Kelly Michels(The Gallery Press, 2024); £11.25, pbk Sean Scully’s oil and pastel on aluminium depiction of the American flag (‘Ghost Gun’) on the front cover of Kelly Michels’ debut collection, American Anthem, confronts and provokes its reader – the facile drawing of a gun swaddled in blood-tinged bandages in the box-section where the stars usually Read More
Sanah Ahsan (Bloomsbury Poetry, 2024); pbk, £9.99 Sanah Ahsan’s I cannot be good until you say it is a poetry collection of uncompromising vulnerability. Awarded the Out-Spoken Performance Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the White Review Poet’s Prize and the Bridport Prize, Ahsan’s confrontational and questioning poetry is Read More
Victoria Chang(Corsair Poetry, 2024); pbk, £12.99 On the Poetry Foundation website, ekphrastic poetry is defined as ‘the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture” which in turn ‘may amplify and expand its meaning.’ Metaphor’s imaginative carrying over of the qualities of one dissimilar state or entity to another, Read More
Ella Frears(Rough Trade Books 2024); hbk; £14.99 Ella Frears’ second collection, GOODLORD, is a convention-defying tour-de-force. In a form-flouting, novel-length poem framed as an email from an aggrieved tenant to a letting agent, Frear unpacks notions of ownership and autonomy. In an unrelenting pace, with bitter irony and piercing clarity, Frears lays bare the injustices Read More
Jasmine Cooray(Bad Betty Press, 2023); pbk, £10.99 Jasmine Cooray’s debut poetry collection, Inheritance, is nominated for the Forward’s Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. Besides being a poet, she is also a psychotherapist, BBC Performing Arts Fellow, and former National University of Singapore Writer In-Residence. She has published and performed her poetry since the Read More
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Fady Joudah,(Out-Spoken Press, 2024); pbk £11.99 Shortlisted for the 2024 Forward Prize for Best Collection, Fady Joudah’s seventh poetry collection […] articulates, paradoxically, the silenced and unspeakable. Comprised predominantly of poems similarly titled ‘[…]’, navigated by a narrator who identifies as ‘unfinished business,’ this collection deconstructs political boundaries from the margins, giving voice to intergenerational Read More
Rachael Allen(Faber, 2024); pbk; £12.99 God Complex is a study in toxicity, focusing on a poisoned self, a poisoned relationship and a poisoned environment. Its fascination with the darkness of its subject makes for a difficult but compelling read. Rachael Allen’s new collection is an extensive narrative meditation on various forms of breakdown—and also attempts Read More
Sarah Wimbush(Stairwell Books, 2024); pbk, £15.00 300 million years of compression dripping through their hands. (‘Boy Riddlers’) Trade union activists reading Sarah Wimbush’s Strike will recognise those turbulent meetings, the passions, pains, waved placards, and they will know both the lasting comradeship and the perpetual divisions germinated during prolonged strife. They will be Read More
Janet Sutherland (Shearsman Books, 2023); pbk: £16.95 Janet Sutherland is a British poet and a co-founder of the Needlewriters cooperative. In this her fifth collection from Shearsman Books, The Messenger House, she aims to better understand societies on local and global levels, and `why things happened as they did`. This book was created based on Read More
Eithne Hand (Salmon Poetry, 2020); pbk: €12,00 Wherever your political inclinations, in the aftermath of the UK’s most recent election, it’s likely we can agree that we have all endured a certain amount of tired, repetitive debate. In poetry, probably, there are parallels in the regularly trundled out arguments polarising page and stage, discussions which Read More