Charlotte Shevchenko Knight(Jonathan Cape, 2024); pbk, £13, Food for the Dead by Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a hauntingly evocative poetry collection that weaves together Ukrainian history, personal memory, and the deep scars of generational trauma. At the heart of the collection is a powerful timeline of interconnected poems, moving backwards from Kyiv in 2021 to Read More
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
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
![Featured image of […] (Shortlisted, Forward Poetry Prize Best Collection)](https://dura-dundee.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2024/10/Screen-Shot-2024-03-12-at-10.18.08-AM-683x1024-1.png)
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
Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa’s debut collection of poetry starts with a quotation from Richard Ligon in 1657, ‘For what can poor people do, that are without Letters and Numbers, which is the soul of all business that is acted by Mortals, upon the Globe of this Word.’ Kinshasa asks, how does one speak outside of what is conventionally recognised as words? Might there be alternative languages? How might one recover from ‘the void of first-hand narratives from enslaved people (particularly women)’ something that will make sense to present lives?
Kandace Siobhan Walker is a writer, artist and filmmaker with exceptional creative dexterity. In 2019 Walker won The Guardian’s 4th Estate BAME short story prize. In 2021 she was a recipient of the Eric Gregory Award, winner of The White Review Poet’s Prize, and in 2022, published her debut double pamphlet, Kaleido, in 2022.
Do not be misled by preconceived ideas evoked by the quiet artwork on the cover of this, Walker’s first full collection, Cowboy. Poems shift, build and gather, some driving home their conceit, others ebbing away into the ether. This is not simple in terms of content or of theme either….
