Penguin

Poetry as Acts of Resistance: An Interview with André Naffis-Sahely

Our conversation has covered a variety of topics and his interest in life is both present and contagious. It is quite clear André is a man with a thirst for knowledge, which brings me to ask him why use poetry as your main vehicle to navigate such terrain? He answers succinctly, ‘I have an axe to grind.’ That is followed by his infectious laughter. He elaborates by referring to the Chilean poet, Nicanor Parra whom André tells me once said, ‘a poet should be a thorn in society’s side’. This resonated with him in his teens.

The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life

It is quite often said a good book can take the reader on a journey; in this collection the journey is quite literal as we are invited to flit around the globe from Abu Dhabi to Venice, from Tamil Nadu to the Catskills. Don’t be mistaken – this is not a book simply about travelling but about perspective… the type of perspective that is born out of an itinerant life….

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars

Neuropsychologist Paul Broks combines an exploration of consciousness and mortality, framed within a personal experience of losing his wife to cancer. He warns the reader it is a ‘rambling, ramshackle house they’re about to enter’ where ‘fact sits alongside fiction’ and ‘science tangles with myth’. Acknowledging a shared human fragility, he intersperses descriptions of patients with neurological disorders who ’inhabit the twilight zones of the mind’ with a meandering series of visits to some of his own.

Rotten Days in Late Summer (Shortlisted, Forward Prize for Best First Collection)

Here is a young poet’s first collection, tracing the fallout from his father’s terminal illness and death, and which moves through the narrator’s own depression, self-loathing, self-harm and experience of bi- and homophobia….

If All the World And Love Were Young (Forward Prize Shortlisted, The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection)

From the first moment we set foot onto ‘Yoshi’s Island’ in Stephen Sexton’s If All the World And Love Were Young, we are whisked along. There is no time to situate ourselves before we are riding on Yoshi’s back through the long-distant lands of Sexton’s childhood where he joins Mario in battling against the bosses Read More

Lost Children’s Archive: A Novel (Longlisted, 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction)

In a recent interview for The Guardian Valeria Luiselli complained that we demand too little of the novel as readers or as students of the form. In upholding “relatability” and “empathy” as praiseworthy qualities, we mistake what are entry level virtues for the high bar. It goes without saying then that this is an ambitious Read More

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Shortlisted, TS Eliot Poetry Prize)

American poet Terrance Hayes’ latest poetry collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, is a series of sonnets that, as the back of the paperback declares, ‘traces the fault lines of race, gender and political oppression with a singular passion and wit.’ Indeed, this offering of 70 devastating sonnets both disarms and charms the reader. Read More

WADE IN THE WATER (SHORTLISTED, TS ELIOT POETRY PRIZE)

“If we had a vision and a feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow […] and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” (George Eliot, Middlemarch.) The US Laureate, Tracy K. Smith, in her fourth collection of poetry, explores that “other Read More

Calling a Wolf a Wolf (SHORTLISTED FOR 2018 FORWARD PRIZES FOR POETRY: THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION)

Kaveh Akbar’s poetry is captivating not only for its beautiful turn of phrases but also for its more profound musings in evocative lines that linger: “eternity looms/ in the corner like a home invader saying don’t mind me I’m just here to watch you nap”. Yet Calling a Wolf a Wolf isn’t simply a sum Read More

DREAMS AND REALITY

“What we are doing,” Tom told his crew, “is real and not real. We are living in a world where dreams are reality and reality is dreams. In our world everything starts from a dream.” This quote, from the final chapter of Muriel Spark’s Dreams and Reality, encapsulates the book’s title, and entices the reader Read More