The Forward Book of Poetry 2021


Book Description

The annual Forward Book of Poetry brings news from the frontlines of the contemporary poetry boom. The judges of the Forward Prizes, described by the Daily Telegraph as 'the most coveted awards in British poetry', have chosen the best work from the year's UK crop of new collections and literary journals. Their selection combines fresh voices with familiar names, making the book essential reading for seasoned poetry enthusiasts and new readers alike.




The Forward Book of Poetry 2020


Book Description

Contains poems from The Forward Prize for Best Collection: Fiona Benson - Vertigo & Ghost, Niall Campbell - Noctuary, Ilya Kaminsky - Deaf Republic, Vidyan Ravinthiran - The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here, Helen Tookey - City of Departures; The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection: Raymond Antrobus - The Perseverance, Jay Bernard - Surge, David Cain - Truth Street, Isabel Galleymore - Significant Other, Stephen Sexton - If All the World and Love Were Young; The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem: Liz Berry - 'Highbury Park', Mary Jean Chan - 'The Window', Jonathan Edwards - 'Bridge', Parwana Fayyaz - 'Forty Names', Holly Pester - 'Comic Timing'; And Highly Commended Poems 2019.




bird of winter


Book Description

'Hiller offers extraordinary resilience and moments of immense, liberatory tenderness. [...] This is a harrowing book, yes, but ultimately, with its invitation to “billow forth the wrecks we hold”, with its emphasis on resistance and joy, it is a staggeringly beautiful piece of life-affirming work.' Stephanie Sy-Quia, The Poetry Review




Poems of the Decade


Book Description

'These annual anthologies of the poems in the running for the Forward Prizes remain the best way of encountering the richness that new poetry has to offer.' Daily Telegraph




The Renunciations


Book Description

An extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of Bestiary The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of “the oracle”—an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends—the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility. In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma—a home whose construction starts “with a razing.”




Burn the Bridge


Book Description

Explosive debut of author Cliff Sowers! In pursuit of finding yourself, bridges must burn.




Writing the Camp


Book Description

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY SPRING RECOMMENDATION 2021 Yousif M Qasmiyeh's Writing The Camp is an exceptional, essential collection drawn from the poet's experience of the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon. The poetry moves beyond the observational into a philosophical meditation on the existential nature of place. Qasmiyeh asks "Where is time?", crossing footprints of Derrida, "To experience is to advance by navigating, to walk by traversing". Writing The Camp is a brave and beautiful work, one which will surely be of historical importance.




Forty Names


Book Description

A New Statesman Book of the Year 2021 A White Review Book of the Year 2021 In this remarkable first collection, Parwana Fayyaz evokes events in the lives of Afghan women, past and present – their endurance and achievements, told from their points of view. John McAuliffe writes of the 'remarkable litanies, which haunt her poems' occasions' and the title poem, with which she won the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, is such a litany, conjuring and commemorating. The poems are not judgmental: they witness. The reader infers the contexts. As well as the human stories there is a spectacular landscape, unfamiliar villages and cities, and a rich history which the Western press in reporting contemporary news foreshortens and diminishes. 'Storytelling has a long tradition in Afghan culture. Stories are passed down orally. Every woman even or especially those who are illiterate knows and has memorized a few important stories – to share [...] I grew up among women who never went to school – my grandmothers, my mother, my aunts.' As the poet grew away from that tradition, in which patience was the chief virtue, she lost patience and began her resistance, their resistance, in her poems which hover between cultures and languages, thinking in one and understanding in another. Each language has its history and value systems: 'it was learning English that gave me my voice as a poet, enabling me to distance myself as well as to comprehend the connection with the tradition I was brought up in.'




The Best American Poetry 2021


Book Description

The 2021 edition of the leading collection of contemporary American poetry is guest edited by the former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, providing renewed proof that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a choice of the year’s most memorable poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work. The guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2021 is Tracy K. Smith, the former United States Poet Laureate, whose own poems are, Toi Derricotte’s words, “beautiful and serene” in their surfaces with an underlying “sense of an unknown vastness.” In The Best American Poetry 2021, Smith has selected a distinguished array of works both vast and beautiful by such important voices as Henri Cole, Billy Collins, Louise Erdrich, Nobel laureate Louise Glück, Terrance Hayes, and Kevin Young.




Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World


Book Description

“Mesmerizing, magical, deeply moving.” —Elif Shafak Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers immersive reflections on fifty powerful poems. In the tumult of our contemporary moment, poetry has emerged as an inviting, consoling outlet with a unique power to move and connect us, to inspire fury, tears, joy, laughter, and surprise. This generous anthology pairs fifty illuminating poems with poet and podcast host Pádraig Ó Tuama’s appealing, unhurried reflections. With keen insight and warm personal anecdotes, Ó Tuama considers each poem’s artistry and explores how its meaning can reach into our own lives. Focusing mainly on poets writing today, Ó Tuama engages with a diverse array of voices that includes Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, and Reginald Dwayne Betts. Natasha Trethewey meditates on miscegenation and Mississippi; Raymond Antrobus makes poetry out of the questions shot at him by an immigration officer; Martín Espada mourns his father; Marie Howe remembers and blesses her mother’s body; Aimee Nezhukumatathil offers comfort to her child-self. Through these wide-ranging poems, Ó Tuama guides us on an inspiring journey to reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. For anyone who has wanted to try their hand at a conversation with poetry but doesn’t know where to start, Poetry Unbound presents a window through which to celebrate the art of being alive.