Rachel Cleverly has mastered the art of sly transgression. The voice of her debut has a knack of rendering notions you feel perhaps can’t or shouldn’t be said.
For more than a decade, the Barbican Young Poets programme has served as a base for experimentation, creative development and an ever-extending community of poetic practice. To Be Languaged Thus collects and celebrates work produced by poets of the 2023 cohort.
For more than a decade, the Barbican Young Poets programme has served as a base for experimentation, creative development and an ever-extending community of poetic practice. From the Ground to the Birdsong collects and celebrates work produced by poets of the 2024 cohort.
If language is music, it is apt that a playlist is a poem. It makes even more sense in The Epic of Cader Idris, coming from Samatar Elmi, a poet whose concerns with the origins of things and the landscape of the margins are expressed in language so lyrical that you could almost miss its politics in its own music: "almost invisible, like the ......
Don't Speak Easy is Tom Jameson's debut pamphlet. Its scope ranges from a childhood spent in the immediate wake of the Second World War to a projected future where death provides the opportunity to spin back to the very beginning of life at breakneck speed. Jameson's skill as a poet and storyteller never loses sight of the fine grain of human ......
As evidenced by a section called "for" in the middle of this debut pamphlet, Akila Richards is a poet in conversation with the world - a world that discriminates, a world that marginalises. The poems in that section make visible the quiet dignity of folk who rarely make the headlines. Versatile in tone, the impassioned protest of A Lived Life sits ......
Aoife Mannix's latest full collection begins with a series of poems that chronicle her recovery from cancer and surgery. In the wake of physical and personal transformation, the seemingly reliable constant of the outside world is in turn transformed by the global pandemic. Between these two antagonising poles of personal health and a world shut ......
Set in 1792, amongst the merchant princes and cut-throat backstreets of Liverpool, in the Palace of Westminster in London and aboard the Blackamoor Jenny - a guineaman making its sixth "African voyage" Abolition gives us the voices of people caught up in the original sin of slavery and fighting to survive it, profit from it, ignore it, or end it.
** 15-YEAR EDITION ** Fizzing with the irreverence of ZZ Packer, the time-bending antics of Borges and the layered mystery of Alice Munro, the tales in 29 Ways to Drown grip by their absolute logic and the sheer absurdity of the inevitable truths they unravel.
