A Portable Paradise


Book Description

This collection's title points to the underlying philosophy expressed in these poems: that earthly joy is, or ought to be, just within, but is often beyond our reach, denied by racism, misogyny, physical cruelty and those with the class power to deny others their share of worldly goods and pleasures.




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.




The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English


Book Description

Over the last few decades Caribbean writers - performance poets, newspaper poets, singer-songwriters - have created a genuinely popular art form, a poetry heard by audiences all over the world. At the same time, even at its most literary, Caribbean poetry shares the vigour of the oral tradition. Writers like Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and many other exciting new voices, are exploring ways of capturing the vitality of the spoken word on the page. Both of these traditions are represented in this lively anthology, which traces Caribbean verse from its roots to the present.




Surge


Book Description

**Winner of the 2020 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award** Jay Bernard's extraordinary debut is a fearless exploration of the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in which thirteen young black people were killed. Dubbed the 'New Cross Massacre', the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain. Tracing a line from New Cross to the 'towers of blood' of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice. A ground-breaking work of excavation, memory and activism - both political and personal, witness and documentary - Surge shines a much-needed light on an unacknowledged chapter in British history, one that powerfully resonates in our present moment. 'The verse has anger and political purpose, but a rare lyrical precision, too. The combination is powerful' Sebastian Faulks, Spectator, Books of the Year 2020 *Winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry* *Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award; T.S. Eliot Prize; Forward Prize for Best First Collection; Dylan Thomas Prize; RSL Ondaatje Prize; John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize* *Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2020*




Who Is Mary Sue?


Book Description

In the language of fan fiction, a 'Mary Sue' is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive-factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority.A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world. Who Is Mary Sue? is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood.




Road Trip


Book Description




Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different


Book Description

One of the Evening Standard's Best Non-fiction 2021. 'We knew that black and brown bodies, working class voices, women's voices, did not have a space where they could be heard - and so this writing collective was a necessary and political act' In the early years of the new millennium, poets Malika Booker and Roger Robinson saw the need for a space for writers outside of the establishment to grow, improve, discuss and learn. One Friday night, Malika offered her Brixton kitchen table as a meeting place. And so Malika's Poetry Kitchen was born. 'Kitchen', as it became known, has ushered in a new generation of voices, launching some of the most exciting writers, books and initiatives in British poetry in the past twenty years. Today, Kitchen is a thriving writers' collective, with a wealth of talented poets and branches in Chicago and India. Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different is a celebration of Kitchen's legacy, an appreciation of its foundational spirit and a rallying cry for all writers to dream the future. The collection features breathtaking new poems by Warsan Shire, Inua Ellams, Kayo Chingonyi, Dean Atta, Roger Robinson, Malika Booker among many others.




Home Is Not A Place


Book Description

‘Beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking ... A book I will return to again and again’ Bernardine Evaristo ‘Masterful ... A thing of brilliance’ Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water A gorgeously produced, hugely original examination of Black Britishness in the 21st century




100 Poems to Save the Earth


Book Description

100 Poems to Save the Earth is a concise, eclectic and engaging anthology of poems in English addressing the climate crisis, edited by Welsh poets and enviromentalists Zo Brigley and Kristian Evans and including poems from America, UK, Ireland and beyond, such as Roger Robinson, Rhian Edwards, Tishani Doshi, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and George Szirtes.




Land of Fire


Book Description

The poems in Mario Chard's first collection follow three entangled strands--a contemporary immigrant story, echoes of the Fall in John Milton's /Paradise Lost/, and meditations on fatherhood in the shadow of Abraham's command to sacrifice a son.--