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After the death of his father, Raymond returns to Jamaica but restless questions begin to unearth inside him (Who I am now is something I need to remember).Upon returning to the UK Raymond travelled to Bristol, Liverpool, Hastings, Hull and around London to meditate in the places where the pain and grief of history is bigger than his own.

Through the porosity of the US/Mexico border, Freudian slippages, and toxic relationships, poet Juana Adcock interrogates what it means to cross from one country into another – the gradient spaces that inhabit the nexus between life and death, and the people and languages that sit either side of it.Ghostly glitches, the role of rivers, and the character of Lisa Simpson as voiced for the Latin American market all empower I Sugar the Bones to stand as a polyvocal display; one where revelatory restlessness is underpinned by predicaments and realities which work to complicate the vistas of the interpersonal.

Discover the best new poetry from emerging voices across the UK and Ireland in the Propel Anthology, featuring selected poems from Propel Magazine Issues 1–12 (2022–24). Propel focuses on poets yet to publish a first full collection, with each issue edited by a renowned poet, Propel offers a window into the diverse poetries currently thriving in the UK and Ireland.Editor-in-Chief: Anthony Anaxagorou. Issue Editors: Mary Jean Chan, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Rebecca Tamás, Jack Underwood, Alycia Pirmohamed, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Pascale Petit, Harry Josephine Giles, Fran Lock, Inua Ellams, Ian McMillan and Tishani Doshi.Contributors include: Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Sanah Ahsan, Isabelle Baafi, Eve Ellis, Livia Franchini, Yanita Georgieva, Elontra Hall, Natalie Linh Bolderston and S. Niroshini.

The Age of Olive Trees is the debut pamphlet by Haia Mohammed, a 22-year-old poet and student in Gaza, living through the ongoing genocide.Haia Mohammed’s poems feel to me like the most important work being written in the world today. They are staggeringly impactful in their honesty, strength and beauty. The people of Gaza, as Haia says, are different; they write poems that defy death. These pieces are miracles of language and spirit, they are humanity at its best and most resilient. — Max PorterAll proceeds from the sale of this book will go to the author, to help support her and her family.

With appearances by Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Chris Burden, Studs Terkel, Anthony Bourdain, Gene Kelly, and others, Shapero investigates themes of method acting, abstract expressionism, and the production and commodification of intense expression and raw interiority. She offers sly examinations of labor and housing markets. She interrogates the influence of artists’ material conditions on the work they produce and the culture they shape. With a cutting, sardonic voice, Shapero asks what it means to be a working artist under capitalism; which individuals are permitted earnest extensions of the self; and “whether being born is worth it.”

Jabez Incarnate is the debut poetry pamphlet from Nigerian-British artist Joladé Olusanya. Written in the wake of spiritual reckoning and personal transition, the collection explores the burdens of inheritance, masculinity, faith, memory, and belonging.Olusanya’s poems travel between London, Lagos, and New York, where familial duty and the weight of culture clash and harmonise. Rooted in the language of the everyday and the epic, Jabez Incarnate is a sustained meditation on lineage, distance, and what it means to carry names, promises and absences.Through striking lyricism and cinematic frames, Olusanya captures moments of soft resistance – men at barbershops, prayer in public, grief on public transport – evoking a sense of a person trying to navigate who he is, and who he must become.

In Simon Maddrell’s wide and bracing world, childhood orbits the voice of a distant and sometimes dangerous parent. Memories of sex parties, dead friends and estranged lovers straddle the spaces between feeling and thought, loss and fatalism. lamping wild rabbits is a brave and expansive multiverse, exploring sexuality, queer desire, memory recall and testimony. With poems that pay homage to the late Derek Jarman, to verses which situate themselves in and around the Isle of Man, exploring Britain’s colonial presence through the subverted interplay of English and the Manx language.A poly-vocal and multifaceted debut which is unafraid to confront the shame and stigma of HIV, while never allowing the poems to lose shape or pace, altering the lens to bring the reader’s attention to birdsong and the queer body in nature.Maddrell has achieved a distinct and totally convincing sound through the literary geography of lamping wild rabbits, one that gives the impression it’s been everywhere and returned because it survived.

Bark, Archive, Splinter is an ecopoetic experiment. Inspired, in part, by the commonplace book, by medieval texts, these fragments aim to bring together intimacies of wood, race, desire, via a sylvestral grammar and syntax, via a poetics of grafting.

"This is an enthralling collection of playful yet elegant and lithe poetry. The voice is skilfully woven with wisdoms of experience, first insights and deep reflection, while the subject is composed of gendered world-gestures, animal archetypes, injuries and transformations. We are so close to her, she disappears, returns again, reminding us, almost urgently, that each poem is its own kind of knowledge and knows things we never will." — Holly Pester

Set in the beating heart of Family, Rojbin Arjen Yigit's poems are both a questioning of the past and a mirror searching for future possibilities. Grappling with loss, the futility of language and the distances of countries, these poems are an accumulation of the speaker’s struggles and senses. Interconnecting locales across generations, they set out what it means to belong and what it means to mean.

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens. Fady Joudah is the author of six previous collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and, most recently, Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

In Boiled Owls, Azad Ashim Sharma delves into the kaleidoscopic terrain of cocaine addiction to explore the strain it puts on his speaker's interior, as well as family and those in close proximity. With frenetic language finely calibrated, sitting somewhere between impulse and philosophy, Boiled Owls resists common and fanciful depictions, instead turning its camera onto the spaces addiction arises from, along with the turmoil it can so often bring. Sharma’s project is not interested in stylising its subject, nor presenting it through the lens of pity. This is a collection of poetry which moves between centre stage and the fringes of addiction, never failing to ignore the nexus between mania and the road to sobriety.

In his arresting debut pamphlet, Alex Marlow asks what desire and longing look like in the 21st century. Nude as Retrospect is an exploration of contemporary intimacy examined through the lens of family, queerness, sex, and mental health. These are poems that position connection as the root of human want, while straddling the gaps between what we have and what we can get.

‘You know what they say: TODAY HAMLET,TOMORROW A SUPERNUMERARY. You knowwhat they say: today planet Earth, tomorrowconsignment to Hell. I’ve had enough’Natalie Shapero is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection POPULAR LONGING. Her previous collections are HARD CHILD, shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and NO OBJECT, winner of the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award. Natalie’s writing has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches at UC Irvine.

"what should i tell you? that feral will not enrich you. that feral will not be mastered. feral is ‘wild’ without utility. it offers nothing, and it asks for nothing in return."In this uncompromising collection of lyric essays, T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Fran Lock pulls us with her into the vortex of the ‘feral’. From medieval bestiaries to Poundland, Edmund Spenser to X-Ray Spex, in Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects Lock explores and eviscerates historical and cultural links between animality and otherness in contexts ranging across class, gender, queerness and Irishness. Overflowing with ‘strange rigour’ and a rage that is ‘tempering hope’ Lock excavates the ways feral is at once both trap and means of liberation.‘Fran Lock is our savvy sc/avenging angel, undoing the curse of racial capitalism’s stranglehold on language and meaning. Mattering out of place, Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects is endlessly errant, reminding us that writing is “a verb, not a noun,” immersive, propulsive and absolutely extra. Every line is so alive, so completely itself, it leaps from the page to flare bright & huge as graffiti on every wall until they fall.’ — So Mayer

Apricot is a devastating debut from one of the UK’s brightest and most fascinating poets, written with the urgency of someone who knows they might not make it through the weekend. Katie O’Pray’s is a highly articulate poetics, kicking against the language of convention that would seek to limit us. The improvisational vocabulary at play here engenders both a developed identity and a young identity continuously being made, as each section of the book subverts the questions of mental health practitioners with wisdom and panache. These poems do not just concern the violence of gender, of sexuality, of disability, of addiction, they reinvigorate how these violences can be understood. This is a collection of singular quality.

Cane, Corn & Gully is a genealogical and autobiographical collection which unites dance and poetry to observe, question and ruminate on what it means to adopt, perform, and pass down the notion of black West Indian femininity. Using labanotation and rhythm to analyse movement from Caribbean dances to movements carried out in everyday rituals, Kinshasa uses these motifs as a form of cartography for the poems.Cane, Corn & Gully interrogates survival, sexual exploitation, race, gender, and class and invests in a unique discourse on the violence inflicted on the black female body (historically and presently). It explores the meaning of movement in oppressive ideological structures and serves to vindicate the rebellious acts of black women past, present and yet to come.

A Disbelief of Flesh holds a grief not just for the loved and lost, but one that comes with depth of identity, of culture, of faith.Christodoulou’s affection for her Cypriot heritage is channelled through her grandmother and grandfather, through food and the walls of home, and through her mother, whom she embodies sometimes, and who becomes a worshipped figure. We learn here of a tension that exists where pain meets catharsis, making possible a transformative connection with the roots of the self. This debut is a lesson in nuanced and poignant song.Maria-Sophia Christodoulou is a British born Cypriot working as an English Secondary School Teacher, Mental Health Advocate and Poet in London. She graduated from Goldsmiths with a BA and MA in English with Creative Writing, and Creative and Life Writing. She has since been published in Nascent by Out-Spoken Press, Away with Words by Toothgrinder Press and in Ink Sweat & Tears. Her work explores her dual-nationality within her identity and her search for acceptance within a feeling and state of ‘in-betweenness’.

How do we think of ourselves as poets? How does our race, our home(s), and our cultural heritage, shape our sense of belonging, our ways of seeing or experiencing the world? How can we learn from and offer support to each other? State of Play brings together conversations between an international line-up of poets, taking place over the course of a year, to offer rich insights into these questions and the ways a life lived in many places can invigorate one’s writing. With themes ranging from the sense of home and racialised expectations, to community and language, as well as the process of writing poetry, these creative discussions delve into the complexities and diversity of identity in the days of global citizenship and cultural diaspora.‘Multiple yet singular, the conversations here reveal the complexities of poetic language as a space of becoming rather than being, of identities sharply focusing under the weight of plurality, the forces of migration and the long tethers of home and empire. This book makes a critical intervention in the shaping of diasporic writing, turns us away from the outworn frameworks to demand bolder and more imaginative ways of reading. Let these conversations begin urgent ones elsewhere about how language is made and how it remakes us as global subjects speaking together.’ —Prof. Sandeep Parmar, Professor of English Literature, University of Liverpool and Founder of Ledbury Critics of Colour.‘State of Play reminds us of the global reach of English-language poetry and poetics, whose production is not limited to the predominantly white Anglophone countries of the so-called West and reminds us of the ongoing legacies of British colonialism underlying even such seemingly neutral concepts as home, everyday life, and poetics.’ —Prof. Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry & convenor/co-founder of Race and Poetry and Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK)‘Giving voice to a diverse and multi-generational choir of distinctive voices, this anthology offers rare and intimate insights into the creative challenges of writing poetry now and the vital importance of dialogue as a free space for the play of ideas and critical thinking.’ —Prof. Susheila Nasta, Founder of Wasafiri, Magazine of International Contemporary Writing‘State of Play draws together a sparky and inspiring array of conversations between East and Southeast Asian poets situated across continents and borders. The different interactions are characterised by their commitment to exchange and reciprocity even where the poets meet for the first time only through the medium of these conversations. Editors Jennifer Wong and Eddie Tay have done a superb job of bringing together a rich spectrum of topics including nomadism, childhood, diaspora, race, belonging, the question of what it is to be creative, and all-important issues of language-choice and self-translation. I wager that no reader interested in poetry will not find excitement in this vibrant anthology.’ —Prof. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford

Trust Fall is an exhalation of loss; a lean into frailty and bodily abandon. In the language of stomach and synapse, Gee maps a path towards accepting unwellness.These poems interrogate the role masculinity, capital and love can play when imposed upon by chronic illness. As each new movement writhes with pain, is abject with grief, it also sings of a deeper beauty to be found in being loved at one’s most vulnerable.William Gee is a poet from the West Country who lives with and writes about chronic illness. His debut pamphlet Rheuma (Bad Betty Press, 2020) was selected as the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2020, and his work has appeared widely in publications including Poetry London and Tentacular and on BBC Radio 4.

sad thing angry is an expression of the inexpressible: the fracturing of a relationship with living.In this unique and brilliant debut, Emma Jeremy finds new language to navigate a journey where guilt and hope, grief and isolation live side by side. In a voice that’s both daring and one-of-a-kind, these poems hold a quiet wisdom earned from knowledge delivered too early. This ambitious collection hums with complex feeling, bringing into question what being alive means, when all you can think about is death.“I am a dour and obsessive person and I am in these dour days obsessed with the dour and obsessive sad thing angry by Emma Jeremy. These poems are funny and horrifying, destabilizing, depersonalizing, extremely weird, and so extremely smart. “i should have picked up a lamb many years ago / so as it grew into a sheep / i could have grown stronger,” Jeremy writes with characteristic twistiness. For this and other important regrets, I recommend sad thing angry, which, like the lamb, will strengthen you. Pick it up.”— Natalie ShaperoEmma Jeremy is a British poet, born in Bristol. She is the author of Safety Behaviour (Smith|Doorstop, 2019) and a former winner of the New Poets Prize. Her poems have featured in publications such as Poetry London, Poetry Review and Magma. sad thing angry is her debut collection.

G&T is a pamphlet-length poem, exploring themes of queerness, sexuality and desire. Told through a series of anonymous encounters and relationships with older men, G&T moves between the anonymity of the early hours and the cold light of day. Taking us through drug and alcohol-fuelled nights with strangers, the poem questions the nature of desire, addiction and the sprawling and anonymous world of gay hookup culture, asking what we become when we agree to play roles for the benefit of other people.

In Lasagne, acclaimed poet Wayne Holloway-Smith moves between internal and external landscapes with pace, panache and vulnerability. This short collection of poems is a defibrillator resurrecting a small part of the universe at each new twist: a silent scream rearranging the flowers in a window, the miracle of a near-dead cow sprung back to life and feeding orphans, tears coming at the speed of cars. When these poems hit, you hardly see it coming.

54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father is the second pamphlet by British-born Irish poet Joe Carrick-Varty.“Atmospheric, suffused with the blue light of other people’s televisions, these poems, while often devastating, possess a tremendous warmth. Carrick-Varty takes an object/a loved one/a particular moment in time and carefully turns it over and over in his hands. This pamphlet is open-hearted, thoughtful — painfully, beautifully alive to the world and its strange specifics" — Ella Frears"Joe Carrick-Varty's poems don't need permission from anybody. Their exceptional and beautiful vulnerability is a permission all of its own. Each poem contained here demonstrates a mind completely awake to the sadnesses and risks of intimacy, and awake to finding an original vocabulary for articulating these things. A brilliant short collection. I'm utterly convinced of this poet's talent." —Wayne Holloway-Smith

The innovative debut collection from Adam Kammerling, Seder is an archived and deft account of a person reckoning with their heritage and family history. Hybrid, dexterous and informed, Kammerling retraces his Jewish heritage back to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, as poems fluctuate through time and space, leaving us with a forbidding sense that what has changed over recent decades is not enough.

A lesbian relationship tries to survive berzerk love, while rage swells in gas stations and living rooms around them; erupting into nationwide revolution. Set in Lebanon, this collection of poems studies the symbiotic relationship between tenderness and violence at every layer of the characters' lives, from intimacy to uprising. A fictionalised retelling of Luxx’s time in Beirut during the current crisis as a British Syrian lesbian woman, the book is written in forms typical to the region including the qasida and ghazal. Powerful, dynamic and uncompromising.

An examination of solitude and absence, the poems within this collection grapple with the reality and taboo of loneliness pitted against an anxiety of connecting. Exploring human relationships, breakdown in communication, and silence – self-inflicted or otherwise – the poems give voice to the fears and experiences that shape us, and interrogate the ways in which we process and avoid. Frecknall’s leaps of surreality, extreme empathy and vivid imagery make Somewhere Something is Burning a compelling joyride of a read.