Breathe explores Fidel Castro-era Cuba; in nine stunning stories, Segal captures a fast-fading era with emotional brushstrokes. A beautiful example is the penultimate story, Leaving Cuba, with its haunting closing image of Havana's night sky; an eloquently rendered a tale of the lives of everyday Cubans: whichever path one takes, something is ......
Drawn from Agnes Agboton's two Spanish collections in a single volume for the first time ever, Voice of the Two Shores was originally written in Gun, a language of Benin, the musicality of which is faithfully reproduced through the net of two translations. Many of the poems are rooted in Benin, while others confront the absence of the living ......
Rachel Cleverly has mastered the art of sly transgression. The voice of her debut has a knack of rendering notions you feel perhaps can’t or shouldn’t be said.
Don't Speak Easy is Tom Jameson's debut pamphlet. Its scope ranges from a childhood spent in the immediate wake of the Second World War to a projected future where death provides the opportunity to spin back to the very beginning of life at breakneck speed. Jameson's skill as a poet and storyteller never loses sight of the fine grain of human ......
As evidenced by a section called "for" in the middle of this debut pamphlet, Akila Richards is a poet in conversation with the world - a world that discriminates, a world that marginalises. The poems in that section make visible the quiet dignity of folk who rarely make the headlines. Versatile in tone, the impassioned protest of A Lived Life sits ......
ARTICULATIONS FOR KEEPING THE LIGHT IN is an anthology of the work of the 2022 Barbican Young Poets (BYP) cohort. In a dazzling array of poetics and forms, ranging from prayer to the personal dynamics of light, these poems continue to extend the legacy of the decade-old BYP programme and showcase the potency and integrity of contemporary poetry.
BEFORE THEM, WE explores the lives of migrant elders from Africa, unpacking the intimate details of their lives - their loves, obsessions and motivations - before the families they went on to establish. A collaborative act of sharing by poets of African descent, BEFORE THEM, WE is a revealing meditation on how we engage with the practice of ......
Written originally in Me'phaa, First Rain is a selection of poems that emerged from the poet responding to the death of his grandmother who declared to him in 2005: I will die in the days when the first rains come. The work mourns both the loss of a grandmother, and the fading away (like her sight in later life) of a culture and language that hold ......
