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In Theophanies, award-winning poet Sarah Ghazal Ali testifies to women's capacity for piercing and musical exegesis and asks: what more might a woman’s body hold after it has been hailed as a vessel for the divine?Braiding the scriptures of the Qur’an and Bible, Theophanies interlaces the spectacles of gender, faith, and family and unravels the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Drawing from art and music, Pakistani history, and cultural inheritance, these poems speak back against eons to the matriarchs of the Abrahamic faiths, the mothers at the heart of sacred history.Shortlisted for The Forward Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2025Featured in Riz Ahmed's "five creatives I highly rate" WePresent 2025Winner of the California Book Award 2025Shortlisted for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award 2025"Sarah’s collection of poems in Theophanies weaves together faith, doubt, and the female body into a tight knot—one that lived in the pit of my stomach long after I had read it." —Riz Ahmed"Ali's is one of the most sure-footed debuts I've had the pleasure to encounter in many years. Wrought with precision, control, and an astute humility before the wondrous, the profound and profane, these poems feel crafted from the sum total of history, then realized at the crest of the poet's matrix of experiences. A truly fearless and tender gem of a collection." —Ocean Vuong

Dear Diaspora is an unapologetic reckoning with history, memory, and grief. Parting the weeds on a small American town, this collection sheds light on the intersections of girlhood and diaspora. The poems introduce us to Suzi: ripping her leg hairs out with duct tape, praying for ecstasy during Sunday mass, dreaming up a language for buried familial trauma and discovering that such a language may not exist. Through a collage of lyric, documentary, and epistolary poems, we follow Suzi as she untangles intergenerational grief and her father’s disappearance while climbing trees to stare at the color green and wishing that she wore Lucy Liu’s freckles.Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora scrutinizes our turning away from the trauma of our past and our complicity in its erasure. Suzi, caught between enjoying a rundown American adolescence and living with the inheritances of war, attempts to unravel her own inherited grief as she explores the multiplicities of identity and selfhood against the backdrop of the Vietnamese diaspora. In its deliberate interweaving of voices, Dear Diaspora explores Suzi’s journey while bringing to light other incarnations of the refugee experience.

The poems in Summer Farah’s magnetic debut collection The Hungering Years move between personal and collective crises. A series of epistolary poems imagine conversations with Arab-American literary ancestor Etel Adnan, focused through engagements with popular culture, from the musician Mitski, the television series Supernatural, the video game The Legend of Zelda, and more.Farah’s poetry is imbued with a sense of grief – its entanglement with migration, yearning, and return – as the reader follows the speaker from Berkeley, California to the Mediterranean Sea and onwards to Palestine. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes in her introduction to this collection, Farah’s repetitions “are more than echo. They are a vernacular of this unspeakable era”. What emerges in the sonic architecture of Farah’s poetry is a sense of devotion to the possible, to friendship and the search for existential meaning through art.

“A Holy Dread is the kind of book you want everyone to read so you can talk about it with everyone.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!A Holy Dread reckons with identity, family, and history to illuminate the tenderness and calamity of the world we make together—the beauty and grief our children will inherit. R. A. Villanueva’s poetry emerges from essential questions and fierce hopes about why we create, who we hold dear, and how we might brave "every small / catastrophe laced with joy." Inspired by his experiences as a Filipino American writer, educator, son, and father, Villanueva's revelatory new book expands on his celebrated debut, Reliquaria, with grace and intensity.Through explorations of faith and myth, experiments with praise songs, sonnet sequences, devotionals and lyric fragments, Villanueva's poems dare to reach for "all-trembling miracles" even as things fall apart around us.This edition carries a new foreword by Sarah Howe.

Winner of the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Poetry The Observer's Poetry Book of the Month, October 2026jason b. crawford’s YEET! envisions the Black community lifted off the earth and set free towards the stars.These poems ask what a free Black people would look like and how we might achieve such a thing. YEET! presents a new take on Afrofuturism and utopianism. Rather than looking to a future of technological change, it steps years ahead to show how people are happier once they are no longer owned.Speaking to racism, gun violence, colonisation, global warming, flight, joy, friendship, and noise, YEET! is about creating new worlds free from the systems of supremacy that have plagued us.

In Filling the Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic, ordinary motion and emotion are treated as political when spectacular political movements like protests, strikes, or revolutions feel far away, forced, or otherwise impossible. Threading reflections from fans, rappers, DJs, producers, and venue owners, El Zein offers new insights into what it means politically to be moved by music.Filling the Head challenges existing narratives that equate rap with popular political resistance against oppressive regimes. El Zein explores the political promise in artists' refusal to confine their lyrical or musical experimentation to an ethos of resistance.

'Her Black Woman’s voice rings true and deep and gentle, with an iron echo. It is merciless and vulnerable and far ranging.' —Audre LordeAlongside her invaluable contributions to social justice, Pat Parker (1944-1989) wrote five collections of poetry during her lifetime and is widely recognised as one of the leading African-American, lesbian-feminist voices of the 20th Century.Selected Poems collects her most loved works into an accessible volume, introducing new readers to Parker's fire for justice, tenderness, and vision for the world.This is the first time Pat Parker's poetry has been published in the United Kingdom.Readers interested in Pat Parker’s life may also enjoy The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974–1989, an archival work documenting their intimate friendship and important work as activist-poets.

Whiting Award 2025 Winner in Poetry Long-listed for the (Forward) Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2026This extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena'ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Into this "distance between the learning and the telling," Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard.Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to "decide/who you must become."

Glitchwork tracks the uneven lineages of Central India, building on modernist legacies and reckoning with the spectres of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Mantra Mukim’s debut poetry collection is situated in a timeless, forested grid, poised on the verge of industrial erasure. This grid, a restless site of extraction and production, also brims with potential for lushness, fey ambience, and petite clearings.Its three long poems consist of fragments on a mysterious Cold War ‘plant’, remixes of Surdas (the medieval-Braj poet), notes on palaeolithic hands, philology of the line, anomalies in a lunar-roving vehicle, and the origin myths of Raipur.

Issam Zineh’s debut poetry collection Unceded Land traces the lines of intimacy, loss, and colonial legacies. Zineh unearths psychological depths and interrogates geographical territories, bridging the gap between the mind and the world, the personal and the political, the poem and the reader. Here is the poetry of unknotted affect, of landscapes as primordial as they are crushed by history, of perception rooted in diasporic experience.

Poetry Book Society Translation Choice 2026'One of the greatest poets the world has today.' —José Saramago, Winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in LiteratureThis bilingual edition makes Juan Gelman’s hauntingly beautiful poetry collection, Notes / Notas, available to English-speaking audiences in its entirety for the first time.Originally published in 1979, Notas / Notes was composed in exile, following the 1976 military coup d'etat in Argentina. This period of state terrorism resulted in the disappearance of writers, comrades, and Gelman’s own son.With a deep appreciation for Gelman’s masterful linguistic play, translators Afsari and Tandeciarz channel the force of his poetic testimony against the real violence of dictatorship.Interweaving reflections on revolution, loss and memory, Argentina’s poet laureate conjures forth a sense of hope in the wake of inconceivable suffering.

Moving through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi here attempts to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood.The voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life.TERROR COUNTER asks: where and how might a Palestinian subject escape the public consumption of American letters? And, ultimately, how can we continue to love each other amidst the endless terror of the colonial world?

Tracy Fuad’s second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape.PORTAL documents a life that is mediated, even at its most intimate moments, by flattening interfaces of technology and in which language—and even intelligence—is no longer produced only by humans.The voices here are stalked by eco-grief and loneliness, but they also brim with song and ecstasy, reveling in the strangeness of contemporary life while grieving losses that cannot be restored. Through Fuad’s frank, honest poetry, PORTAL vibrates with pleasure and dread.

Essays and interviews on the cultural politics of South Asian music-making_x000D_/>_x000D_/>On the 30th anniversary of Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (1996) a pivotal book in British Asian music and cultural studies, Dis-Orient30: Music, Culture, Diaspora brings together original contributions from academic, creative and cultural workers. These essays, interviews and sound tracks take up, critique and expand Dis-Orienting approaches to the cultures and politics of South Asian music-making and listening._x000D_/>_x000D_/>This heterogenous collection guides readers through soundscapes and candid conversations on race, class, ethnicity, gender, nationalism, religion, exoticism, political Blackness, Brown sound, noise and voices._x000D_/>_x000D_/>Readers will step onto dance floors in Bangalore, London, and Los Angeles, enter recording studios in Bollywood and Vancouver, sound system spaces in Southall, play back Bengali mixtapes in London, Pothwari cassette messages in Manchester and Glasgow, tune in to community radio in Birmingham, rifle through record collections, trace samples, and hear from established and emergent artists.

"This is a book of fierce clarity and aching beauty: a record of a life weathered, a landscape unsettled, and a future pending." —Peter GizziTom Branfoot’s debut poetry collection explores nature during a time of political crisis, drawing its title from the Middle English use of ‘volatile’ to name birds and other winged creatures. Pulling apart what it means to dwell, habitat loss appears synonymous with eviction, and birds become fellow travellers in our precarious present. Produced as a part of a residency at Manchester Cathedral, the long poem "Muminent" is threaded throughout the book engaging with the earliest recorded history of Manchester to consider the body as an archive at risk of disappearance.Volatile reaches out in solidarity to the dispossessed everywhere who still sing in the wreckage of the now.

dove / Chris Kirubi's WILDPLASSEN is a finely-wrought debut collection. The weather surrounds, as subjectivity is carefully interrogated through typographic gesture and image. Thinking with Sembéne, Glissant, Nourbese Philip and others, we are ushered into a space of translation and study reflecting on dispossession, native informants and racial categorisation. "Wildplassen" is a legal term for public urination in which wildness is invoked as an inappropriate occupation of public (urban) space. This collection transfigures the borders of air, city and landscape; language, lyric and page with instability and waywardness.

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidence through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and videotapes.The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this unique correspondence in which Lorde and Parker discuss their work as writers as well as the intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. These letters are a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

In this extraordinary, passionate debut poetry collection, Jimin Seo takes up a material we think we recognize – language – and transforms it through permutation, history, and translation into a lyrical and alien terrain. Seo takes up both Korean and English, drawing them across multiple experiences of relation – none of them equivalence. Translation and re-translation triangulate to form the ghostly third other which defines every relationship of two. Fragmentation, riff, homophony, and analogy sprawl like cuttings from a plant, yielding poems that grow in defiant new directions. This is a book calling to a mother, a teacher, lovers, and ultimately a self whose elements materialise through language, even as the speaker laments what language cannot be or hold.

An estranged father. An abused and abusive mother. An army of relatives. A tapestry of violence stretching between Turkey, Lebanon, and Western Sydney.This is the legacy left to Jamal Smith, a young queer Muslim trying to escape a past in which memory and rumour trace ugly shapes in the dark. When every thread in life constricts instead of connects, how do you find a way to breathe? Torn between faith and fear, gossip and gospel, family and friendship, Jamal must find and test the limits of love.In this extraordinary work, Omar Sakr deftly weaves a multifaceted tale brimming with angels and djinn, racist kangaroos and adoring bats, examining with a poet’s eye the destructive impetus of repressed desire and the complexities that make us human.

Titled for the influential singer left almost voiceless by a terrible syndrome, the poems bring sweet melodies and rhythms as the voices blend and become multitudinous. There's an honouring of not only survival, but of persistence, as this part research-based, pensive collection contemplates what it takes to move forward when the unimaginable holds you back.

In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet’s uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society.

gestalt is a poetic enquiry of the Panchayat, a collective of South Asian and Black artists/practitioners involved in communal archiving, artmaking and activism in Britain from 1988-2015. gestalt consists of visual poetry, drawings and instructions which provide an alternative documentation of the materials and ephemera from the Panchayat Collection. It is a score for performance holding a spotlight on questions of race, class, gender, colonisation, erasure and collective memory.

Recupera is a book of interwoven essays and autofiction constellating around the complex nature of sisterhood. It follows two sisters as they recover from addiction. With a mix of epistolary form, lyric essay, and art writing, the work hopes to reach beyond conventional narrative towards something hybrid and multivalent. It is about the relationships between two sisters across Catalunya, Colorado and London– a bond which unravels and exposes its multifaceted nature through their narrative of addiction and recovery.

MAAFA is an epic poem about reparations and the female body. MAAFA undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity. Maafa has killed her father and been granted eternal life.Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry CollectionMaafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust, and echoes the Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is always in progress. Maafa killed her father in the barracoons because the sight of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero’s journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing and forgetting that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her into all manners of light and darkness. Through an accumulation of images she exorcises her own haunts, and is healed into complete being.

Gabrielle Bates’s electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book’s eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the “forbidden felt language” of sexual and sacred love. These poems conjure encounters with figures from scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild, and mothering as a shapeshifting, spectral force; they question what it means to love another person and how to exorcise childhood fears. All the while, the Deep South haunts, and no matter how far away the speaker moves, the South always draws her back home.In confession, in illumination, Bates establishes herself as an unflinching witness to the risks that desire necessitates, as Judas Goat holds readers close and whispers its unforgettable lines.The Scotsman Poem of the Week October 2025

Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?

The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder.Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction — as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognises the familiar, ever-changing seasons.Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness.Once, “desire was an arrow, but now desire / is the field.” Pinto presides over this expanse, deciding, “I have three choices: to drift through life / anaesthetised, to soften. . .” In that unspoken “or,” the merciful lacuna of that ellipsis, reside the lyrical mystery and medicine that feed this astonishing collection and strengthen resolve, both ours and the speaker’s: “The lake looks frozen, but it is not.”

A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025The Nightmare Sequence is a searing response to the atrocities in Gaza and beyond since October 2023. Heartbreaking and humane, it is a necessary portrait of the violence committed by Israel and its Western allies.Through poetry and visual art, Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed capture these historic injustices, while also critiquing the role of art and media – including their own – in this time. Born of collective suffering and despair, their collaboration interrogates the position of witness: the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively participating in the catastrophic destruction of Arabs and Muslims overseas.With a foreword by Palestinian American poet George Abraham, The Nightmare Sequence is an insightful work of testimony that also considers how art is complicit in Empire. This transcendent book invokes the power of poetry and art to shift hearts and minds; it will serve as a vital record in decades to come.

Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2025 Poetry Book Society RecommendationSomething about Living is the brilliant third collection from acclaimed poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.It explores Palestinian life through the lens of language, revealing a legacy of obfuscation and erasure. What happens when language only permits ongoing disasters to be packaged neatly for consumption and subsequent disposal? Searing with insights from the perspective of a Palestinian in diaspora, Something about Living refuses to cede ground to nihilism and apathy, taking the reader through the difficult landscape of hope and futurity in the midst of an interminable, uncertain, and often devastating present.