Böcker i Salt Modern Poets-serien

Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. These poems are clear, direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery, but head right for the heart of shame, laying bare the terrors of parenting, loss, regret, and falling in love with the wrong people.

A poem sequence that interweaves scenes and stories in a soundtrack that sweeps through modern Los Angeles. A cop and a hooker become a lover and a beloved, who, line by line, scene by scene, reveal their affair in a bitter script that tours the city streets, taking in actresses and immigrants, beauty school students, dreamers and discontents.

Peterkin explores the expectations and limits of being human with lashings of wit and sometimes a disquieting note of threat. Mad cap, extravagant, urban and questioning, this is a collection no one will forget.

In this powerful debut collection, Shamshad Khan struts with attitude from the poetic to the polemic; side stepping from the satirical towards the spiritual. She has a keen awareness of rhythm and the spoken word. With wickedly simple language she explores themes of power, loss, identity and love.

From Ovid's Rome to the blood-soaked trenches of Gallipoli, The Word for Sorrow, brings new resonance to ancient grief. Its powerful and spellbinding poems give voice to the universal suffering of exile, war or grief, celebrating the enduring common humanity that binds us across countries and over all the centuries.

Luxe is a magnificent spree in a bric-a-brac shop. A haul of pre-loved and glittering objets - pralines in a crystal bowl, a handful of tame ladybirds, a portrait in vinyl and cola-cubes - are artfully displayed on the poems' shelves to represent the conflicts and connections of a fabulous circle of friends and lovers, those real, remembered and imagined.

The poems in More Shadow Than Bird are imagistic narratives of emotional situations that offer not the story of a life, but of the consciousness accompanying the life lived.

The Mystic and The Pig Thief is, in part, an elegy. It is also a book about the pain of being imperfectly assimilated, a book about being torn between the culture you come from and the society you're obliged to live in; a book about being pulled both ways while belonging to neither camp.

Semmens' new collection is a loosely structured sequence of surreal fantasies in which famous figures from (mostly) the past - sometimes singly, sometimes in unlikely pairings - make incongruous, anachronistic appearances in modern settings and situations.

The Meanwhile Sites is a book about development sites and their relationships with people, and the oppositions of marginality against mainstream, renewability against finitude, utility against intangible value, and the changing forms of physical, cultural and psychological landscapes in a post-industrial age.

Formally-innovative, comic, surreal and deeply poignant - Evans's poetry is a restless delight as he tackles almost anything: lost invoices, hearing aids, fruit flies, migration, bin lorries, road signs and love's strains and pleasures.

The Death Poems: Songs, Visons, Meditations explores death in a range of forms - celebratory, visionary and contemplatively.

Sing Me Down From the Dark explores the highs and lows of a ten-year sojourn in Japan, two international marriages, a homecoming, and the struggles of cross-cultural relationships. It is full of light and dark, as if the writer herself has been 'caught off guard' in the making of these poems.

Tackling the loss of the poet's mother - as well as themes of motherhood, birth, death and marriage - this poignant collection explores how we grieve and remember those we love.