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 ......
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 ......
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 ......
