Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisHome on the Move explores notions of `home' that are challenged and reshaped by unprecedented migration. The anthology interrogates ideas of home, belonging and language from poetic perspectives. The creative responses are the results of a journey undertaken by two poems about `home': TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Deryn Rees-Jones's poem `HOME' who travelled from the UK via France to Spain and back and Polish poet Rafal Gawin's poem: `DOM. KONSTRUKCJA W PROCESIE SADOWYM' (`Home. Structure on Trial'). Gawin travelled to the UK via Romania and back to Poland and the poem reflects the inspiration of these places. During each journey, the poems were translated by a literary translator and a local film artist.

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Book SynopsisWe all have our favourite demons. A desperate Romeo circles the bushes below Juliet's balcony, hoping for a glimpse of her bare body, 'nipples stiffening on powdered ribs'. Adamant of his own sanity, Hamlet chatters away to his oldest friend - the squat skull grinning in his palm. Andromache screams for her only child, 'spiralling like sycamore' from the walls of Troy, her husband brutally dragged to death in the dirt that rises around her. All the while, weaved throughout this collection, the narrator is haunted by her biggest demon of all: the gargantuan Small. Told with a rawness and honesty that sears, the secretive nature of living with an eating disorder is yanked out into the open and given the voice that only ever hisses darkly inside the skull. Through relationship breakdowns, bath-times, the cacophonous dazzle of Delhi and the fug of hospital waiting rooms, Small is always, there slyly riding on the shoulders of a woman running for miles to get away - yet forever haunted by hunger.

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Book SynopsisFrom social and political issues, Amazon reviews and reflections on life’s everyday moments, I Like Your Hat is Magi Gibson’s latest poetry collection. Gibson’s fresh, evocative (and sometimes provocative) writing is both modern and timeless. She draw inferences with keen insight from the little things in life (from buying stationery, graffiti to hats) that affect the big issues in all our lives – growing older, poverty and loss. Sometimes the smallest detail tells the most important story.

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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 SynopsisFeaturing the work of Black women poets from Botswana to Brazil, in this collection, we encounter ancestors who made love, just for the sake of love, and women who die with each orgasm while attempting to mark the extent of their own humanities.This is for the nuns, the singers, the clowns, the diviners and the conjurers who reject the constant attempt to clean up history. The wildly imperfect women of slick braids, shiny skin and succulent lips, building new homes from clouds for future legions.Here congregate the women, womxn and womyn who do not believe in tough love that disguises hurt just to prove a point. They dance with the dead with exquisite feet, cheekbones high, reflecting their mothers' smiles.Because no one claps for martyrs, these dirty/pretty women learn to walk cities like they own them, choosing the battles of their hearts.If this collection teaches anything, it is that love is always messy, that our sacrament requires wet wipes and that we are just flesh and bone honing practice.Table of ContentsCONTENTS Foreword by Bernardine Evaristo xv Editor’s Note by Natalia Molebatsi xxi Diana Ferrus (South Africa) I’ve Come to Take You Home 1 My Mother Was a Storm 3 This Song of Freedom 4 Nikki Giovanni (usa) The Seamstress of Montgomery 5 A Prayer for Nina 7 Miriam Alves (Brazil) Womanly (Feminil) 8 Subtleties (Sutilezas) 9 I Go Far (Vou Longe) 10 Makhosazana Xaba (South Africa) Women of Xolobeni 11 For Dulcie September 13 Sister to Sister 14 Cheryl L Clarke (usa) History 15 On Their Way to Life 18 Brief Interval 20 Jackie Kay (Scotland) Fanny Eaton – The Jamaican Pre-Raphaelite Muse! 21 A Banquet for The Boys 24 Bonnie Lassie 25 Gcina Mhlophe (South Africa) Camagu Mama Sisulu 26 The Ancient Voices 29 Anni Domingo (Sierra Leone) Empty Cradle 32 The Cutting 34 Because I Am a Girl 36 M NourbeSe Philip (Tobago/Canada) in this together 37 before after/after before 39 when the looting starts … 40 Kadija Sesay (Sierra Leone/uk) Tattoo 44 The Most Beautiful Sound in the World? 45 Stilled Tragedy 46 The Moon Under Water 47 Ana-Maurine Lara (Dominican Republic) La Zafra 48 Call 50 Lebogang Mashile (South Africa) Vulva Volcanoes 53 Family Portrait 56 This Is Not a Poem 58 Ladan Osman (Somalia) Heart Runoff 59 Sacraments 61 Boat Journey 64 ix Staceyann Chin (Jamaica) Revolution Food 66 The Hustle 69 Dirty/Pretty Things 71 Natalia Molebatsi (South Africa) Lessons to Learn 74 Truth 75 A Kind of Storm 76 Elizandra Souza (Brazil) My Only Woman’s Day 77 Regality 78 Preserving Heritage 79 Jumoke Verissimo (Nigeria) we all live here 80 Lockdown Journaling 82 Train Musings 83 Nadia Alexis (usa/Haiti) Cantaloupe 84 Watershed 86 Supposition 88 Prayer to Ezili Danto 89 Olumide Popoola (Nigeria/Germany) a fierce love 90 mercy killing 92 Show Me 94 LB Williams (usa) emotional autonomy 96 Little Black Boy 97 x Tjawangwa Dema (Botswana) loss and ampersand 98 Plough 100 Contrition 101 d’bi.young anitafrika (Jamaica) no more pussy gate-keeping 102 Warsan Shire (Somalia/uk) Backwards 109 Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre) 111 Questions for Miriam 113 Gabeba Baderoon (South Africa) Autobiography of a Reader 114 Nature 115 Greeting 116 Camila Trindade (Brazil) Heartburn (Azia) 117 Between the Lines (Entrelinhas) 119 My Body (Meu Corpo) 120 Jamila Osman (Somalia/usa) Winter Blues 121 Diaspora 122 Boats 123 The Lost Key Poem 124 Koleka Putuma (South Africa) europe asks if it can touch my hair 125 into the water 129 xi Julie Jokoto (Ghana) Another Slave 131 On Freedom’s Wings 133 Weapons of War 134 Michelle K Angwenyi (Kenya) In Your Neutral Room 136 Ngwatilo Mawiyoo (Kenya) Mermaid’s Lament 138 Home 139 In Vancouver, a White Woman Compliments My Hair 141 Batsirai E Chigama (Zimbabwe) To Mothers Learning to Breathe and Failing 142 The Precipice 143 Breath Slayer 144 Safia Elhillo (Sudan/usa) From girls that never die 145 rhapsody in pink 146 From girls that never die 147 Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (usa) For Despair (or: You Don’t Even Know How to Spell Black Excellence) 149 Poem for LB 154 vangile gantsho (South Africa) breathing under water 155 i have inside me my mother’s doubt 156 missing 157 xii Alexis Teyie (Kenya) A Need for Sighing 158 Those Corner-Dwellers, They 159 Momtaza Mehri (uk/Somalia) The Unthought Has a Comb 160 Wink Wink 162 Busisiwe Mahlangu (South Africa) Girl Is Prayer 163 Worship 164 Malika Booker (Grenada/Guyana/uk) Samson & His Mother 165 Ash Wednesday’s Hymn 170 Eve Daydreams 171 Ijeoma Umebinyuo (Nigeria) Stillborn 172 Bloody Tuesday 174 Women Forced out of Girls 176

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Book SynopsisWritten during the three years Matt Broomfield spent living and working in the autonomous, Kurdish-led region of Syria known as Rojava, these poems paint a unique picture of the revolution there, from the inside out. From Broomfield's own place in the revolution as an 'internationalist' volunteer, to the future of the region in the face of war, this collection raises serious questions and seeks to capture of the energy of Rojava, so often overlooked by the primary-coloured propaganda and grey criticism of our media. "The revolution is living, ugly, beautiful, writhing, self-contradictory, hopelessly compromised, and utterly worth fighting for."

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Book SynopsisImperfect Beginnings lays its poems out to rest on uncertain terrain. Visa paperwork deadlines hang in the air. New-borns, torn too early from their mother's breast, learn to adapt to harsh guardianship. Belonging and exile are mirrored in the stories of having to leave one's birthmother-or motherland. From narrative poems such as 'My Father Sold Cigarettes To The Nazis', Fogel takes us on a journey throughout history, spanning ancestry, wartime, adoption and peacetime, as life settles. Family, work, love and the natural world provide purpose, meaning and a sense of coming 'home'.

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Book SynopsisThe Last Woman Born on the Island is an exploration of the past and the present, and a celebration of the landscapes, both physical and emotional, that make up our lives. What are the colours of the language or languages we speak, and how do they infl uence the ways we live? Much of this collection is set in the author’s homeland of Scotland. Some poems contemplate the history and traditions of the Highlands and Islands – from the HMS Iolaire disaster off Lewis in 1919 to the knitting of Eriskay ganseys, from the legend of the White Cow at Callanish stone circle to herring girls at the start of the twentieth century. Others consider Scottish languages and parlances, the country’s wildest and most beautiful landscapes, and the effects of tourism on the culture of the Hebrides. Is there is a diff erence between something lost and something merely forgotten? How do we fi nd what we don’t know we ever had? And what is belonging to a place, let alone to two places? In one long poem, the author stands between her home country and her adopted country of France, letting her feet talk us through the places they have been. Who is the last woman and where is the island?Table of ContentsThe last woman born on the island 5 After a Reading by Jackie Kay 7 Chickens 9 Eggs 10 Made the Small Way 11 Tracks 13 Room Six 15 Passing It On 16 Lucky Penny 17 Spoon 18 Lismore 19 Heatwave 20 The Lean Years 21 Night Walk, Baile Mòr 23 Fault Lines 24 West Highland 25 Instead of gulls 26 Peace 27 Sheela-na-gig 28 Fly 29 Cod Fishing, Firth of Clyde 30 Ear 31 Landbound 32 Corvids 33 The Dream 34 Angling 36 Collins Gem 37 Bystander 38 Prototype 39 Middle C 40 Hollows 42 Monochrome 44 Tobar na h-Aois 46 Things That Can Be Thrown 47 Forbidden 48 The White Cow 49 Hebridean 50 Gardener 51 Every time I step inside 52 Post Op 53 Eriskay Wives 54 Plea to Boy on a Train 56 First Keys 57 Celia’s Shoes 58 Thirty-Seventh View of Mount Fuji 59 Death Trumpets 60 Twelve 61 Recipes 62 Upper Cut 64 Fourteen 65 Seventeen 67 Urination For Girls 68 Cusp 70 Feet 72 Trefoil 78 Love 79 I would have liked 80 Her Hair 82 A Seat at Cailleach Farm 83 Revisiting the Island 85 Letter Home, 1920 86 Light’s Tricks 88 Notes 91 Acknowledgements 93 Prizes 94

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Book SynopsisKnow Thy Audience, Nadia de Vries's third poetry collection, disavows the platitude from which it takes its name and makes the reader complicit in both her aggression and her submission, sparked by a history of domestic abuse that escapes all euphemism and metaphor - but not poetry altogether. Speaking-or rather, singing-as a 'battered woman' from a working-class neighborhood, De Vries' aphoristic writing belies a vengeful reversal of roles in which the author-and not her perpetrator-pulls the strings. Who is the victim in these poems? Can violence be redeemed through esthetic metamorphosis? Or can powerlessness only be transferred as fetish? Know Thy Audience investigates the extent to which a victim can share their wounds, and to what degree an audience can-sensibly, ethically-be burdened with painful knowledge.Trade Review"Menace turned inside out! 'When I die I want to come back as a piercing sound / In the ear of every rapist.' Here is the poetry without the hero, a blanket leaving you colder somehow, but you know this book is brilliant, and you know you will live with these poems for the rest of your life once you have read them. I am a huge fan of Nadia de Vries, a poet wrangling suffering bodies on the map of a world we like to think we know, offering us no easy answers." CAConrad ----------"Know Thy Audience is a revelation, and confirms that De Vries is an extraordinarily significant, vital voice in English-language poetry." Ralf Webb ---------- "In her visceral and razor-sharp poems, Nadia de Vries navigates the circular relationship between perpetration and victimhood, assuaging the catharsis often seen as intrinsic to writing and opening up new paths to redemption." Hannah Pezzack ---------- "Nadia de Vries' poetry is as precise as a surgical tool and as turbulent and anarchic as blood gushing from a wound." Francesca Kritikos ---------- "Know Thy Audience tangles us into the ease with which we can be violated, into that very violence, and the frontlines of the war. 'How do you depict a stabbing motion in a poem?' Here's how." M.M. Garr ----------- "These tiny, curt and stark poems are anthems of empowerment for anyone who has ever had to claw their way out." Lucy K .Shaw

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Book SynopsisOn its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler's childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents' suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in an essay, 'You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.'Trade Review‘Lutz Seiler’s Pitch & Glint … uses broken and glitchy language to reflect the fractures of East German history… These poems, and their English translation by Stefan Tobler, are a rare achievement.’ Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian Best poetry books of 2023 ---- 'Pitch & Glint resists description but compels shock, admiration and envy. It has something of the amphibrachic chant of early Celan, jolie-laide language, lower case, ampersands, a harsh and physical sampling of a childhood in a working landscape (the uranium mines) in the last years of the GDR.' Michael Hofmann ---- 'Seiler's poems are immersive, unpredictable journeys into a past that is both irrecoverably lost and hauntingly present. They are at once soundscapes and dream-narratives, their language propulsive and furious and broken.' Patrick McGuinness ---- ‘Recording this music requires such fluid syntax, allowing sentences to slip over and under each other to make new meanings. The force of this music made me reconsider the values of the broad field of ecological poetry.’ Harry Josephine Giles, Poetry Book Society's Translation Choice selector ---- 'Pitch & Glint unfurls against the backdrop of late-twentieth-century East Germany, a landscape strewn with spoilheaps, disappeared villages, "snow, oil and phlegm". Wandering over this uncertain terrain, Seiler meditates hauntingly on the disembodied lives emerging from its midst - and Tobler's stark, elegant translations do a fine job of capturing the essential interplay of muscularity and vaporousness at its heart. This is an exquisite, humane, deliciously shadowy verse music - a real-world Stalker with line-breaks. ' Alex Niven ---- 'Pitch & Glint was an event, because all of us who still believe poetry can do something, felt that something was being given voice by this poet, something that would otherwise have been hopelessly lost.' Michael Kruger ---- 'Seiler has effectively rewired the lyric for the twenty-first century.' Joshua Weiner, POETRY Magazine ---- ‘Lutz Seiler began as a bricklayer and ended up building poems. “Why I started to read and write, I have no idea,” he says, but we should be glad. Pitch & Glint created a storm when it was published in its original German. Finally these poems are translated into English by Stefan Tobler.’ Chris McCabe, Librarian of the National Poetry Library, UK ---- ‘The Georg Büchner Prize, the most prestigious prize in German literature, has been awarded to a magician of poetic language. [...] A true conjuror, he has rightly joined the company of his great countryman Wolfgang Hilbig, that other bulwark of German poetry and prose.’ Evelyn Schlag, PN Review ---- ‘A seminal work of German verse translated into radiant English for the first time [...] Like the uranium that underlaid Seiler's childhood, Pitch & Glint burns with an unstable power.’ Jack Barron, The Arts Desk ---- 'Epoch-making.' Angelika Overath, Neue Zurcher Zeitung ---- 'Seiler's poems are original. They have body and a rhythm. They breathe dust and dirt, the desolation in minds and homes, the collapse and change, but their form is so strong that something new arises.' Ursula Krechel, Der Tagesspiegel ---- 'Here the contemporary appears with archaic force.' Helmut Boettiger, Frankfurter Rundschau ---- 'Seiler is not aiming at reportage, not a documentary recording of places and landscapes. He is after the images with which they are internalised: how they get into people's bones. [...] Distrustful of fixed rhyming schemes, he throws his lines like garlands over the sentence structures, playing with internal rhyme and alliteration, closer to Dylan Thomas than Peter Huchel. This slim, wonderful book is like a seashell: a part of Germany is enclosed in it, in a rush of sound.' Lothar Muller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ---- 'Seiler's art is an inbetween one. Pitch & Glint remains a secret until you find a way in, reading it as an evocation and as a challenge to move in echoing sounds.' Martin Ahrends, Die Zeit

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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 SynopsisCharm Offensive, Ross White''s debut poetry collection, explores the space between Dickinson''s directive to tell the truth slant and the universal reality of seeing the truth slant without knowing it. Charting the ways that tenderness can resolve into dissonance and uncertainty can resolve into transcendence, Charm Offensive crackles with the dangers of being alive and the joys of remaining defiant. At turns playful and surreal, exuberant and somber, these poems urge readers to find something new to trust in the world.

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Book SynopsisThese poems take the reader on a fantastic journey through the first season of the hit 1960s TV series I Dream of Jeannie. Each poem corresponds to an episode in that season, originally aired in 1965. Watching on the black and white set from her loungeroom in Perth, Western Australia, the poet, like millions of other little girls, dreamed of being the sultry Jeannie who lived inside a glass-stoppered bottle in a bachelor''s house in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Revisiting the series as an adult, the poet recreates a world in which a woman searches for love with a surly astronaut, using her superpowers to further her quest.

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Book SynopsisA Girl and Boy in a relationship that is both intoxicating and toxic, exhilarating but ultimately at a cost to each. Edgy and compelling, Nkere tells it all through the parallel narratives of the Girl and Boy drawing on a kaleidoscope of influences that include poetic prose and contemporary spoken word. Experimental in form, this startling debut collection breaks with convention, bringing seemingly polarised forces into combat: religion versus primal desire and love versus desolation.

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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 SynopsisPartly inspired by Chaka, a famous South African novel from 1931, written by Thomas Mofolo, the book charts the imaginary progress of the nineteenth-century statesman and tyrant, Shaka Zulu (1787-1828). Structured around a series of daydreams and major events in Zulu's life, the poet extracts Zulu from the historical past and moves him to the modern media age where speed dating, UFOs and effervescent pain-killers are the norm. The collection is hugely diverse, from lyrical poetry to tweets to wit.

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Book SynopsisTeapot in the Fridge is a collection of poems written in love, rage and despair by a wife caring for her husband as he descends into the no-man’s-land of dementia. The tone of the poems range from the desolate to the furious, and from nostalgia to hilarity to despair, but informing all of them is the sense – unshakeable – that 'what will remain of us is love.' 'An outstanding illustration of the love and concern of one caring for a partner with dementia' – Timothy West.

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Book SynopsisHow can we have hope in a world that is dying? With a forensic eye, Howells takes us on a journey through ordinary human lives and the extraordinary natural world we are in danger of losing. The carder bee carries the story of a colony, a species, and, ultimately, the fate of all life on earth. The mermaid weaves an almost beautiful tale of a tragic miscarriage. The magpie writes yearning letters to her lost lover. The brilliant kingfisher flits through the mind of a woman with dementia. Through each exacting portrait, we begin to understand something special, a language of bees, and discover for ourselves how intimately we are all connected and what the natural world is trying to tell us.

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Book SynopsisPearl and Bone explores the complexities of the first year in the life of a pandemic mother, with the stories of other mothers interwoven amongst the author's intimate moments, from pregnancy to childbirth and beyond. These poems showcase the lost voices of women through history - in the throes of labour, Mary paces the stable; in a dim Soho studio, Christine Keeler poses for the infamous Lewis Morley photographs; while above us, the moon laments the number of feet that have stormed her surface. Beautiful, emotional and richly imagistic, Mari Ellis Dunning presents mothers in many forms: those experienced, chosen, unwitting, and presumed, asking us to consider the true nuances of motherhood - delicate as pearl, durable as bone.Trade Review'In this profound study of the maternal journey, Mari Ellis Dunning does not attempt to speak for all mothers, but she can speak up for the many that become "pale and bloodless ghosts". These essential, visceral poems ensure we pay attention to the fear, risk and shame that accompanies the female pregnant body, whilst weaving a picture of the truthful, tender reckonings that are the poet's own.' – Rebecca Goss

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Book Synopsiswhat if / I actually - am - a bird / my cupped hands / opening to release me... Phil Barnett's relationship with birds is so close that his poetry blurs the distinctions between himself and the birds - a kind of ornimorphology where rather than giving the birds human characteristics, the reverse happens, and he imagines himself as a bird. Phil Barnett is a photographer, writer, musician, artist and naturalist, who has a passion for the birds that kept him company through a long hard illness. His photography and poetry have quite a following on social media, which is where we found him, on The Daily Haiku. His skill as a photographer leads to an acute visual sensibility, and his slow recovery moves from a tick sheet his mother had to fill in for him, to extraordinary poetry - full of wit and wonder and spectacular language.Trade ReviewThese poems are windows onto moments of a life steeped in nature. At once perceptive and full of wonder, they captivate with a uniqueness and vibrancy, just as the sudden surprise of birds can startle us from our myopic existence. Jane LovellTable of ContentsBirds Knit my Ribs Together Introduction The pond Dream Thrush Wounds Three Curses To know what it's like Box of letting go Jackdaws to roost Bird watching We give what we can Just sitting Under wings Trepanning unchorused A crack must have opened Plugged by a bird unsprung Butcher bird Terrible curve Nor Woodcock rising Two white horses Floating cork of me Molten roe So close Amber under The news Spans two hills Its own angle The nature dog Coastal footpath Used to be Flux Set the air Stones Open A willow's words When I was water

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Book SynopsisThe debut poetry collection from a talented, fresh-voiced poet, People: Unfinished Poems is a lyrical, thought-provoking and moving selection that observes and enjoys the beauty and strangeness of people, exploring their connections to themselves, each other and the places in which they live. With particular attention paid to family, friendship, love, belonging and acceptance, the collection is a real celebration of human individuality and connection. Following a late diagnosis of ADHD, one strand of Ruth’s poetry explores and foregrounds the condition; the reader is invited into a mind that is endlessly thinking and never truly at rest. For Ruth, one result of this is intricate patterns and fragments of poetry sprawled across endless notebooks. This collection includes several poems presented in the poet’s own handwriting, decorated in much the same way as her notebooks, giving the reader an intimate insight into some of the artistic and creative aspects of neurodiversity.

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Book SynopsisThis collection features one hundred poems selected by award-winning poet Jordi Larios. Keenly aware that we measure the world through words, he also knows that words become worn with use, and that poetry recalibrates their instrumentation, injecting them with fresh focus for graphing elusive terrains of inner and outer experience, prodding us to encounter and engage the world in a way that sustains and renews the self. Each Larios poem is a magnet, impacting us with the infixed force that its reading unleashes, subtle yet powerful in its imagery. A seagull, unfazed by the ‘crisis of the sunset,’ declares life on a greying backdrop (‘Rough Weather’), and desolate landscapes can set the scene for unexpected solace (‘Cold,’ ‘Historical Present’): pulling sunken memories to the surface and bringing poetic imagery into alignment with points of inwardness in search of outward counterparts. Along with the subtle power of imagery, Larios blends into his poems an uncanny marshalling of words, reassigning them to posts of optimal meaning and musicality. Technique underlies the poems, but the resulting art is greater than the sum of words, lifting language above ‘the clattering of / too many words,’ which, bereft of poetry, only render us alone (‘Man Alone’).Trade Review‘Larios seeks the essence and purification without glitter or shrillness because “the voice that gets heard is often the softest.” A great book to read.’ —ENRIC UMBERT-REXACH, NÚVOL.

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Book SynopsisOut for Air is the exhilarating first collection by former professional skateboarder Olly Todd. Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Each poem is its own event: expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place. From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things. 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARDTrade Review'Olly Todd makes rare, richly idiomatic music from the rubble of the pop metropolis. Like the pro skateboarder whose world is here uniquely evoked, Todd approaches the built environment through drift and detour, finding hidden lines of desire and happenstance. These often balladic poems are gorgeously wrought and idiosyncratic, scored with the subterranean rhythms of Cumbria, California and London. The air of the book is at once as intimate as its city nightcaps and as expansive as its bay vistas. When I read Todd's poems I feel more a part of the world, the textured interaction of time and place, the 'afternoons julienned / Into cigarettes, cider trips', 'the circles we insist on travelling'. This is a tender, transformative, elemental book.' SAM BUCHAN-WATTS;'Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut, in which the early evening sun lights up the soaring, exhilarating miles of skateable road and sky between the north of England and the USA. With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.'MARTHA SPRACKLAND; 'Olly Todd's wonderful Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard to pin down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects' international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.' WILL BURNS; 'It's really weird, as I am reading Olly's poems I am engaging with a part of my brain I forgot existed. It's kinda like when you try a mindfulness app and the narrator asks you to focus on or pay particular attention to eating, say, a nut or a raisin. Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.' NICK JENSEN; 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARD; 'Olly Todd’s debut collection, Out for Air, is one of acute angles and constant surprise. His is a somewhat degraded diction, at least in the sense of his rarely reaching for an ornately lyrical register; instead there is something brutalist, a language made of concrete and artful lighting. It’s rare to encounter a new poet whose work is absolutely unpredictable, from one line to the next, but Todd is capable of jarring shifts, refreshing coinages. [...] These are poems as atmosphere – rich in poise, and somewhat sui generis, blending modernist urges towards cataloguing the metropolis with something of Todd’s own' Declan Ryan, The Poetry Review

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Book SynopsisImprovised Explosive Device is a startlingly innovative exploration of extremism, hate crime and violence by poet Arji Manuelpillai. In this powerful and unsettling first collection, Manuelpillai presents a vision of the contemporary haunted by Melville's image of the whale - the terror beneath the surface of the sea. His uncompromising focus on violence is laced with gallows humour and the surreal, framed against the mundane detritus of modern life: two boys playing Mortal Kombat; a field of old trainers; the lonely glare of laptop light; a suspicious looking package in the back seat of a van. The poems in Improvised Explosive Device emerged through research and interviews with academics, sociologists, and former members of extremist groups and their families - from the English Defence League and the National Front to ISIS and the Tamil Tigers. These complex, unnerving texts ask a series of important questions. What drives a person to commit a radical act of violence? How is that violence mediated through screens and social media? And how does the British government police marginalised groups? Improvised Explosive Device is a brave, surprising and risk-taking book; it will change the way you look at the world. "Refusing glib analysis and easy answers, Improvised Explosive Device is a work of radical empathy, fuelled by honesty and compassion, both for those stirred to violence against minorities, and those who suffer from it." Rishi Dastidar "The project of Arji Manuelpillai's Improvised Explosive Device leans into the mighty disciplines of poetry, sociology, and reportage to formulate an arresting debut which contests the ways we're conditioned to internalise notions of terrorism, nationalism and belonging...a bold and startling new work." Anthony AnaxagorouTrade Review“Refusing glib analysis and easy answers, Improvised Explosive Device is a work of radical empathy, fuelled by honesty and compassion, both for those stirred to violence against minorities, and those who suffer from it. The poems are unflinching, uncomfortable and uncommonly brave, reminders that life is visceral in its pleasures and its pains, and that for some of us belonging is tenuous, a daily fight to carve a space in which we might be safe, thrive – live. It will make many of us seen, for the first time, and kick us to “speak our truth”. More than this Arji Manuelpillai shows us that the real radicalism is to love, love deeply without prejudice.” Rishi Dastidar; “The project of Arji Manuelpillai’s Improvised Explosive Device leans into the mighty disciplines of poetry, sociology, and reportage to formulate an arresting debut which contests the ways we’re conditioned to internalise notions of terrorism, nationalism and belonging. Poems here are bolstered by their proximity to their subjects; formed out of interviews and conversations with people whose stories are either sensationalised or decontextualised. Manuelpillai demonstrates how a poet can artfully draw down into the grit, the discomfort and ignominy of social life to destabilise the public imagination while never forfeiting the virtues of compassion and rigour. What remains is a bold and startling new work.” Anthony Anaxagorou; “One of these poems has a line-break segregating the phrase—before we move on—I have to fight. Arji Manuelpillai’s first collection is a ferociously savvy feat of activist scrutiny, that fights racist hate while also questioning why it, those hatemongers, and arguably all of us, feel at present so perennially up for a fight, so dominated by squalls of ire and outrage.” Vidyan Ravinthiran;“Arji Manuelpillai assures us this is not an Improvised Explosive Device as he packs his poetry in a duffle bag and invites us to accompany him through the everyday encounters - ‘real’ and ‘pixelated’- that illuminate the sometimes click-fast shift from butterfly-watcher to butterfly-killer but also the slow accumulation of the ‘dark spots’ deposited by hate, the ‘raised eyebrow’ of the CCTV outside a block of flats or humiliation carried as an heirloom. Together, his poems create an exquisitely layered, and moving, exploration of what brings individuals - from very different contexts but a shared world - to acts of violence and war. This collection of poetry is not an IED but it tears down the facades of easy explanations and lays bare what lies beneath as powerfully as if it were.” Hilary Pilkington, University of Manchester; Praise for Mutton Rolls: "The poems in this brilliant, playful debut are multifarious though gratifyingly interlinked, addressing the subjects of Sri-Lankan British identity, masculinity, friendship, grief and love. The tone is sometimes satirical, but there is no hiding behind satire in Arji Manuelpillai's work - great tenderness and beauty characterise these poems, and the poet's voice is completely original, entirely his own." - Hannah Lowe

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Book SynopsisFor centuries poetry has been a form of knowledge and a way of knowing for non centred people. In this collection Muneera recenters her voice and the voices of other people that are often times relegated to the sidelines or misrepresented in mainstream thought. 'That day she'll relate her chronicles' explores belonging, spirituality, gender race and identity as well as themes of girlhood, pop cultural, familial bonds and crushes, against the back drop of London and Bristol streets steeped colonial power structures that still live on. Despite that this collection is a story of love and a labour of love.

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Book SynopsisAdapted from a spoken word solo show, Chosen Family by ibizo Iami is a raw but gentle story of recovery and strength. Set in the waiting room of Dr Unicorn's office, Ibizo reflects on the instances that have knocked her down and built them back up again. Through emotionally charged poems and monologues, we start to unpick the importance of boundaries, love and expression in the quest to recover the body from trauma. We meet friends and concepts along the way that shape Ibizo's journey to finding their chosen family.

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Book SynopsisMoving through moods and atmospheres (Passion, Anger, Joy, Nature/ The Sea, Melancholy, Philosophical/ Mystical, and finally Whimsy), Spectral is a book intended to be read in a number of different ways: 1. From beginning to end, moving through the blended spectrum of moods laid out in order; 2. As a mood-picker – either finding something to match your feelings from one of the seven main sections, or using something to change your mood to where you would like it to be; or 3. As a pic’n’mix menu of topics, emotions, and poetry forms. The pieces come from a number of places across the years – some of them from NaPoWriMo prompts, some from commissions, some from workshops, others inspired by random book pages, musical sequences, or just turning up without warning. A couple come, inevitably, from this past age of isolation and confinement, and still others are inspired by the wisdom and grace of chosen family. Not so much a pick-your-own-adventure book as a means to either follow an artistic journey laid out or choosing your own path, Spectral is an experience Fay is looking forward to sharing with you.

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Book SynopsisJemima Foxtrot’s highly anticipated A New Game whirls you through a world of vivid images, hedonism, memory and wonder as it celebrates and investigates the minutiae of everyday life. Full of wry humour and written with a bold elegance, Jemima Foxtrot proves that there is no subject that can’t inspire a poem. Foxtrot specialises in joy and this book makes you smile as much as it makes you think.

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Book SynopsisA poem cycle about giving birth. A creative response to the seemingly improbable and yet utterly commonplace act of somehow producing a human from your body. A rollercoaster ride of viscera and vulnerability, exploring the agony and the ecstasy of an everyday accouchement.

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Book SynopsisIn Late Shift at the Pickle Factory Mary Dickins presents the reader with an intensely crafted patchwork of stories, reminiscences, observations and whimsy. These poems are tender, sad, joyful, surreal and ridiculous and always characterised by Mary's distinctive blend of wordplay, humour, poignancy and politics. Mary believes that there is nothing stranger, more intriguing and revealing than the everyday life, people and places that we take for granted. She invites you to explore and enjoy this book as part of her poetic legacy drawn from an exuberant and challenging life well lived.Trade ReviewAn understated pathos and a highly politicised mind at work. - Jacqueline Saphra

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Book Synopsis'No problem here pal. None at all.ʼ In the early hours of the morning, thirty-one-year-old Sheku Bayoh set out to walk home from his friend’s place after watching a boxing match. Just hours later, he had lost his life in police custody. Lament for Sheku Bayoh is a poetic expression of grief for the human behind the headlines and a non-apologetic reflection on racism in Scotland today. 'Timely and necessary' The Stage, 5 Stars

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Book SynopsisJuan Ramirez, Jr.’s collection of poetry and monologues, Juan by Juan, is an exploration of life, identity, and love featuring 15 poems from the popular writer, actor, and theater maker. The playful verse hits home with reflections on what it means to be a man called Juan in a place called The Bronx. Coupled with his poetry, this volume contains 14 monologues by Juan Ramirez Jr., for actors of all ages, genders, and identities. Juan Ramirez, Jr., is an internationally produced and award-winning multi-hyphenated artist. Puerto Rican and Guatemalteco, Bronx born and raised, Juan champions the voiceless in his work. This collection breaks open a new window on his city and its people, capturing the energy and impact in verse and spoken word. "Juan Ramirez, Jr.'s Juan by Juan, is what we poetry lovers desperately need; surprise. Being a theater disciple, Juan understands the value of surprise. Staying ahead of your audience is the quintessential tool a playwright must possess. Juan by Juan is a fun yet revealing read." - reg e gaines "Juan’s work exudes such an earthiness and a nitty gritty passion that jumps right out of the page and knocks at the door of your heart." Celine Hispiche, artistic director Celine's Salon

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Book SynopsisCardiff Writers’ Circle was formed in 1947 and is joined here by other local writinggroups, all lending their imaginations to a wide variety of styles, genres, and formats. You may laugh. You may cry. You may gasp at the sheer beauty contained within these pages. But above all, you will be holding a snapshot of the fantastic talent that exists today in Cardiff, city of the dragon.

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Book SynopsisThis remarkable collection of poetry by two friends whose work is in some way similar, but also refreshingly different, focuses on ten primary themes that engagingly highlight and make eternally memorable, experiences that are common to many people, but rarely as well written as this. The phrase, 'True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd / What oft was thought but ne'er so well express'd', applies very poignantly to this collection. Rene and Chris served in the Intelligence Corps and met in a now redundant army camp in 1965. Their friendship has endured for more than fifty-six years, sustained even over the thirty-five years when Chris lived in Australia and Rene travelled the world. They collaborated on this book to select poems that depict their lives. The poems stir the emotions of, for example, adventure, love, family and nation. They can provoke, they often amuse. Rene and Chris hope you enjoy them.

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Book Synopsis‘More Poems for Young and Old… and Their Dog’ is a collection of engaging poems taking the reader on an excursion into humour, nonsense, and even downright hilarity, with an occasional more serious direction. I hope these pages will bring you joy, Whether you’re young or old, girl or boy, I also wish that in just a while Something in them will make you smile.Table of ContentsPreface 13 Timothy Platt Part 4 14 Drummer 15 Penelope Klopp Part 3 16 Wisdom 17 The pirate 18 Mum 19 Sleep 20 The gnu 21 The world 22 Talent 23 The Vicar Part 3 24 Jock McRae 25 Nelson 27 I saw 28 Henry 29 Breakdown 30 Cake 31 Pie 32 Duties 34 Timothy Platt Part 5 36 Vitamin D 38 Snow 39 The hat 40 Shoes 41 Rearrangement 42 Confusion 43 Stairs 44 The vet 45 The canoe 46 The coat 47 Cleaning 48 Taps 49 Shredder 50 Walking boots 51 Supermarket 52 Doormat 53 Lessons 54 Injury 56 The highwayman 57 Scrap yard 59 Poppy 61 Milk 62 Shadow 63 Snoring 64 The office 65 The postman 66 Poet 67 Washing machine 68 The pet 69 The café 70 Uncle Seth 71 Directions 72 Glasses 73 Jake 75 Oscar 76 Climbing 77 Newspaper 79 Gerald’s socks 80 Decorating 81 Grandad’s fears 82 Vision 83 Money 84 King Canute 85 Grandma’s chair 87 The library 89 Time 90 Victor 91 Eyes 93 Christmas Eve 94 Car sales 95 Floxton Moor 97 Centipede 98 Drink 99 Age 100 Photo 101 Friendship 102 Water 103 Identity 104 Career 105 Flat pack 106 Watching 107 Heating 108 Haircut 109 The bicycle 110 A&E 112 Decisions 114 Ancestry 115 Tax 116 Shrinkage 117 Groceries 119 The insurance man 121 A slice of cake 123 Supporter 124 Mother 126 Reading or writing 127 Judgement 128

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Book SynopsisA unique poem to enhance every day of the Jewish year

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Book SynopsisWhere Shadow Falls explores the frailties of the human condition, the landscapes in which such frailties emerge, and the dire consequences that can ensue. The language and structure of the poems allows readers to create their own interpretations of events and relationships. Never didactic and often leavened with wit, the poems occupy the liminal space between what’s present and what lies beyond. Nevertheless, they are attentive in their range to such present-day realities as prostitution, prison and political deception. Forgiveness, they discover, may be found in time or place but we can only be ‘…certain that all is other in these uncertain times.’Trade Review‘Where Shadow Falls’ is a fabulous book with a poet who is on top form and a consummate purveyor of the ‘craft or sullen art’ of poetry. Ruth O’Callaghan is equally at ease with beautifully realised ‘observational’ poems and the philosophical, often mixing successfully the two. The personal and the political merge, coalesce and they are underlined with a poet whose sensibilities are wide ranging in their compassion and backlit by a wry, ironic humour that breaks through as the lucky reader experiences in a poetry book, laughter, tears and gasps of admiration. A stunning collection. — JACK CARADOC

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