Andrew McMillan - Böcker

*Winner of the 2015 Guardian First Book Award*Raw and urgent, these poems are hymns to the male body – to male friendship and male love – muscular, sometimes shocking, but always deeply moving. We are witness here to an almost religious celebration of the flesh: a flesh vital with the vulnerability of love and loss, to desire and its departure. In an extraordinary blend of McMillan’s own colloquial Yorkshire rhythms with a sinewy, Metaphysical music and Thom Gunn’s torque and speed – ‘your kiss was deep enough to stand in’ – the poems in this first collection confront what it is to be a man and interrogate the very idea of masculinity. This is poetry where every instance of human connection, from the casual encounter to the intimate relationship, becomes redeemable and revelatory. Dispensing with conventional punctuation, the poet is attentive and alert to the quality of breathing, giving the work an extraordinary sense of being vividly poised and present – drawing lines that are deft, lyrical and perfectly pitched from a world of urban dereliction. An elegant stylist and unfashionably honest poet, McMillan’s eye and ear are tuned, exactly, to both the mechanics of the body and the miracles of the heart.Winner of the 2015 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry PrizeShortlisted for the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection

Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan's luminous anthology, 100 Queer Poems, is a celebration of thrilling contemporary voices and visionary poets of the past. Featuring Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Ocean Vuong, Carol Ann Duffy, Kae Tempest and many more.* A Guardian Best Poetry Book of the Year ** Shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards *Encompassing both the flowering of queer poetry over the past few decades and the poets who came before and broke new ground, 100 Queer Poems presents an electrifying range of writing from the twentieth century to the present day.Questioning and redefining what we mean by a 'queer' poem, you'll find inside classics by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Wilfred Owen, Charlotte Mew and June Jordan, central contemporary figures such as Mark Doty, Jericho Brown, Carol Ann Duffy, Kei Miller, Kae Tempest, Natalie Diaz and Ocean Vuong, alongside thrilling new voices including Chen Chen, Richard Scott, Harry Josephine Giles, Verity Spott and Jay Bernard.Curated by two widely acclaimed poets, Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, 100 Queer Poems moves from childhood and adolescence to forging new homes and relationships with our chosen families, from urban life to the natural world, from explorations of the past to how we find and create our future selves.'Abundantly rich and rewarding...capturing how queer poets and their work speak to one another across generations' Attitude'More than a landmark volume... An anthology that marks the present moment and ushers in a new one' Okechukwu Nzelu, author of Here Again Now

*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES AND IRISH TIMES CULTURE*After two prize-winning collections which examined the intimacies and intricacies of the physical body, McMillan's third book marks a shift: both inward, into the difficult world of mental health, and outwards into the natural and political world.Keeping his trademark breath-space and lower-case lines, but more formally experimental, incorporating sequences and sonnets, the poems in pandemonium explore the fragility and depth of the human mind - in its panic and its troubled retreat - and map this turmoil onto the chaos and abundance of the garden. Depression is mirrored in the invasive, seemingly untreatable knotweed that slowly suffocates the garden, while the sky conspires in its sudden, terrifying clarity, 'as though the root of the world were ripped clean off'.McMillan has been celebrated for his unflinchingly frank depictions of the body and sexual love, but these new poems are raw dispatches from a mind in freefall, a body in trouble. Addressing a period of acute depression, they are less about physical union and completeness and more about fracture and distance: tender, savagely moving poems which stare, unblinkingly, into the sudden havoc and hurt of this world, searching for - and finally finding - some redemption.

A SUNDAY TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2024A BBC MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024AN INDEPENDENT BEST FICTION TO READ IN 2024A NEW STATESMAN FICTION HIGHLIGHT OF 2024A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024AN i-D FICTION HIGHLIGHT TO BE EXCITED FOR IN 2024AN INDEPENDENT AND LUNATE JOURNAL BOOK OF THE YEARLONGLISTED FOR THE SWANSEA UNIVERSITY DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2025'A deeply felt and rich enactment of love, loneliness and personal triumph that leaves an indelible mark on modern Queer life' OCEAN VUONGThe town was once a hub of industry. A place where men toiled underground in darkness, picking and shovelling in the dust and the sleck. It was dangerous and back-breaking work but it meant something. Once, the town provided, it was important; it had purpose. But what is it now?Brothers Alex and Brian have spent their whole life in the town where their father lived and his father, too. Now in his middle age and still reeling from the collapse of his personal life, Alex must reckon with a part of his identity he has long tried to conceal. His only child Simon has no memory of the mines. Now in his twenties and working in a call centre, he derives passion from his side hustle in sex work and his weekly drag gigs. Set across three generations of South Yorkshire mining family, Andrew McMillan's magnificent debut novel is a lament for a lost way of life as well as a celebration of resilience and the possibility for change.

A SUNDAY TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2024A BBC MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024AN INDEPENDENT BEST FICTION TO READ IN 2024A NEW STATESMAN FICTION HIGHLIGHT OF 2024A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024AN i-D FICTION HIGHLIGHT TO BE EXCITED FOR IN 2024LONGLISTED FOR THE SWANSEA UNIVERSITY DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2025'A deeply felt and rich enactment of love, loneliness and personal triumph that leaves an indelible mark on modern Queer life' OCEAN VUONGThe town was once a hub of industry. A place where men toiled underground in darkness, picking and shovelling in the dust and the sleck. It was dangerous and back-breaking work but it meant something. Once, the town provided, it was important; it had purpose. But what is it now?Brothers Alex and Brian have spent their whole life in the town where their father lived and his father, too. Now in his middle age and still reeling from the collapse of his personal life, Alex must reckon with a part of his identity he has long tried to conceal. His only child Simon has no memory of the mines. Now in his twenties and working in a call centre, he derives passion from his side hustle in sex work and his weekly drag gigs. Set across three generations of South Yorkshire mining family, Andrew McMillan's magnificent debut novel is a lament for a lost way of life as well as a celebration of resilience and the possibility for change.

**WINNER OF THE POLARI PRIZE 2019**‘Vivid, accessible and honest, sometimes uncomfortably so’ Alan Bennett, London Review of BooksIn these intimate, sometimes painfully frank poems, Andrew McMillan takes us back to childhood and early adolescence to explore the different ways we grow into our sexual selves and our adult identities. Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that shape us – eating disorders, masturbation, loss of virginity – the poet examines how we use bodies, both our own and other people’s, to chart our progress towards selfhood.McMillan’s award-winning debut collection, physical, was praised for a poetry that was tight and powerful, raw and tender, and playtime expands that narrative frame and widens the gaze. Alongside poems in praise of the naivety of youth, there are those that explore the troubling intersections of violence, masculinity, class and sexuality, always taking the reader with them towards a better understanding of our own physicality. ‘isn’t this what human kind was made for’, McMillan asks in one poem, ‘telling stories learning where the skin/is most in need of touch’. These humane and vital poems are confessions, both in the spiritual and personal sense; they tell us stories that some of us, perhaps, have never found the courage to read before.