Poetry / Poems
Nightboat Books Local Woman
Book SynopsisA pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood. Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, jzl jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.
£12.34
Deep Vellum Publishing Foreign Music
Book SynopsisTaut and contemplative, these poems ruminate on family, exile, love, and the vagaries of human perception. Love Training encapsulates Andrés Neuman’s work as a poet, spanning two decades in a single unified collection. The book is divided into three sections that complement and respond to each other. The first, “Love Training,” focuses on family, loss, relationships, desire, and a sense of anchoring in the world. The second, “Fictions of Sight,” is concerned with questions of perception, perspective, language and creativity. The third, “I Don’t Know Why,” is a whimsical set of interconnected poems that ask unanswered questions, serving as a kind of coda. While Andrés Neuman is a rightly celebrated and widely translated novelist, he is also a lucid—and quite prolific—poet. Love Training is the first volume to make his sensitive, incisive poems available in English.
£14.25
She Writes Press Words Make a Way Through Fire
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£15.29
Austin Macauley Publishers The Honeybee Rivals the Spring
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£10.44
Cipher Press Ten Bridges I've Burnt: A Memoir in Verse
Book SynopsisIn Ten Bridges I've Burnt, Brontez Purnell - the bard of the underloved and overlooked - turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. 'The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,' Purnell writes, 'is simply existing.' The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges Ive Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers' rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement. With the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges Ive Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.Trade Review"This book is brutal and brutally honest, but still perversely addictive because Brontez Purnell is a performer in the truest sense. Reading Ten Bridges I've Burnt, I felt tucked-in with him, along for the intimate ride, and paused only once to write down a part I’d been looking for my whole life." — Miranda July "This memoir in verse makes me enormously happy. To the things I know about Brontez Purnell add astral poet (in terms of imagination and scale) and classicist (elegant concerns). Witness it here. Lines leap out of themselves like light eruptions from the funniest angel you ever saw. I could listen to this poet for hours, drive for days on a single thought: 'in my defense/I just had to signify/that poetry/is still dangerous.'" — Eileen Myles "Brontez Purnell has impeccable comic timing and the gift of absolute candor. His poems leap off the page with insouciant, revolutionary speed. The urgent messages they deliver—with stinging wit and carefully honed critical defiance—provide inspiring models for how to perform, how to thrive, and how to write." — Wayne Koestenbaum
£10.44
Central Avenue Publishing Starlight She Becomes
Book SynopsisTrans poet Parker Lee (author of the bestselling coffee days whiskey nights) returns with an all new collection of poetry, prose, and aphorisms. This is a journey from hopelessness through to self-discovery, self-love, and romantic love presented in three sections: moonrise, sunrise, and stardust. In moonrise, you'll follow Parker as she copes with various struggles, including alcohol abuse, disordered eating, gender dysphoria, and mental health. In sunrise, Parker finds herself coming to terms with and accepting her identity as a woman, and everything that comes with being trans in today's current political and social climate. Through that struggle, Parker comes out on the other side in stardust, dedicated to self-love, sapphic love, and trans joy. With raw vulnerability and unwavering strength, The Starlight She Becomes is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the beauty found in embracing one's true self.
£12.34
Central Avenue Publishing The Never Was
£18.90
Biblioasis Come Again
Book SynopsisONE OF CBC BOOKS’ BEST BOOKS OF 2023A jubilant, irreverent, generous collection by a poet facing terminal illness.Following his New York Times Best of the Year Dark Woods, Richard Sanger's fourth and final book is a clear-eyed and big-hearted inventory of the passions of a life well lived. Understated, tender, archly funny and achingly generous, Way to Go is a joyful catalog of Sanger's loves and a last gift from an irrepressibly jubilant poet.Trade ReviewPraise for Way to Go"Sanger wields the traditional tools of the poet—rhyme, metre and metaphor—brilliantly, and inhabits a range of speakers and situations. [...] The collection is more a celebration of life than a lament."—Toronto Star"In Way to Go, Richard Sanger uses poetry to explore his passions, give gratitude and provide humourous observations about a life well-lived."—CBC Books"Remarkable [...] We should all be so blessed (and brave) to leave such a farewell as Sanger has."—Miramichi ReaderPraise for Richard Sanger“The rueful, lucid, deliberately casual poems in Dark Woods can surprise you with their tenderness, but also with their prickly intelligence.”—New York Times“Splendidly-shaped and imagistically adroit. These are outstanding poems.”—Globe and Mail“In the poems' accentual, lightly metered stanzas we are made conscious of time passing, the body aging, and those quiet moments outside time ... understated and moving.”—Malahat Review"[Sanger's] poems are tender and often funny. Sometimes arch, sometimes bemused, he is a humane observer of daily life ... Throughout Dark Woods, his cleverness and verbal mischief enliven traditional forms."—Canadian Literature“Spectacular … Sophisticated metrical sense, teasing wit and limitless linguistic resources … The real thing: an original poet of rare talent.”—Montreal Gazette“Very accomplished … [Sanger] writes in a voice that is all his own, and its groundtone is a cleverly, progressively sophisticated one which is never merely adroit.”—Journal of Canadian Poetry
£11.39
Profile Books Ltd Peace, Love & Potatoes
Book SynopsisThis volume by the inimitable poet, comedian and performer John Hegley brings together poetry, prose and drawings on the themes closest to his heart. Contemplating subjects from painting, France and family to Daleks and of course potatoes, these pieces are by turns funny, moving, thought-provoking - and always brilliantly original. Peace, Love and Potatoes opens a new window onto John Hegley's unique and vivid way of seeing the world, and is certain to delight fans old and new.Trade ReviewJohn Hegley is to potatoes what Wordsworth has been to daffodils * Observer *Comedy's poet laureate * Independent *The Peter Kay of poetry . . . The more personal he is, the more poetic he becomes . . . lovely. -- Mark Sanderson * Sunday Telegraph *Confirms John Hegley's reputation as one of the wittiest of contemporary British poets ... a master of the poetically unexpected. -- Steve Barfield * The Lady *
£9.49
Poetry Wales Press East of the Sun West of the Moon
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£9.49
Jessica Kingsley Publishers Poetry in Expressive Arts: Supporting Resilience
Book SynopsisPoetry is increasingly used in therapy, and it already occupies a central place in expressive arts therapies. This book is the first to explicitly combine theory and practice from the field of expressive arts with poetry and poetics.The book offers both a guide and poetic encouragement for using poetry in expressive arts work. Within this arts context, poetry is offered as a way to create hope and confidence, providing clients with a platform for healing, reconciliation, problem solving, and personal and professional development. Each chapter uses examples of poetry to illustrate the ideas of the chapter.With an outstanding contribution to the field of expressive arts theory and practice, this book is essential for people wanting to use an integrative arts-based approach to help their clients build resilience and foster sustainable, positive change in their lives.
£24.99
Vintage Publishing Ecstasy
Book SynopsisAt the end of ecstasy / only the memory of ecstasy. / The tongue. The chorus. / The streets of flesh. In Ecstasy, Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it. He explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous. In Today I Love Being Alive', we find the poet naked in his kitchen, eating a banana and obsessed with a new lover, declaring I don't care about being remembered. / I care about . . . Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather'; in Poppers', he stands lightheaded in the bathroom at a bar, thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life', and issuing a warning to himself and us: Poetry / is not a self-help book.'Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. Ecstasy also engages with the poet's Christian upbringing, interrogating faith as both an enemy and valve of catharsis, and a bedfellow of what this book celebrates and courts: profound human ecstasy.
£14.39
Cinnamon Press And Then the Rain Came
Book SynopsisEdward Ragg won the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and his debut collection was A Force That Takes (2013). His second volume, Holding Unfailing (2017), charted the rise of modern China, whilst Exploring Rights (2020) confronted ‘post-truth’ culture and the prospects of humankind’s survival. And Then the Rain Came turns to love, physical and mental geographies, well-being and the vitality of the present. Set against the backdrops of the global pandemic and climate crisis, each poem embraces present perception in the awakening motif of rain.Trade ReviewThe manifestations and properties of water are excitingly explored in Edward Ragg’s new collection. Here are living poems where narrative and lyric work together to contemplate the energies implicit in water. The intriguing emphases laid upon the meanings of the word ‘present’ give a unique edge to the poems. Glass, tears, ice, rivers, wine, salinity, tides: all these elements are woven into the texture of this collection, where the illuminations and fluidities of language are beautifully captured. — Penelope Shuttle; In his latest volume Edward Ragg weaves together two deft poetic sequences as a tribute to the power of water and the yearning water can evoke. From the shadows of Durham Cathedral to the Chinese water-town of Tongli, water in this collection is the long-promised rain, the speckled pattern on a window and dew evaporating to a new day. Framed within the challenges of navigating the world in the Covid era, this is a book to read, keep and cherish. — David Tait
£8.99
Cinnamon Press Yellow Noonday
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£9.99
Cinnamon Press Streetwise
Book SynopsisThe art of people-watching is one we all engage in, and in Streetwise these observations, suffused with the many ways we imagine the lives of others, take on depth and focus as poet and passers-by interact without a word needing to be said. In nuanced and lyrical pieces, the poet draws on years of experience as an employment lawyer, aware of those turned out onto the street; reflects on personal experience of the paths that lead to medical diagnoses, aware of those whose news was less fortunate, and above all, simply watches with a humane and intelligent perspective. From city streets to the streets of history, from country paths to places of memory, David Burridge follows in the footsteps of the philosopher Rousseau, revealing how much can be discovered by simply walking through a forest or up a hill. A finely layered and compelling reflection on the many routes we take through life, Streetwise is a collection to which readers will return.
£9.99
Seagull Books London Ltd I Am a Field Full of Rapeseed, Give Cover to Deer
Book SynopsisUlrike Almut Sandig’s second volume of poems to be translated into English is a journey through a world that is imaginary yet entirely recognizable. Precise observation of the concrete is mixed with playful humor, inspired musicality, and an anxious reckoning with undercurrents of violence in these poems from Ulrike Almut Sandig. Borrowing from the Brothers Grimm, the collection explores the darker side of their fairy tales as a backdrop for very contemporary concerns: Migration, war, the rise of the new right, ecological threat, information overload, and political apathy. At the same time, Sandig plays with the German meaning of the word “Grimm”: rage. That emotion permeates the collection as a reaction to the darkness in the collective German consciousness. Yet the book is also animated by passionate, expansive empathy—and reminds us what it is to be human. Always inventive, Sandig teases us here with multiple versions of the self, and multiple voices all in search of the origins of poetry in hidden places: in the silence before language, in the wings, in the field of rapeseed deep in the snow. Trade Review"Reading this book is a powerful experience. For me it meant full immersion into a unique world, filled with vivid, or even lurid colours, and strong tastes and smells. . . . [A] truly masterful job of the translator, Karen Leeder." * European Lit Network *"Rage underscores much of the collection as a whole, as an invigorating energy that refuses to be silenced. There is beauty and ugliness here, balanced against anger and hope: a collection as strange and strangely intriguing as its wonderfully eccentric title." * Rough Ghosts *
£13.99
Seagull Books Every Day a Celebration
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£20.89
Olympia Publishers The Past Few Years
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£8.65
Olympia Publishers True Felicity
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£5.99
New Island Books SOME POEMS OF ROGER CASEMENT
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£9.45
Penguin Books Ltd Into the Hush
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£10.44
Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers One Day I Hope to Find My Way
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£6.99
Smokestack Books Ferocious
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£7.59
Blue Mark Books Along The River
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£9.00
Conscious Dreams Publishing Open Book, Open Soul
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£6.74
Riverside Publishing Solutions Ltd Stepping from Thoughts: Poetic stories for
Book SynopsisWhat of our lives that pass so quickly? What stories have we written? What have we learned? What can we pass on to others? I look at life as a collection of stories; those that I have made myself, others that I've been part of, and those I have witnessed or read about. I ask myself, will the stories to come be as bountiful as those already created? Will the stories to come fill me with emotions like these that I relive through my poetry, taking me deeply to the moment they happened and recapturing original thoughts and feelings, whether of joy or some sadness? Stepping from Thoughts tells my poetic stories of adventures that have pushed and pulled me, thoughts on the trials and tribulations of life, and how I see the world. We all look through our own spectacles so our worldviews naturally and beautifully differ. Like most people I daydream, but those dreams are pointless if they remain imaginations. Stepping from Thoughts includes wide-ranging inspirational stories that share how some of those dreams have become reality. I hope you enjoy these poetic stories, but I also hope you're out there creating your own.
£9.38
Nine Arches Press Popular Song
Book SynopsisPopular Song makes us tap our feet to the rhythms of nostalgia, life on Mars, science fiction, lyric odyssey, humour and a fondness for the spirit-catching cassette tape in this highly inventive debut from Harry Man.
£10.79
Hedgehog Poetry Press chengyu: chinoiserie
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£7.59
Stairwell Books First of All I Wrote Your Name
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£9.00
Black Ocean Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture
Book SynopsisBlack artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future. Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, “liberation.” With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology—luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey—Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author’s own journey of gender transition while writing the book. Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph’s College. He was a 2017–2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.Trade Review“Duplan skillfully models radical listening in the relationship he cultivates between the text and its audience, prompting us to reimagine our interactions with artistic tradition and our lives in language.” — Ploughshares“In Duplan’s exquisite (and exquisitely bizarre) vision, survival is effortful; it is massy; it is textural; it is en masse, dependent on group and swarm bodies; it is swarmed with contradiction; yet it is marvelous because it somehow persists.”—Fanzine
£13.29
McSweeney's Publishing Shadow Act: An Elegy for Journalist James Foley
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£14.40
Sarabande Books, Incorporated Book of Potions
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions captures a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.
£12.34
Black Ocean Our Human Shores
Book SynopsisOur Human Shores explores living in the Anthropocene, the ecological disasters life faces, and the barriers and inequality society faces in trying to create a better and livable world. Our Human Shores is an exploration into how language is rooted within the Anthropocene — and how poetry shapes meaning-making, faith in people and institutions, and death through lyricism, experiment, and ecopoetics. Using a phrase from John Keats’ “Bright Star” sonnet, Our Human Shores explores a tautology of thresholds and shores to remake our world, our experience of nature, and our relationship with climate, creation, and humankind’s existential place in a world staring down the apocalypse. Our Human Shores is a speculative work that will guide humanity through extinction.
£12.34
Simon & Schuster Immortal Poems of the English Language
Book SynopsisA timeless and comprehensive anthology of enduring English language poetry, featuring entries from 150 British and American poets, including Alexander Pope, Lord Byron, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Emily Dickinson. The last six hundred years in British and American literature have given us some of the most moving and memorable poems in all literature. Now, discover many of these same works in one gorgeously wrought collection, featuring entries from poets as legendary and beloved as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Ralph Waldo Emerson, D.H. Lawrence, and many more. From Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberywocky” to Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and from Shakespeare’s sonnets to anonymous classics, this is the ultimate gift for poetry lovers of all ages and backgrounds. Arranged chronologically, the 150 poems featured in this stunning collection reflect the immortality of the poetic soul.
£11.69
LAYERJAM LTD Key and Other Poems
Book SynopsisKey and Other Poems is a beautifully crafted hardcover that embodies transformation and hope. Inspired by a poet and therapist's battle with addiction, this collection seamlessly blends hand-typewritten poetry with vibrant colour illustrations, reflecting moments of quiet beauty amongst the struggle of overcoming adversity.
£20.25
HarperCollins India Saundarya Lahari: Wave of Beauty
Book SynopsisA joyful rendition of an iconic text'' - Arundhathi Subramaniam Saundarya Lahari is a popular Sanskrit hymn celebrating the power and beauty of Sakti, the primordial goddess. In one hundred verses, it underlines the centrality of the feminine principle in Indian thought. Attributed to Adi Sankaracarya, Saundarya Lahari is a valuable source for understanding tantric ideas. Every verse is associated with yantras and encoded mantras for tantric rituals, and specific verses in the hymn are considered potent for acquiring good health, lovers, and even poetic skills. Mani Rao''s Saundarya Lahari is an inspired, lyrical translation that renders the esoteric immediate and the distant near.
£13.99
Europe Books THOUGHTS FROM A DAMAGED MIND DRAW SPACES
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£9.00
Andrews McMeel Publishing Soon It Will Be Sunday
£15.82
Andrews McMeel Publishing Serenitys Song
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£15.82
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC Sermons in Dust
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£6.99
Far West Press The Secret Door
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£10.44
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance
Book Synopsis"It was a refreshing, old-fashioned pleasure to read Julie Scott Meisami’s verse translation of, and introduction and notes to, this twelfth-century Persian allegorical romance." —Orhan Pahmuk, in the Times Literary SupplementTrade Review"The Haft Paykar—Nizami's twelfth-century masterpiece, written in the Persian verse couplet form known as masnavi—has waited a long time for a translation like this: one that simultaneously captures its lightness and charm and plumbs its wealth of cultural detail. Julie Meisami's deft, accurate, seemingly effortless version (rendered in English tetrameter, an inspired choice) is a rare accomplishment." —Michael Beard, University of North Dakota"Nizami's Haft Paykar is a deep, enduring work of literature, one that can be appreciated as psychological bildungsroman, fairytale, spiritual quest, and adventure tale. Meisami is a leading scholar of the classical Persian literary tradition, and her translation—the first full modern English rendering, and the only one to be based on a critical edition of the Persian text—pays close attention to the literary qualities of the poem." —Franklin Lewis, University of Chicago"Meisami is one of the foremost specialists in Persian literature alive today. Her translation of the Haft Paykar not only makes available for the general reader one of the classics of Persian literature, but enriches it with an extensive introduction and notes of the highest quality." —Jawid Mojaddedi, Rutgers University
£19.79
Zondervan You Are Only Just Beginning
Book SynopsisFrom bestselling author Morgan Harper Nichols, You Are Only Just Beginning is an illustrated poetry collection that invites you to imagine the adventures ahead of you and step out in faith that you have what it takes to embark on a new journey.
£11.69
Andrews McMeel Publishing Glass Hearts & Broken Promises
Book Synopsis“You're the one who must decide that love outweighs the risk of getting hurt.”Poet Kayla McCullough’s Glass Hearts & Broken Promises is a collection of poetry and prose reflecting on heartbreak, self-love, and unfiltered emotions. Divided into two parts—The Break and The Mend—Kayla gently guides readers through the journey of heartache and reminds them to embrace the love from within. An inspired debut from a talented new voice, Glass Hearts & Broken Promises is the best friend you need when it’s time to heal the broken pieces.Trade ReviewEmily Flake is known for her brilliant humor, but she’s also known for her generous and collaborative support of other funny people. Joke in a Box is a gift to creative writers and illustrators, as well as to anyone that just wants more laughter in their life. (Wendy Aarons)
£11.69
Penguin Putnam Inc The Odyssey
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£999.99
HarperCollins Publishers Inc Enlightened Heart T
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£13.49
Andrews McMeel Publishing We Hope This Reaches You in Time
Book SynopsisA revised and expanded paperback edition of We Hope This Reaches You in Time by Samantha King Holmes and r.h. Sin with all-new bonus material from the authors.Ideas, poetry, and prose from bestselling authors Samantha King Holmes & r.h. Sin.
£10.79
Andrews McMeel Publishing What the Moon Gave Her
Book SynopsisIt is never too late to become all that you envision. Your birth happens more than once so sink into each feeling of uncertainty and ride with the waves. From loneliness, fear, and change comes a breathtaking collection of poetry that inspires strength and self-healing during a time when we couldn’t feel farther apart.What the Moon Gave Her is a poetry collection born from self-discovery. The debut collection from Christi Steyn delves into themes of self-doubt, anxiety, and the unprecedented loss felt during the height of the pandemic. Beauty is found in every corner of this book's six dynamic chapters––"birth by the ocean", “youplucked too many petals," “how to grow wings,” "dancing dolphins,” "full moon/bloom" and "two trees intertwined"What the Moon Gave Her is a moving collection about rebirth and the way we reconnect with the world around us through love.
£9.99
