It's 1970s Ireland: Jack O'Connell saves the life of an American sailor, Troy, who repays him by unwittingly stealing the love of his life, Kate O'Rourke. Jack fights to win Kate back, but his perfect life falls apart when she dies. In the fall out, he loses custody of their son, Cathal, to his embittered sister-in-law, but many questions remain ......
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 ......
If language is music, it is apt that a playlist is a poem. It makes even more sense in The Epic of Cader Idris, coming from Samatar Elmi, a poet whose concerns with the origins of things and the landscape of the margins are expressed in language so lyrical that you could almost miss its politics in its own music: "almost invisible, like the ......
Charlotte Ansell's territory, from her debut in 2002, has been the heart. In Amittere, the heart is stripped to its connections - parent to child in poems such as Navigation and Poiesis; between friends and siblings in Dandelions and Twins; and to place. Beyond that she excavates how the body that holds a heart, perceived through lenses of race, ......
For more than a decade, the Barbican Young Poets programme has served as a space for experimentation, creative development and an ever-extending community of poetic practice. The Art of Turning Possible collects and celebrates work produced by poets of the 2025 cohort. A vivid field of questions and visions. Poems that reckon with memory, identity ......
What happens when you connect one poet to another to think about a theme? And what then happens when you ask them to create a poem together? Does poetry itself create common ground that rises above differences in background, culture and identity - a shared space that is human and universal? 26 Connections shows the results. Here, 13 alumni of the ......
"I was raging against a color she said / matter of factly / her braids consisting of an ever so slightly increasing number of strands" Yellow Things: A Family Operetta retraces a childhood of "round and rounding days" in the Texas Gulf Coast and presses onwards into the dreamy flatlands of Ohio, potentially misremembered cafe encounters in New ......
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 ......
