Modern and contemporary poetry

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book Synopsis'Exquisite . . . readers will find themselves transformed by it' Claire Lynch'Stunning . . . dazzlingly laser-like and movingly original' Lara Feigel'Inventive and searching' Calvin Bedient'I am awestruck . . . a masterpiece' Mary GordonThe stunningly original exploration of pregnancy and childbirth by the acclaimed author of CitizenIn this, the landmark achievement that crowned the first phase of her writing career, Claudia Rankine invites us into the lives of Liv and her husband Erland, as they find themselves propelled into the classic plot: boy loves girl, girl gets pregnant. The couple's journey is charted through dreams, conversations and reflections, in a text like no other, deftly moulding language and crossing genres to arrive at new life: baby Ersatz.Plot is an inventive and engrossing meditation on pregnancy and the changes it heralds: the potential bodily cost, the loss of self, the sense of impending stasis. Each fear compounds Liv's reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering world. A profoundly daring collection, it explodes the emotive capabilities of language and form to achieve an unparalleled understanding of creation and existence.Trade ReviewExquisite . . . This collection is made from language to live on and in. It's the sort of book you read with your body as much as your mind. I'm quite sure readers will find themselves transformed by it -- Claire LynchIt's both stunning and utterly logical that before embarking on the landmark American Trilogy where she would tackle the largest themes of public life with such personal detail and vehemence, Claudia Rankine's writing was grounded in this dazzlingly laser-like and movingly original meditation on not so much motherhood or parenthood as pregnancy itself. Rankine slides from one form to another, and animates everyday domestic life with a grand sense of literary history and sensibility. It's as if this book is pregnant with her entire poetic project -- Lara FeigelPlot is inexhaustibly complex, varied, and difficult-and as fearlessly and even grimly inventive and searching as one can conceive any book of poems as being. It instantly joins the few contemporary works ... whose gravity is synonymous with the passion and integrity of their intelligence -- Calvin Bedient * Verse *To read her work is to be drawn deep into a thought's unfolding, into the eerie landscape of a dream; the dislocation one feels is tempered by the assurance of the writing, the deftness of Rankine's experiments with words and ideas * Indiana Review *I am awestruck. Quite simply, I have never read anything like Plot. Its stupendous intelligence . . . marks it as a masterpiece -- Mary Gordon, author of PAYBACKPlot moves as in a picaresque novel, in which the body schemes and frightens, accompanied by Claudia Rankine's instinct for poetic surprise -- Barbara Guest, author of THE RED GAZEA fiercely gifted poet . . . She knows when to bless and to curse . . . [and] makes you hopeful for American poetry -- Robert Hass, author of SUMMER SNOWA startling and eloquent exploration of states in, about, and around maternity . . . This is an unsettling poetry of the body wrestling itself in the making of thought -- Charles BernsteinSpiraling around the story of "Liv" and "Erland" and their future child, "Ersatz," this book-length poem embeds its loose "plot" in the sensations and anxieties of birth and child-rearing . . . striking . . . This book seems consciously aimed at the nexus of several different feminist avant-garde projects, from the nouveau roman of Monique Wittig to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee * Publishers Weekly *[Claudia Rankine's] books trace their own sort of movement . . . In Plot, the crisis sharpens, revolving around life and birth-the narrative center is a woman reluctant to give birth to a child who is already growing inside her . . . surprising -- David L. Ulin * Paris Review *

Read more less

Book SynopsisDeeply attuned to those things that make and unmake us, Dylan Brennan's Let The Dead concerns itself with life's alchemical processes. A couple breathe life into a doomed poppet, a photographer immortalises a corpse, Joyce and Breton rub shoulders on the streets of the poet's adopted Mexico, where life is a tapestry of 'delicate anthers' and 'disembodied tongues'. These dark meditations are set against poems which consider love, miscarriage, childbirth and the daily miracle of family life. Beautiful and disturbing by turns, these reflections on Ireland and Mexico's shared colonial past invoke topographies both real and imagined, where 'things in the ground have a tendency to grow.' Let the Dead reminds us of the power of art to shape our perception of history, and of the artist's responsibility in a time of violence.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA collection of poetry witnessing celebrations both private and public, from the author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS.'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMAMaya Angelou's poetry has stirred our souls, energized our minds and healed our hearts. Celebrations is a collection of timely and timeless poems: the inspiring 'On the Pulse of Morning', read at President William Jefferson Clinton's 1993 inauguration; the heartening 'Amazing Peace'; 'A Brave and Startling Truth', which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations; and 'Mother', which beautifully honours the first woman in our lives. 'She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds' OPRAH WINFREY'She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate' TONI MORRISON

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis compendium of Edgar Mittelholzer’s uncollected by Juanita Cox, brings together his early collection of sketches of Georgetown life, Creole Chips, his speculative novella, The Adding Machine, twenty-four short stories, two short plays, his published and unpublished poetry and essays covering travel, literature and his personal beliefs. This is mostly work written before Mittelholzer came to England in search of publishing opportunities. It shows a writer still deeply concerned with the Caribbean, a writer of playful humour who is committed to entertain, not to preach as his later work tends to do, and a writer who wrote in a variety of genres (speculative fiction, crime, and the Gothic) that contemporary Caribbean writers are rediscovering.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThese poems are alive with electricity, pulsating with a frequency that vibrates throughout. In a journey from there to here, The Bone Library examines and interprets all of human life. Throughout the collection Jenni Fagan responds to broader themes of identity, of place, of love and the unloved. Written in the old Dick Vet Bone Library during the author’s time as writer-in-residence there, this is a vivid exploration that is honest and searching and cuts to the very core of what it is to be alive.Trade Review'Thrilling, original and unexpected. It promises to take the reader on an unforgettable adventure through the most intimate and haunted secrets of human life.' -- Toni Velikova, Scottish Poetry Library'Thrilling, original and unexpected. It promises to take the reader on an unforgettable adventure through the most intimate and haunted secrets of human life' * Bookseller *'Excels in moments of tenderness, [and] tends to shine most in its wit' -- Stuart Kelly * The Scotsman *'Stunning... the vocabulary alone is so vivid, so visceral, and we feel it in the poem that gives the book its title' * BBC Radio Scotland Afternoon Show *'A stunning new collection' * Scots Magazine *'As brilliant, as sensual, as vivid and as thought-provoking as all the rest of her poetry' * Ileach *'Powerful and gritty writing that reflects many aspects of twenty-first century life' -- Peter B. Freshwater * University of Edinburgh Journal *

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom Hannah Lavery, Edinburgh’s Makar. 'Speaks to and for the conflicted conscience of Scotland ... with a power and authenticity like perhaps no other' – The Scotsman In a moment that is demanding you to constantly choose your side, how do you find your humanity, your own voice, when you are being pushed to find safety in numbers? Blood Salt Spring is a meditation on where we are – exploring ideas of nation, race and belonging. Much of the collection was written in lockdown and speaks to that moment, the isolation and the traumas of 2020 but it also looks to find some meaning and makes an attempt to heal the pain and vulnerabilities that were picked and cut open again in the recent cultural shifts and political wars. Organised into three sections this book takes the reader on a journey from the old inherited wounds, the trauma of tearing open again these chasms within recent discourses and events, to a hopeful spring, where pain and trauma can be laid down and a new future can be imagined. In this collection, the poet has sought to heal these salted wounds, and move out of winter and into spring – into hope. The National Theatre of Scotland has launched a new digital visual album, Blood, Salt, Spring - a digital accompaniment to Hannah Lavery’s collection. You can view the visual album here.Trade Review'hers is a voice which speaks to and for the conflicted conscience of Scotland around issues of identity, race, justice and belonging with a power and authenticity like perhaps no other' -- Malcolm Jack * The Scotsman *'moves from poignant lyricism to Informationist-style interrogation of language' -- Stuart Kelly'Much of it written through lockdown, it has an interesting take on a world of isolation' * Scots Magazine *'Blood Salt Spring offers a personal response to wider cultural conversations from national identity to personal autonomy, divisive politics to mothering during lockdown. Its terrain is vast. Its perspective unequivocal' -- Rachel Loughran * The National *'With much of the collection written in lockdown, it’s poetry that feels both of the moment while reaching out and attempting to find meaning, to move forward, and find hope' * Books From Scotland *'A terrific debut poetry collection' * BBC Radio Scotland, Afternoon Show *'Important issues including nation, race and belonging are at the heart of Blood Salt Spring.' * East Lothian Courier *'Hannah Lavery stole our hearts and set our minds alight with her breath-taking pamphlets and the astonishing Lament for Sheku Bayoh – for years we've been hungry for more & now finally: Blood Salt Spring is HERE! * The Lighthouse Bookshop *‘An absolutely amazing collection… it blew me away. It feels monumental and fleeting at the same time' -- Denise Mina'Hannah has been crucial in carving out spaces and stages for writers of colour in Scotland, and her own debut collection (Blood, Salt, Spring) is a triumph' -- Michael Pedersen * Electric Literature *'Hannah Lavery's debut collection shows her deft ability to marry the personal with the political' -- Andres N. Ordorica * The Skinny *

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis is an exclusive limited edition with a preface by Liz Lochhead and a new introduction by Ali Smith. Liz Lochhead is one of the leading poets writing in Britain today. This, her debut collection, published in 1972, was a landmark publication. Writing at a time when the landscape of Scottish poetry was male dominated, hers was a new voice, tackling subjects that resonated with readers – as it still does. Her poetry paved the way, and inspired, countless new voices including Ali Smith, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy. Still writing and performing today, fifty years on from her first book of poetry, Liz Lochhead has been awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and was Scotland’s second modern Makar, succeeding Edwin Morgan. Memo for Spring is accessible, vital and always as honest as it is hopeful. Driving through this collection are themes of pain, acceptance, loss and triumph.Trade Review'A voice so fresh and relevant that it broke new ground, paving the way for the likes of Ali Smith, Jackie Kay, Kathleen Jamie and Carol Ann Duffy' * The Sunday Post *'Lochhead was a fresh, young female voice in the masculine world of Scottish poetry and these early poems are just as exhilarating and entertaining a read today' * Daily Mail *'An inspirational presence in British poetry – funny, feisty, female and full of feeling' -- Carol Ann Duffy'This is the work of a highly intelligent, sensitive, perceptive, and humorous young woman' -- George Mackay Brown'Liz Lochead made it possible to imagine being a poet' -- Kathleen Jamie'In Scotland’s literary world Lochhead was a pioneer, imprinting the female experiences of love and loss' -- Steven McGinty * The Sunday Times *'This new 50th anniversary edition celebrates Liz Lochhead’s seminal poetry collection' * Scots Magazine *'A book full of youthful hope and heartbreak' * The Herald *

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis collected editon of Sorley MacLean brings together published poetry from MacLean's own edited volumes of poetry, poetry previously published in various magazines, literary journals and anthologies, and poetry which has never been published before. The poems are given in their original Gaelic with English translations. The volume opens with a biographical summary of Maclean's childhood on Raasay, his life at university and war experiences, and examines MacLean's effect on Gaelic and Scottish literature, and his literary, political and philosophical influences, which included Gaelic traditional song, Romanticism and Modernism, as well as Communism and Fascism.

Read more less

Book SynopsisLiz Lochhead is one of the country’s leading poets. Her work has paved the way and inspired some of the most inspirational voices writing in Scotland today, including Ali Smith, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy. In A Handsel, the first new poems from Scotland’s second modern Makar since 2016’s Fugitive Colours, the poet celebrates people and those small momentous moments that encapsulate so much of her work. It is human relationships that sit at the heart of these poems; each one is a beautifully realised snapshot that explores the poet’s past, her friendships and revisits favourite characters from earlier collections. This landmark publication collects for the first time the poetry of Liz Lochhead. Bringing work back into print, this collected poems publishes all of the poet’s collections, presented in their entirety: Memo for Spring, Islands, The Grimm Sisters, Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black and White and Fugitive Colours, as well as poems from Bagpipe Muzak and True Confessions.Trade Review'This collection of Liz Lochhead’s poems is full of humour and a sheer joy in language, and allows for a deeper appreciation of her work to date' -- Stuart Kelly * The Scotsman *'this book is further revelation of the combined light touch and deep discipline of this poet and thinker who never sells us short and asks of everything with a tenacity that’s a gift of warmth, spirit, unending intelligence' -- Ali Smith * New Statesman *'A Handsel brings together her substantial body of poetry, allowing us finally to understand its coherence and seriousness... Lochhead is a deeply enjoyable writer - her storytelling blend of the confessional, the fabular and the lightly feminist is thoroughly more-ish' * The Guardian, Poetry Books of the Month *'Moving, revealing and remarkable in equal measure' * Scottish Field *'Liz Lochhead is the very epitome of an exceptional and versatile writer who has made an outstanding contribution to the Scottish literary ecology. She has been a literary trailblazer, inspiring generations of young people who study her work, and writers wishing to emulate her authenticity . . . We owe her a debt of gratitude' * Saltire Society, Lifetime Achievement Award *'An opus of her life's work... estimating Liz Lochhead in terms of her impact and her place in the national psyche isn't that tricky a job. Just look around you' -- Barry Didcock * Herald *

Read more less

Book SynopsisAfter her tragic death in December 1938 at the early age of twenty-six, Antonia Pozzi’s poems – which she had been secretly writing for years – were brought to light and became the object of great critical attention, going through several editions in Italy and being translated into all the major European languages. Since then, her reputation has risen steadily, and she is now considered one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century. This new version by prize-winning poet and translator Peter Robinson perfectly renders the delicate undertones and that sense of longing which is such a distinctive feature of Pozzi’s poetry.Trade Review'Purity of sound and precision of imagery were her natural gifts.' Eugenio Montale

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Say, Sarala Estruch explores the limits of language in the face of overwhelming loss and attempts to forge a language with which to probe subjects that still remain largely taboo: grief, childhood bereavement, the challenges and possibilities of cross-cultural and interracial relationships, mixed-race identity, colonialism and its aftermath. A pamphlet that exists in the spaces left vacant by the silences in the stories that parents and grandparents tell us; Say casts a slant light on the scars our ancestors carry, both those we inherit and those we choose to leave behind.Trade Review"Sarala Estruch’s extraordinary debut flows from the question posed by Audre Lorde: 'What do you need to say?' From these engrossing, wise, surprising poems, we learn about the poet’s struggle to 'coax words from hiding', but also about need: the need to speak, the need to hold back, the need for closeness - whether across the threshold of the page, or across the gulf of death. Say is the work of a spellbinding storyteller, who pieces together a cloth shot through with silences: old griefs, family secrets, the blindspots around race and colonial history from which our culture still turns away. 'Still, I’m not brave enough to ask', the poet regrets of her younger self. These poems shine with that bravery: I will come back to them again and again." -- Sarah Howe; "Sarala Estruch's Say grieves, is grief, gives grief its echo. Here a father is not lost but binds the daughter in an intricate web of mourning for home, language, belonging as well as love. The poems make uncanny crystalisations in a transformative image, a rhythm, a fragment, swelling with empathy. The poet speaks with two voices, wishes them into one, and what is said fractures language in its frame." -- Sandeep Parmar

Read more less

Book SynopsisTwo Girls and a Beehive offers a minutely observed exploration in poetry of the life and work of Stanley Spencer and his two wives, Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece, engaging readers with the particular unease that must trouble any follower of Spencer's paintings, with their human dramas and contradictory beatitudes. 'Nothing less than a masterpiece of ekphrasis, this is a work of extraordinary unity, daring and emotional breadth... These poems reconfigure Spencer's tawny pigments, scenes of warfare and bohemian domesticity, couplings in low-ceilinged rooms, flowered prints, the strange militancy of his Christian faith and, above all, the annihilation of a woman artist on the altars of desire, betrayal and art. I was smitten from the first page to the last.' ~ ANNIE FREUD 'A marvellous act of dual authorship by two poets at the top of their game. Something magical happens in these pages. Works of visual power exchange speech with poems written in response to them. Biographical poems thoroughly inhabit and re-imagine the minds of Stanley and Hilda Spencer. The book is an act of what Dante called visible speaking (esto visible parlare): visual practice takes on a refreshed verbal life; the landscapes of paintings rise clear in the mind's eye; and their subjects speak newly to the mind's ear.' ~ DAVID MORLEY 'An original and impressive collection, varied yet unified.' ~ ANTHONY THWAITE

Read more less

Book SynopsisHouse Arrest, comprising poems selected from Alizadeh’s two collections, Diary of a House Arrest,1956-1967 (2003) and Blue Bicycle (2015), takes as its central theme the overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, during an American and British-led coup in 1953. After being removed from power, Mosaddegh was forced to live in exile in Ahmadabad castle near Tehran, and in these poems, Alizadeh imagines himself in Mosaddegh’s place, in exile, and allows his imagination to take him wherever it pleases. In the dream-like atmosphere of his poems, times and places melt into each other like magma, blending Greco-Roman mythology, ancient Iranian folklore, the Christian New Testament, the Old Testament, European fairy tales and Persian Sufism. Yet his work is thoroughly modern; mythical figures live alongside contemporary humans, and classical forms are transformed into modernist experiments.Hasan Alizadeh was born in 1947 and embarked on a literary career, initially as a short story writer, but since the 1990s, he has focused mostly on poetry. His talent is widely recognized in Iran, as shown by his having won the Modern Iranian poetry Prize in 2002, but very little is known about him personally as he declines to give interviews or talk about himself.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn 2020, Amanda Dalton participated – for the second year running – in National Poetry Writing Month, a project that challenges the public to write a poem every day throughout the month of April. Each midnight, new instructions are posted informing participants what they should write about in the next 24 hours – anything from an ode to life’s small pleasures to a concrete poem, to a poem from the viewpoint of a figure in Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. This chapbook contains the unedited versions of the thirty poems that Amanda wrote. By turns witty (often very funny), clever, moving and erudite, this short collection represents an astonishing achievement by an outstanding writer.

Read more less

Book Synopsis"Forrest Gander knows that the poet''s first duty is ''to see what''s there and not already patterned by familiarity'' - and in Your Nearness he brings to that task a combination of vision, generosity of spirit and humility in the face of wonder that singles him out as one of the fi nest, and most vigilant, poets working in English today." - JOHN BURNSIDE "There''s a deep personal feeling found in Forrest Gander''s desperately beautiful ''Librettos for Eros'' [in which] feeling masters the poems, and it is feeling about self, desperate, squandered, willful, all but out of control - and ultimately uncivilized...." - THOM GUNN

Read more less

Book Synopsis“Boy Thing is a thing of wonder. These are poems that negotiate anew the tender, hurt territory of a boy abruptly unfathered with every fresh reading; and that travel into the wonderment of becoming a father of boys. We are given a boy’s-eye-view of 1970s Cornwall with a music and detail so meticulous that we yearn with Clarke for its lost territories. But these are not just poems of archive or archaeology; they are revelatory, dynamic and raw. Clarke is crucially attuned to the secret messages received in boyhood – its preoccupations and awakenings, epiphanies and abuses, and its shames. This book is unmissable: human and humane, grimy and sublime.” - Fiona Benson “Boy Thing is a beautiful book – sensual, atmospheric, full of nature and ritual. These poems while formally precise, possess a rawness that is startling and utterly compelling.” - Ella Frears

Read more less

Book SynopsisMolly Naylor is a poet, scriptwriter, performer and director. She is the co-writer of Sky One comedy After Hours. Theatre work includes Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You (writer/performer), My Robot Heart (writer/performer) and LIGHTS! PLANETS! PEOPLE! (writer/director). She has written for a range of organisations including BBC Radio 4, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British Film Institute. Her first poetry collection Badminton was also published by Burning Eye Books. She is the co-director of True Stories Live. Stop Trying to be Fantastic is her second poetry collection.Trade Review'Molly makes me laugh and her poetry makes my heart grow plumper and more confident. I love her words and her honesty.' Sara Pascoe

Read more less

Book SynopsisAfshan D'souza-Lodhi's debut poetry collection 're: desire' explores the yearning to love, be loved and belong from a desi (South Asian) perspective. Her work sits on the intersections of flash fiction, poetry and script, echoing the hybridity of the worlds that many young British desis find themselves occupying. Drawing on the poetry of many different languages and cultures - Urdu, English, Konkani, Islamic and Christian - this collection explores how we access our traditions from a distance. 're: desire' is a collection of poetry that draws upon literary traditions and cultural references to flip the male gaze common in mushairas on its head. Common themes for mushairas are love, God and being drunk or intoxicated by love and God - but is usually seen from a male perspective. The pieces in re: desire are mainly told from a female perspective, and question the gender given to particular acts, objects and ideas.Trade Review'A beautiful and poignant collection that speaks to the internal lives of British people of colour.' - Nikesh Shukla (author of The Good Immigrant and The One Who Wrote Destiny)

Read more less

Book SynopsisManatomy is a collection of wry, witty and cheeky poems exploring how nature, nurture, pop culture, prejudice and politics shape the identity of camp gay man James McDermott. Structured in three parts - 'Boy', 'Youth' and 'Man' - Manatomy interrogates how the experiences of growing up gay in a homophobic world and in rural millennial England affect a gay man's relationships with himself, his partners, the LGBTQ+ community and the wider worldTrade Review"McDermott's debut collection delivers us his heart, his terrors and his triumphs. Posh Spice, Hooch, shower room headlocks, and a Daewoo Matiz all feature as he paints his passions on a quotidian backdrop. An honest and direct account of growing up gay on the very edges of England" Luke Wright; 'A work of great intimacy. Utterly contemporary and impressively confessional. A book that was missing from the lives of many youths of my generation. May it reach many.' - David McAlmont; 'This funny, frank and filthy debut begs to be shared with friends, lovers and homophobic relatives.' - Molly Naylor

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe second volume of poetry by Gruffudd Owen, Chaired Bard of Cardiff National Eisteddfod 2018.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisParadise Takeaway is a long poem with Luton Airport in it. Part memoir, part invention, it takes us along the bus and train routes of the London metropolitan area, not stopping at the eponymous fast food outlet en route to Aylesbury. On the way you’ll meet the Spirit of Rail, the Lady of Passport Control, a famous German philosopher, and other figures real and unreal. Warning: this book contains Marmite. Somewhere at the back of it all is ‘Germany: A Winter’s Fairy Tale’, Heinrich Heine’s long poem on returning to Germany for the first time after thirteen years in Parisian exile. Drawing on thirty years of trips back from Berlin to the UK, and a lifetime of not always entirely healthy eating, Alistair Noon reflects on what it is to watch a country and a waistline changing. And there isn’t a single mention of You Know What.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDeath and Exes explores the complexity of grief and the author''s struggle to process loss through consumption; of food, drugs, alcohol, pop culture, sex, and fashion. Buying and imbibing things are often looked at as superficial distractions that keep us from dealing with difficult emotions. In Death and Exes, they are touchstones that help remind us of who we are during the times we feel most untethered and alone. These are poems of mourning, but they are also a celebration of the life affirming power of, among other things, burlesque, RuPaul, Dolly Parton, Hellraiser, and Columbo.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn poems as tautly constructed as they are trenchantly observed, Winter, Glossolalia probes the natureof language to depict the world from which it springs. Paired with humorous, often satirical images,this collection explores human ingenuity and creativity against the material resources of the givenworld, highlighting the possibilities and the limits of artistic making. In that sense, it is both a timelyand enduring book, one that recalls Virgil?s Georgics as readily as it evokes the crisis of anthropogenicclimate change.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn essential handbook for our time of astonishing technological transformation by the world''s leading AI poet.In 2018, Sasha Stiles found herself wondering what the rise of large language models might mean for writers - and for creativity at large. To probe the possibilities, she began translating over a decade of analog poems and research into a personalized AI model, augmenting human voice with next-gen imagination.Crafted jointly by Stiles and her poetic alter ego, and first published in hardcover in 2021, Technelegy is a prescient artifact of the pre-ChatGPT era - a collection of generative poems nestled in their own training data - and an unprecedented experiment fusing past and future, woman and machine, verse and code, elegy and wordplay, in search of answers to the urgent question: what does it mean to be human in a nearly posthuman world?

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Covid-19 virus outbreak of 2020 will forever be a pivotal part of human history. The impact was global and affected everyone on the planet. Here, in the UK, we managed the coronavirus in similar ways to other countries but also with a degree of Britishness that has defined us for centuries. Not that it was all good and it raised many issues about our culture and values. Hundreds of thousands caught the virus and many thousands died. The impact on the nation, on families and our very own NHS was palpable and at times, almost too much to bear. A Facebook group in Marlow was set up to help people, to communicate and provide support to anyone that might need it. It became incredibly important for many and it was here that Mike started writing 'The Virus Poems'. The journey began and ended sixty seven days later on the 31st May 2020. When you read just one poem it might touch you or amuse you. It is when you consider every subject that, without knowing, this has become a walk through our time in 'Lockdown' as this period will be forever known. We have also included alongside every poem an extract of the news headlines of the day to help you put the poems into some context.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisCartoon characters are routinely tossed off cliffs, shot, exploded, have their limbs thrown about. They return for the next episode intact. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is a meditation on being a creator while feeling utterly like a caricature—a cartoon, an exaggeration, an actualization of a metaphor. Through the politics of the personal, examining memory, desire, grief, faith, and love, these poems are a disembodiment sermon, the frantic gathering of memory before confabulation or gaslighting. They are wishes; howls in love's name. They are considerations of the separation between lived experience and the witness, even as they inhabit the same body, illustrating the unreality of depression, the whir and fragmentation of constant analysis. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is about the process of mistaking people for cartoons, of making fortitude limitless, here, at a point in our collective history, where we seem to be calling for change in the unjust and systemic mistreatment of Black people, who have always been expected to pick up their broken pieces and try again. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is the moment before the anvil falls from its midair suspension; the roadrunner running out of road; the thin line between the phenomenology of the real and a vaguely familiar Tooniverse.Trade ReviewEvery single poem in Alexus Erin’s Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence comes directly from the mouth. This is an important voice that makes us question what happens when we hold on tighter to the ever-passing commercials and pixelated cartoons, questioning and voicing our true realities, especially in the contexts of violence and injustice. Erin’s full-length debut is an ars poetica that makes us jump into love—this is a book of constant focal points and priceless camera asides—it will make you hungry. - Dorothy Chan, Revenge of the Asian WomanIn Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin transmogrifies her sure-tongued words into Acme-type explosives, defying physics to puncture reality's patchwork. From the star-shaped holes her poems cut, golden hour light illuminates divinity in stillness and brutality: holy incense rising from a post-prom coffee, the hollow erasure that comes with grief, and the gut-punch pleasures of choral chord changes and pop-punk push pits. Her sleight-of-hand etymological slicing makes detours for Medieval cantatas, 1960s sitcoms, dreams, dances, desserts, and so much more—a giddy trajectory that traces lucid, crucial messages in smoke across the bright celluloid sky. – Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13In Cartoon Logic Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin shows the heartbeat beyond the pixels of human perception to the pains and joys therein. These poems journey, with a relentlessly curious and personal speaker's voice, from loss to body image to the multifaceted Black experience. In this book, we are illuminated as if on a technicolor screen. We vibrate with inescapable life. – Ashley M. Jones, author of REPARATIONS NOW! and Alabama Poet Laureate Alexus Erin’s words defy gravity. Not just in their elastic critique of how the world runs out of road for Black folks, but in the stretching of space & logic. In this brilliant debut collection, Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Erin’s poems push past the limitations of this dimension & offer a close-eyed intimate navigation of a world by hand. We watch the hands drawing the boundaries of this world with Erin’s words, its positioning, its havoc . . . This collection is electric. – Nabila Lovelace, author of Sons of Achilles and editor at DivedapperAlexus Erin knows there is a "tide to turn" — these poems are the storm to swell the water. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence investigates the complexity of life at the intersections: between Blackness and being "wholly and entirely a woman," between portrait and caricature, between fixture and fleeting mirage. These poems gaslight, they hide, they accuse, they flaunt, they speed off the edges of cartoon cliffs and hang there — "gravity negated by fear" — all in the name of steadying our gaze on ourselves. Look deeper. "How else does one encounter the God / question?" Truly, an expansive work. - Adam Falkner, author of The Willies

Read more less

Book SynopsisPoems that acknowledge the existential anxieties of our age while continuing to celebrate the beauty and musicality of language. In Would We Still Be, James Henry Knippen crafts the anxieties that emanate from human existence—grief, fear, hopelessness, uncertainty—into poetic reflections that express a deep reverence for the musicality and incantational capacity of language. Like a moon or a wren, two of the book’s obsessions, these haunting poems call us to consider beauty’s connection to the transitory. Among the ghosts that wander these pages—those of loved ones, those we are, and those we will become—Knippen asks if image is enough, if sound is enough, if faith is enough. In doing so, these poems seek out the soul’s communion with voice, encouraging us to sing our fate.Trade Review“This gorgeous debut felt like it came to me from another time and held me spellbound. I’m awed at Knippen’s skillful tensions, crafting rhetorical movements that seem at once bold and simple. Deeply imagistic, these poems manage to simultaneously be rooted and sensory, as well as elusive and incantatory. Knippen deftly weaves ghosts and lilies, wrens and windows, nouns serving like legends on a grief map. Knippen’s language draws us closer to an unnamed loss until we feel the heat of the wound, but not the death itself. But more than the ghost, the wonder. More than the longing, the lyrical leap into what we don’t know is coming but trust will be beautiful.” -- Traci Brimhall“From its first poem, this marvelous first book makes way for Knippen’s affinity for likeness, not as simple mirroring but likeness in total, compelled to include dissimilarity, and this habit of mind results in image-dependent poems that gather, layer, re-gather in a precarious and lavish state of being between. Knippen’s poems can bear the weight of their layered, sensory-driven realities because he’s clearly devoted to language as the most supple and true means of navigation. Rare for poets of his generation, he gives voice to being drawn toward as often as he surrenders to his will to say. Encountering these poems is exciting; the world and our thinking about it both enlarge.” -- Kathleen Peirce

Read more less

Book SynopsisDerek Chung’s poems capture the East-meets-West synergy of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan culture, while tracking the city’s myriad transformations over the past two decades. Though his poems bear the influence of Anglophone poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney, Hong Kong is at the heart of his work. Writing through the lens of a father, restaurant-goer, dreamer, flaneur, protester, and more, Chung captures a city in motion—and the joy, loss, and heartbreak that comes with loving Hong Kong.

Read more less