Modern and contemporary poetry

Book SynopsisHannah Sullivan's first collection, Three Poems, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the inaugural John Pollard International Poetry Prize. Was It for This continues that book's project, offering a trenchant exploration of the ways in which we attempt to map our lives in space and time. But there is also the wider, collective experience to contend with, the upheaval of historic event and present disaster. Tenants', the first poem, is an elegy for Grenfell, written from the uneasy perspective of a new mother living a few streets away. Elsewhere, from the terraces and precincts of seventies and eighties London to the late-at-night decks of American suburbs, intimately inhabited geographies provide reference points and sites for revisiting. Nothing is too small or unlovely to be transfixed by the poet's attention, from the thin concrete pillars of a flyover to an elderly peacock's broken train. There is a memorialising strain in the forensic accumulation of detail, but there is also celebration, a keen sense of holding on to and cherishing what we can.

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Book SynopsisNigel Planer has been writing poetry for over fifty years. Now he has corralled many of his poems into one volume, Making Other Plans - as in 'poetry is what happens when you're busy making other plans.' This collection forms a poetic memoir, richly articulating humorous and serious observations on life, love, ageing, society and the human condition, recounted with emotional tenderness and warranted vexation.Trade Review"A unique piece of poetic time travel. Frequently funny, sometimes alarming, always honest and constantly surprising." -Tim Firth / "Intelligent, inventive and always engaging." -Henry Normal / "Planer's poetry is marked by a true emotional tenderness; he effortlessly weaves together profound insights into the journey of his life with his quick wit." -Shobna Gulati

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Book SynopsisA haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.” “Once there were oarfish, opaleyes, olive flounders. Once the oxbows were not overrun with nitrogen.” Part requiem, part bedtime story, Meltwater narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it. Prose poems melt into erasures, erasures swell into lush catalogs. Within this formal ebb and flow, Claire Wahmanholm explores both abundance and annihilation, giving shape and music to our shared human anxieties. What does it mean to bring children into a world like this one? A world where grenades are “the only kind of fruit we can still name”? Where “lightning can strike over / and over without boredom or belief and nothing / is saved”? Where losses, both ecological and personal, proliferate endlessly? Here, a parent’s joy is accompanied by the gnaw of remorse. And yet, Wahmanholm recognizes, children bind us to the world—to its missiles and marvels, to the possibility that there is indeed grace worth “suffer[ing] the empty universe for.”If we are going to worry, let us also at least wonder. If we are going to be seized by terror, let us also be “seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it.” A glittering, kinetic testament to vanishing—of biodiversity, of climate stability, of a sense of safety—Meltwater is both vindication and balm.Trade ReviewPraise for Meltwater "Wahmanholm delivers a dynamic collection of poems in which parenthood, nature, reverie, and anticipation intersect in a surreal landscape that illustrates the cognitive dissonance of an age of impending destruction. [...] This is a hypnotic and devastating maelstrom of introspection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review“Meltwater feels necessary and urgent. And comforting… Art that surveys the atmospheric wreckage of the Anthropocene might be the only way to soothe the existential dread that accompanies this fast-warming planet’s forecast”—Racket“Despite the inherent sorrow that accompanies our necropastoral landscape, this collection nevertheless remains tender and beautiful as it ruminates on ongoing loss.”—Marissa Ahmadkhan, West Review"Meltwater guides readers through a deep-welling grief for a world in upheaval while offering an antidote to some of that grief. While the collection is heavy with mourning, it is also subtly and deftly uplifting, prompting us to remember the simple things that we “suffer the empty universe for.”—Zoe Binder, zyzzyva“Claire Wahmanholm is a poet of devastating inevitability, of all the living that comes after the apocalypse, and Meltwater is ‘a vast, organic machine / running like static behind everything.’”—Allison Flory, Arkansas International“Wahmanholm most certainly writes the body and land electric—and I am charged, crackling, and grateful for these stunning poems. Meltwater makes a wholly original music of land, loss, and motherhood. A must for anyone wanting to read the hard beauty and fragility of the environment anew.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil “When we call a poet visionary, we usually mean that the poet in question shows us impalpable abstractions in realms far removed from our own. But Claire Wahmanholm is a visionary of the concrete, the stippled and slippery textures of the precarious present, and the unthinkably imminent. The patterns she reveals to us are the fractal geometries of fear as our surroundings, our loves, and our very selves are pulled into the spiraling inevitabilities of ecological collapse. These poems are devastating, even in their heartrending tenderness. Wahmanholm is a poet of singular and essential power.”—Monica Youn“In Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater, ‘the world’ means entanglement. In these poems, things pour through one another; even thinkings pour through one another, via the melting form of the erasure. There is no outside to the book’s ecology, and nothing to be considered in isolation: alphabets and glaciers; human love and human loss, human folly and human violence; animal continuity and species devastation; hairdryers and zygotes. We are inescapably permeated by the everything that is ‘us’: water, ice; land; animal, mineral, vegetable beings and their ways of making meaning; human beings and human ways of making meaning. When Wahmanholm writes, with others before her, that ‘you are grass,’ I know it.”—Éireann LorsungPraise for Redmouth“Claire Wahmanholm’s book, Redmouth, is grief-stricken. But how does the poet make grief so beautiful? Who knew the language of grief could be stricken itself with the language of beauty? Here the deer have disappeared but when the speaker closes her eyes, she ‘can see them / licking the coats of their fawns, anchoring / their spots to their fur to their bodies to the forest floor.’ There’s simply no doubt that Wahmanholm is a poet because language is the center of all of her work, whether it is describing a decayed world where ‘mountains have unraveled into sand’ to the stripping away and lifting out of language in the equally stunning erasures sprinkled throughout this book. Yes, darkness razors across these poems, but what comes out of the experience of reading is beauty. I don’t know many poets today who can write such beauty into such devastation: ‘The children’s hair lies dewy on the hillocks of their heads / until shreds like cornsilk come off in the breeze.’ Gorgeously rendered, devastatingly stunning.”—Victoria Chang“Redmouth is singing. In these poems, Claire Wahmanholm again and again proves that music intensifies not only emotions, but also ideas: ‘I carried a groan in my throat. Mostly it sat silent, but at night / I untethered it note by note. It pillared above me in the dark, / curling into the shape of a dog, a horse, a goat. It made a moat around me.’ This is a poetry of the greatest skill; this is a book that could make a person who had never cared for poetry before want to write it.”—Shane McCrae“Redmouth is a book of lush privacies, of ‘lamb-lioned’ promises (the sort that grief makes, always disingenuously). ‘The doe [is] a torch in the garden,’ she writes at one point—or excavates, in one of a series of bravura erasures. Claire Wahmanholm is the purest of lyric poets, if purity can be reconciled with the creaturely—which is, perhaps, the work that Redmouth most aspires to. Each poem here is a small, glittering emblem commemorating that effort.”—G.C. Waldrep“‘Let all / Headlong fall from this / song,’ Claire Wahmanholm urges in her prophetic and sonically-lush second collection of poems, Redmouth, which blooms—singing—out of the void. As the poet brings us to ‘the nightside / of the heart,’ words whirl into worlds, from sunrise’s ‘quartz-cold tongue’ to a beloved’s absence, which ‘clings to the undersides of leaves like chrysalides.’ There are disappearances in this book: the names of what we love most are driven ‘to the edge of a cliff’ and the author even imagines molting from her own name, eating it, ‘crushing that sorrow gently into my jaws.’ But there are also risings from the darkness, from a world left fallow: ‘If of sunflowers.’”—Nomi StonePraise for Wilder “Long after I finished reading Wilder, I was in grief that its beauty had ended, and also in grief over the spoiled world it describes. Stripped wholly of autobiographical content, the poems in this book seem like the texts written by an ancient collective—texts that are at once full of wonder and bewilderment, cosmic vision and earthly pain. Except that the book’s voices aren’t those of the ancients after all, but of those in a disturbingly probable future where bleach dapples the ground, relaxation tapes play in manic loops, there are bombs in everyone’s bellies, and grief travels through the body like mercury. Intimate as well as mythic, Wilder is a staggeringly dark proposition about where we are going. And while the book offers no easy scenarios of rescue or solace, its lyricism is nonetheless steeped in vibrant making. As the speaker of one poem says, ‘We had seen many last things: the last acorn, the last lightning storm, the last tide.’ And maybe, just maybe, in the artfulness brought to that exquisitely vatic catalog, the work of repair takes place.”—Rick Barot“In Wilder, Claire Wahmanholm invents a language of disintegrating futures, using poems to take us through unraveling fairytales and the volatile terrain of our unraveling planet. Written in 2018, the book feels like a premonition of what is to come . . . What I appreciate most about these speakers is their impulse to move closer to one another. It’s a reminder to me to do the same.”—MAYDAY Magazine “Claire Wahmanholm channels the singular voice of H. D. as she travels us through a landscape wounded, this time not by the industrial military complex, but by the industrial greed complex. Wahmanholm’s gorgeous, epic lyric breathes across time and place, self and other, blame and consequence—placing the song of impossible hope not with our news cycle but in our lungs, on our tongues. In its end, this oracular voice teaches us that despite it all we grow to ‘see deeply into each other, all the way to the marrow.’ Please God, may it be so.”—Rebecca Gayle Howell “Wilder is a gorgeous, heady book of fables touched with a kind of black moss, or jellyfish tendrils, or nets and ghosts. Throughout the collection, we are implicated in a never-ending journey—continuously emerging from the underneath of things, the excavations of the world, the lightless places that lead to the sea. Moments are exquisitely strange and strangely exquisite. There is an abundance of being lost, of encroaching upon apocalyptic moments, of falling back to burning music. In Wilder, we are all eternally, or suddenly, feral children left to our own shared devices. Merry with memories that are now suspect, we are led on circular treks through one shifting illusion after another. Doom and freedom seem to be the same in these landscapes but our senses are more alive than ever. Here we are howling, smoking, crooked, afloat through skies of vultures and honeycombs.”—Sun Yung Shin“Wilder is bewildering and born of collapse. These searing poems spring not only from the end but from the imagined after, excavating from the ruins of this world ‘the birds swooping from the trees to land / beside their own bones, // our bodies reaching down to grab our shadows by the hands.’ I cannot recall a collection of poems that thrilled and devastated me more.” —Maggie SmithTable of ContentsO HungerYou Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill YouGlacierMeltwaterMIn a Land Where Everything is Already Trying to Kill Me, I Enter a New Phase of My Life in Which It Would Be Very Bad If I DiedMeltwaterMetamorphosis with Milk and SugarIn a Land Where Everything is Trying to Kill You, I Teach You to be an AutotomistPoem That Cries WolfGlacierMeltwaterStarlingMore RabbitsPrimerThe Child Puts Apples into the Mouth of the TreeMeltwaterThe New HorticultureGlacierApotropaeiIn A Land Where Everything Is Trying To Kill Me, I Consider Letting ItThe Sun, the ShipMeltwaterAt the End We Turn Into TreesGlossary of What I’ll MissThe New FearThe New LanguageGlacierMeltwaterPDeathbed Dream with Extinction ListIf Anyone AsksIn Sorrow Thou Shalt Bring Forth ChildrenPoem With No Children In itMeltwaterThe FutureMeltwater:The Empty UniverseXYZ NotesAcknowledgments

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Book SynopsisA tender homage to the journeys of growth and change that we all experience, told through the theme of the four seasons and the connection they have to our lives.Growing pains, societal pressures, loneliness, grief––all these things make it hard to see the positive moments life offers. Maybe Today, a new collection of poetry from SK Williams, reflects on these difficulties but paves a path of light and love while doing so. Through inspiration from nature and gentle yet stirring words, Williams proves that becoming the healthiest, happiest version of ourselves is possible––and worth it. Sometimes we just need a little help finding it.Titled “Fall,” “Winter,” “Spring,” and “Summer,” each of the four sections of the book detail varying yet relatable life experiences. The main voice of the book is enhanced through the addition of annotations from a tender perspective of a trusted friend, representing the gentler, affirming perspective we all deserve to hear.

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Book SynopsisA marvellous book, lovingly edited, beautifully produced. . . and brimming with literary insights, much laughter, a sprinkle of gossip and the poet's insuppressible joie de vivre, even in adversity. Buy it, read it, and keep it to hand on to your children.' John Banville, GuardianAn epistolary cornucopia. . . contains an abundance of insight and illumination, literary gossip and appraisal, playfulness and cogency, all bound up with a steadfast attention to the feelings and expectations of each correspondent.' Patricia Craig, TLS Books of the YearEvery now and again I need to get down here, to get into the Diogenes tub, as it were, or the Colmcille beehive hut, or the Mossbawn scullery. At any rate, a hedge surrounds me, the blackbird calls, the soul settles for an hour or two . . .For all his public eminence, Seamus Heaney seems never to have lost the compelling need to write personal letters. In this ample but discriminating selection from fifty years of his correspondence, we are given access as never before to the life and poetic development of a literary titan from his early days in Belfast, through his controversial decision to settle in the Republic, to the gradual broadening of horizons that culminated in the award of a Nobel Prize and the years of international acclaim that kept him heroically busy until his death.Editor Christopher Reid draws from both public and private archives to reveal this story in the poet's own words. Generous, funny, exuberant, confiding, irreverent, empathetic and deeply thoughtful, the letters encompass decades-long relationships with friends and colleagues, as well as showing an unstinted responsiveness to passing acquaintances. Moreover, Heaney's joyous mastery of language is as evident here as it is in any of his writing for a literary readership.Listening to Heaney's voice, we find ourselves in the same room as a man whose presence, when he lived, enriched the world immeasurably, and whose legacy continues to deepen our sense of what truly matters.

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Book SynopsisSome good things must come to an end, for new things to begin. Poet Alicia Cook explores this grievous emotion in her latest and final mixtape collection, The Music Was Just Getting Good.Alicia Cook is back with the highly anticipated final tracklist in her poetry collection of mixtapes, The Music Was Just Getting Good. Following in the footsteps of her first two installments, Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately (2016) and Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back (2020), Cook is closing out her trilogy with a poignant and all too relatable look at the ebbs and flows of life. And why, even during our most difficult seasons, a better day can appear just around the corner. Spread across 184 tracks (92 poems and 92 blackout poems), each paired with an accompanying song, Cook returns to her evergreen themes of mental health, hope, and recovery, and reminds readers that grief is not reserved solely for death. We may grieve who we used to be, moments that never came to pass, physical places, and, of course, people; people who’ve died, but also those who left, and those we had to leave behind. A stunning closing number in a timely and necessary collection of work, The Music Was Just Getting Good is the balm your soul has been waiting for.

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Book SynopsisSusannah Dickey is a poet and novelist from Derry and the author of four pamphlets, I had some very slight concerns (2017), genuine human values (2018), bloodthirsty for marriage (2020) and Oh! (2022). Her poems have been published in The Poetry Review, The TLS, Poetry London, and Poetry Ireland Review, amongst others. She is an Eric Gregory Award winner, a prize granted for a collection by poets under the age of thirty. Susannah is the author of two novels, Tennis Lessons (2020), and Common Decency (2022), both published by Doubleday UK and Penguin Ireland.Trade ReviewA poet of tremendous imaginative range, artistic vision, and accomplishment -- Kayo Chingonyi, author of A Blood ConditionSusannah Dickey’s bloodthirsty for marriage made me think of Alice Notley in its urgency and playfulness. But Dickey is more surreal, more vivid; there are more dead gerbils. These are poems that scorch the earth with their originality and then write out of the ashes. -- Will HarrisA rare talent, and certainly one to watch. * The Sunday Times *Using the real-life case of an unidentified woman’s body found in Norway as a jumping off point, this brilliantly realised first collection by the novelist Susannah Dickey is a multilayered investigation into the ethics of the true crime genre * The Guardian *[ISDAL pushes] the boundary of how we might think about form and genre . . . Dickey brings a singular voice and a unique complexity to her investigation -- Tara Bergin * PN Review *

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Book SynopsisBestselling and Goodreads Choice Award-winning author Trista Mateer returns with another mythical approach to self-care in her newest poetry collection, Persephone Made Me Do It. Following her previous work in this series, Mateer weaves together mythology, tarot, poetry, and conversation to reveal a new side of a very old story. Alternating between the perspectives of poet and goddess, Persephone’s lore is explored, related to modern issues, and ultimately reclaimed.“You want to talk about duality? You want to talk about love? Let us speak instead of chaos.”In this new collection of art and feminist verse from Trista Mateer, Persephone might have flowers in her hair—but she is out for blood.

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Book SynopsisThe enchanting festive poem from Carol Ann Duffy, former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, and adorned with sumptuous illustrations by artist Margaux Carpentier, Christmas Eve at The Moon Under Water is the perfect festive gift for the poetry lover in your life.All the lights were on at The Moon Under Waterand the landlord, an Owl, was slowly pulling a pintto test his ale. Toothsome. It was Christmas Eveand the fire in the ancient grate gargled its flames...A horse walks into a bar. A hedgehog plays the piano. An owl mulls a flagon of wine. On Christmas Eve at The Moon Under Water, anything is possible, so when the landlord announces a festive prize for the best performance of the night, all and sundry pile into the pub, eager for a chance at victory.In Christmas Eve at The Moon Under Water all the old rivalries of the natural world are suspended for one miraculous night, as man stands shoulder to shoulder with animal, and predator and prey add warble and wail to the Yuletide chorus.

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Book SynopsisIn these skillful new translations by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick, whose work has previously been shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry, each line is gnomic yet ample, opening spaces of reflection on mortality and infinity. Now preserved in this portable, English-language volume, these poems from Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister’s last decade are oracular and entrancing. While the collections previously published by Wave—Of Entirety Say the Sentence, In Time’s Rift, and Wallless Space—provide expansive access to Meister’s late work, Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) delivers granular, endlessly rewarding profundities. Trade ReviewPoetry translation is such tricky and unappreciated work—“translation is impossible,” Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick declare in their introduction to a volume of Ernst Meister's work in which they've performed that exact miracle. —Arielle Greenberg, American Poetry ReviewLike his subject matter, Meister’s writing is ominous, intangible, and inescapable. —Publishers WeeklyMeister compacts a meditation on the nature of space, nothingness and our interaction with the two in the work’s sparse, dense lines. —Lindsay Choi, The Daily Californian

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Book Synopsis'A la lumiere d'hiver' (1977) is a central work in the writing of the Swiss French poet Philippe Jaccottet (1925-2021). Written in middle age, it forms a bridge between the poet's intricate early lyrics and his more expansive and meditative later work. Starting from a direct confrontation with the raw facts of mortality, its three poem-sequences strip away further layers of illusion until a glimmer of meaning starts to appear in the 'winter light' of the landscape of the Drome area of northern Provence, where Jaccottet made his home from 1953 until the end of his life. Tim Dooley's translation, 'In Winter Light', is the product of a long relationship with the original, which he first read at the time of its publication. His English version mirrors the tentative, scrupulous exploration of being he finds in Jaccottet's French, both its hesitancies and circular movements and, finally, its 'unblinking eyes'.Trade Review'In this fine translation of Phillipe Jaccottet's elegiac three-part collection Tim Dooley wonderfully combines the grace of his own attentive poetics with a clear intimacy of understanding. In his hands, In Winter Light relays Jaccottet's lucidly charged journey through loss and mourning in language that's as close to the ear as it is to the imagination and the heart' - Jane Draycott; 'Philippe Jaccottet often employs a negative theology in which attempts at simile are discarded in the imperative to arrive at the mot juste - considered both as language and as philosophical position. Tim Dooley is alert to this ascesis, and his translations seem to me quite excellent: they are chaste, rhythmically sound, and retain the constant decorum that is a chief quality of this quiet, essential voice' - Stephen RomerTable of ContentsIntroduction: 'In the old days it would be called song' The Lessons Songs from down there In Winter Light

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Book Synopsis*Donna Ashworth's new book Wild Hope is out September 2023*FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF I WISH I KNEWFor those looking for inspiration, peace and acceptance on the bumpy road that is life, Donna Ashworth's poems give insight into the enigmas of ageing, body image, family and the rapidly changing world around us.For every twist, turn and roadblock the journey has to offer, this collection provides relief to busy minds and dares us to live with a reckless abundance of joy.Readers are embracing Life- 'One of today's best poets.' ***** NetGalley- 'Donna's writing conveys so beautifully what it is to be human' ***** Amazon- 'Each time I read a poem and decide that is my favourite I turn the page and find another beautifully written, eloquent piece that resonates, comforts, and that makes you stop and reflect.' ***** Amazon- 'They are wonderful books to dip in and out of when you need inspiration, some advice, a hug, a friendly word.' ***** Amazon

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Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH LISTOWEL WRITERS'' WEEKThroughout these poems, with their roaming sense of first-person, the speakers' minds are cavernous and echoic, primal and sophisticated, observant and raw, in and out of control of themselves. The effect is unpredictable and thrilling, at once a dark art and an illumination of unease and loss and wishfulness. The collection features disquieting songs of a mutable self alongside poignant elegies, interior journeys and subtle (and not so subtle) ripostes to the legacy of Trumpism while elsewhere encounters with ghostly feet and tongues of fire consort with riffs on Baudelaire, Rilke and Laforgue. These poems twinkle with mischief and humour, making for a pungent and haunting read. Riordan a poet whose strong, rippling influence is felt by all in his wake affirms his reputation at the forefront of contemporary poetry.

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Book Synopsis“I thought 2020 would be the year I got everything I wanted. Now I know 2020 was the year I appreciated everything I have.” From the author of Self Love Poetry comes a new collection of transformative poetry focused on reframing thoughts and seeing post-pandemic life through a rich, new, kaleidoscopic lens. The world has changed – but thankfully so have we. The Shift: Poetry for a New Perspective embodies the best of who we are now. From Melody Godfred, author of Self Love Poetry: for Thinkers & Feelers, comes a collection of poems designed to reframe how we see and move through this brave new, post-pandemic world. Each pair of poems inspires a shift from the old way of thinking to the new: from guilt to gratitude, resistance to surrender, and fear to love. The left side of every spread is dedicated to the old way. The right side offers a shift in perspective that lovingly illuminates the new. Each seemingly simple poem instantly elicits a profound reset, and is coupled with beautiful line drawings that awaken not just the mind, but also the heart. The Shift’s unique poem pairings uplift the soul by offering a hopeful salve for our collective burnout. Whether you read a pair of poems a day, or consume the entire book in one sitting, The Shift will be your trusted companion as you bravely navigate the great unknown that lies ahead in the months, years and decades to come.

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Book SynopsisIn 2019 poet-artist Gommie began walking the coastline of an England with nothing but a backpack, a tent and an unusually large collection of pens. His aim? Searching for hope during increasingly hard times. From losing his way on the Dover Hills to bankruptcy in Rhyl and wild camping in Scarborough, Gommie’s extraordinary journey is still ongoing, and his findings, a deeply moving mixture of texture, illustration, poetry and verbatim conversations, are a gentle homage to the often-overlooked places we inhabit and the frequently forgotten voices we hear. Follow him @gommie_poem on Instagram.

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Book Synopsis'A source of uncompromising elemental warmth' Ali SmithBy turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in flux, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment.Dearly is a pure Atwood delight, and long-term readers and new fans alike will treasure its insight, empathy and humour.BOOK OF THE YEAR OBSERVER, FINANCIAL TIMESTrade ReviewHere we see Atwood at the height of her poetic powers * New York Times Book Review *A poignant yet playful collection of verse, about endings and departures, it is sliced with clever, sharp humour * Daily Telegraph *This collection of poems is a reckoning with the past that comes from a place of wisdom and control . . . You can almost hear her speaking voice, see the twinkle in her eye . . . wonderfully observed * Observer *Atwood's first poetry collection in over a decade is intimate, lingering delicately between the human and the natural, and this world and the next * New Statesman *She's become world famous for The Handmaid's Tale, and jointly won the 2019 Booker Prize for The Testaments, but Canadian author Margaret Atwood was once better known as a poet . . . this new volume brings together some of her favourite themes, from zombies, werewolves and aliens, to the passage of time and the most pressing political issues of the day * Evening Standard *

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Book SynopsisThis beautifully illustrated collection brings together, for the first time, Carol Ann Duffy’s much-celebrated festive poems.For a decade, while she was Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy gifted her thousands of readers an illustrated poem every Christmas, transporting them in one year to a seventeenth-century festival on the frozen Thames, in another to Western Front to witness the famous 1914 truce, then to a sweet winter’s night in the South of France with Pablo Picasso and his small dog.Christmas Poems showcases Duffy’s bold and innovative voice, alongside gorgeous artwork from Rob Ryan, David De Las Heras and Lara Hawthorne, amongst others. These ten much-loved poems are gathered together for the first time in this compendium to make a perfect gift for old friends celebrating a decade’s tradition or those experiencing the magic of Duffy’s festive verse for the first time.Trade ReviewDuffy's spellbinding verse, spiced with witty, wintry illustrations, recaptures a magic most of us left behind in childhood * Intelligent Life *

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Book SynopsisViolet in Some Places is the life of a man enveloped in the raw, nurturing magic of matriarchs. If ever there was a guide toward masculine vulnerability, power through listening, a rosetta stone for empathy— it is here in the silky, poetic prose beautifully woven throughout this empowering collection from Cebo Campbell.

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Book SynopsisFrank O'Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, 'which, by its vitality alone, became the dominant force in the American poetic tradition.'Frank O'Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England; from 1951 he lived and worked in New York, both for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an associate curator. O'Hara's untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, 'the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed.'This collection is a reissue of a volume first published by Grove Press in 1957, and it demonstrates beautifully the flawless rhythm underlying O'Hara's conviction that to write poetry, indeed to live, 'you just go on your nerve.'

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Book Synopsis*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION*** AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4**'Warsan Shire is an extraordinarily gifted poet whose profoundly moving poems so powerfully give voice to the unspoken' Bernardine Evaristo'Vital, moving and courageous, this is a debut not to be missed' Guardian__________Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience from the award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire, celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé's Lemonade and Black Is King.With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls. These are noisy lives, full of music and weeping and surahs. These are fragrant lives, full of blood and perfume and jasmine. These are polychrome lives, full of moonlight and turmeric and kohl.The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of survival. Each reader will come away changed.'Warsan Shire electrifies... The beautifully crafted poems in this collection are fiercely tender gifts' Roxane Gay'Absolutely beautiful... So relevant' Elizabeth Day, *Day's Delights*Trade ReviewI have long been a massive fan of Warsan Shire's extraordinarily gifted poetry. Her exquisite, memorable and finely-tuned poems articulate a depth of experience that never fails to surprise and profoundly move me, as she so powerfully gives voice to the unspoken -- Bernardine EvaristoAn incredible collection -- Candice Carty-Williams * Stylist *Shire invokes the creative powers of the writer to transform one's past... Vital, moving and courageous, this is a debut not to be missed -- Mary Jean Chan * 'The best recent poetry' - Guardian *It is absolutely astonishing how much emotion, intelligence, imagination, and truth Warsan Shire can get into one collection. She is a poet of the highest order, with a compassionate heart, and a limitless mind -- Benjamin ZephaniahMust-read poetry from the superstar Somali-British writer Warsan Shire * Stylist *

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Book SynopsisSalt is a distinctive assembly of poems by the multi-award winning David Harsent. Resting somewhere between fragment and exposition, these intense and primal pieces stretch out across the measure of the page in the form of brief utterances. One extends to sonnet-length, one consists of a single line; but each piece uniquely completes its own world, and at the same time shades on to the next as a succession of frames and stills and imaginings that lends light and colour in the round. The poems in this book are a series, not a sequence,' the author explains. They belong to each other in mood, in tone and by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes not least the word salt.' Mineral, eerie, sensory, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life that refresh with the turning of each page. Like little fictions passed through space from hand to hand, the writings build powerfully to make Salt

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Book SynopsisThe Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller''Gorgeous.'' Glennon Doyle''Sharp observations on modern womanhood.'' Sunday Times''Exquisite.'' Fi GloverA stunning and honest debut poetry collection about the beauty and hardships of being a woman in the world today, and the many roles we play - mother, partner, and friend.''When life throws you a bag of sorrow, hold out your hands/Little by little, mountains are climbed.'' So ends Kate Baer''s remarkable poem ''Things My Girlfriends Teach Me.'' In ''Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels'' she challenges her reader to consider their grandmother''s cake, the taste of the sea, the cool swill of freedom. In her poem ''Deliverance'' about her son''s birth she writes ''What is the word for when the light leaves the body?/What is the word for when it/at last, returns?''Through poems that are as unforgettably beautiful as they are accessible, Kate Baer prov

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Book Synopsis“Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture” collects two of Antonin Artaud’s foremost poetic works from the last period of his life. He wrote both works soon after his release from the psychiatric hospital of Rodez and his return to Paris, and they were published during the flurry of intensive activity and protests against his work’s censorship. The Indian Culture is the first and most ambitious work of Artaud’s last period. It deals with his travels in Mexico in 1936 where Artaud sets aside his usual preoccupations with peyote and the Tarahumara people’s sorcerers to directly anatomize his obsessions with gods, corporeality, and sexuality. Here Lies is Artaud’s final declaration of autonomy for his own body from its birth to its imminent death, won at the cost of multiple battles against the infiltrating powers amassed to steal that birth and death away from him. Both works demonstrate Artaud’s final poetry as a unique amalgam of delicate linguistic invention and ferociously obscene invective. “Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture” was translated by the award-winning translator Clayton Eshleman, widely seen as the preeminent translator into English of Artaud’s work, with its profound intensity and multiply nuanced language. For the first time since its first publication, this bilingual edition presents the two works in one volume, as Artaud originally intended. This edition also features a contextual afterword by Stephen Barber as well as new material, previously untranslated into English.

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Book SynopsisA beautifully produced collection of Thom Gunn's classic poetry, illuminated by insightful notes.

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021. Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. Arrow is a debut volume extraordinary in ambition, range and achievement. At its centre is 'Dear, beloved', a more-than-elegy for her younger sister who died suddenly: in the two years she took to write the poem, much else came into play: 'it was my hope to write the mood of elegy rather than an elegy proper,' following the example of the great elegists including Milton, to whose Paradise Lost she listened during the period of composition, also hearing the strains of Brigit Pegeen Kelly's Song, of Alice Oswald and Marie Howe. The poem becomes a kind of kingdom, 'one that is at once evil, or blighted, and beautiful, not to mention everything in between'. As well as elegy, Chakraborty composes invocations, verse essays, and the strange extended miracle of the title poem, in which ancient and modern history, memory and the lived moment, are held in a directed balance. It celebrates the natural forces of the world and the rapt experience of balance, form and - love. She declares a marked admiration for poems that 'will write into being a world that already in some way exists'. This is what her poems achieve.Trade Review'This powerful and endlessly mysterious collection of poems is a book of fables, of spells, of revised narratives, and of realigned songs, brightly lifted above our bodies by music that is as unpredictable as it is marvelous. The lyricism is everywhere apparent as Sumita Chakraborty addresses us, our bodies and their stories, our planet, and our sense of time itself. How does she do it? Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry, W.H. Auden wrote about Yeats, and as the hurt enters Chakraborty's language, we see that in speech violated, sounds and meanings - and even the oldest of human mysteries, like 'the etymology of love' - are redefined. All one can do is repeat: this is an endlessly compelling book. Bravo.' - Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic; 'About a quarter of the way through Sumita Chakraborty's Arrow, the reader encounters an impossible poem called 'Dear, beloved.' It's impossible because who could write it? It's as large, in its way, as any epic, but as compressed as any lyric, and as beautiful as any lyric, but as foundational as any epic, but it seems to come after all things, though it seems, also, diurnal. And it's impossible also because it's a highlight, not the highlight, of Arrow, a debut as assured as any first or last book, as compelling as any, as well-made.' - Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block; 'I stand in awe of Sumita Chakraborty's visionary collection, by turns epic and compressed in scope, weighty in its tapestry-like materiality and sleekly dynamic as an arrow... Seamless and diverse in form, cosmic in subject and image.' - Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl

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Book Synopsis**WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2019****WINNER OF THE ROEHAMPTON PRIZE FOR BEST POETRY COLLECTION 2019**Violence hangs over this book like an electric storm. Beginning with a poem about the teenage dawning of sexuality, Vertigo & Ghost pitches quickly into a long sequence of graphic, stunning pieces about Zeus as a serial rapist, for whom woman are prey and sex is weaponised. These are frank, brilliant, devastating poems of vulnerability and rage, and as Zeus is confronted with aggressions both personal and historical, his house comes crumbling down. A disturbing contemporary world is exposed, in which violent acts against women continue to be perpetrated on a daily – hourly – basis. The book shifts, in its second half, to an intimate and lyrical document of depression and family life. It sounds out the complex and ambivalent terrain of early motherhood – its anxieties and claustrophobias as well as its gifts of tenderness and love – reclaiming the sanctuary of domestic private life, and the right to raise children in peace and safety. Vertigo & Ghost is an important, necessary book, hugely impressive in its range and risk, and dramatic in its currency: a collection that speaks out with clarity, grace and bravery against the abuse of power.**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE****SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 T. S. ELIOT PRIZE** ‘Misogynistic violence, ancient myth and modern rage confront each other in moving and dynamic verse’ Financial TimesTrade ReviewVertigo & Ghost explodes into furious life with a series of poems and fragments about the Greek god Zeus... jagged, staccato poems that shoot down the pages like lightning bolts... an addictive, thrilling, sickening experience. * Guardian *Vertigo & Ghost knocked the breath from me. Such furious, fierce, ecstatic poems, at once brutal and heartachingly tender; I lay awake at night unable to stop thinking about them. Mothers and children, girls and women, their vulnerabilities and sorrows, fears amidst grave danger, their beautiful animal selves. Against a frightening darkness, these "sore jewels" radiate wild white-heat.This extraordinarily moving collection is a bold confrontation of violence against women. Vertigo & Ghost is one of the darkest, bravest and most unsettling collections I have read in a while. * Observer *An exceptional achievement. -- Paul Bailey * Literary Review *[A] tour-de-force... [Vertigo & Ghost] has generated a lot of (justified) buzz... poems of lasting power. * Telegraph *Poetry Book of the Month* *

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Book Synopsis''That crown which he set on his lifetime''s effort.' Ted HughesFour Quartets is the culminating achievement of T. S. Eliot's career as a poet. This edition is based on the design made by Giovanni Mardersteig for his letterpress edition of 1960 and marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of its first publication in the UK by Faber & Faber in 1944.Throughout these poems there is also the invention of new rhythms, of unimagined possibilities in the movement of language . . . He is perhaps more original and inventive in rhythm than any other poet in English.' Delmore SchwartzThe most original contribution to poetry that has been made in our time.' Edwin Muir

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Book SynopsisWinner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2020.Poetry Book Society Choice, Summer 2020.Bhanu Kapil’s extraordinary and original work has been published in the US over the last two decades. During that time Kapil has established herself as one of our most important and ethical writers. Her books often defy categorisation as she fearlessly engages with colonialism and its ongoing and devastating aftermath, creating what she calls in Ban en Banlieue (2015) a ‘Literature that is not made from literature’. Always at the centre of her books and performances are the experiences of the body, and, whether she is exploring racism, violence, the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England or America, what emerges is a heart-stopping, life-affirming way of telling the near impossible-to-be-told. How To Wash A Heart, Kapil's first full-length collection published in the UK, depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care.Trade ReviewReviews'Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart catches the thinning smile of that ancient human ritual: hospitality. In a time of increasing hostility against migrants, Kapil demonstrates how survival tunes the guest to its host with devastating intimacy: ‘It’s exhausting to be a guest / In somebody else’s house / Forever.’ In these lines an ancestral trauma pours from the heart of the unwelcome across a warzone, a threshold, into a spare bedroom edging its occupant out. Ultimately what Kapil teaches us is that although the heart might be where desire, gratitude, even love exist, it is an organ to which, like a country, we may never fully belong.'Sandeep Parmar'This joyous, occasionally furious, collection explores the limits of hospitality… Kapil establishes an astonishing presence, emphasising process over product, welcoming the reader to participate in the ritual of her poems’ making.' Sammi Gale, i'Brilliantly relentless… Kapil’s words sit brilliantly between the intellectual and the bodily. The eponymous phrase of this book returns again and again, to be held up to the light in different ways. Violence, exile, love and the world of literature drip out in the answers to the opening question.' Andrew McMillan, Poetry Book Society'Responds with brilliant acuity to the prolonged stress of the immigrant experience... In this series of precise, destabilising poems, Kapil skilfully amplifies the pressured immigrant heart, showing how precarious it is to exist in colour in a white space.' Joanna Lee, The Guardian'How to Wash a Heart addresses the world of lockdown with uncanny prescience, capturing its fragmented texture and vectors of distraction, and the constant intersection it reveals between personal and political precarity.' Dai George, Wales Arts Review'Lots of the books are forgettable. This one isn’t. It sounds like nothing else I’ve read. Initially disorientating, it soon clarifies into a novelistic tale about charity and hypocrisy, the story of an immigrant welcomed as a “guest” into the home of a woman who grows resentful of this new arrival’s friendship with her adopted daughter.' Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph'Bhanu Kapil’s work exceeds beyond the page; it is felt somatically, it moves and it pulses and tremors and it tears... the collection’s raw, understated tone draws attention to the harmful systematic and clinical processes of immigration.' Alycia Pirmohamed, The Scores'Bhanu Kapil’s brilliant and formally innovative How To Wash A Heart is a bold singular work… that lays bare the struggle of the immigrant… Kapil does this with a quiet brutality and stylistic flair.' Juliano Zaffino'In this emotionally-complex, lyrically-innovative, and thematically-rich collection, hospitality becomes a way of exploring the classical literary themes of arrival and departure, forcing them into a space where the question of belonging is perennially unanswered.'Devina Shah, The Poetry School'A brilliant and complex book, urgent in its message, How To Wash A Heart deserves (and requires) a wide and attentive readership.'Seán Hewitt, Irish Times'These books [How To Wash A Heart and The Olive Trees’ Jazz and Other Poems by Samira Negrouche] are gems. Both authoritative in the best sense of the word; stridently reflecting worlds of their own – that we know, and yet have never read described in this particular way, according to the contours along which our hearts move.'Khairani Barokka, The Poetry Review'How To Wash a Heart brilliantly dissects power, both ethnic and economic... It is a wise, thought-provoking collection which burrows under the skin.'Katrina Naomi'How to Wash a Heart asks extremely difficult and delicate questions that open a space for dialogue. It is also a beautiful book to hold and read. If only our public debates had Kapil’s subtlety, refinement, and distinction. How to Wash a Heart has already won an award in my heart, by merely beating, striving, pumping blood.'David Morgan O'Connor, RHINO Poetry'The book’s final pages, both the end of the sequence itself and the paratextual material, are devastating. How To Wash A Heart confronts “the link / Between creativity / And survival” – arguing that creativity is necessary for survival, but sadly not sufficient – more skilfully and innovatively than anything else I have read this year.'Dominic Leonard, The TLS'Bhanu’s book is kind of like walking into a kaleidoscope of heritage... It’s not like other books this year, subtle, nuanced and in the astro-plane only really wild poets get into. If the book was in a pub it would be the lady with the trolley full of black bags, you always wondered what was in them and now you can find out. Go on, go have a peek, let the words wash over you, let them roll through you and when you come out you will have the stench of something new and precious.'Arji Manuelpillai, Out-Spoken'How to Wash a Heart with its urgent salutory lessons about ways in which immigrants are unhoused and unmade punches above its weight of 44 pages.'Gail Low, Dundee University Review of the Arts'Kapil’s memorable protest depends upon her ability to overturn poetic expectation. She is never conventional… [in How To Wash A Heart] an assertive beauty surfaces from turmoil.'Kate Kellaway, The Observer‘Bhanu Kapil is a major writer, producing works that make you think and feel differently about the world, that end up wiring your brain differently. She explores racism, violence and the psychological effects of diaspora and uncertainty on the body of the immigrant in a poetry that is at once innovative and relatively comprehensible.’ Steven Waling, Magma Poetry'This book speaks of the wider experience of the refugee or immigrant. Notions of home and love change over time and become distorted so that the narrator becomes alienated both from their current situation and their own past. The poems capture perfectly the loneliness of being a guest in someone else’s home and in a country that is not your own. The conflicting emotions of such a situation – gratitude, indebtedness, confusion, discomfort, anxiety, fear, anger. [...] This is a beautiful, furious heart-rending book – utterly compelling.'Julia Webb, Under the Radar 'It is noteworthy, then, that How to Wash A Heart began its life in the UK, published by Liverpool University Press’s Pavilion Poetry. This represents a pivot in Kapil’s practice: after decades of living and working in the United States, she has also returned to the UK, a move that has coincided with her receiving greater recognition in her home country. [...] How to Wash A Heart speaks deliberately to the specifics of Britain: its racism, and its reception of immigrants. [...]What I love about Kapil is her concision, arrived at through processes of sifting which refuse to be rushed, which challenge us all to fully answer the question: What do you inherit, and what do you reproduce? The power of Kapil’s writing lies in her ability to evoke violence with a gentle touch. [...] Her books are spaces to rest, to lay down your armfuls of things. Now that she finds herself back here, on the near ground of Britain, it will be a joy and a wonder to see what she makes of it and our barrage of inheritances.'Stephanie Sy-Quia, The White Review'The poetic energy here doesn’t lie in the vocabulary but in the controlled fear that stalks those line breaks, interrupting each sentence as if the guest is choosing her words carefully, aware that someone may be listening behind the open door. [...] How to Wash a Heart tells a story about the ‘inclusive, complex, molecular’ chemistry of temporary host-guest bonds. But it produces that reality effect by hosting a series of unwelcome images that Kapil the artist can’t expel. [...] Kapil is both dissident and artist, of course: an agitator who won’t allow self-congratulation in through the back door, and the female artist using her body as a lightning conductor to pick up the violence latent in a place, or in her audience.'Peter Howarth, London Review of Books

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Book SynopsisWhat has happened to the lost art of memorising poems? Why do we no longer feel that it is necessary to know the most enduring, beautiful poems in the English language ''by heart''? In his introduction Ted Hughes explains how we can overcome the problem by using a memory system that becomes easier the more frequently it is practised. The collected 101 poems are both personal favourites and particularly well-suited to the method Hughes demonstrates. Spanning four centuries, ranging from Shakespeare and Keats through to Thomas Hardy and Seamus Heaney, By Heart offers the reader a ''mental gymnasium'' in which the memory can be exercised and trained in the most pleasurable way. Some poems will be more of a challenge than others, but all will be treasured once they have become part of the memory bank.This edition is part of a series of anthologies edited by poets such as Don Paterson and Simon Armitage and features an attractive new design to complement an anthology of cl

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Book SynopsisThese poems explore the distance between the head and the heart—and all of the pain, beauty, and hope in between.This book is one woman’s account of her longing to know herself fully. Her mind, body, and soul. This book might make you cry, fill you with nostalgia, empower you, or even give you hope. You might not see eye to eye with every idea inside, but with any luck you’ll see your soul reflected in its pages. You will question things. You will remember your past. You will be thankful for your present. You will dream a new dream. Above all, you will feel. Welcome to the journey of Eighteen Inches, a battlefield between a woman’s beat-up heart and her complex mind.

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Book SynopsisAuden, George Barker, William Empson, Geoffrey Faber, John Hayward, James Laughlin, Hope Mirrlees, Mervyn Peake, Ezra Pound, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, Tambimuttu, Allen Tate, Michael Tippett, Charles Williams and Virginia Woolf.

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Book SynopsisThe complete Cavafy poems including the unfinished works in a stunning new translation.From the acclaimed author of The Lost', a translation that scales new heights in modern poetic rendering. With a masterful eye for irony and an ear for the music of Cavafy's form, Daniel Mendelsohn's translation brings to English the poet who won acclaim from generations of writers, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot among them.Spanning the fall of Homeric heroes to the rise of the modern world, Cavafy's poetry collapses the spectra of time, geography and age into intimately personal elegies. Works such as Waiting for the Barbarians and Ithica, famed for their revival of the ancient worlds, continue to address the modern reader in terms of timeless relevance. Here they are accompanied by Cavafy's unfinished poems, translated into English for the first time. From a highly respected classicist and social essayist, Daniel Mendelsohn's edition is uniquely placed to become the fresh, definitive edition of CavaTrade Review’The poetry of Cavafy has been my spiritual food for many years now … Cavafy is a poet who never leaves you. He gets under your skin’ Louis de Bernieres ‘Magisterial … A brilliant scholar, a discerning critic and a generous person, Mendelsohn brings Cavafy alive’ Times ‘This beautifully produced book is as complete an edition as one can expect. Mendelsohn’s scholarship is formidable. No previous editor or translator has been so thorough’ Guardian ‘No-one seeking the fullest possible picture of the poet need go further than Daniel Mendelsohn's exhaustive edition of his work … Mendelsohn’s scholarship and sensitivity manage to persuade us that the poet’s love of history can combine with this more immediate nostalgia, so that in the best poems it’s impossible to separate the cerebral from the sensual’ Daily Telegraph ‘Daniel Mendelsohn has translated all of Cavafy’s poems, including the thirty ‘unfinished’ poems never before rendered in English. The results are extraordinary, and a whole galaxy orbits them’ New Yorker ‘This not only brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language … It is an event on the page. Mendelsohn’s Cavafy is itself a work of art’ New York Times Book Review

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Book SynopsisI seem to be your new favorite novel.One that keeps you up at night,turning my pages.Fingers lingering on me so you don't lose your place.In her first collection of poetry, Lili Reinhart explores the euphoric beginnings of young love, battling anxiety and depression in the face of fame, and the inevitable heartbreak that stems from passion.Relatable yet deeply intimate, provocative yet comforting, bite-size yet profound, these beautiful poems are about growingup, falling down, and getting back up again. They capture what it feels like to be a young woman in today's image-obsessed world with Lili's trademark honesty, optimism, and unique perspective.Accompanied by striking and evocative illustrations, the poems in Swimming Lessons reveal the depths of female experience, and are the work of a storyteller who is coming into her own.Trade Review‘Reinhart is committed to authenticity…and candid about her battles with anxiety and depression.’―Harpers Bazaar ‘There's a reason her fans feel they know her. She's been outspoken on various platforms about deeply personal topics.’ ―Glamour ‘Reinhart is a force to be reckoned with.’ ―Who What Wear ‘She's a breath of fresh air. Navigating her way through fame her own way, not for a second trying to be anyone she's not, and showing every one of her millions of fans that it's OK to be who you are. In fact, it's the only way.’ ―ASOS

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Book Synopsis The first ever collection of poems by the acclaimed author of the Aubrey/Maturin series of Napoleonic naval adventures. Trade Review'You are in for the treat of your lives. Thank God for Patrick O’Brian: his genius illuminates the literature of the English language, and lightens the lives of those who read him' Irish Times ‘O’Brian’s narrative pace is always gripping: it shifts its speed and provides endlessly varying shocks and surprises – comic, grim, farcical and tragic.… The writing is as strong and delightfully various as the people and plots. And everything – skies and seas and ports and creatures – is vivid and sensuously present.’ A. S. Byatt, Evening Standard ‘O’Brian writes like a man to whom writing comes as easily as breathing: precisely, fluently, economically… perfect cadences’ Jane Schilling, Sunday Telegraph ‘A man of poetic sensibility with a plain-teller's instinct. At best, that resounds with authority in a late Yeatsian way’ George Szirtes

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Book Synopsis Bringing together the collected works of bestselling poet Charly Cox for the very first time with new and exclusive material. Trade Review‘Honest, relatable, and thought provoking.’ Stylist magazine ‘Funny and heartfelt and brilliant.’ Sunday Times STYLE ‘Relatable and funny.’ ELLE ‘Encapsulates what it is to be a young woman.’ Pandora Sykes ‘Divine.’ Cecelia Ahern

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Book SynopsisAn embrace of a book' Florence WelchPoetry was my place, my little clearing in the forest, where I could quietly put everything I was holding. I'm not sure what gave me the courage to open up that space to you, but here I am, doing it.'The Magic Border is the debut book from Mercury Prize-winning musician and poet Arlo Parks, combining never-before-seen poetry, song lyrics and beautiful, intimate images from collaborator, photographer Daniyel Lowden.Featuring twenty original poems, alongside an exclusive artist's statement and the complete lyrics from her sophomore album My Soft Machine, this vital collection explores the queer experience, blackness, grief, trauma and love through the eyes of the remarkable young musician.The Magic Border allows readers rare insight into her creative process and beautifully showcases the full breadth of Arlo's singular artistry.Arlo Parks pulls beauty around her as a war tactic, and she shares the spoils with us' Katie Gavin, MUNAThere's as much music Trade Review‘The most tender and tactile collection. Arlo Parks writes poetry you can taste … An embrace of a book’ Florence Welch ‘Arlo Parks pulls beauty around her as a war tactic, and she shares the spoils with us. I am grateful and invigorated’ Katie Gavin, MUNA ‘There’s as much music in Arlo’s poetry as there is poetry in her music. How nice to find her same reassuring warmth, eloquence, and softness in another medium as she finds new ways to capture the fierce love and noticing she has for life and the people she adores’ Lucy Dacus ‘Dream-like, song-like, Arlo Parks’ sumptuous poems pierce us with their directness of emotion, keen images, and seductive rhythms. As rich and sharp as photographs, The Magic Border is sexy and startling; these songs penetrate the heart’ Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers ‘Wonderful, full of intoxicating beauty and tenderness. This is a collection to savour’ Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch

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Book Synopsis“Serious art does not need to be weighty or explicitly topical. It can be, as it is here, apparently as light as a feather: The Lumberjack’s Dove is, in its manner, a folktale; it is also a meditation on attachment, on loss, on transformation. Like its less humble relatives, myth and parable, it is pithy, magical, its many insights, its cautions and clarifications, unfolding in a chain of brief scenes and koan-like revelations. This is a book of unexpected lightness and buoyancy, as necessary in our tense period as the more urgent confrontations.” --Louise Gluck A boldly original and visceral debut collection from the winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Louise GluckIn the ingenious and vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose Nethercott describes a lumberjack who cuts his hand off with an axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand

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Book SynopsisAn insightful and haunting new collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic Irreverent and sly, observant and keenly imagined, Come Closer and Listen is the latest work from one of our most beloved poets.Trade Review“Simic...has always challenged and delighted his audience with writing that is beautiful and surreal and forces people to consider the validity of their own perceptions.” — Washington Post “One of our finest poets... singularly engaging, eminently sane...” — New York Review of Books “His poetry … is comic and elegiac in equal measure. It has an Old World sensibility…that he pins to a New World lightness of heart.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times

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Book SynopsisNamed A Most Anticipated Book by: LitHub * Vulture * Time *A PW 2022 Holiday Gift PickOne of: Time''s 100 Must-Read Books of 2022 * NPR''s 2022 Books We Love Vulture''s 10 Best Books of 2022A Goodreads Readers Choice Award SemifinalistFrom acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds?past, present, and future. Choi?s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.Many have called our timedystopian. ButThe World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples.With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time--from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi''s signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work,The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes Onultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.Trade ReviewNamed A Most Anticipated Book by: LitHub * Vulture * Time * Lambda Literary One of Time's "100 Must-Read Books of 2022" * One of NPR's 2022 "Books We Love" * One of The Boston Globe's "Best Books of 2022" * A PW 2022 Holiday Gift Pick A Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist An Atlantic "Best Poetry Collections to Read Again and Again" — "Franny Choi’s poems are both of the world and transport us to another. I’ve taught her writing in multiple contexts for years. I’m thrilled to now have this new collection of her poems to savor and to share. The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is a luminous, jarring, and gorgeous gift. Grateful to have these poems as a compass in these times" — Mariame Kaba, author of the NYT bestseller We Do This Til We Free Us "In their arresting poetry collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Choi considers the many ways in which the unthinkable has already happened for the most marginalized around the world by way of catastrophe, war, and devastation." — Time “Capturing the painful truths about surviving this world that seems to care very little about the lives of communities of color, [Choi's] poetry inspires us to continuously fight for a different world--one that would be informed by generations of loss, lessons, and collective movements. Her poetry identifies why it is that our hearts and bones have been aching for so long. We have been at war and the world keeps ending. Franny’s collection is an homage to where we have been and how we must continue--injured, determined, beautifully and together.” — Connie Wun, PhD, co-founder of AAPI Women Lead "Franny Choi’s latest collection of poetry...neutralizes the feeling of apocalyptic panic by showing that xenophobia and brutality within an unequal society are, indeed, nothing new. Compounding the weariness of the past several years with that of the ages flies rather close to despair, but World eludes cynicism to cast generational trauma as a paean to survival." — Vulture “It was Franny Choi who first taught me the truism that every utopia requires an attendant dystopia, and here she catalogues them both with aplomb. Choi charts a path through the gloom and ecstasy of everyday catastrophe, always more mundane than we expected. It’s dull and violent and lined with ancestral memory and mushrooms ready to forage. Anyone who has lived through the daily absurdity of disaster— which is to say, all of us— can find a home here.” — Eve L. Ewing, author of 1919 and Electric Arches “Virtuosic visionary Franny Choi beholds brutal reality and, with uncanny and singular genius, transforms it into revolution. Choi believes community, family, history, eros, truth, and love demand change worth living for/through. This book gives blood, voice, and generations of memory to the slim chance that we can change this world enough to survive its endless dystopia, war, violence. Somehow this poet still believes in us: that we might read this work and, made bold with desire, love the world so deeply it has to love us back.” — Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museumi and Tanya "Franny Choi’s poems are arresting, sharp; they demand we listen and follow her where she wants to take us." — Literary Hub “Science Fiction Poetry” isn’t just the title of one poem from Franny Choi’s collection; it’s also a goal the whole volume undertakes. Effusively angry visions of near-future apocalypse and violent collapse make way, first, for Korean historical memory, and then for brighter visions of a rebuilt society. —Stephanie Burt — Boston Globe "In this new collection, Franny Choi brings her fierce intelligence, ferocious humor, and tonal virtuosity to new ground, imagining and reimagining utopia, dystopia, ongoingness, ending, and the end of ending. First loves, lost mothers, forever wars, 'little nevers' – the temporal vertigo of grief for country and kin, the anguish of failing to protect elders from being attacked – all are voiced in indelible song.... Choi doesn’t flinch from 'what we had to survive/ to make paradise/ from its ruins,' but, with equal bravery, insists on conceiving new communities, new possibilities, new tomorrows.... Her vision is luminous." — Suji Kwock Kim, author of Notes From the Divided Country "Franny Choi is one of my favorite poets and her new collection does not disappoint. These are incisive, elegant poems. There is a throughline of grief in many of the poem but the work demonstrates both stylistic and intellectual range. So excited for people to get into this book." — Roxane Gay “Choi has crafted a fight song for the apocalypse. Musical, defiant, queer, pushing — Choi dances with language at the protest to invite us to save each other. You will read this, read it again aloud, and copy down poems to send to your friends.” — Fawzy Taylor, A Room Of One’s Own Bookstore, Madison, WI "A marked attentiveness to craftsmanship and the niceties of language enlivens the poems in Franny Choi’s urgent, stirring [collection]. A fearless shifter of form, Choi switches moods and modes to tackle such topics as social unrest, climate change and her Korean heritage. Formidable themes like the nature of tragedy and the human capacity for renewal lend a timelessness to her work. Choi’s collection will awaken and inspire readers...her attitude is contagious." — BookPage (starred review) "Lines like these--poems like these--remind readers of what is possible in poetry. " — Shelf Awareness "If you are only going to read one book of poetry this year, or assign one book of poetry for your next class, make it this one. Choi leaves nothing on the table, offering a collection that will satisfy students of poetry and casual readers with equal fervor. This is one collection you will want to carry with you for months to come." — The Poetry Question "A collection that will startle readers." — Library Journal (starred review) "Choi calls upon apocalypses of the past, present, and future to imagine a picture of what survival through community could look like." — Chicago Review of Books, " 12 Must-Read Books of November" "In these ecstatic lyrics, Choi explores what it means to survive in an era that teeters on the edge of apocalyptic doom." — Poets & Writers "The paradox of how we can live in this disastrous world, and handle our own culpability, burns through this collection.” — Poetry

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Book SynopsisFROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF GIRL, WOMAN, OTHERWINNER OF THE NESTA FELLOWSHIP AWARD 2003''Wildly entertaining, deeply affecting'' Ali Smith, author of How to be both and AutumnA coming-of-age tale to make the muses themselves roar with laughter and weep for pity -- sassy, razor-sharp and transformative.Londinium, AD 211. Zuleika is a modern girl living in an ancient world. She''s a back-alley firecracker, a scruffy Nubian babe with tangled hair and bare feet - and she''s just been married off a fat old Roman. Life as a teenage bride is no joke but Zeeks is a born survivor. She knows this city like the back of her hand: its slave girls and drag queens, its shining villas and rotting slums. She knows how to get by. Until one day she catches the eye of the most powerful man on earth, the Roman Emperor, and her trouble really starts . . .Silver-tongued and merry-eyed, this is a sto

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