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.
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.
Aoife Mannix's latest full collection begins with a series of poems that chronicle her recovery from cancer and surgery. In the wake of physical and personal transformation, the seemingly reliable constant of the outside world is in turn transformed by the global pandemic. Between these two antagonising poles of personal health and a world shut ......
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 ......
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.
Miriam Nash's debut, 'Small Change,' is a document of transitions. In language that is at once rural, urban, shocking and gentle, she chronicles a compelling portrait of modern life - a global conundrum in which even love learns to stretch beyond time-zones.
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 ......
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 ......
