Staking a landmark for the UK's Latinx community, Katherine Lockton's debut pamphlet, Paper Doll, is a tract of the unseen made visible and given a striking, defiant vocabulary. There is no smooth ride to be had here. As the poet puts it in the poem The Paper Doll Chain, "she will defy me; time after time/ teaching me how to live when she does."
The work in Chip's first full collection, A Class Act, reveals a poet very much engaged with the struggles of the working man. The poetry is characterised by an attitude of stern determination and a tender, underlying empathy that never forgets the human story behind every headline and statistic.
The question of belonging lies at the heart of Life in a Country Album: who gets to decide who belongs? "Now that we are guests in our bodies, how do we survive?" In its clarity, craft and chimeric language, this book is a love letter and admonition mailed by the same stamp. Nathalie remains an urgent and singular voice in contemporary poetry.
A Warning to the House That Holds Me builds on the milestones and mythology of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo to perform a deeply personal act of reclaiming power. Drawing on a long tradition of Somali storytelling, these poems achieve the complex balance of being as conversational as they are crafted.
Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers is the first major anthology of UK-based writers of Latin American heritage, a new vanguard in British literature. Their work carries a sly political edge, channelling the rich mythology and scope of Latin American literature, but carrying a uniquely British gene - a bit of banter, a flash of restrained cheek.
'Deluge', as with Charlotte Ansell's previous books - 'you were for the poem' and 'After Rain' - displays an unerring emotional honesty. Confronting therapy, family, as well as social shifts like gentrification, Charlotte draws perspective from the community she lives in and distils it into the poems that make up this stunning collection.
The poems in A Quickening Star are brought into increasingly vivid focus line-by-line, each line like a frame in a well-crafted film opening sequence. This loaded narrative quality of Sue Morgan's work is particularly evident in the short but harrowing 'Forced Entry', which begins with "The click-tick/ of a cockroach on a dark ceiling" and ......
A Suburb of Heaven is based on Stanley Spencer's work and the part-imagined life of Anna O, patient zero of psychoanalysis. Spencer's predilection for using Biblical scenes in a rural context carries a narrative impetus that Pnina Shinebourne builds on, and she deftly invents Anna O's history, complete with music notes and linguistic asides.
The poems in Katie Hale's Breaking the Surface are populated with totems of our wild, essential truths- from the raven bearing witness to death, to the wolf's dark appetite. Hale interrogates desire in its different forms and unpicks the seams of myths, folktales and fairy stories, offering them up with new life. A self-assured debut.
