The translations included in this volume are of very high quality and might together make a wonderful primer for a course in literary translation. * World Literature Today *An exceptional introduction to [Stepanova's] work, the product of intensive collaboration, creative endeavour, and serious scholarship . . . essential reading for anybody interested in poetry today and in contemporary Russian culture. * Translation and Literature *Table of ContentsPrefaceBibliographic NoteIntroduction. “Speaking in Voices”: On Maria Stepanova’s Literary Creation, by Irina ShevelenkoPart I: The Here-WorldA Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a RusskiThe North of sleep. Head’s in a pillow cradleAhoy! Beyond the azure’s tempestAdieu, until one branched floor higherFor you, but the voice of the straitened MuseThe BrideThe PilotThe morning sun arises in the morningAs Danaë, prone in the incarce-chamberIt is certainly time to stopEven bluer than the toilet tiles(a birthday on the train)(half an hour on foot)July 3rd, 2004The Women’s Locker Room at “Planet Fitness”Sarah on the BarricadesThe Desire to Be a RibBus Stop: Israelitischer FriedhofZoo, Woman, MonkeyPart II: Displaced PersonAnd a vo-vo-voice aroseIn the festive sky, impassivable, tinfurledSaturday and Sunday burn like starsIn every little park, in every little squareMom-pop didn’t know himMama, what janitorA train rides down entire RussiaOrdnance was weeping in the openThe A went past, Tram-TraumWell I don’t sing Kupitye papirosnThe light swells and pulses at the garden gateIn the village, in the field, in the forestA deer, a deer stood in that placeThe last songs are assemblingMy dear, my little LibertyThere he lies in his new bed, a band of paper round his headDon’t wait for us, my darlingDon’t strain your sightFour OperasIn Unheard-of SimplicityDisplaced PersonPart III: SpoliaSpoliaWar of the Beasts and the AnimalsToday Before Yesterday (excerpt)After the Dead WaterIntending to LiveAt the Door of a Notnew AgePart IV: Over Venerable GravesThe Maximum Cost of Living (Marina Tsvetaeva)Conversations in the Realm of the Dead (Lyubov Shaporina)What Alice Found There (Alisa Poret)The Last Hero (Susan Sontag)From That Side: Notes on SebaldOver Venerable GravesNotes

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Book SynopsisIn this debut collection from Jennie Malboeuf, we observe undercurrents of violence and power, the dynamics of memory, gender, marriage, and miscarriage. At times, God is brutal. At times, delicate. Through true stories of animal savagery, God Had a Body unravels human behavior and undoes the opaque and cryptic mysteries of faith.Trade Review"Salient and provoking, sensuous and cerebral, Jennie Malboeuf's poems locate holiness in the living, dead, partial and whole creations of this planet: among them a "cow's eye . . . so pretty I squinched hard/and wished it back to the socket"; a "redback spider [that] throws himself/into the hollow fangs of his beloved" ; a dead whale whose "mouth hung open/like a friendly doorway," until "that certain scent of ending" makes the human fantasy of welcome clear. Yes, we are like the animals—whether tiny or enormous—but make no mistake: they are themselves, worthy of our attention and our reverence, rarely reflecting us. As Malboeuf puts it, "the birds we kept/in cages fought any mirror." The poet laces her observant news of these encounters with a biblical re-envisioning, as well as with her own peculiar wit: for example, in "The Cow's Eye," Malboeuf notes that "Daddy picked it up from the stockyards . . . He said it'd help with my science project." In another encounter, the speaker's father has a run-in with a mosquito: "at the height of an anecdote, a mosquito, a female, / flew inside his head." The humor there is spiky and profound. At the doctor's office, the daughter gets to see "the mold of hot wax they poured to pull her—preserved in flight—right out." In "The Hydra," that organism is described as "a penis-shaped creature with a spider/topping its head." This poet thrives amid and among other bodies, observing, feeling, and listening, trying very hard not to cut life short or diminish its sacredness with fallible descriptions, while acknowledging with her striking wit our human-centric eye. I relish these poems and will return to them for their stories, their humor, and the ways they intertwine language and life."—Lisa Williams, author of Woman Reading to the Sea"There is a fierce spirituality and mordant wit in God had a body, Jennie Malboeuf's first book of poems. Here is a poet with a transformative vision of divine and earthly enterprise as well as a sharp eye for the repercussions of physical detail. Malboeuf's use of enactments and embodiments—actions and images—startle and awaken the reader to a powerful new voice in American poetry. What a glorious debut collection."—Stuart Dischell, author of Children with EnemiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsThe GodheadPart IFirst Death Ever FilmedChrist is a Great Blue HeronThe Cow's EyeAnimals in the BibleFrog Gig, 1983Some Things Have Been Heard EnoughGracklesWildingRuthSacred HeartAnimalsThe Meaning of GodA Figure for the Holy GhostPart IIThe CountryOrreryThe LeonidsEarly Signs of the ApocalypseZoonosisSong of the CockMen in My Bed as Dead Animal in Dog Mouthal MealLandscape Where I Forget My FatherBlindfoldAnimals in CaptivityThe Nightjarphylum<\GRAY>::class::order::family::genus<\GRAY>The Giving AwayRepletionSnakehandlingFearWhat the Eclipse Does to AnimalsThe Miracle of the PigsLandscape Where I Miss My MotherPhobia, 1985lullabyGrandmothersThe MenIn the MythsKingdomHubrisThe WomenFirst MirrorThe ScrewwormMnemonicsOde to the CannibalMan, Beast, Lion, BirdGod-manInscapeThought Inventory with Rorschach and CaesuraLetting GoTopography of a BirdPart IIINewfound Star SystemDouble Star—OrbsThe GodwitTo Begin WithHeavy Animals, or Frustrated Attempts to See GodImmolationThe HydraEschatologyThe GospelsThe Lesser Water BoatmanOrgasm as LapwingErectionValentineThe QuickeningWedding NightElflandNestingflying changeStrawberry MoonHonest SignalsReasons We Should Be TogetherThe Night We Decided Was a Day

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Book SynopsisIn this brilliant book, ?Abdulwa?id Lu'lu'a translates and introduces eighty poems from one of the pioneers of modern Arabic poetry, Buland Al-?aidari.Buland Al-?aidari might fairly be considered the fourth pillar holding up the dome of modern Arabic poetry. Alongside his famous contemporaries Nazik al-Mala''ika, Badre Shakir Al-Sayyab, and Abdulwahhab Al-Bayyati, Al-?aidari likewise made significant contributions to the development of twentieth-century Arabic poetry, including the departure from the traditional use of two-hemistich verses in favor of what has been called the Arabic free verse form.A few of Al-?aidari's poems have been translated into English separately, but no book-length translation of his poetry has been published until now. In Buland Al-?aidari and Modern Iraqi Poetry, ?Abdulwa?id Lu'lu'a translates eighty of Al-?aidari's most important poems, giving English-speaking readers access to this rich corpus. Lu'lu'a's perceptive introductioTrade Review“Long overdue, this highly competent translation fills a major gap in our understanding of Arab literary history. No Middle East studies collection will be complete without it.” —Hussein N. Kadhim, author of The Poetics of Anti-Colonialism in the Arabic QaṣīdahTable of ContentsFrom Clay Throb (1947) 1. Semiramis 2. Autumn Echo 3. Whimper 4. Dreaming Silence 5. Boredom 6. Clay Throb 7. Shades 8. Closed Lips From Songs of the Dead City (1951) 9. Barrenness 10. Depths 11. Postman 12. Image 13. Three Signs 14. The Hypocritical Wound 15. At Night 16. Here You Are 17. Roads 18. Old Age 19. Dream 20. An Old Love 21. Slavery 22. O My Friend 23. Deceit 24. Lost Step 25. Loss 26. Where To From Steps in Exile (1965) 27. Secret 28. Old Image 29. Judahs’ Repentance 30. You Came with the Dawn 31. Bitter Land 32. I Want To 33. Tomorrow Here 34. And Tomorrow I Return 35. He Said Something to Us 36. Return to Hiroshima 37. In a Few Hours 38. A Talk for Next Saturday 39. The Eighth Journey 40. At Forty 41. To My Town 42. Steps in Exile From The Journey of Yellow Letters (1968) 43. To a Negro from Alabama 44. Disappointment of the Man of the Past 45. Desolation 46. Genesis 47. Dreaming of Return 48. Two Faces 49. Message of the Small Man 50. The Paling Salt 51. Age of Rubber Stamps 52. I Wish If 53. Short Laugh 54. The Waiting Sails 55. Suffocation 56. Call of a Nation 57. Dream of the Snow 58. At the Crossroads 59. A Child of the First War 60. Night, Cold and Wardens 61. Journey of the Yellow Letters From Songs of the Tired Guard 62. Sleeping Pills 63. Indicted, Though Innocent 64. A Call for Stupor 65. A Dream in Four Scenes 66. Expulsion 67. The Killed Witness 68. Apology 69. Between Two Points 70. Dialogue in the Bend 71. Confessions from 1961 72. Hey… You are Indicted 73. Dialogue in Three Dimensions 74. Procession of the Seven Sins 75. Call of the Seven Sins 76. Stolen Frontiers 77. Sindbad’s Eighth Journey 78. On the Verge of the Fallen World 79. Two Voices Late at Night 80. I’ll Stay Here

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