Search results for ""author margie"

A knife is pulled. An Uber driver is racially abused on the day of the Brexit referendum. A father bathes his son in ice water. A schoolboy drives a drawing pin into a map of the world. The threat of violence is never far away in Anthony Anaxagorou's breakthrough collection After the Formalities. Technically achieved, emotionally transformative and razor-sharp, these are poems that confront and contradict; poems in which the scholarly synthesises with the streetwise, and global histories are told through the lens of one family. Anaxagorou 'speaks against the darkness', tracking the male body under pressure from political and historical forces, and celebrates the precarious joy of parenthood. The title poem is a meditation on racism and race science that draws on the poet's Cypriot heritage and is as uncomfortable as it is virtuosic. Elsewhere, in a sequence of prose poems that shimmer with lyric grace, he writes, 'I'm your father & the only person keeping you alive.' Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize A Poetry Society Recommendation A Guardian Poetry Book of the Year One of The Telegraphs Best Poetry Books of 2019

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Shortlisted for the Costa 2019 Poetry Award. . Winner of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize. Surreal, joyful, political and queer, Reckless Paper Birds is a collection to treasure by Polari Prize-winning poet John McCullough. These exuberant poems welcome you into a psychedelic, parallel world of 'vomit and blossom' where Kate Bush mingles with a weeping Lady Gaga, a 'fractal coast' full of see-through things: water, mirrors, glass pebbles. With a magpie's eye for hidden charms, McCullough ranges across birdlife, Grindr and My Little Pony while also addressing social issues from homelessness to homophobia.

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A Poetry Book Society recommendation; A book of the year - the Poetry School; The Triumph of Cancer blurs the borders of science and poetry, working with forensic attention to capture the `inscape' of the living world. In this powerful new collection, presented as a museum of artefacts, Chris McCabe returns to the site of personal trauma to confront disease head-on. Elegies for his father, poets and celebrities mingle with still-life portraits of organic and synthetic subjects. These poems move with lyric grace and surgical precision against a backdrop of terror and cancerous global politics, showing McCabe at the height of his powers: dextrous, darklycomic and a true original.

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Margins, edges and coastlines abound in John McCullough’s tender, humorous explorations of contemporary life and love. Encompassing everything from lichen to lava lamps, and from the etymology of words to Brighton’s gay scene,& Spacecraft is a humane and spellbinding collection from the winner of the 2012 Polari First Book Prize. Spacecraft & navigates the white space of the page and the distance between people.

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In his ambitious second full collection, Ross Sutherland is an uneasy observer of our age of inauthenticity, hacked computers and digital avatars. Emergency Window features new poems alongside excerpts from two recent sequences, including a hilarious and strangely prescient version of 'Little Red Riding Hood', a poem written using Google Streetview, sonnets inspired by the Street Fighter 2 video game, and a sequence of computer-generated translations of classic literature.Surreal, funny, intelligent and experimental, these poems chart a search for meaning in a disintegrating world."If he were a piece of furniture, he would be an elegant high stool that felt uncomfortable and stylish at the same time."Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3"Sparky, surprising, joyous poetry" Roddy LumsdenRoss Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. His first collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2009, followed by the limited-edition mini-book Twelve Nudes in 2010 and the free National Poetry Day e-book Hyakuretsu Kyaku in 2011. Ross regularly appears at the Aldeburgh, Manchester, Glastonbury and Latitude Festivals; he is taking his latest show, Comedian Dies in the Middle of Joke, to the Edinburgh Fringe 2012. He lives in Cambridge.

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One of The Times' "ten rising stars of British poetry".'Kalagora' is a Hindi neologism meaning 'black man / white man'. This book tells his story: from a wild Millennium eve party in Manhattan to homecoming amid the grime and glory of London's East End. In this dazzling debut collection by Siddhartha Bose, the global wanderer pays witness to traffic accidents and street surrealism in Mumbai – the irresistible 'city of motion' – observing the uncanny and the unexpected at the start of the 21st century. Across continents and time-zones, a story emerges of love, chaos and addiction, a tale that evokes the colour and raw energy of these hybrid, multi-cultural cities. "Bose's métier is a kind of breathless urban Romanticism… daring the reader to keep up."Simon TurnerSiddhartha Bose is a poet and performer based in London. He grew up in Mumbai and Calcutta, followed by a seven year itch in the USA. Selections of his work have appeared in the anthologies City State: New London Poetry(Penned in the Margins, 2009) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Bose has recently completed a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, where he also teaches poetry and Shakespeare. He is playwright-in-residence with WhynotTheatre, Toronto.

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Stranger in the Mask of a Deer conjures an elemental, dreamlike narrative ranging from the present to the Late-Upper Palaeolithic, when the British peninsula was gradually reoccupied by humans and animals returning from the greater continent after the Ice Age. Richard Skelton began this book-length poem many years ago with the intention of exploring the history of Britain's landscape, only for the text to transform into a kind of literary seance, involving both human and other-than-human voices. Its transforming power lies in the accumulative magic of the word as ritual. Skelton's is a mesmeric lyric, probing the edges of consciousness towards a place where 'there are always presences / always inherences / things beyond sight.' 'An incredibly moving, essential meditation on where we have come from, where we are, and where we are headed.' -Kerri ni Dochartaigh

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Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain.Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton's poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision.Includes 'i am very precious' - Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2016.

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Longlisted for the 2020 Laurel PrizePlunge into mountain lakes and drift along meandering rivers in Swims, the debut poetry collection by Elizabeth-Jane BurnettA long poem taking many forms, Swims begins and ends in Devon, moving across the waterways of England and Wales: from urban pond to open sea. The poet swims among fishermen on Grasmere, reimagines the body as bottle cap in the Channel, and clambers down the bank of the river Ouse with words scrawled on her swimsuit.As political as they are personal, these meditations are conceived as environmental acts that probe the relationship between landscape, memory and the self. A sinuous, innovative debut, Swims reminds us of the power of swimming to transform the human spirit, registering what the water gives to us and what it takes away.

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Plastiglomerate finds our world in the midst of environmental disaster: from plastic pollution and wrecked shipping to fires in the Amazon rainforest. Geographer-poet Tim Cresswell writes with the forensic eye of a professional, bending the hard vocabulary of science into a jagged but compelling lyric that telescopes from the vast to the cellular in the space of a line. Plastiglomerate completes a trilogy of poetry books that examines mankind's impact on the earth; its central poem recycles the British folk ballad 'The Twa Magicians' to make an ecological protest song fit for the Anthropocene age. But among powerful depictions of the natural world under threat - from beached whales to lost birds - it is the humanity of Cresswell's imagery that wins through: leaf-blowers in surgical masks, blue nail polish, the biro 'leaking in the heat of my pocket'. 'Engaging and unsettling poems that tell it like it is, looking unflinchingly at environmental beauty and disaster. There is redemption here too, in the warmth of human relationships - while this is indeed a world of 'ruin and plunder', it is also a place 'full of love and sap'. A powerful and memorable collection.' - Jean Sprackland

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"The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk captures the precariousness and fragility of life" LUKE KENNARD; Kate Davis writes magical realist poems born of the hills, marshes and coastal edgelands of south Cumbria. In this remarkable first collection, tarns, limekilns and abandoned pits become portals into a dark, interior world. A woman levitates above a building site; earth slips and fault-lines open up beneath the town; the sea hides ‘a gob of virus’. The moving title sequence tells the story of a young girl with polio who struggles to find her feet — and her voice — in an unforgiving landscape where ‘the ground cannot be trusted’. Alive to geology, memory and myth, The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk is a brave, uncompromising and unmissable debut.

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The Sun is our neighbourhood star, igniting the imagination and setting the template for divinity. But in reality, it is crawling with sunspots of differing shapes, sizes, and power. Simon Barraclough (Poet in Residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory) is your guide to the Sun in this ambitious and energetic new collection of poems, fusing science and literature, and channelling Shakespeare, Byron, Nabokov and more. Is the Sun a god, a man, a woman, or simply a giant ball of hydrogen? Why does it tell fibs about its favourite painters? Is the Sun afraid of dying? Does it get depressed? And what does it really think about us, and the solar system it is bound to care for? In Sunspots fact, fiction, horror, humour and joy are condensed into a powerful meditation on the star that gives us life.

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In The Story of No Emma Hammond delivers an experimental lyric that is wild, weird and full of the errata of modern life. Her poems reappropriate the language of brands, pornography and instant messaging, and argue for Carry On films and Wotsits as the true subjects of poetry. The shifts of register and voice alone range from the breathtaking to the disconcerting in this stunning and complex second collection.

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The Sun is our neighbourhood star, igniting the imagination and setting the template for divinity. But in reality, it is crawling with sunspots of differing shapes, sizes, and power. Simon Barraclough (Poet in Residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory) is your guide to the Sun in this ambitious and energetic new collection of poems, fusing science and literature, and channelling Shakespeare, Byron, Nabokov and more. Is the Sun a god, a man, a woman, or simply a giant ball of hydrogen? Why does it tell fibs about its favourite painters? Is the Sun afraid of dying? Does it get depressed? And what does it really think about us, and the solar system it is bound to care for? In Sunspots fact, fiction, horror, humour and joy are condensed into a powerful meditation on the star that gives us life.

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A piano is thrown from the top of an East London tower block. A Goth is sick on the bus.Crises, curses and kisses punctuate this new book of poetry by Tim Wells. Written from the edges of the city, Wells' tightly honed poems satirise the slide towards a world of frustration, gentrification and heavy manners. Sometimes hilarious, often angry and always decisive, Everything Crash is a fierce examination of love, loss and the politics of modern living. This is poetry that challenges austerity and pretension with a cutting wit."Sharp, witty and ultimately unforgiving in all the right places"PHILL JUPITUS

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Co-editor Tom Chivers was born in 1983 in South London. A poet, publisher and independent arts producer, his books include How to Build a City (Salt Publishing, 2009), The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009) and, as editor, City State: New London Poetry and Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2009 & 2012). In 2009 he presented a documentary for BBC Radio 4. His poem 'The Event' was animated by artist Julia Pott for Channel 4 television and has been viewed over 80,000 times online. Tom is currently writing a book of creative non-fiction entitled London Clay: Journeys into the Deep City. Co-editor Martin Kratz lives and writes in Manchester. He collaborates regularly with the composer Leo Geyer, and their piece Sedna won the 2011 Rosamund Prize. The opera The Mermaid of Zennor was described by the Times as an 'imaginative and beautifully shaped take on the Cornish legend'. 'The Dancing Bear' and 'The Bearded Lady' from the song cycle Sideshows, won the Philip Bates Prize for Composers and Songwriters. 2014 sees the premiere of three new collaborations: the complete performance of Sideshows, the opera Glasstown, and the ballet The Fox, to be performed at Sadler's Wells. Martin is currently writing a PhD on contemporary poetry and the sense of touch.

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Forms of Protest collects together for the first time the work of Hannah Silva, a poet known for her fearless and wholly original vocal performances. These poems and experimental texts oscillate between sense and nonsense, meaning and music, deconstructing traditional discourse and always testing the limits of language to represent the lived world.Ranging in form from sound poems to collaged spam email, from monologues to lists of insults, and embracing subjects as diverse as war, sexuality and giant squid, Silva's poetry is like nothing else you've read.Hannah Silva is a poet and playwright. She has performed internationally and throughout the UK, including at Latitude Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe and on Radio 3. Her solo show Opposition toured in 2011-12 and was described in a five-star review by What's on Stage as "radical, political, courageous". Her writing has been published in the anthologies Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2012; ISBN 9781908058010) and Dear World & Everyone In It (Bloodaxe Books, 2013; ISBN 9781852249496). She lives in Plymouth.

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Oliver Dixon was born in Sussex and, excepting periods travelling in Europe and Asia, has lived most of his adult life in London. He is a specialist teacher for students with learning disabilities. His poems and reviews have appeared in PN Review, The London Magazine, The Wolf, Frogmore Papers, Long Poem Magazine, Blackbox Manifold, Gists & Piths and New Welsh Review. He blogs at Ictus (oliverdixon1.blogspot.com). Human Form is his first book.

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Reader's nomination for Guardian First Book Award 2013Anchors, shipwrecks, whales and islands abound in this first collection by young Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien. Trévien's is a surreal vision, steeped in myth and music, in which everything is alive and – like the sea itself – constantly shifting form. Fishermen become owls; a woman turns into a snake, while another gives birth to a tree; a glow-worm might become a wasp or 'a toy on standby'.Struck through with brilliant, sometimes sinister imagery reminiscent of Pan's Labyrinth or an Angela Carter novel, The Shipwrecked House is a lyrical and hallucinatory debut from a poet featured in Salt's Best British Poetry 2012.Claire Trévien was born in Brittany. Her pamphlet Low-Tide Lottery was published by Salt in 2011. Her work also appears in the recent anthologies Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt, 2012) and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon, 2012). She is the editor of Sabotage Reviews and the co-organiser of Penning Perfumes, a creative collaboration between poets and perfumers, featured in the Guardian (June 2012) and the Financial Times (August 2012). She is currently in the fourth year of a PhD at Warwick University.

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Love / All That /& OK, an anti-confessional by experimental British poet Emily Critchley, brings together a diverse range of work previously published in chapbooks since 2004, and includes new material from the sequences 'Poems for Luke', 'The Sonnets' and 'Poems for Other People'.

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From urban sketches of London and warped love poems to a paean to the Boston Tea Party and a letter to an American in Afghanistan, Metrophobia establishes a poetry that is inventive, quirky and packed with humour.Metrophobia, n.Fear or hatred of poetryStephanie Leal's satirical verses, visual poems and prose chunks gnaw at the edges of pop culture and the everyday. Her language twists and turns in unexpected ways, revealing a bold new writer ready to 'french kiss life square in the mouth'."A searching and resourceful imagination is at work here, seeking new perspectives with vitality and insight."Penelope Shuttle"Leal [is] playful, experimental, questioning of 'poetry' as a specialised, rarefied state enjoyed only by sensitive types, her poems with a touch of theatre and bravura."George Szirtes"These poems are an alternative news broadcast from a young American correspondent abroad in the world. Contained within them are many of the domestic and emotional snippets which CNN will never give you."Martin Newell"The poems turn familiar tropes and warp them into new, peculiar shapes; the one-night stand becomes a defiant one, stories of her grandfather take a hallucinatory turn. Stephanie Leal's world is one where preconceived ideas unravel suddenly, leaving a strange and unfamiliar territory behind them. [...] She is neither militant nor fawning – a struck bell that demonstrates a romantic but pragmatic spirit."Andrew SpraggStephanie Leal is originally from New Jersey, USA. She received her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2007 and is studying for her PhD in Philosophy. She currently lives in Norwich.

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An escaped lion roams the streets of Essex; a lonely pensioner holds a tower block fete; and a young woman dreams of leaving home. Travel the unfashionable A-roads and commuter lines of England -'where industry meets marsh'- with poet Luke Wright. In his stunning new collection, discover a country riven by inequality and corruption but sustained by a surreal, gallow's humour. The Toll combines the elegaic with the anarchic, placing uproarious satire cheek-by-jowl with wild experiments in form and touching poems of parenthood. In this mature follow-up to his best-selling debut, Mondeo Man, Wright captures the strain of austerity Britain, speaking truth to power and registering the toll it takes on us all.

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A woman stands at the edge of a cliff, looking out to sea and the horizon. Dancers welcome the sun in a circle of stones. A dowsing road turns without warning. A church bell. Footsteps.Old Weird Albion is America writer Justin Hopper's dark love song to the English South; a poetic essay interrogating the high, haunted landscape of the South Downs Way; the memories, myths and forgotten histories from Winchester to Beachy Head.When someone disappears, when someone leaps from a cliff and is all-but-erased from memory, what traces might we find in the crumbling chalk of the cliff face; in the wind that buffets the edge of this Albion?A skewed alternative to Bill Bryson, Hopper casts himself as the outsider as he wanders the English countryside in pursuit of mystical encounters. His journey sees him joining New Age eccentrics and accidental visionaries on the hunt for crop circles and druidic stones, discussing the power of nature with ecotherapists and pagans, tracing the ruins of abandoned settlements and walking the streets of eerie suburbs.Through a startling revelation of his own family history, Hopper turns part detective, part memoirist, tracking the footsteps of his grandfather's first wife, Doris; piecing together her forgotten history.

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Improvised Explosive Device is a startlingly innovative exploration of extremism, hate crime and violence by poet Arji Manuelpillai. In this powerful and unsettling first collection, Manuelpillai presents a vision of the contemporary haunted by Melville's image of the whale - the terror beneath the surface of the sea. His uncompromising focus on violence is laced with gallows humour and the surreal, framed against the mundane detritus of modern life: two boys playing Mortal Kombat; a field of old trainers; the lonely glare of laptop light; a suspicious looking package in the back seat of a van. The poems in Improvised Explosive Device emerged through research and interviews with academics, sociologists, and former members of extremist groups and their families - from the English Defence League and the National Front to ISIS and the Tamil Tigers. These complex, unnerving texts ask a series of important questions. What drives a person to commit a radical act of violence? How is that violence mediated through screens and social media? And how does the British government police marginalised groups? Improvised Explosive Device is a brave, surprising and risk-taking book; it will change the way you look at the world. "Refusing glib analysis and easy answers, Improvised Explosive Device is a work of radical empathy, fuelled by honesty and compassion, both for those stirred to violence against minorities, and those who suffer from it." Rishi Dastidar "The project of Arji Manuelpillai's Improvised Explosive Device leans into the mighty disciplines of poetry, sociology, and reportage to formulate an arresting debut which contests the ways we're conditioned to internalise notions of terrorism, nationalism and belonging...a bold and startling new work." Anthony Anaxagorou

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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST SINGLE POEM* From the mercurial mind of award-winning poet John McCullough comes his darkest and most experimental book to date. Panic Response puts personal and cultural anxiety under the microscope. It is full of things that shimmer, quiver and fizz: plankton glowing at low tide; brain tissue turning to glass; a basketball emerging from the waves, covered in barnacles. These are poems of uncertainty but also of hope, which move beyond the breathlessness of panic towards luminescence and solidarity.

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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION* *A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation* Seaweed and sunburn. The death of a fridge. A 'pie-faced' St George upstaged by the horse. The English Summer confronts the illusions and paradoxes of history in poems that reimagine medieval anchorites and 18th-century follies, zombies and the Megabus. This is a landscape populated by overcrowded urban bedsits and burnt-out country piles, where ghosts of the past are sensed beneath dual carriageways and old gods emerge from rotting bindweed. Visceral and analytic at turns, Hopkins' startling collection probes at the undergrowth of English culture; a white-hot debut by a poet of singular vision.

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An Archive of Happiness is set in the Scottish Highlands over the course of one day during the Avens family's annual get-together. It's the summer solstice and theirs is a fractured family, broken by arguments, by things said and not said, by a mother who has left and a father who was left behind. What happens on this day will force them to cleave together to survive and redraw the traditional bonds of family. * Longlisted for the 2020 Highland Book Prize* "This is such a big-hearted, intricate and compelling novel: it is as robust and delicate as the landscapes it inhabits. Reeder tells a story of loss, fracture and repair, every sentence infused with both clear-sightedness and love." -Jenn Ashworth "An Archive of Happiness is a poignant, multi-layered exploration of family relationships brilliantly revealed. A haunting story told in exquisite prose." - Ruth Hogan

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Headstones are sliding earthwards. An urban fox forages for slugs. A jogger disappears into a forest of sycamores as high-rise blocks glister with the last of the sun. Follow Chris McCabe into the nocturnal world of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in search of the lost and forgotten poets of the East End. In The East Edge, McCabe leaves the safety of streetlights behind and walks in the footsteps of William Morris and W.G. Sebald through one of London's most enigmatic Victorian cemeteries. Stealing through the shadows, McCabe discovers stories of maritime disasters and the war dead, veers off the path with contemporary poet Stephen Watts, and trawls the archives to uncover one of London's overlooked mavericks, the career criminal-turned-poet William 'Spring' Onions. McCabe's lyrical prose and trademark dark wit are interrupted by a 'disembodied essay', spoken by a poltergeist who has returned to haunt his master's house. In this, the third instalment of McCabe's journey through London's Magnificent Seven, the stakes are raised as he places himself into the foreground of the cemetery as a performer. Can the burial grounds become a space for live theatre? Will the voices of the dead rise to meet the living? What ghosts emerge when darkness falls?

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Fence is an epic of fragments that is at once beautiful and beautifully strange. In his exploration of the vast, frozen Svalbard islands, poet and geographer Tim Cresswell has created a kind of travel poetry whose taut, minimalist lyric synthesises subjects as diverse as history, politics and Arctic ecology. Echoing the mournful atmospherics of the great Anglo-Saxon elegies, this book-length poem is a powerful meditation on places that are slipping away, where 'compass gone haywire / so north'.

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In his most daring collection to date, Chris McCabe delves into the shadowy recesses of London history, bringing forth unsettling anachronisms and revealing the city as a perilous place to exist.Taking its name from the term for a female spy, Speculatrix is at once the voyeur and the observed. Fame and death are McCabe's subjects, sifted and strained through his poems' urgent rhythms. At the heart of the book, a sequence of wild, neurotic sonnets tears at the corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to conjure a visceral landscape of decay and financial collapse. Extending the collection beyond his trademark urban locale are startling poems for the loved and departed: from the artist Francis Bacon to the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Barry MacSweeney. In Speculatrix, McCabe has pulled out all the stops, showing why he is considered one of British poetry's most arresting and pioneering spirits.

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In 2013 poet Sarah Hesketh spent 20 weeks visiting a residential care home for people with dementia. The result is The Hard Word Box, a book of poems and verbatim interviews that takes the reader on a surprising and enriching journey through memory and imagination. The agility of Hesketh's poetic voice channels moments of tenderness, suffering and humour, revealing dementia as a negotiation with language and silence. The Hard Word Box is an inventive and compassionate meditation on the things that will be lost.

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PBS Recommended Translation for Spring 2013The Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf is brought to life by American poet Meghan Purvis in a vigorous contemporary translation. Written across a range of poetic forms and voices, this rendering captures the thrust and gore of battle, the sinister fens and moorlands of Dark Age Denmark, and the treasures and glories of the mead-hall. But can the hero defeat his blood-thirsty foes, save the Geats from being wiped off the map, and claim his just rewards?Combining faithful translation with innovative re-workings and poems from alternative viewpoints, Purvis has created an exciting new interpretation of Beowulf – full of verve and the bristle of language.Meghan Purvis received her MA and PhD in Creative Writing from UEA. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Rialto, The Frogmore Papers and Magma. She won the 2011 Times Stephen Spender Prize for an excerpt from her translation of Beowulf; another poem was commended. She lives in Cambridge.

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A Hornchurch Commuter / The Drunk Train / Thaxted / Get Parochial! / Loughborough / Stansted / Jean-Claude Gendarme / The Ballad of Mr & Mrs P. Cartwright / The Billionaire Princess / The Royal Wedding, 1947 / For Radio / Jeremy, Who Drew Penises on Everything / SCANDAL! / Bloody Hell, It's Barbara! / The Rise and Fall of Dudley Livingstone / Luke's Got a Joke / At 4.48am Sentinel_poet wrote: / Mondeo Man / Another Grotty Holiday / Clean Slate / Weekday Dad / A143 / The Ballad of Raoul Moat / The Meek / About a Minute / The Ballad of Chris & Ann's Fish Bar / It's Splendid Being the Infidel / Houses that Used to Be Boozers / A Shed of One's Own

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City State showcases the work of twenty-seven London writers between the ages of 16 and 36. From hyperlinked walks of Battersea bombsites and guerilla gardening projects to jagged urban lyrics and dark hymns to the East End, City State presents a confident, entertaining and truly diverse snapshot of the best new poetry from London.Featuring poems by: Jay Bernard, Caroline Bird, Ben Borek, Siddhartha Bose, Tom Chivers, Swithun Cooper, Alex Davies, Inua Ellams, Laura Forman, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Christopher Horton, Kirsten Irving, Annie Katchinska, Amy Key, Chris McCabe, Marianne Munk, Holly Pester, Heather Phillipson, Nick Potamitis, Imogen Robertson, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Ashna Sarkar, Jon Stone, Barnaby Tidman, Ahren Warner, James Wilkes, Steve Willey"We are offered London as a test case for a new diversity of means and manner, from sassy performance scripts to the solid blocks of densely disjunctive language characterised as innovative or avant-garde. [City State proposes] a central space that is also the meeting place of many edges."Philip Gross, Poetry London"City State is [a] journey across the metropolis in rush hour: a journey that by turns bewilders, delights and throws up unpalatable truths. The anthology showcases a real range of styles, from Jacob Sam-La Rose's heartfelt verse, to Chris McCabe's complex, darkly witty observations. Though diverse, the poets featured here often seem to riff around several themes that are associated with London itself: dislocation, escapism, breathlessness."Helen Mort"Performance poets are wedged side by side with the new crop of post-langpo practitioners and sculptors of sound; formalism and new narrative jostle for position with cut-ups, found poems and the inheritors of a confessional poetics [...] What seems to unit the best of the poets here is a quality of looking outward: they are aware of, and play with, the possibilities of language and form; they draw on a recognisable tradition but refresh it, linguistically and subjectively [...] There is a great deal of vitality and versatility among the younger generation of emerging poets in the country's capital."Simon Turner"Here is a good, deep shaft drilled into the poetry of the capital. [...] What I like about this anthology is its range. There are poets here who, I guess, could fit into the latest Bloodaxe catalogue with relative ease. There are others, like Nick Potamitis or Steve Wiley and Alex Davies, who are much more experimental and are carrying on the work of poets such as Allen Fisher and Iain Sinclair. And there are poets coming out of a more performance-oriented stream such as Jacob Sam-La Rose, whose wonderfully ironic 'How to be Black' is one of the many highlights of this collection.[...] A true anthology of what's going on in poetry now."Steven WalingTom Chivers (editor) was born in 1983 in South London. A writer, editor and promoter of poetry, his publications include The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009) and How To Build A City (Salt Publishing, 2009). A winner of the inaugural Crashaw Prize, he is Associate Editor of Tears in the Fence, was Poet in Residence at The Bishopsgate Institute, London, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Tom is Director of Penned in the Margins and Co-Director of London Word Festival.

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George Ttoouli is an Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme. He co-founded the Heaventree Press in 2002 and has worked in the education team at the Poetry Society. He's now mostly skint, in Coventry. He co-edits poetry blogzine Gists & Piths. In 2004 he received a Jerwood-Arvon Young Writing Apprenticeship to work on a novel, which he still hasn't abandoned. Static Exile is his debut collection of poetry.

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Featured on BBC Newsnight Review Mono-browed cousins, clandestine paperboys, murderous action heroes and Swiss euthanasia clinics jostle for position in Ross Sutherland's intelligent and wildly entertaining debut collection of poetry. Sutherland charts the never-ending urban excursions of Pac-Man; constructs mash-ups of celebrity obits; and dons a surgical mask to conduct an 'Experiment to Determine the Existence of Love'. Things To Do Before You Leave Town is a sharp, ambitious and blackly comic exploration of the end of things, where 'all the roads that lead out are really leading back in'.

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'My poor old heart, I've left its drawbridge down' Divorced, and perhaps a little bruised, Luke Wright journeys off the sunken roads of southern England and into himself, pursued by murderous swans, empty car seats, and his father's skeleton clocks. Both brazen and elegiac, these poems pull on the 'tidy hem' of responsible existence, unravelling the banal frustrations of online outrage and ageing friends, and grasping at something 'beyond our squeaky comprehension'. Wright files through the shackles of cynicism to ask how can we let go without giving up. 'Luke Wright is one of the greats. A poetic pugilist. Beguiling, hypnotic and master of the emotional sucker-punch. The Feel-Good Movie of the Year is his best yet.' - Carl Barat

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Winner of The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021 Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party. A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar. Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard's affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse. 'Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "aren't knives fascinating... and hearts, my god!" whilst everything slowly goes black.' - Caroline Bird A Poetry Book Society Recommendation

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What I Learned From Johnny Bevan is a politically charged modern epic by celebrated poet Luke Wright. Written in electrifying verse, this is a story of friendship, class ceilings and the battle for the soul of the Left.At university the mercurial Johnny Bevan saves Nick, smashing his comfortable middle class bubble and firing him up about politics, music and books. Twenty years later, as their youthful dreams disintegrate alongside the social justice they hoped for, can Nick, now a jaded music journalist, save Johnny from himself?Winner of a prestigious Fringe First Award, What I Learned from Johnny strikes at the heart of a divided Britain with wit, compassion and laser precision.

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The Book of Naseeb tells the story of an idealistic heroin dealer who dreams of fitting the victims of war in Afghanistan with artificial limbs. In this breathtaking first novel, Khaled Nurul Hakim chronicles the hero's struggle for redemption through the backstreets and motorway service stations of modern Britain to the desert and mountains of a fictional borderland. Written in an exhilarating, incantatory blend of street argot and Quranic-inspired language, The Book of Naseeb charts an epic journey like no other. 'A completely absorbing, singular book. Night journey, border odyssey, angel's-eye view of human striving.' YASMINE SEALE 'What a book - visionary, terrifying, remarkable use of language. London, Birmingham, Afghan borderland. Khaled Nurul Hakim is a writer you won't forget, and this deserves to be read.' TOM BOLTON 'The Book of Naseeb sits at the pinnacle of the contemporary, addressing itself to the particular challenges, and the people, of today. It is a profound contemplation of human struggle, and remarkably impressive.' Daniel Baksi, The Arts Desk

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From the late 15th century onwards, a flurry of voyages were made into the North Atlantic in search of fish, the fabled Northwest Passage, and beyond into the territories purely imaginary. Today, this vast expanse is crisscrossed with ocean and wind currents, submarine cables and wireless signals, seabirds and passengers, static and cargo ships. In her long-awaited poetry debut, award-winning digital writer and artist J.R. Carpenter transforms the dense, fragmented archive of the North Atlantic into an astonishing sea of fresh new text. Cartographic and maritime vernaculars inflected with the syntax and grammar of ships logs and code languages splinter and pulse across the page. Haunting, politically charged and formally innovative, An Ocean of Static presents an ever-shifting array of variables. Amid global currents of melting sea ice and changing ocean currents, Carpenter charts the elusive passages of women and animals, of indigenous people and migrants, of strange noises and phantom islands.

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"Beautiful Girls is not a book for the faint-hearted. The reader has been invited to a sleepover at the asylum, a night in which five-year old girls drift alone through the wards, where the mentally unstable do sit-ups when nobody is watching and where heaven is a place between "the sky and the planets" reserved for those with personality disorders. The book will be a home-to-home for sufferers and a journey through terrible night for those who've been fortunate enough to take the non-scenic route in life. [...] Mental suffering is here shown in all its nocturnal and diurnal detail: the nurses, the drugs, the lack of sleep; the disconnect from the yearned-for true self. Beautiful Girls will survive as a testament to poetry's force in overcoming."– Chris McCabeMelissa Lee-Houghton was born in Wythenshawe, Manchester in 1982. Her poetry, short fiction and reviews have been published in literary magazines such as Succour, The Short Review, Magma and Tears in the Fence. Her first collection, A Body Made of You, was published in 2011 by Penned in the Margins (ISBN 9781908058003). She lives in Blackburn, Lancashire.

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Brimming with off beat humour, ISABELLA FOR REAL sets the scene for an eccentric, multi-generational family drama that will have readers laughing out loud and giving Isabella’s performance a standing ovation.

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Three billy goats, unable to cross a bridge because they cannot pay the toll, form a car pool with The Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack of beanstalk fame to get past the rude Troll.

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