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.
Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers is the first major anthology of UK-based writers of Latin American heritage, a new vanguard in British literature. Their work carries a sly political edge, channelling the rich mythology and scope of Latin American literature, but carrying a uniquely British gene - a bit of banter, a flash of restrained cheek.
'Deluge', as with Charlotte Ansell's previous books - 'you were for the poem' and 'After Rain' - displays an unerring emotional honesty. Confronting therapy, family, as well as social shifts like gentrification, Charlotte draws perspective from the community she lives in and distils it into the poems that make up this stunning collection.
The poems in A Quickening Star are brought into increasingly vivid focus line-by-line, each line like a frame in a well-crafted film opening sequence. This loaded narrative quality of Sue Morgan's work is particularly evident in the short but harrowing 'Forced Entry', which begins with "The click-tick/ of a cockroach on a dark ceiling" and ......
A Suburb of Heaven is based on Stanley Spencer's work and the part-imagined life of Anna O, patient zero of psychoanalysis. Spencer's predilection for using Biblical scenes in a rural context carries a narrative impetus that Pnina Shinebourne builds on, and she deftly invents Anna O's history, complete with music notes and linguistic asides.
The poems in Katie Hale's Breaking the Surface are populated with totems of our wild, essential truths- from the raven bearing witness to death, to the wolf's dark appetite. Hale interrogates desire in its different forms and unpicks the seams of myths, folktales and fairy stories, offering them up with new life. A self-assured debut.
The Sideways for It is a tour de force of poetic invention. Crafted to read as the eye leads, the poems are experienced both as commentary and personal engagement. Ian's work draws us into 'the silence of space,' urges us to observe the bridge cupping its shadow 'like a lover,' and the 'delicate proboscis of the moth'.
Peter Ebsworth is a poet in love with the stage. Enlisting heavyweights such as Sarah Kane and Samuel Beckett to Sticky Vicky, the veteran Benidorm erotic entertainer, as extras, his debut collection, Krapp's Last Tape, shows him to be a true connoisseur of high and low culture.
