Written while the author grieved the loss of a friend who took her life after a long struggle with mental illness, She Can Still Sing is a eulogy that projects from light.
Eleanor Penny's Mercy celebrates and shuttles between the visceral and vulnerable, the cruel and and the kind. A dizzying yet finely orchestrated menagerie of dark fairytale, biblical allusion and metamorphosis, Mercy is anchored by a sense of something intimate in every bright detail. A wholly original debut.
After close to a decade focused on teaching and fatherhood, Niall O'Sullivan returns with a book of new and selected poems, Werewolf of London, a collection of sweeping, insightful reflections delivered with a smile - a gem of fluid, funny, fierce verse.
Grammar of Passage details a German family's quiet lives as they are pulled into the gathering maelstrom of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Monika Cassel's attention to detail in this debut, tempered with a deep empathy brings individual moments to vivid life, deftly demonstrates how poetry can excavate and reinvigorate history.
Portrait of Colossus, Samatar Elmi's searingly forthright debut poetry pamphlet, brims with a mix of vulnerability and erudition. Pitched between the lilt of hooyo's admonitions and Ted Hughes' eye for the natural world, many of the poems reconcile disparate worlds, cultures and identities, firing them with the lyricism of Dawud's Psalms.
Staking a landmark for the UK's Latinx community, Katherine Lockton's debut pamphlet, Paper Doll, is a tract of the unseen made visible and given a striking, defiant vocabulary. There is no smooth ride to be had here. As the poet puts it in the poem The Paper Doll Chain, "she will defy me; time after time/ teaching me how to live when she does."
The work in Chip's first full collection, A Class Act, reveals a poet very much engaged with the struggles of the working man. The poetry is characterised by an attitude of stern determination and a tender, underlying empathy that never forgets the human story behind every headline and statistic.
The question of belonging lies at the heart of Life in a Country Album: who gets to decide who belongs? "Now that we are guests in our bodies, how do we survive?" In its clarity, craft and chimeric language, this book is a love letter and admonition mailed by the same stamp. Nathalie remains an urgent and singular voice in contemporary poetry.
A Warning to the House That Holds Me builds on the milestones and mythology of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo to perform a deeply personal act of reclaiming power. Drawing on a long tradition of Somali storytelling, these poems achieve the complex balance of being as conversational as they are crafted.
