After over a decade working as a musician under the name Kae Sun, Kwaku Darko-Mensah Jnr. makes a full-blooded return to poetry. His debut Flood Season explores diasporic belonging, the tensions between who we are and the cliches that surround our nation states, and hybridity.
When twins Afya and Aftab, along with their adopted brother Khaled, leave the shelter of a hidden valley, they are astonished by the bustle and noise of the outside world. But beneath this chaos is an order more threatening than bedlam. An army of shadows gathers, looking to break free from the navel of the world, where they have been subdued for ......
Humaning, Laurie Ogden's striking debut, moves through a storm of conflicting notions of womanhood, the body, and difference. Sometimes open and playful, sometimes dark and surreal, the poems offer up self-authorship and anthropomorphism as tools for transformation in the aftermath of trauma.
In Say, Sarala Estruch explores the limits of language in the face of overwhelming loss and attempts to forge a language with which to probe subjects that still remain largely taboo. In doing so, Say casts a slant light on the scars our ancestors carry, both those we inherit and those we choose to leave behind.
Written while the author grieved the loss of a friend who took her life after a long struggle with mental illness, She Can Still Sing is a eulogy that projects from light.
Eleanor Penny's Mercy celebrates and shuttles between the visceral and vulnerable, the cruel and and the kind. A dizzying yet finely orchestrated menagerie of dark fairytale, biblical allusion and metamorphosis, Mercy is anchored by a sense of something intimate in every bright detail. A wholly original debut.
After close to a decade focused on teaching and fatherhood, Niall O'Sullivan returns with a book of new and selected poems, Werewolf of London, a collection of sweeping, insightful reflections delivered with a smile - a gem of fluid, funny, fierce verse.
Grammar of Passage details a German family's quiet lives as they are pulled into the gathering maelstrom of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Monika Cassel's attention to detail in this debut, tempered with a deep empathy brings individual moments to vivid life, deftly demonstrates how poetry can excavate and reinvigorate history.
Portrait of Colossus, Samatar Elmi's searingly forthright debut poetry pamphlet, brims with a mix of vulnerability and erudition. Pitched between the lilt of hooyo's admonitions and Ted Hughes' eye for the natural world, many of the poems reconcile disparate worlds, cultures and identities, firing them with the lyricism of Dawud's Psalms.
