Poetry Books

Book SynopsisDiane Thiel’s eagerly anticipated collection of poems, Questions from Outer Space, explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. This thought-provoking book reflects a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.Trade Review“Diane Thiel is a poet of unusual worldliness, capable of bringing biology, anthropology, and global travel to the mix. This is a strong new collection from a poet who has been expanding her vision and refining her art: ‘The seahorse in the brain / appears to be in charge / of memory and navigation.’ The objectivity of science mixed with a human concern for how we find our way. These are field notes from ‘the edge of reason,’ poems of intelligence and concern. Questions from Outer Space is a book tuned to deep experience of life on earth, marking the welcome return of a first-rate poet.” —David Mason, author of The Sound: New and Selected Poems“Diane Thiel is the real thing—a genuinely memorable lyric poet whose intuitive music strikes the difficult balance between the mythic and the real, the personal and the historical, the familiar and the unknown.” —Dana Gioia, poet, critic, and American Book Award winner"Diane Thiel’s Questions from Outer Space is a deft, accomplished collection, honed and fluent, that takes us on multiple journeys through known and unknown territories, locations traveled and imagined. We join her philosophical investigations of the multiverse, 'a different way / of making sense,' and accompany her on earthly journeys through La Paz, Bolivia; Veria, Greece; the complications and rewards of parenting; the mutability of memory. A curiosity and openness to experience throughout teach the poet, and us, of the paradox she explores: a love of both 'belonging // to [the] world, while also being alien to it,' via questions, and geographies, that always amplify an appreciation of Thiel’s various and richly traveled galaxies." —Adrianne Kalfopoulou, author of A History of Too Much"Questions from Outer Space reinvigorates the world of the everyday, a world we think we know until we read Diane Thiel. She not only makes it strange and makes it new, she wants us to reinvest in a sensuous world replete with complex thoughts and experiences. Her poems display complexity of form, are allegorical, narrative, metaphorical, psychological, political, and advocate on behalf of the natural world. She offers subtle critiques of the machine and digital age for their impersonality and for mounting assaults on nature. Diane Thiel subverts our conventional impulses—, mostly blind ones—, into an awareness that a sacred poetics informs our secular lives."—Fred D’Aguiar, author of Year of Plagues"Diane Thiel’s poems lament our destruction of planet Earth and caution against how technology separates us from one another—yet the book ultimately presents a message of hope. These poems offer the possibility of solace in the natural world: the opportunity to escape our machine-constrained lives through water, woods, and stars." — Ann Amicucci, for Colorado State University"What makes this book truly successful-and beautiful-is that the last two sections, 'The Farthest Side' and 'Time in the Wilderness,' though they seem to move away from the 'Outer Space' and alien of the earlier sections, actually move deeper into it and suggest that the most alien, the most 'other,' is the most ordinary."—Delmarva Review"Thiel’s wry and sometimes whimsical way of looking at the world (a trait readily apparent in her previous volumes) is woven throughout these poems, often making light of, or even mocking, the slippery and careless use of language in social and corporate settings (“KwickAssess”)."— Stephen Bentz, The Florida Review"Thiel's third full-length poetry collection, and her twelfth book, arrives bristling with navigable strangeness and open-ended questions." —Edward Hardy, Brown Alumni Magazine

Read more less

Book SynopsisTrowbridge’s Fool is based on an archetype that runs from the beginnings of storytelling up to modern films (silent and sound), fiction, poetry, and stand-up comedy. He is combination schlemiel and shlimazel, alternately the spiller and the spilled-on. Often the scapegoat, he is, as St. Chrysostom put it, “he who gets slapped.” Trowbridge’s Fool, after blundering into hell with Lucifer and company, is reincarnated in various historical times, with occasional unplanned visits back to the heavenly realm, operated as a mega-corporation by its Enron-style CEO. Trowbridge thought he was through with his not-so-distant relative after his collection came out, but the Fool is back again, none the wiser.

Read more less

Book SynopsisStill Water Carving Light tenderly navigates the depths of loss and memory.Peggy Shumaker delicately captures the fragility of the human body, the profound bonds between loved ones, and the unpredictable journey of life itself. As seasons shift and bodies age, these poems gracefully explore the ebb and flow of pain and healing. Intimate snapshots of everyday life depict the quiet resilience of those left behind, inviting readers who have experienced loss to connect deeply with their own emotions. With compassionate insight, Shumaker reminds us that while grief endures, it can be embraced, allowing for profound growth and deeper understanding.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis collection consists of odes to the Mexican American, first-gen experience as well as surreal prose poems with cultural references and settings native to the Los Angeles area. The collection opens with odes to everyday images and symbols of the Latinx community. In an age of elevated racism, these odes seek to celebrate Latinx culture in the face of constant scapegoating, ridicule, and surveillance. Also, this collection explores surreal prose poetry both in the suburbs and barrios of Los Angeles and the larger American landscape. A future prizewinner, according to former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, this collection seeks to celebrate the Mexican American experience while also exploring how surrealism and absurdism can lead to wondrous discoveries about the self, community, and the imagination.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAUTHOR OF AWARD-WINNING I WAS A BELL M. Soledad Caballero explores the complexities of the body, delving into themes such as cancer, memory, and love in a lyrical collection of poems you won’t want to miss.“This stunning book is an elegy for the body before, an ode for the body after.”-Carmen Giménez, author of Be Recorder “Masterfully uses visceral language and vivid imagery to hold space for both sorrow and hope, beauty and pain, the light and the dark, the water and the land.”-Jasminne Mendez, author of City Without AltarIn this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation.Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn aching meditation on the cyclical nature of grief and memory’s limited capacity to preserve everything time takes from us.How does one make sense of loss—personal and collective? When language and memory are at capacity, where do we turn? Confronted with “a year meant to end all / those to come,” acclaimed poet Adam Clay questions whether anything is “wide enough to contain what’s left / of hope.” In the absence of a clear way forward, the poems of Circle Back wander grief’s strange and winding path. Along the way, the line between reality and dreams blurs: cows stare with otherworldly eyes, 78s play under cactus needles, a father becomes his own child, and the dead become something more complicated—a “sketch turned to painting / left in a room dusty from / lack of passing through.”But amidst these liminal landscapes, a “thread of pro

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Blue Absolute’s prose poems are hot boxes of lyrical language combusting with daily life. People move and think amidst a flurry of dots and dashes in a constant shift of perspective and action—urban and pastoral, highly figured and fragmented, grieving and dreaming—each poem a compressed but fluid zone of almost psychedelic intensity. The book closes with “Shiver,” an American epic, at once a lament for and vision of a great city on the edge: San Francisco past, present, and future.Trade Review"The poems in The Blue Absolute are liberating in the way they lean toward sky, breaking ceilings and conjuring the absolute richness of the moment. Shurin is a bright voice in the wilderness, one that illuminates and builds worlds with words."—Scott Neuffer, Shelf Awareness "The collection is offered in four parts; the last, 'Shiver,' is dedicated 'for San Francisco.' […] Reading it is as simple as tackling prose, but there’s poetic sparkle and daring in it, as in all the pieces in the collection, the abstract melting into the particular."—Roberto Friedman, Bay Area Reporter "The Blue Absolute has choreographic electricity that dances skin-to-skin and mingles senses in ways that would surely please Allen Ginsberg and other Beats who knew their Shakespeare, their Rabelais, and their Zen."—Barbara Berman, The Rumpus "The Blue Absolute‘s sonic felicity binds each page to a common score which draws from song its deep notes, an encompassing melopoeia that subtends the whole. Whether held in a knot of anguish or bliss, whether echoing hollow nights or breathing along pelicans, wind, trees, and storms, the poem will always tilt toward an upper limit, melody, which is its own kind of transcending 'shiver.'—Chris Tysh, Fence Digital "The poems are atmospheric, effervescent, totally enchanting. A cinematic light sweeps throughout this book of prose poems."—Holly Mason, The University of Arizona's Poetry Center Blog "In March, Aaron Shurin’s new book, The Blue Absolute, was just arriving in bookstores as they were closing down. I met Aaron on Divisadero St. to pick up two copies. The Blue Absolute reads to me as a trembling, elaborated, and vulnerable shape of life in San Francisco in the last few decades—the time Aaron has lived here, very active in teaching and poetry (this is his 14th book), remembering 'the joy of the torque of the wind, with my hair flying' and the torques of grief, the previous pandemic, aging, evictions. He thanks his publishers, Nightboat, for their indomitability. I thank him for his."—Hazel White, Periodicities "Shurin’s prose poems lend themselves to the dreamlike fluidity frequent in the genre. They are conversational and often elliptical. The line of flight drives the speaker across the page sometimes into metamorphosis and sometimes across objective correlatives. The elegance of these shifts and leaps provide a conceptual rhythm that is consistent throughout the collection, revealing the poet’s steady hand and sure craft. But delightfully—and seriously—the work permits complexity and acknowledges imperfection within the subjects."—Nicholas Alexander Hayes, Your Impossible Voice "Aaron Shurin’s queer sentences have for decades liberated both gender and genre. Few poets wear their syntax with a fit so sensuous, so glamorous, but no one shows up to the poem dressed quite like him in the fabulous finery of 'crimson rebellion and orange confetti.' And no one else insists not only on the poem as a means of enchantment but also as an impassioned expression of enchantment’s political and existential necessity. 'This was essential,' Shurin declares, 'I had to make the walls sing.' And sing they do, as does every syllable in The Blue Absolute, tuned as they are to catch the frequency of a radical erotic music that’s demanded nothing less than total devotion from the poet: 'tear up the book, feed it to the song, feed all to all.' Indeed, each of these ravishing sentences is an offering to all and a model of prosody that elicits from poet and reader alike 'a pose of surrender and a shiver of thanks.'"—Brian Teare "Aaron Shurin’s The Blue Absolute is a wonder composed by one of our most crucial poets who has trained his considerable powers of observation to exceed time and space. Refusing singularity, having long ago stolen 'gender from the fem-bots and dude-droids,' Shurin has steadfastly become our poet of permeability in accord, in concord, with weather, city, lovers. His sharp attention to the everyday gives way to an expansive vision in the ever-changing cosmos that can be found in a room, on a street, at the kitchen table. Don’t miss 'Shiver,' his magisterial paean to San Francisco. In lieu of America’s shrinking whispers of fear and scarcity, we receive the bounty of a maximalist: Mortality, paradise, ecstasy, days of youth, of aging, unfold into a sublime as close and shifting as the very sky."—Gillian Conoley "Once again, Aaron Shurin proves to be one of America’s greatest poets. The Blue Absolute is a lesson in how to write prose poems that sway, tilt, shiver, quake, torque, pulse, thunder, and dance. Aboard the vessel of this form, Shurin sails behind, in, and under the sensual dimensions of joy and grief, love and loss, youth and age, sex and death. In the end, this book teaches us how to feed our 'beautiful naked grief' to song so that we may live indomitably."––Craig Santos Perez

Read more less

Book SynopsisVibratory Milieu weaves together eight years of writing and the author’s daily practice of collection to build a glistening web of perception and interconnection, including bits and pieces from a myriad of sources: current events, news briefs, facebook & twitter quips, the movie “Carrie,” Buddhist texts, and feminist theory. Hunter’s own writing practice becomes material for the collage as she culls lines from journals, poems written to music, poems written after meditation and dreams, poems written in response to friends’ poems, poems inspired by the Divine Comedy (itself a collage text). What emerges from the field of language is a study of identity and its abstraction, formation, and analysis through interaction with texts of all kinds: poems, film, music, dream, friendship.Trade Review"As in her first collection, The Incompossible, Hunter effortlessly blends private dialogue with public testimony orchestrated in a variety of forms. Orphan Machines drones a bittersweet urban lyric, and by the end readers may also be asking themselves in public, 'Should / I fake normalcy or be real?'”—Jacket2"This is a book of subtle curiosity, attentiveness, and carefully balanced juxtaposition. It re-enlivens a kind of attention to language and shows us possibility and resonant significance within the mundane.”—Full Stop"Vibratory Milieu is a polyglot chorus where the lines reverberate in a sound cloud, and where we take in more than we might have thought we could handle. It vibrates, this cacophonous milieu. The title of this potent book makes a resonant promise that the work delivers on."—Colorado Review"This is a book with many entry-points, without a singular intended route. Turn to any random page and it will feel like you’re walking into another dimension. I enjoyed encountering it as if I was doing contact improv. My attention and comprehension had its ebbs and flows, but I enjoyed watching how the text blocks surged and retreated; I attended to moments of resonance and harmonized in the margins with my own citations and lived history."—Anomaly"Vibratory Milieu is a high-speed polyphonic lyric suite that somehow feels simultaneously an extension of her prior work, and yet, leagues ahead in terms of structure."—rob mclennan"Like the eponymous teen heroine of strategic reversals, Carrie White, Carrie Hunter wields awesome telekinetic powers. Collaged quotations and phrases hover on the page, spotlighting the objects of our desire, fury and incredulity. We find ourselves somewhere within 'boundaryless metamorphosis’s apparent borders,' a tensile and refractive echo chamber of mega consequence. With heightened awareness of the stimulations and fabrications at hand, we become emboldened to bring down the house (capitalism, racial, gendered and ecological violence, etc.), an imbricated architecture, every part, every function accumulative and inextricably linked. In Vibratory Milieu, feminist provocation tackles the garish and overarching humiliating features of the omnipresent succubus that wields so many guises. 'If true consciousness lies below the conscious level,' ease into the hypnotic genius of Carrie Hunter’s representation of encounter."—Brenda Iijima"Vibratory Milieu casts a spell of ecstatic, esoteric associations, forming unexpected neural pathways with a language that reminds us, 'the book is still a technology.' Carrie Hunter’s maximalist collage form masterfully weaves together language and living, acting as an antidote to the static-apocalypse all around us, reminding its reader, 'Reality is music.' This vibrant text shakes the body of the reader into a dance of memory, language, and unknowing sublimation."—Angel Dominguez "'Dreaming prepares you for clairvoyance,' Hunter writes, which in turn prepares us for clairvoyance in the various realms of consciousness. We are continually made to know we’re in a poem, and that we’re likewise in a dream, awake. Hunter creates this lucid dreamstate wherein the poem is written and we dwell there, a place where she has dwelt, where she has made a dwelling place for us. Where consciousness is a multifaceted gem to behold, to hold up as we look at it, turning it around. Aphoristic in form, but cohesive in poetic narrative, because the voice drawing together the source fragments is so magnetic. Ripped intelligence is the phrase that comes to mind, ripped like the way muscles are ripped, or the way a text is ripped off. Diamond-like, dovetailed, and then suddenly, your aura drops around your knee."—Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Read more less

Book Synopsis2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARDS FINALIST!Harnessing street protest as a poetic formation, Villainy exhibits the desires that bring queers into public space.Andrea Abi-Karam answers the call to action for poetry itself to become the radical accomplice it was destined to be in their second book, Villainy. In order to live through the grief of the Ghostship Fire & the Muslim Ban, Villainy foments political action in public spaces, and indexes the various emotional states, such as rage, revelry, fear, grief, and desire to which queers must tend during protest. In scenes loaded with glitter, broken glass, and cum, Abi-Karam insists that in order to shatter the rising influence of new fascism we must embrace the collective work of antifascists, street medics, and queer exhibitionists and that the safety that we risk is reckless and necessary. Disruptive and demanding, these punk poems embody direct action and invite the audience into the desire-filled slippage between public sex and demonstration. At heart, Villainy aims to destroy all levels of hierarchy to establish a participatory, temporary autonomous zone in which the targeted other can thrive.Trade Review"Abi-Karam writes with a revolutionary energy that invites the reader to rethink how a poem sounds, and what it can do on the page and beyond."—Publishers Weekly"Infused throughout Villainy is a frenetic playfulness, a 'TRANSFUSION OF GLAM,' and a celebration of all things punk, sexy, dirty, risky, villainous. Abi-Karam’s use of all capitals tattoos onto their poems a set of teeth, which, coupled with the baseline-beating anaphora, gives this collection a heady directness and evokes the energy and rhythm of a street protest."—Harriet Books"“In this anarchist poetic manifesto, the theme of survival in the face of surveillance coexists with queer desire and joy in public places. Queer sex in public—like a dance floor, a museum room, etc.—in particular, becomes a way to articulate rebellion in the face of state surveillance. Abi-Karam’s work is specifically interested in the healing and empowering nature of collective work and co-existence, whether that’s in their personal politics or creation of art.”—Electric Literature"Abi-Karam’s Villainy is a dizzyingly captivating work of anarchist poetics, seamlessly weaving the blunt language of the Anarchist Manifesto with a deeply vulnerable and inviting syntax. While this book places American imperial violence in its crosshairs, it is first and foremost a document of grief, both personal and collective."—LARB"While many aspire towards a 'toothless' antiseptic poetry, Abi-Karam proudly displays their titanium fangs, delighted to bear the smoldering crown of the insurrectionist. They loom leather-clad at the edge of a churning vat of nuclear waste, detonation device firmly in hand. 'I am the villain,' they declare with a radioactive glint in their eye, before plunging headfirst into the abyss."—The Adroit Journal"At the heart of Abi-Karam’s Villainy is an impulse to keep us alive to the world and to language in a way that is necessary to activism."—EcoTheo"Villainy loosens away from villain-as-identity and moves towards forces, energy transfers, and what collectivity engages and reworks in struggle. Refusing optic reduction, staying tactically capacious, in pursuit of another world."—The Poetry Project Newsletter"Villainy is a timely collection and it should be an enduring one, something we keep reading and talking about. The future is dire and the time for action is now."—Cleveland Review of Books"In Villainy, it’s Abi-Karam’s resolve that we hear, full and flagrant above all... In this dream, all of us do, and somehow — swept up in the motion, teeth bared in joy or in rage — we find a way through."—Oxford Review of Books"By following the threads of statement and metaphor that weave in and out through Andrea Abi-Karam’s pages, we can appreciate how cohesive the writer’s vision is, and how appropriate the choice of disruption for their poetic project."—RHINO"Many of the poems in VILLAINY are set in the radical queer spaces that Abi-Karam inhabits; they lean into the eroticism and overwhelm, producing a viscerality that only poems can. Simultaneously, the book asks, but what else can the poem do?"—Vagabond City"I hope this book finds its way into the hands of those queer lives who need healing, whose hearts need the warm of Andrea’s spitfire text. These poems wrestle with the world, its violence and fleeting joy, and invites us to confront these truths, comforts, and peace, in ourselves."—Wussy"Language is a way of forming the world we want to see in anticipation of its arrival. So too, Villainy shows us, are grief and friendship."—Full Stop"In an industry that encourages the toothless, Andrea Abi-Karam’s propulsive Villainy calls: 'give the poem teeth.' In an industry that incants, this book incites, revealing the revolutionary potential of desire, of determined disfiguration, of poetry itself, which, in Abi-Karam’s hands and ways becomes, as the street, a site of unbounded action. Here is a poetry that demolishes poetry. A fire to our fascist order. A book fully alive."—Solmaz Sharif, author of National Book Award Finalist Look "Andrea I like your experience. Thanks thanks thanks for this frank obtuse poetix, this wriggling book. Its wisdom is when I think I’ve summed it up it’s something else - action and spatial, flat versatile wily & interior maybe even yeah poetic in that way only prose can be but CAPS-STRONG, manifesting today. Oh and here’s my favorite line: resist the present approach impurity. Yessss!"—Eileen Myles “'If we are to start again,' White says, 'renewed or better', Villainy insists, we’ll first suffer the pain of radical un-making. Willingness to suffer such pains, in, for example, the desire to be ‘flat’ (which would hurt) constitutes villainy while the world belongs to ‘1. CAPITALISM 2. THE STATE 3. COLONIALISM 4. NAZIS 5. RACISM 6. OPPRESSION.’ This is a text that performs the awful compression – squeezing – of our capacities collectively to deal with reckless disrespect for life not just under this government. This book is fire. But not to burn-it-down. To light my way to a friend.”—Simone White "In these incisive poems, Andrea Abi-Karam engages with both language and the body as sites of becoming and unbecoming, as gateways through which to summon infinite possibilities. VILLAINY asks how language can be an ‘accomplice to radical action,’ and then—in this work sharp as glass shattering, hallowed as a body shaped into a home for one’s dead—answers."—Zeyn Joukhadar"Villainy is openly and honestly passionate and heartbreaking, deeply personal and savagely political, attempting to articulate shape and purpose out of an enormous grief and loss, as Abi-Karam is somehow able to articulate an incredibly powerful response to what might, at first, appear a rage and a grief too large to be possible to write through or around at all, let alone so well." —rob mclennan"This is poetry that is anti-poetry that is very wise and confrontational. To make a new way we must “unmake” an older way and suffering comes with this. Andrea Abi-Karam uses language and the body as ways of becoming and unbecoming that lead us to new futures and possibilities. Here is the language for a new world and a new activism."—Amos Lassen"When poetry is spoken aloud to an audience, we often call it a “reading,” but when poet Andrea Abi-Karam reads it is more than mere recitation. Instead, their punk protest ethos mixes with mylar and medical staplers to create a performance event.” —Full Stop

Read more less

Book SynopsisA response to the unimaginable cruelties that became our new quotidian in 2020, that moves musically and discursively through innovative permutations of lyric form.CRUEL/CRUEL is the manifestation of a Black, queer voice grappling with the intricacies of (un)belonging and identity. These poems use genres of queerness and race to reckon with the pervasive power of oppressive institutions, shaped by art and a soundtrack of Black musical traditions of resistance: from jazz to soul to experimental to hip hop. A hybrid visual and literary object, CRUEL/CRUEL feels relentlessly present, and yet emphasizes the archival and documentary as intrinsic to our personal and collective survivals.Trade Review"Stephens’s beguiling book puzzles out the interconnections of seemingly opposing forces as it wrestles with issues of race, language, and legibility in the wake of 2020’s twin cataclysms of police violence and COVID-19.”—Harriet Books"Dior Stephens’ CRUEL/CRUEL is a meticulously arranged series of poems that contrasts playful lightness with the heavy weight of racial conflict and tension in a form that is both startling and familiar in its restrained mix of anger and hope. Each poem’s eye is turned inward with an intensity that burns through the self, revealing a brilliant mirror reflecting the world through the Black body."—Stephen Patrick Bell, Lamda Literary Review“I can honestly say he might be one of my favorite poets I’ve read. With all the brutal honesty of Claudia Rankine and the playfulness of Ross Gay, Stephens’s declaration that 'a poet is a poem is a keeper' is my new motto. This one’s definitely a keeper.”—D.D. Deischer-Eddy, Green Blotter"Dior J. Stephens’ CRUEL/CRUEL is a testament to queer interiority, an ode to the Saturn return, and a celebration of language itself. If you delight in 'FEMBOY NAILS CLAWING UP RAFTERS OF HYPERCRITICALITY,' or if you’ve ever wanted to ride in a 'salted/shroom submarine' then this book is your book. Do as the speaker advises in one of these fantastic poems and 'open your windows'—let this book in."—Cyrée Jarelle Johnson"With glorious music, Dior J. Stephens’ CRUEL/CRUEL explores how societal expectations obstruct true connection and intimacy. Stephens, an expert in energetic wordplay, writes so that each poem is also a performance—something to be experienced within the body, a secret to be shared between friends. And I felt myself leaning in, feeling this speaker’s plight for love and acceptance, found myself also asking, 'and / don’t i croon for you, like / so?'"—Taylor Byas"CRUEL/CRUEL peels the plastic cover off the good couch and relishes in the lush sonic textures and linguistic dexterity of the lyric. Dior J. Stephens exudes a finesse to language and experimentalism as a site for re-imagination, for 'STILL, there’s a hope in the wind that slants pessimism.' Stephens is the 'dolphin in a mask in a mask in plain view,' inventive, playful, and spiritually cognizant to manifest for Black, queer voices toward radiant futures."—Anthony Cody"Dior J. Stephens knows the body is a reluctant archive. Stephens tends to traces of the everyday, knotting them into memory to patch a self frayed and fuming under the gaze of white heteropatriarchy. Yet, Stephens tracks how we buckle with pleasure. To read this book is to slink into a plum-black night where we hear 'the ghost rivers of Harlem play / light patches / in your good ear.' Listen."—Divya Victor

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA Narco-Acid Western told in a series of interlinked poems, Soto’s striking debut collection follows the converging paths of two protagonists through El Sumidero, a fictional US/Mexico border town where an ongoing drug war is raging. The surreal verse of Soto’s poems portrays a bleak political climate as it coincides with the rituals of love & loss, culture & spirituality, & the quest for a better life at all costs. Following the narrative arc of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s classic cult film, El Topo, A Grave is Given Supper builds a world saturated with a mystical aura that describes the finite tensions & complicated desires of lives taking place in the borderland.Trade ReviewAdapted into an original literary-theatric performance by Teatro Dallas directed by Claudia Acosta and starring Elena Hurst LONGLISTED for Reading the West Book Award “The landscape in A Grave is Given a Supper recalls the tones of Frank Stanford, steeped with our phantasmagoric Texan borderlands. Soto offers up each poem like a votive candle, wreath of roses, or weapon, to lay on the altar of the outlaw Jesus Malverde, announcing the arrival of a new literary voice.” —Fernando A. Flores, author of Pig Latin and Stuck on a Razor “Soto describes insects, femicide and the border wall in mystical terms.” —Jaime Dunaway, Advocate Mag “A surreal exploration of the Mexican drug war written in free verse… While many poems traverse…dreamlike terrain, they’re also sometimes grounded in reality. This is where the book is most gripping and provocative.” —Tim Diovanni, Dallas Morning News On Dallas Spleen and previous work: “Soto drives a relentless narrative from poem to poem… a narrative composed of equal parts joy and rage.” —The Literary Review “Soto eases into discomfort and renders it stunning.” —Katy Dycus, The Wild Detectives “There is a deep, inescapable sadness in many of Mike Soto’s poems but it is a sadness for the world and never himself. It’s wrong to stereotype poets, even positively, but I think Soto’s Mexican literary heritage is deep in his bone marrow. It’s a rich, earthly, mystical tradition in which to have one’s taproots. These poems of light and life are compressed, but never crushed.”—Thomas Lux "Feeling distant, far from family and the place that has given me the deepest sense of home, I resolved to write about individuals on a journey of self-actualization despite living in such a climate of violence, but I wanted to take that further—there were already enough portrayals of economic empowerment and ego empowerment—and make it a quest for a kind of enlightenment." —Mike Soto on his work in A Grave is Given SupperLit Hub's “Combines neoclassicism’s equal temperament, the incisive excesses of the metaphysical poets, and Jamie Sabines-like political sensibilities.”—Joe Milazzo, ENTROPY “It’s been wonderful workshopping with Mike and adapting his words for the stage. A lot of our team are first-or second-generation people who have experienced some of the things touched on in the show: migration, drug wars, a journey from Mexico to the U.S.”Teatro Dallas "Across the book, poems spastically display the weight of both people and landscape in heartbreak and obituary...Holding the book together is the poet’s consistency of tone; Soto’s poems never falter at being both maturely concise and emotionally staggering." — Greg Bem, Rain Taxi

Read more less

Book SynopsisA collection of original short plays that focus on sexual harassment and assault in Egypt, by debut Egyptian playwrightsThese five original short plays, written by Egyptian students from the American University in Cairo in collaboration with Jillian Campana and Dina Amin, mark the first published plays in Egypt that deal directly with sexual harassment. Sexual crimes are not limited to the workplace or the street—they happen everywhere, from the bedroom to the café, in shops, on modes of transportation, and in businesses, homes, outdoor areas, and educational and religious institutions. They can be perpetrated by a stranger, acquaintance, friend, family member, or loved one and they can encompass many different types of sexual violence, including verbal, non-verbal, physical, or visual violence. This collection breaks social taboos by offering dramatic texts that reflect the reality of survivors of sexual harassment from multiple perspectives—families and couples, bystanders, victims and perpetrators, men and women. Many of the women portrayed in these plays are independent, educated, and well to do, but they are all subjected to varying degrees of sexual harassment and violence. Accompanied with narrative commentary that places the events in context, these plays and the issues they explore seek to challenge dominant perceptions about sexual harassment in the region and to shine light on the power imbalances and disparities that give rise to it. They will be of interest to artists, social science researchers, educators, and anyone interested in the issue of sexual harassment, and collaborative theater processes.Playwrights: Yehia Abdelghan, Marwan Abdelmoneim, Nour El Captan, Passant Faheem, Nour Ibrahim, Noran Morsi, and Omar OmarThe research on which this book is based was awarded the Times Higher Education 2023 MENA Award for Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Performances of these plays are royalty free.Trade Review"Tackling such topics as consent, psychological trauma, patriarchal attitudes, and the repercussions of speaking out, five sharply honed, open-ended 10-minute plays . . . . transcending easy labels like 'theatre for social action' and 'theatre in education,' they exist in a category of their own."—Critical Stages/Scènes critiques"The first published plays in Egypt that deal directly with sexual harassment."—Al Ahram"This book is a brilliant engagement with the issue of gender-based violence in the private sphere, one of the most difficult challenges that societies all over the world contend with."— Hoda Elsadda, Cairo University, and co-founder and Chair of the Board of the Women and Memory Forum, from the forewordTable of ContentsForeword: The Problem and the ProjectHoda ElSaddaSexual Harassment in Egypt and Using Theater as a Way ForwardJillian Campana and Dina AminThe Plays and Their IntroductionsIntroductions and dramaturgy by Jillian Campana and Dina AminForget Him by Nour El CaptanSee Me by Nour Ibrahim and Omar OmarThe Report by Noran MorsiWhen We Met by Marwan Abdelmoneim and Passant FaheemWhat Do You Know? by Yehia AbdelghanyBibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisWitty and dynamic lovers’ dialogues for the stage. The actress and author Isabella Andreini won international renown playing the bold, versatile, and intellectual inamorata of the commedia dell’arte. After her death, her husband Francesco Andreini continued publishing her works, among them the thirty-one amorosi contrasti—or lovers’ debates— presented in this volume. Available in English for the first time, Lovers' Debates enables readers to envision the commedia dell’arte through the words of its most revered diva. Lovers flirt boldly, trade bawdy insults, exhibit their learning, and drive each other mad in stage dialogues that showcase Isabella’s skill in composition and drama. Sparkling with wit and bursting with dynamic energy, these brilliant lovers’ dialogues for the stage hold strong appeal not only for specialists in early modern literature and women’s studies, but for enthusiasts, scholars, and practitioners of classic and contemporary theatre. Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Illustrations Introduction The Other Voice Life, Works, Legend: “A Brilliant Discursive Mask” Playing the Game: Genre and Occasion Structure and Themes: The Contrasti in Action Diva on Top: The Professor, the Realist, the Bawdy Virago The Art of Losing Control: Madness and Frenzy Theater and Metatheater, Comedy and Tragedy Posthumous Success: Fragmenti, Alone and with Lettere Note on the Italian Text and Transcription Note on the Translation Lovers’ Debates for the Stage Amorosi contrasti PrefazioneDedicazione Tavola de’ Contrasti Scenici Nomi di tutti i Personnagi Amorosi contrasti: Italian Text Lovers’ Debates PrefaceDedication Table of Debates for the Stage Names of All the Characters Lovers’ Debates: English Translation NotesBibliographyIndex

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe first appearance of this award-winning writer''s work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray''s striking poetry to its originally intended form.Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray’s sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been almost entirely unavailable for the better part of half a century. Poems was put together by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray’s mother, and when Murray’s papers, long thought to be lost, reappeared in 2013, it became clear that Code had exercised a heavy editorial hand. This new collection, edited by Farnoosh Fathi from Murray’s original manuscripts, restores Murray’s raw lyricism and visionary lines, while also including a good deal of previously unpublished work, as well as a selection of her exuberant letters.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA new translation of the final part of Dante's Divine Comedy by a poet and psychoanalyst praised for his previous translation of Dante's Purgatorio.Paradiso is the most stylistically virtuosic book of the Divine Comedy—yet it is also the most underappreciated, due to readers’ fears that it is boring and about “nothing but goodness.” D. M. Black’s clear and energetic new translation offers not only a glorious contradiction of such a view, but also, in highlighting the extraordinary beauty and sensorial richness of Dante’s verse, proves that Paradiso is in fact “Dante’s genius at its most indisputable” (Harold Bloom).Cleansed of sin and born anew after his grueling trek up Mount Purgatory, Dante’s pilgrim leaves all that is earthly behind him as he makes his ascent through the celestial spheres. Under the guidance of his childhood sweetheart and lifelong muse Beatrice, he contemplates optics, angels, free will, justice, and love, to arrive at one of the most moving and ecstatic epiphanies in the history of literature—that God is “the Love that moves the Sun and all the stars.”Written at a time of great political turmoil in Italy and great personal anxiety in Dante’s life, Paradiso wrestles with many questions that have echoes in our own disturbing times. At its heart, it is a book about the shape of the universe and how to find one’s place within it, composed with inventive daring and linguistic ingenuity as Dante stretches the Italian vernacular to its very limits, striving to make vivid and tangible the ineffable and sublime.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe anthology will be published in May 2023, just ahead of Pride. Containing 30 stories, non-fiction pieces, flash fiction and poetry, the winning entries from an international competition to capture the best of Queer writing today. Entry is open to anyone, without restriction. Submissions will open on 15th August and close on 1st October 2022. Winning authors will be notified in November 2022.Trade Review"Celebrating queer love...multiple, fleeting, varied'. Kevin Brazil TLS. 'Beautiful writing, original ideas and a few suprises'. Matt Cain. 'A great initiative'. Paul Burston, author, journalist, curator of the Polari Salon"

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis'Kerf' are the sawdust, particles or pieces irrevocably extracted from wood by the blades of cutting implements. Failure to calculate blade thickness when cutting wood can throw off project measurements exponentially. Thin-kerf blades are most accurate for fine woodworking, but they can warp and need careful maintenance. Thick-kerf blades are labour saving but are brute and lack finesse. The poems of Kerf write through themes of woodworking, craft and labour, but these poems also analogise 'kerf' as social and cultural remnants and as examples of disjecta membra. Embedded in and around these themes, the poems in Kerf also explore the author's own, as well as others', experiences of autism and neurodivergence, particularly as manifested in feelings of isolation and in experiences of violence and rejection, but also from the angles of positive and negative obsessions, focus and distraction.

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrom award-winning writer Johanna Skibsrud, Mediumshares the lives and perspectives of women who?in their roles as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums?have helped to shape the course of history.Helen of Troy, Anne Boleyn, Shakuntala Devi, Hypatia of Alexandria, Marie Curie: Medium interprets the voices of women vilified over time, silenced by famous husbands, forced into sex work, or wrongly accused. Reckoning with the dominant historical narratives of each woman?s era, Skibsrud underscores the power of poetry to bring about new formulations for understanding the relationship between past and present, self and other.These deeply resonant and performative poems use language as a bridge across experience, sensibility, and time. Each exploration begins with a brief vignette inspired by the ?vidas? that once began manuscripts of the troubadours. Both vidas and poems provide lyrical reinterpretations of real and imagined elements in the lives of scholars, scientists, computer engineers, mystics, entrepreneurs, artists, nurses, and other leaders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA Blueprint for Survival begins in wildfire season, charting a long-distance relationship against the increasing urgency of climate change in the boreal, then shifts to a long sequence, ?Seeds,? which thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of the sixth mass extinction. Each seed functions as blueprint, whether simple human-made tool or complex organism driven by its DNA to adapt to and respond to our current existential threat, each showing a different way of being in the world: lentil, snowdrop, chinook salmon, codex, tardigrade, honeybee, ?the beautiful cell.?

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe poems in Tracery enact a lyric condensation. Many of them were written in transit: on the bus, on a bicycle, on foot, in the endless to and fro of work life. Their lyric brevity allowed composition directly in the brain, or quick jottings in a pocket notebook, primarily governed by the music of reason ? ?the ear?s judgement? (Joachim du Bellay), the ?natural music? of poetry (Eustache Deschamps), ?music at the heart of thinking? (Fred Wah). A major feature of this work is its incorporation and reworking ? a translation ? of other works of western literature and philosophy across the span of its brief, localized history. These are poems that barge into the arena of classic and modernist literary works with little regard for what is generally regarded as genius, with contempt for the ever-present misogyny and gender segregation of our collective past, with an ever-present critique, but also with a constantly renewable sense of wonder and humility. Written in a time of plagues, through dreams and daily life, these are poems to be enjoyed by anyone who observes events occurring in time, and then wonders at them.

Read more less

Book SynopsisA unique anthology containing over five decades of protest poetry.'i may have been born on 27 April 1994 - but i was never born free.' Mjiele MsimangContemporary poet Mjiele Msimang captures something of today's zeitgeist in his poem 'born(e) to the grave.' But what of the past half-century of protest poetry in South Africa, a rich tradition born in response to colonialism, and fed by apartheid and a faltering democracy?In Years of Fire and Ash: South African Poems of Decolonisation, over fifty years of protest poetry are gathered in one single volume, bringing together some of the most remarkable and thought-provoking poems that have emerged from struggle. The animating impulse behind this collection of old and new voices is 'decolonisation', a term which has regained prominence over the last few years. It allows us to perceive how different South African poets have placed their work in the world, and how that work might relate to the struggle for radical social transformation.Compiled by award-winning literary critic Wamuwi Mbao, this collection includes established voices such as HIE Dhlomo, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, Mongane Wally, Serote, Sipho Sepamla, and Es'kia Mphahlele, as well as prominent contemporary poets such as Vangile Gantsho, Lebohang Masango and Sihle Ntuli.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe mischievous and often dark world of Wayne Holloway-Smith's first collection Alarum exists in the space between the peculiar thought and its dismissal. It is a place in which commonsense is unfixed, where the imagination disrupts notions of stability. 'A single crow falling from the mind' of the poet is something awkward left at our feet, and the 'air itself' is the voice of skewered unease. The complexities of life are jolted awake throughout this fearlessly inventive debut, as loss arrives played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a movie, the risk of romance is understood as the filling in a sandwich, and anxieties are found hunkered in bushes, blooming behind the wallpaper, and in the bursting of balloons.Trade Review'Alarum is a collection composed in the "mournful shadows", skulking beneath your window at that very hour of a sleepless night when you feel most alone, to deliver up to you its glorious, melancholy verdict on living. By turns abject, bereft, exultant and belligerent, the poems' voices reckon with the things we can't get hold of (or get rid of) via a kind of reification, whereby non-material things - air, anxiety, heartbreak - take on an unbearable substance. Thus Wayne Holloway-Smith - "Magic Wayne with flowers", among other incarnations - finds himself negotiating with the objects or creatures that "fell out" of his mind, becoming real: a population of crows that need "constant attention", or a Punch and Judy still wielding weapons. Always concerned with what happens in the margins, Alarum's own margins are full of violence - the violence that occurs at society's edges and the violence entailed when pulling back from those edges amounts to a kind of self-erasure. "Alarum" also means "a call to arms" and, in speaking its fears aloud, this is a collection of poems that fights back.' - Emily Berry; 'There's an awful lot of poetry about these days. You can barely walk across the living room without stubbing your toe on a bit or getting some in your eye. But the thing is, not much of that poetry (in fact almost none of it) is actually poetry. Mostly it's just wearing an outfit that gives it the appearance of being poetry so it can pass itself off as such to the undiscerning or the unhurt. The most important thing I'd say about Wayne Holloway-Smith's book is that it actually is, unmistakably, poetry. When you look inside it you find yourself go quiet because you recognise that someone with a peculiar openness has been still and listened to the world and written down what it said. This book is funny, clever, serious, touching, and extraordinarily imaginative. Also it has a certain unguarded gentleness about it, by that I mean, it has a certain old-fashioned courtesy, the courtesy of the gent. That is a rare quality too I think. To recommend it sounds a bit glib. But I unequivocally do.' - Mark WaldronTable of ContentsI 11 The air itself 12 If I forget this, let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth 14 Some Waynes 15 Everything is always sometimes broken 17 The Warning Notes 18 Doo-wop 19 No Worries 20 What Happened Was This 21 So Many Different Ways to Talk About the Same Thing 23 Worship Music 24 Self Portrait #2 25 When the itching became too great 26 I hope this will explain everything: 27 (SOME VIOLENCE) II 43 The Politics of Birds 44 The Language 45 Sarah Sarsaparilla 46 Sympathy for Toast 47 Grandfather, with Flowers 48 Tina, understand 49 Self Portrait #3 50 Poem in Which 51 If I'm Ever to Find These Trees Meaningful I Must Have You by the Thighs 53 Cake 54 Why 55 Pear Tree 56 Lucky 57 There is absolutely no way to make this real life interesting 60 He left the body as fluids 61 Alarum 62 Short 64 Notes

Read more less

Book SynopsisAlbania's Luljeta Lleshanaku grew up in negative space, living under family house arrest during the years of Enver Hoxha's autocratic communist rule. Her recent poems are a response to what was missing then, not only in her life but for her whole generation, evoking absences, emptiness - what was unseen, unspoken or undone - through the concept of negative space. The space around objects, not the objects themselves, becomes the real, most significant part of an image, bringing balance to the whole of a composition, so enabling Lleshanaku to look back at the reality of her Albanian past and give voice to those who could not speak for themselves.Many of the poems are tied to no specific place or time. Histories intertwine and stories are re-framed, as in her long poem 'Homo Antarcticus', which traces the fate of an inspirational explorer who could adapt to months of near-starvation in sub-zero Antarctica but not to later life back in civilisation, one of a number of poems in the book relating to society's pressure on the individual. Sorrow and death, love and desire, imprisonment and disappointment are all themes that echo deeply in Lleshanaku's hauntingly beautiful poems. Negative Space draws on two recent collections published in Albania, Almost Yesterday (2012) and Homo Antarcticus (2015), and follows Haywire: New & Selected Poems, her first UK selection published by Bloodaxe in 2011, a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation which was shortlisted for the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize in 2013. Negative Space is also a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize 2019.Trade Review'Luljeta Lleshanaku is a pioneer of Albanian poetry. She speaks with a completely original voice, her imagery and language always unexpected and innovative. Her poetry has little connection to poetic styles past or present in America, Europe, or the rest of the world. And, interestingly enough, it is not connected to anything in Albanian poetry either. We have in Lleshanaku a completely original poet.' - Peter Constantine; 'The tyrant's insistence that there is no private realm has the unintended effect of making it necessary to write powerful and durable poems which suffer all the constraints imposed by confinement and yet have something ungovernable in reserve, namely their accuracy.' - Sean O'Brien, The Guardian; 'The Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku's first British collection is a revelation. The poems are peculiar and sonorous in these translations, full of objects and souls, transformed and given wings in Chagall-like metaphor. Her grand and melancholic opening poem 'Memory' sets the tone for this remarkable collection. Lleshanaku's poetry essentially describes Albanian rural life. Albania, remote and for so long an outcast in Europe, has in Lleshanaku's poetry a static, timeless quality.' - Sasha Dugdale, PN Review

Read more less

Book SynopsisA noctuary is a diary for the late hours. In Niall Campbell’s poems, this is a time for reflection, discovering what it means to be a young father, anxious, caring and protective, deeply connected to the new, precious life of another human being. The deftly lyrical poems in his second collection illuminate a night world of disturbed sleep and half dream, midnight feeds, the quiet of snowfall through the hours of dark. At the same time the grown man now living in the city reconnects with his own childhood on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, the territory of his highly praised first collection, Moontide. Hearing his father’s voice in how he calls to his son, other images of the island’s seascapes, myths and wildlife return to him in Noctuary. Noctuary was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection.Trade ReviewFull of striking moments, the poems of Moontide are illuminated by powerful lyric impulses. -- David Wheatley * Guardian *In his understated debut collection, Campbell, who spent his childhood on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, draws on an intimately known landscape as witness to solitude and shared lives. -- Maria Crawford * Financial Times, Summer books 2014 *With precise language, musicality and insight, Campbell’s first collection explores solitude, companionship and memory against a backdrop of closely observed nature. His intimate poems draw on the seascapes and myths of his native Eriskay, in the Outer Hebrides, but take the same sharp-focused eye to other places, too... Meditative and haunting – my favourite poetry book of 2014 so far. -- Juanita Coulson * The Lady *Table of Contents13 Midnight 14 First Nights 15 Thinning Apples 16 First Illness 17 Keeping the Poacher’s Light 19 Crusoe, One Year on the Island 20 Clapping Game 21 All the Doubts of the Late Evening 22 Moth 23 Lyrics 25 Packhorse 26 The Address 28 Poacher 29 A New Father Thinks About Those Running Home 30 Dear, 31 The Night Watch 32 The Disembarked 33 Go There 34 The Water Carrier 35 Returning to Work 36 Measuring Heat Loss in the Arctic 37 Dream 38 Blackberries 39 Poetry When Working 40 An Island Vigil 41 The Cut 42 Four Memories in No Particular Order 43 Horseshoe Crab 44 Proof 45 Living in the City and Dreaming of the Winter Beach 46 Two Poems after Cuevas Lopes 46 Picking Day 47 Leaving Town 48 Other Branches 49 February Morning 50 Glasgow 51 Cooling a Meal by the Outside Door 52 Capture 53 Tightrope 54 Thirties 55 Language 56 From the Spanish 58 Good Night 61 Acknowledgements 63 Biographical note

Read more less

Book SynopsisPascale Petit’s Tiger Girl marks a shift from the Amazonian rainforests of her previous work to explore her grandmother’s Indian heritage and the fauna and flora of subcontinental jungles. Tiger girl is the grandmother, with her tales of wild tigers, but she’s also the endangered predators Petit encountered in Central India. In exuberant and tender ecopoems, the saving grace of love in an otherwise bleak childhood is celebrated through spellbinding visions of nature, alongside haunting images of poaching and species extinction. Tiger Girl is Pascale Petit’s eighth collection, and her second from Bloodaxe, following Mama Amazonica, winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize 2018 – the first time a poetry book won this prize for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry best evoking the spirit of a place. It is shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Four of her earlier collections were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.Trade ReviewNo one writing in English today comes anywhere near the exuberance of Pascale Petit. Rarely has the personal and environmental lament found such imaginative fusion, such outlandish and shocking expression that is at once spectacularly vigorous, intimate and heartbroken. -- Daljit Nagra * (judge for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018) *Beautifully sad, the imagery inexhaustible, the sorrow and torment both tempered and sharpened by the relish for language and the ingenuity of the imagination. -- Simon Armitage * [on Mama Amazonica] *Pascale Petit’s Mama Amazonica powerfully twists together fantasy and experience. Over a sustained sequence of poems, Petit transfigures her mother’s desperate and disturbed life through fabulous imagery of the rainforest and its flora and fauna, moving towards a kind of extreme, Ovidian release into metamorphosis. It won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize this year, a first for a book of poetry. -- Marina Warner * The Tablet (Books of the Year 2018) *Table of Contents11 Her Gypsy Clothes 13 The Umbrella Stand 15 In the Forest 22 Green Bee-eater 24 Surprised! 25 My Mugger Crib 27 Her Tigress Eyes 28 Tiger Gran 30 Indian Roller 32 Her Bulbul 33 When I was eight my father visited and we went fishing 34 Mongoose Brushes 35 Chital Girl 37 Pump 38 Her Globe 40 Her Mouth 41 Baghwa 44 Her Washing 45 Landscape with Vultures 47 Her Half Indian Back 48 Flash Forests 50 #ExtinctionRebellion 52 Trees of Song 54 Her Teeth 55 Treasure Cupboard 56 A Tailorbird Nest 57 The Anthropocene 58 Snow Leopardskin Jacket 59 Grandala 61 Jungle Owlet 63 Her Glasses 64 My Velvet 65 Clouded Girl 66 My Grecian Urn 68 Indian Paradise Flycatcher 70 Wild Dogs 71 The Tiger Game 72 Nilgai 73 Prize Photograph 74 Hatha Jodi 76 Spotted Deer 77 Pangolin 79 Swamp Deer 80 Barasingha 82 Brown Fish Owl 84 Tiger Myth 86 Noor 87 Common Map 88 Passport 90 The Superb Lyrebird 92 Her Bedroom 93 Night Garden 94 Forest Guard 96 Jungle Cat 97 Mahaman’s Face through Binoculars 98 For a Coming Extinction 100 Her Staircase 102 Kew Gardens 103 Her Flowers 104 Sky Ladder 107 Walking Fire 111 Acknowledgements

Read more less

Book SynopsisAnnemarie Austin's vividly imaginative poems explore other worlds and other lives, drawing upon her own memories and experiences, as well as on art, travel, dream, myth, history and literature. The first poem in her new collection asks 'Shall we go on the shiny?', the last one ends 'being altogether gone this time'. In between there's the tightrope, 'The Walking Shot', the report on the pilgrimage in progress, the marquise going out at five o'clock. The eye moves left to right along with the poems' movement. Though there are stops from time to time, for problems of the unidentified, the location of waterholes, whether or not those birds are oystercatchers, for the interior of a pocket and Nijinsky jumping. Then on, maybe to the beach again. Shall We Go? is Annemarie Austin's eighth book of poetry, following her Bloodaxe retrospective, Very: New & Selected Poems (2008) and later collection Track (2014).Trade ReviewLack of ostentation is part of the appeal of Austin's work. It voices mysteries with elegant composure. The mundane is met on its own terms, then all at once titled, a strangeness exposed. Sometimes the art is in the omission... Track is a book of many themes and explorations. Again, it reminds us of a poet whose technical control, musicality and gift for subtle surprise deserve wider notice. -- Carol Rumens * The Guardian *Austin's poems are full of intriguing images, with jounreys and transitions as their main themes. Another concern in the capturing of fleeting details... But beneath the plain language and form, the uncanny and the terrible are never far away. -- Juanita Coulson * The Lady *Austin is a fable maker. Hers is a poetry of parts held together by powerfully imagined dream associations. As her world deliquesces and reforms, her imagination breathes life into other people in other times, weirdly authenticating the material she draws from history. -- Anne StevensonTable of Contents11 Shall We Go on the Shiny? 12 Nail File 13 Anything with Beak or Bill 14 Fruit 15 Slow and After 16 Dances 17 Anything with Paws Before Its Eyes 18 Pincer 19 Form 21 Problem 25 Polly Vaughan – Variations 27 The Unidentified 29 Razzle-dazzle 31 Botafumeiro 32 Camino 33 True Vessel 34 Which Conceals the Location of Waterholes 35 Hole 36 Between the Yews 37 Marquise 39 The Unspoken 40 Latent Levitation 41 Line Drawing 42 Tightrope 43 The Walking Shot 44 The Misses Booth Photographed by Camille Silvy 46 The Tour 47 In Sight 48 Maybe Oystercatchers 49 Waterscape 50 Wishes for the Poem as Object 52 Table/Field 53 Godney 54 Kids Don’t Take Walks 56 I Go on It and 61 Grey Area 62 Like My Pocket 64 Cut Out 65 Nijinsky Jumps 67 It (after Linnaeus) 68 Lop-sided 69 Bringing in the Washing 70 The Place of Stations

Read more less

Book SynopsisTua Forsström is a visionary Finland-Swedish poet who has become Finland’s most celebrated contemporary poet. Her poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. I walked on into the forest is her twelfth book of poetry, her first since One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (2012/2015), the collection which followed her celebrated trilogy, I studied once at a wonderful faculty (2003), published in English translation by Bloodaxe in 2006. In some sense a continuation of the previous collection, her new book focuses more acutely on the themes of death and grief, and in particular the devastating loss of her beloved granddaughter. It shows her poetry’s tone of inner discourse shifting imperceptibly towards a new and harsh gravity. As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented on her work as a whole, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction – against death in life’.Trade ReviewForsström has Finland-Swedish modernism in her bloodstream but has kept a coolly timeless tone in her poetry. Her style can with some reason be called classical… What we read slowly reveals its true poetic face – the face of the lament, the elegy… It’s most beautifully and bravely done. -- Magnus Ringgren * Aftonbladet, Sweden *Tua Forsström writes poetry that comes stealing up on you. There is something curious about her poems, a way of adhering to the world that is hard to put one’s finger on. -- Hadle Oftedal Andersen * Klassekampen, Norway *I don’t know what I am going to need on the day that I have to face major loss, but I’m already writing a reminder to myself to go to the bookshelf then and pick out all of Tua Forsström's books. -- Anna-Lina Brunell * Hufvudstadsbladet, Finland *Table of ContentsI II III IV V

Read more less

Book SynopsisJoan Margarit (1938-2021) was one of Spain’s major modern writers. He worked as an architect and first published his work in Spanish, but over the past four decades became known for his mastery of the Catalan language, and was Spain’s most widely acclaimed contemporary poet. The melancholy and candour of his poetry show his affinity with Thomas Hardy, whose work he translated. He was awarded both the 2019 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honour, and the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry 2019, the most important poetry award for Spain, Portugal and Latin America. In the much praised Tugs in the Fog: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), Joan Margarit evoked the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the harshness of life in Barcelona under Franco, and grief at the death of a beloved handicapped daughter, reminding us that it is not death we have to understand but life. Five of his later collections were translated by Anna Crowe and published by Bloodaxe in two compilations, Strangely Happy (2011) and Love Is a Place (2016). Wild Creature brings together the poems of his final two collections, Un hivern fascinant (An amazing winter, 2017) and Animal de bosc (Wild creature, 2020). The two books that make up this final collection in English show us a poet writing at the end of his life, and facing up to his approaching death with courage, humility and even humour. Confronting loss is one of Margarit’s enduring themes, and many of these poems do just that but – continuing the theme of his previous collection, Love Is a Place – there are even more that celebrate love and everyday domesticity, and he reminds us that love needs to be worked at. These are poems that arise naturally out of an examined life, and although he does not spare himself or the folly of our times, there is great tenderness in the way he reaches out to embrace life, love, and the pain of the past. A solitary, Margarit pays tribute to other writers and artists of that ilk, to the rural poverty of his childhood, and to the wild creature deep in each one of us whom we ignore at our peril.Trade ReviewI love these poems for many reasons. When I first read Joan Margarit, I heard a powerfully distinctive voice, a spirit of great freedom and energy, humaneness, mischief, and depth. In these naked, subtle, clear poems, surprise and wisdom are often right next to each other… Each of Margarit’s poems is its own being, like a living creature with its own body-shape and voice, its own breath and heart-beat. His poems live and breathe in their natural habitat. They are elegant and shapely. And sometimes they seem almost overheard, as if they are singing in the voice the mind uses when talking with itself or with its close close other. It is common enough speech, and it is brilliant, too, sensually beautiful (but not too beautiful) and with a genuine, just-conceived feeling. -- Sharon Olds * on Love Is a Place *His work is time-haunted and death-haunted, but the poems also have a wonderful, clear, intelligent light in them. Margarit is perhaps firstly a love poet, and, readers can be assured, his loves are more often flesh and blood than steel. -- Carol Rumens * Guardian.com (Poem of the Week) *He deploys his central themes – the prospect of death and rediscovery of love – with a compelling freshness, wisdom, dignity and enveloping tenderness. Time and again I find myself gasping in admiration, or fighting back tears. And the cover image must be one of the most beautiful of the year. -- Stewart Conn * The Herald (Books of the Year) *Table of ContentsAN AMAZING WINTER (2017) 12 An amazing winter 13 Atocha Hill 14 The mysterious island 15 Works of love 16 Woman about to do her hands 17 Building a destiny 18 Verdaguer 19 Familiarities 20 Goyescas 21 On insults 22 Memory’s punishment 23 North wind 24 Our time 25 Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? 26 All-in wrestling 27 Stroke 28 Future 29 The albatross 30 Road 31 Through pain 32 What enlightens me 33 More than a song 34 Thermopylae 35 Life 36 Golden Age 37 Rides 38 Photograph of a girl 39 De senectute 40 Jorge Manrique 41 If you read this book 42 Time’s lyric 43 Courage 44 Final performances 45 Known cruelty 46 Purposes 47 Behind the glass 48 Instants 49 Mythology 50 The solitude of the sea 51 No other beginning 53 Epilogue to An amazing winter WILD CREATURE (2020) 58 The two snowfalls 59 The kitchen 60 Museums 61 Silent woman 62 Ángel González, a memory 63 Don’t talk about this with anybody 64 From poverty 65 Clear and difficult 66 Seductions, after so much time 67 Lost village 68 Wild creature 69 Beloved time with her 70 Iliad 71 Note on truth 72 Silence and survival 73 First lesson 74 Orpheus 75 The calm of coming back 76 The poem and the wall 77 The depths of poverty 78 Morning in Sant Just 79 Family lunch 80 A simple farewell 81 The final intimacy 82 The beginning of everything 83 Protections, consolations 84 Rachid Boujedra 85 Faraway smiles 86 Seagulls 87 A price 88 Chamber music 89 Love and fear 90 The long ending 91 In the early morning 92 What is approaching? 93 The picture of Santes Creus monastery 94 Autumn in Elizondo 95 Final pause 96 Murmur of rain 97 The house 98 Consolations 99 Building 100 Nightfall for old lovers 101 The only loyalty 102 Coming out of a concert 103 Dark Night of the Soul 104 Deep paradox 105 Two encounters 106 A poignant indifference 107 Everything is going quiet 108 Mistakes and sewers 109 Inspiration 110 Gratitude 111 Reasons and ways 112 Betrayal is no longer possible 113 Walking through a forest at night 114 A joyous prudence 115 Building work 116 Under a deep blue sky 117 Sick old man 118 About Babel 119 Josep Maria Subirachs 120 A daughter 121 Vincent Van Gogh 122 With you 123 The forgotten dream 124 Attempt at conclusions 125 Courtyard song 126 The past, so difficult at times 127 Another happy world 128 You, me and music 129 Memory of a field 130 Fear of what we are 131 Our dead, Raquel 132 One winter morning, 2020 133 The highest mountain 135 Epilogue

Read more less

Book SynopsisThese intimate, visceral and often wickedly funny poems journey through the darker days of new parenthood, teasing out the anxieties which plague us when night falls. Violence against women, the destruction of our environment, the poisons and pitfalls of 21st-century living are explored here in poems by turns lyrical and earthy, yearning and angry. They mine gold from the darkness and seek luminescence in the deepest oceans. Pit Lullabies is Jessica Traynor’s third collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Ireland’s Dedalus Press. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.Trade ReviewVisionary, luminous and haunted, Jessica Traynor’s poems are home to a host of compelling characters: witches, changelings, the spirit of Hildegard of Bingen. In The Quick, even the grotesque is rendered with subtle delicacy – a woman whose “lungs fold like an origami bird”. These poems will give you goose-bumps. -- Helen Mort * on The Quick *Written with a lightness of touch, these poems are capable of dealing with the big themes – especially those of birth, death or illness…this poet [is] capable of creating canonical work which draws on a contemporary re-thinking of poetic traditions while finding a voice that is wholly her own. -- Siobhán Campbell * Poetry Ireland Review, on The Quick *Traynor is a master at delineating these almost imperceptible but vital changes…Traynor’s fine delicate lyricism belies a social consciousness that subtly bleeds through several poems. -- Martina Evans * The Irish Times, on The Quick *Table of Contents11 Pit Lullaby 12 Megalodon 13 Anatomy Scan 14 In the Birthing Room 15 Metaphysical Breast Milk Poem 16 Ophelia in Ballybough 19 Midwinter 20 Pit Lullaby II 21 A Plea for the Sanctification of the Ditches of Ireland 23 Child you cut me open 24 What It Takes 25 Patchwork Quilt 26 If You Can Tame a Wildcat, You Can Raise a Baby 27 Pit Lullaby III 28 On Poisons 37 Pit Lullaby IV 38 In the Wrong Place 39 Forecast 41 On Plastics 43 Supermoon Trifecta 45 Walrus 46 Men are Talking 47 Pit Lullaby V 48 An Island Sings 56 Pit Lullaby VI 57 The Signs 63 Pit Lullaby VII 64 Nureyev in Dublin 66 Holidaying with Dad During the Divorce 67 Dad Cars 69 Pit Lullaby VIII 70 Milk Teeth 71 Lessons 72 Zodiac 73 Rock Pool 74 Turbulence 75 Pit Lullaby IX 77 Hungry Ghost 80 Bilbea’s Response 81 Lock Years 83 Onion Poem 84 In the Bathroom Showroom 85 Hunting Lions 86 Hawthorn 87 Night Run 88 Pit Lullaby X 89 Lullaby 91 Notes 93 Acknowledgements

Read more less