‘The great thing about these surreal, dazzling poems is how they follow their own, always unexpected logic and pull the reader along with them as well; beneath the luminous imagery lies a heart that will move and beguile you’ — Andrew McMillan

flinch & air is a unique exploration of Asian female identity. Reflecting on culture, politics, language and society in and beyond Hong Kong, this is a book of remembrance, courage, resilience and sacrifice. Touching on the current Hong Kong mass demonstrations, the 2019 Extradition Treaty, and the stories of her female elders, flinch & air positions Asian women at the centre of the page.

‘tender, political, simultaneously exuberant and mournful, and lovingly populated with family of every definition’ — Safia Elhillo

lisa luxx’s debut poetry collection is an examination of the tender violence that pools in all our states of wanting; from our intimacies to our uprisings. It searches the grief of our longing, from the eyes of displacement; carrying her experience in foster care, adoption, and as a mixed-heritage daughter of the Arab diaspora.

*** 2020 National Jewish Book Award finalist ***

‘A beautiful lyric collection’ — Ilya Kaminsky

“Joe Carrick-Varty's poems don't need permission from anybody. Their exceptional and beautiful vulnerability is a permission all of its own. Each poem contained here demonstrates a mind completely awake to the sadnesses and risks of intimacy, and awake to finding an original vocabulary for articulating these things. A brilliant short collection. I'm utterly convinced of this poet's talent.” —Wayne Holloway-Smith

“The poems in this brilliant, playful debut are multifarious though gratifyingly interlinked, addressing the subjects of Sri-Lankan British identity, masculinity, friendship, grief and love. The tone is sometimes satirical, but there is no hiding behind satire in Arji Manuelpillai’s work – great tenderness and beauty characterise these poems, and the poet’s voice is completely original, entirely his own.” — Hannah Lowe

In Lasagne, acclaimed poet Wayne Holloway-Smith moves between internal and external landscapes with pace, panache and vulnerability. This short collection of poems is a defibrillator resurrecting a small part of the universe at each new twist: a silent scream rearranging the flowers in a window, the miracle of a near-dead cow sprung back to life and feeding orphans, tears coming at the speed of cars. When these poems hit, you hardly see it coming.

WINNER of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2020

‘They say birds always find their way back home but home is a nowhere — a memory; a never was.’

Set in the immediate aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Irma, the most catastrophic storm to strike the British Virgin Islands, Richard Georges’ Epiphaneia stands as a collection of rich, transcendental verse. Beyond the loss and devastation that such a natural disaster brings, Georges’ ideas span beyond the physical world, asking us to consider the ways in which families and communities come together amidst such tragedy.

Contains Mild Peril is a book permeated by anxiety, not fatal threat, but the ambient manic hum of daily life. Precarity does something to us at the level of language; it shapes the ways we see and say. Our current climate – political, environmental, economic – engenders its own nervy music. These poems channel this collective apprehension in ways both deeply personal and instantly familiar. It is a collection that abounds in loss, in a sense of being lost, and in the gnawing fear of losing, yet its speakers address us with urgency. This is language in the throes of fighting back.

‘This is the book we have all been waiting for’ —Ian McMillan

Award-winning poet Pete Bearder presents the unwritten history, science, and skill of spoken word and answers some strangely under-explored questions: What is the history of performance poetry in the UK? How does emotional contagion happen in live literature? What has spoken word got to do with hypnotism and ecstatic states? This groundbreaking book explores a thriving ecology of artistry, and how it can serve us for cultural, social and political renewal.

A Greek Verse for Ophelia and Other Poems contains one hundred poems taken from renowned Colombian poet Giovanni Quessep’s entire oeuvre, including his last published book of poetry, Abyss Unveiled. The poems contained have been selected by his translators Felipe Botero Quintana, Ranald Barnicot and the poet himself to launch the introduction of both the magnificent and exuberant world of his art to English-speaking readers of poetry.  

Shortlisted for the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Award 2019

‘The Games’ is a book of play with language. In Scots and English, it mucks about with sound poetry, found poetry, computer-generated poetry, dirty poetry and others ways to blur and bust the borders of genre. Its themes are ecology, power and sex: how can you have fun in a system that’s trying to take power away from you? The Games makes and breaks rules in an effort to live a full life in a full world.

“This poetry disarms, barbs, takes risks. It is true poetry: vital, funny, humane, wrathful, pulsing and peculiar, in the very best of ways.”
— Jenni Fagan

''Songs My Enemy Taught Me' is a collection of poems themed around the experiences of women globally, but it had simple beginnings. It began with me. It began with a small child in a hotel room not wanting to speak. It began with opera, but the kind that cannot be heard. It began at the point at which I ended.

This is a book about colonisation and terrorism, about invasion and ownership. It is a survival manual, a map, a photograph, a song. It is internet at 2am. It is the way your mother just looked at you. It is the way the girl in front of you on the soft journey home just reached for her keys. It is your hand reaching for keys.'

Heterogeneous is the definitive anthology of Anthony Anaxagorou’s poetry - an extensive and revised selection taken from several previous volumes. The winner of the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award, Anaxagorou offers the reader an insight into his poetry career with work spanning from 2009 to 2016.

What is a neighbour? What makes a community? In this themed pamphlet, Hannah Lowe focuses on the urban places she knows and loves, and finds a rich complexity of neighbourliness under the extreme pressure. These poems look urgently into the future, into communities bearing the weight of austerity and gentrification, where global struggles manifest in the local. Nowhere is more at stake than the circle of home the author draws around her infant son, who must learn the fragile meanings of the neighbourhood.

Consider the name of Raymond Antrobus’ extraordinary collection of poems for a moment: To Sweeten Bitter. It’s a phrase of infinite possibility and tender worry, open and searching, wanting and volatile. And in this sense, it serves as a kind of secret refrain for us, a haunted current that charges after each line and image, each heart-fraught question (“you think you’re going / to go free?”) and tentative hope (“there is always enough time / in our lives to see / what we must see”). Here, a father laughs “you cannot love sugar and hate your sweetness” and a son reckons with all that might mean “in the scratched light” of history and the “turning / and the losing of myself.” Derek Walcott once reflected that “I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer;” these poems— in all their urgent beauty—affirm that faith, embody it. - R.A. Villanueva

How You Might Know Me is a poetic exploration of four women’s lives, connected through their experience in different areas of the UK’s growing sex industry. Examining taboos, surprising sexual encounters, the politics of desire, the vastly differing viewpoints on sex work and most prominently, the status of women’s equality in the UK today – How You Might Know Me is certainly a fiery collection of poetry from one of the country’s most exciting writers. 

Dogtooth is a book about ghosts. Not in the undead sense, but more as in the spectres and echoes of absent friends. It looks at the discomforts, paranoias and phobias that haunt a very particular cultural moment.

It’s a book about fear, about a background static of suspicion. It’s about the twin anxieties of identity and assimilation, the folklore we carry and are carried by. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the damage those stories do.

In this debut pamphlet, acclaimed poet Bridget Minamore explores the sensibilities surrounding love, loss, and the subsequent struggles we all face at some point in our relationships. Themed around a series of popular songs and a certain sinking ship, Minamore riffs from poem to poem with a choice selection of humorous and somber verse.