Improvised Explosive Device is a startlingly innovative exploration of extremism, hate crime and violence by poet Arji Manuelpillai. In this powerful and unsettling first collection, Manuelpillai presents a vision of the contemporary haunted by Melville's image of the whale - the terror beneath the surface of the sea. His uncompromising focus on violence is laced with gallows humour and the surreal, framed against the mundane detritus of modern life: two boys playing Mortal Kombat; a field of old trainers; the lonely glare of laptop light; a suspicious looking package in the back seat of a van.The poems in Improvised Explosive Device emerged through research and interviews with academics, sociologists, and former members of extremist groups and their families - from the English Defence League and the National Front to ISIS and the Tamil Tigers. These complex, unnerving texts ask a series of important questions. What drives a person to commit a radical act of violence? How is that violence mediated through screens and social media? And how does the British government police marginalised groups? Improvised Explosive Device is a brave, surprising and risk-taking book; it will change the way you look at the world."e;Refusing glib analysis and easy answers, Improvised Explosive Device is a work of radical empathy, fuelled by honesty and compassion, both for those stirred to violence against minorities, and those who suffer from it."e; Rishi Dastidar"e;The project of Arji Manuelpillai's Improvised Explosive Device leans into the mighty disciplines of poetry, sociology, and reportage to formulate an arresting debut which contests the ways we're conditioned to internalise notions of terrorism, nationalism and belonging...a bold and startling new work."e; Anthony Anaxagorou
Visceral and analytic at turns, Hopkins' startling collection probes at the undergrowth of English culture; a white-hot debut by a poet of singular vision.
Set in the urban pastoral of an East London postcode, Feral Borough asks what it means to call a place home, and how best to share that home with its non-human inhabitants. Meryl Pugh reimagines the wild as 'feral', recording the fauna and flora of Leytonstone in prose as incisive as it is lyrical. Here, on the edge of the city, red kite and parakeets thrive alongside bluebell and yarrow, a muntjac deer is glimpsed in the undergrowth, and an escaped boa constrictor appears on the High Road. In this subtle, captivating book - part herbarium, part bestiary and part memoir - Pugh explores the effects of loss, and lockdown, on human well-being, conjuring the local urban environment as a site for healing and connection.'A subtle, heartfelt and affecting book about home, the city and the self -- Pugh reminds us that nowhere, however urban, is without nature; that wherever we go, the intricate web of life continues to shape and change us.' Rebecca Tamas
SJ Fowler has Enemies. And the Enemies of his Enemies are his friends. This groundbreaking, multi-disciplinary collection is the result of collaborations with over thirty artists, photographers and writers - each imbued with the energy, innovation and generosity of spirit that has become Fowler's calling card as a poet.
Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place.From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things.'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut...The language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' - Luke Kennard'Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut...With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.' - Martha Sprackland'Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.' - Nick Jensen'Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard-to-pin-down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects' international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.' - Will Burns
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST SINGLE POEM*From the mercurial mind of award-winning poet John McCullough comes his darkest and most experimental book to date. Panic Response puts personal and cultural anxiety under the microscope. It is full of things that shimmer, quiver and fizz: plankton glowing at low tide; brain tissue turning to glass; a basketball emerging from the waves, covered in barnacles. These are poems of uncertainty but also of hope, which move beyond the breathlessness of panic towards luminescence and solidarity.
The Sun is Open sifts through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of the author's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. This startlingly innovative debut attempts to decode the fragments left behind and, with them, piece together a history and a life.
A Poetry Book Society RecommendationLuke Kennard recasts Shakespeare's 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party. A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar. Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard's affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse. 'Luke Kennard has the uncanny genius of being able to stick a knife in your heart with such originality and verve that you start thinking "e;aren't knives fascinating... and hearts, my god!"e; whilst everything slowly goes black.'- Caroline Bird
Stranger in the Mask of a Deer conjures an elemental, dreamlike narrative ranging from the present to the Late-Upper Palaeolithic, when the British peninsula was gradually reoccupied by humans and animals returning from the greater continent after the Ice Age. Richard Skelton began this book-length poem many years ago with the intention of exploring the history of Britain's landscape, only for the text to transform into a kind of literary seance, involving both human and other-than-human voices. Its transforming power lies in the accumulative magic of the word as ritual. Skelton's is a mesmeric lyric, probing the edges of consciousness towards a place where 'there are always presences / always inherences / things beyond sight.''An incredibly moving, essential meditation on where we have come from, where we are, and where we are headed.'Kerri n Dochartaigh
In Heavy Time psychogeographer Sonia Overall takes to the old pilgrim roads, navigating a route from Canterbury to Walsingham via London and her home town of Ely. Vivid in her evocation of a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall's secular pilgrimage elevates the ordinary, collecting roadside objects - feathers, a bingo card, a worn penny - as relics. Facing injury and interruption, she takes the path of the lone woman walker, seeking out 'thin places' where past and present collide, and where new ways of living might begin. 'It is a talisman of a book. Heavy Time doesn't just describe a pilgrimage, it becomes one, for both writer and reader. It is an invitation to resist 'busyness', to think of ourselves as explorers, to seek out 'the everyday divine'. It has sent me out looking for 'thin places: pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through.' Beautiful and essential.'- Helen Mortn Heavy Time psychogeographer Sonia Overall takes to the old pilgrim roads, navigating a route from Canterbury to Walsingham via London and her home town of Ely. Vivid in her evocation of a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall's secular pilgrimage elevates the ordinary, collecting roadside objects - feathers, a bingo card, a worn penny - as relics. Facing injury and interruption, she takes the path of the lone woman walker, seeking out 'thin places' where past and present collide, and where new ways of living might begin. 'It is a talisman of a book. Heavy Time doesn't just describe a pilgrimage, it becomes one, for both writer and reader. It is an invitation to resist 'busyness', to think of ourselves as explorers, to seek out 'the everyday divine'. It has sent me out looking for 'thin places: pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through.' Beautiful and essential.'- Helen Mort
A remarkable new book in praise of marine fauna. Of Sea takes the form of a poetic bestiary of creatures living beneath, beside and above the water: in wetlands, salt marshes and the intertidal zone. In a sequence of 46 poems, Burnett captures the world of cockles and clams, rare moths and the humble earwig (to name a few) with a precise and dynamic lyric that seems always on the verge of music. 'Burnett is one of the UK's most original poets of the nonhuman world, and of our environmental moment. Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance.'- Rebecca Tams
Divorced, and perhaps a little bruised, Luke Wright journeys off the sunken roads of southern England and into himself, pursued by murderous swans, empty car seats, and his father's skeleton clocks.
An Archive of Happiness is set in the Scottish Highlands over the course of one day during the Avens family's annual get-together. It's the summer solstice and theirs is a fractured family, broken by arguments, by things said and not said, by a mother who has left and a father who was left behind.
Plastiglomerate finds our world in the midst of environmental disaster: from plastic pollution and wrecked shipping to fires in the Amazon rainforest. It completes a trilogy of poetry books that examines mankind's impact on the earth.
In this breathtaking first novel, Khaled Nurul Hakim chronicles the hero's struggle for redemption through the backstreets and motorway service stations of modern Britain to the desert and mountains of a fictional borderland.
A young woman spends a month taking the waters at a thermal water-based rehabilitation facility in Budapest. On her return to London, she attempts to continue her recovery using an 80 pound inflatable blue bathtub.
Bodypopping Belgians and bicycle couriers populate a world of public fountains and archaeological debris in this original and eclectic collection by James Wilkes.
Static Exile is a powerful and meditative debut collection which combines acute political observation with caustic humour.
We all want something to believe in. It's 1987 and Frankie Vah gorges on love, radical politics, and skuzzy indie stardom. But can he keep it all down? Following the multi award-winning What I Learned From Johnny Bevan, Luke Wright's second verse play deals with love, loss and belief, against a backdrop of grubby indie venues and 80s politics.
At once erudite, humourous and stylishly contemporary, Sarah Hesketh's debut collection invokes a world of frozen lakes, 'snow-spun streets' and people who have stayed too long.
City State showcases the work of twenty-seven London writers between the ages of 16 and 36. From hyperlinked walks of Battersea bombsites and guerilla gardening projects to jagged urban lyrics and dark hymns to the East End, City State presents a confident, entertaining and truly diverse snapshot of the best new poetry from London.
"None of this is the city. All of it is you," writes Siddhartha Bose in his new book of experimental poetry - Digital Monsoon. In his follow-up to the acclaimed debut Kalagora, Bose proposes the poet as a twenty-first century beatnik, a ravenous language machine eating up the margins of the city.
Anchors, shipwrecks, whales and islands abound in this first collection by Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trevien. These poems are sketches, lyrics, dreams, and experiments in language as sound. Trevien's is a surreal vision, steeped in myth and music, in which everything is alive and - like the sea itself - constantly shifting form.
Both human and humane, Oliver Dixon's debut collection maps a city and its inhabitants - from starlings and plane trees to a Stockhausen-listening street cleaner. But Human Form is as much a reflection on an interior world on the cusp of change; a search for form, combining elegantly crafted lyrics with prose poetry and fractured texts.
Love / All That /& OK, an anti-confessional by experimental British poet Emily Critchley, brings together a diverse range of work previously published in chapbooks since 2004, and includes new material from the sequences 'Poems for Luke', 'The Sonnets' and 'Poems for Other People'.
Where can the poem go in the age of the supercomputer? What do Wordsworth, Byron and British rapper Roots Manuva have in common? Would Emily Dickinson have preferred Facebook or Twitter? Does the future look - Oulipian? Is slam poetry any good, and what is "post-avant" anyway?
Logan Dankworth, columnist and Twitter warrior, grew up romanticising the political turmoil of the 1980s. Now, as the EU Referendum looms he is determined to be in the fray of the biggest political battle for years. The third of Luke Wright's trilogy of political verse plays looks at trust and privilege in the age of Brexit.
Follow Chris McCabe into the nocturnal world of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in search of the lost and forgotten poets of the East End. In The East Edge, McCabe leaves the safety of streetlights behind and walks in the footsteps of William Morris and W.G. Sebald through one of London's most enigmatic Victorian cemeteries..
Fiery, feminist and funny, Darling, It's Me is the first collection by Norwich-based writer and academic Alison Winch. Winch combines refreshing explorations of marriage and motherhood with re-imaginings of Chaucer's Wife of Bath and rebuttals to the 'great' (male) philosophers of the Enlightenment.
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