Bloodaxe Books Ltd – serie

For twenty years Micheal O'Siadhail's beloved wife, Brid, suffered from Parkinson's disease. These love poems chronicle the last two years of her life, her death and his grief. In Love Life, now available again in his Collected Poems, he told their story of over three decades of marriage. In this sonnet sequence their love faces illness and death and sounds the depths of parting. There is a tenderness, intensity and gratitude which will resonate with those who know both love and loss.

When R.S. Thomas died in 2000, two seminal studies of modern art were found on his bookshelves - Herbert Read's Art Now (1933) and Surrealism (1936), edited by Read and containing essays by key figures in the Surrealist movement. Some three dozen previously unknown poems handwritten by Thomas were then discovered between the pages of the two books, poems written in response to a selection of the many reproductions of modern art in the Read volumes, including works by Henry Moore, Edvard Munch, George Grosz, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Graham Sutherland - many of whom were Thomas's near contemporaries. These poems are published here for the first time - alongside the works of modern art that inspired them. Thomas's readings of these often unsettling images demonstrate a willingness to confront, unencumbered by illusions, a world in which old certainties have been undermined. Personal identity has become a source of anguish, and relations between the sexes a source of disquiet and suspicion.Thomas's vivid engagements with the works of art produce a series of dramatic encounters haunted by the recurring presence of conflict and by the struggle of the artist who, in a frequently menacing world, is 'too brave to dream'. At times we are offered an unflinching vision of 'a landscape God / looked at once and from which / later he withdrew his gaze'.

In The Insomnia Poems Grace Nichols explores those nocturnal hours when Sleep (the thief who nightly steals your brain) is hard to come by, and the politics of the day hard to shut out, never mind the lavender-scented pillow. Here memories of her own Guyana childhood mingle with the sleeping spectres of dreams and folk legends such as Sleeping Beauty. A lyrical interweaving of tones and textures invites the reader into the zones between sleep and no-sleep, between the solitude of the dark and the awakening of the light. The Insomnia Poems was Grace Nichols's first new collection since Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009). Neither that collection nor this one is included in her Bloodaxe retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010).

Staying Human is the sequel to the Staying Alive trilogy of anthologies which have introduced many thousands of new readers to contemporary poetry. This fourth Bloodaxe world poetry anthology offers poetry lovers an even broader, international selection of 500 more ‘real poems for unreal times’, with a strong focus on 21st-century poems addressing current issues. The range of poetry here complements that of the first three anthologies: hundreds of thoughtful and passionate poems about living in the modern world; poems that touch the heart, stir the mind and fire the spirit; poems about what makes us human, about love and loss, fear and longing, hurt and wonder; talismanic poems which have become personal survival testaments for many. There’s a strong focus on the human side of living in the 21st century in poems from the past two decades relating to migration, oppression, alienation and the individual’s struggle to hold on, stay connected and find meaning in an increasingly polarised world. Staying Human also draws on poems suggested by readers because they’ve been so important in their own lives, as well as many poems which have gone viral after being shared on social media because they speak to our times with such great immediacy. And there are poems from around the world written just recently in response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

States of Happiness, Suzanne Batty’s second full-length collection, begins with an extended sequence written in memory of her twin sister. This explores their relationship from shared birth to her twin’s early death from Friedreich’s ataxia, a rare degenerative disease. Suzanne Batty’s gifts of empathy and imagination combine to produce a profoundly moving elegy telling the hidden story of growing up as the “well” twin and exploring the meaning of illness and wellness in the light of her own experiences. The collection as a whole extends her range and probes more deeply her primary concerns - the uncertainty and necessity of love and the drive to find meaning and healing through the medium of language. The search for states of happiness, no matter how fleeting, is at the heart of this collection. These are poems which move from the everyday to the visionary, in which the physical world reflects changing emotional and perceptual states. Anarchic and sensuous, they fearlessly encounter both beauty and darkness, enabling a new and deeper connection with the world.

The living and the dead are working side by side in John Challis’s dramatic debut collection, The Resurrectionists. Whether in London’s veg and meat markets, far below the Dartford Crossing, or on the edge of the Western world, these poems journey into a buried and sometimes violent landscape to locate the traces of ourselves that remain. Amidst the political disquiet rising from the groundwater, or the unearthing of the class divide at the gravesides of plague victims, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest when a child is born, and something close to hope for the future is resurrected.

Fresh Out of the Sky is a book of songs, dreams, laments, narratives and comedies intertwined with passages about major life changes involving country, identity and belonging. It is about perpetually standing at the edge of change, anticipating it, reflecting on it and dreaming about it. The title sequence of the book returns to the terza rima theme of memory, following sequences in his earlier books, such as those about early Budapest childhood explored in Reel, and about growing to adulthood in England in An English Apocalypse. Here the theme is arrival in England as a child in 1956.These are wound around poems set in the aftermath of war, upheaval, and life in contemporary England as tracked by a series of dreamlike reports from the Covid bunkers we have been inhabiting. Covid poems run through the collection like a thread holding the book – and indeed the condition of England – together. The thread embraces the second part of The Yellow Room, a continuing poem of impossible questions about residual Jewishness experienced as a dialogue with the poet’s late father, as well as a bestiary of transformations woven through Guillaume Apollinaire and Graham Sutherland. The book ends on occasions of consolation, delight and joy in the midst of darkness and uncertainty.

What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue? In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his exploration of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings and the COVID-19 pandemic. With unexpected playfulness and irrepressible humour, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. Hybrid in form and set in New England, West Texas and a landlocked province of China, among other places, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency refuses neat categorisations and pat answers. Instead, the book offers an insatiable curiosity about how it is we keep finding ways to hold one another. Chen Chen's debut When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was published in the UK by Bloodaxe in 2019.

When knowledge is ours at the tap of a key, what is it we’re accumulating, and is it at the expense of another, more intuitive, kind of knowing?The word ‘fool’ derives from the Latin follis, one of whose meanings is ‘empty-headed person’. We can’t imagine such mindlessness but might it be possible that by ‘unknowing’ a thing we can start to see it properly? There’s a lot the fool doesn’t know – otherwise they wouldn’t be a fool. But can anyone be trusted to know anything? What can we be trusted to know?A certain apprehension runs through these poems; a low-level hum of discordance between inner and outer worlds, between the sceptical and the wondering mind. Ideas of belief and objective truth play out in various ways, often through lone figures, thinking aloud in a wilful kind of performance of being.Fool is Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection. Her third collection Alive Alive O was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.

The poems of Matt Howard’s Broadlands are grounded in the reedbeds, meadows and marshes of the Norfolk Broads. They are closely and thrillingly observed from real encounters, inviting us closer to the more-than-human world, its violence, fragility and wonder. Yet the human is always and all the more present; here too are poems of desire, love and grief.They are poems of the field, imaginings from the conservation of habitats restored and created, working with and for all their constituent species - for we now live in times where everywhere is in some part within the gift of the habitat of the human heart and mind.Rooted in their locale, but ever ranging elsewhere, to midwives on St Kilda, the Wordsworths and their cuckoo clock in Grasmere or with a virtuoso sedge warbler, singing in a patch of Norfolk reedbed of all the places we share, mimicking the songs of companion species, across continents, deep time and flyways with ‘the cosmic web condensed in his head’.Redefining what a sense of place might mean, the generous and intimate lyric energy of Broadlands rises from a labour committed, ‘set on this floating ground’.Broadlands is Matt Howard’s second collection, following his debut Gall (2018) from The Rialto, which won the inaugural Laurel Prize for Best First Collection and the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize.

J.H. Prynne is Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they are in the life work of J.H. Prynne. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005, followed by a further seven along with a group of uncollected poems to the third edition of Poems (2015). The decade since Poems (2015) has been the most productive period of Prynne's life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2024. To have added these to a fourth edition of Poems would have more than doubled the size of that volume. Poems 2016–2024 is therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the mostly unchanged contents of 36 texts written since Poems (2015), from Each to Each (2017) to Alembic Forest (2024), including the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022). The 26 Impromptus comprising Memory Working, originally published by Face Press in three separate editions in 2020 and 2021, appear here as a complete sequence. Prynne's most productive decade has also seen the publication of three prose works, Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 (2015/2016), Apophthegms (2017) and Whitman and Truth (2022), along with editions of Prynne's correspondence with Charles Olson (2017) and Douglas Oliver (2022). His two-volume Collected Prose is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York).

Soul Feast is a companion anthology to Soul Food, offering up a further feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit, bringing hope and light in dark, uncertain times.This book’s inspiration – Soul Food – achieved its wide popularity by word of mouth. For many thousands of readers feeling adrift in the early years of the 21st century, the poems in that book offered support and sustenance. What followed has been even more destructive and disorientating: wars, pandemic, oppression, persecution of peoples and minorities, mass migration, dishonest government, financial meltdown, and looming environmental catastrophe.Yet amidst all this there are voices of hope and healing, of love and tolerance, kindness and compassion, sanity and solace, to be heard and felt in the poems of Soul Feast. This new compilation shows how poetry can help sustain our search for meaning in times of spiritual starvation. All these poems are universal illuminations of the meaning of life, speaking to readers of all faiths as well as to seekers and non-believers.Drawn from many traditions, Soul Feast includes work by poets ranging from Lal Ded and Tukaram to Pessoa, Borges, Cummings and Langston Hughes, as well as poems by celebrated contemporary poets such as Ellen Bass, Imtiaz Dharker, Jane Hirshfield and Naomi Shihab Nye. This is a book to keep by the bedside or to keep with you when travelling.

Benjamin Zephaniah (1958-2023) was a writer and performer of extraordinary range: an oral poet, novelist, playwright, children’s writer, reggae artist, actor, television personality and political activist. Born and raised in Birmingham, he was sent to an approved school for being uncontrollable, rebellious and ‘a born failure’, ending up in jail for burglary and affray. After prison he turned from crime to music and poetry. He was later nominated for Oxford Professor of Poetry, and voted Britain’s third favourite poet of all time (after T.S. Eliot and John Donne) in a BBC poll.Benjamin was a poet who wouldn't stay silent, who didn't pull any punches, who wrote out of a sense of urgency and a commitment to social justice. Known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults as well as his poetry with attitude for children, he had his own rap/reggae band. He was the first person to record with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela, which Mandela heard while in prison on Robben Island.Dis Poetry brings together all the poems from Benjamin’s three Bloodaxe collections, City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black, Too Strong (2001), as well as some from The Dread Affair (1985), along with previously unpublished work and lyrics from various recordings.The book includes a QR code giving access to Pamela Robertson-Pearce's feature film To Do Wid Me originally released as a DVD-book in 2015 – enabling you to see and hear Benjamin performing in full over 20 of the poems in Dis Poetry on your phone while reading the book.

Lovers of Kit Wright’s poetry – for its range and virtuosity, deep feeling and rich humour – may find his new gathering exceeds expectations. Jug Band Jag is a wonderfully spirited bout of poetry-making whose forms and themes are markedly diverse, while the concern for musicality is constant. Whether, that is, he is dispensing the low-down on the Gunpowder Plot, or a ghost story from the world of dry-cleaning, or a fairy tale about ox tongue; reflecting on Hitler as artist, or tracing the frustrations of a career mafioso.He gives a detailed and moving account of the sinking of the SS Persia during the First World War, in which his own grandmother and her baby were drowned, and traces the curious history of a small Kentish coastal town. A retired classics teacher sings the rivers of hell and of course, a Deep South jug band renders the blues.Wright’s vision of the world blends the sharply realistic with a distinctive brand of surrealism. Whatever his subject and the tune that he has found for it, these new poems are linked by the quicksilver of irony and the river of humanity that runs through them.

Frank Ormsby’s eighth collection of poems is, on the whole, a playful book which constantly surprises us with serious themes. History is the word and history the image, whether as in a dream about Auschwitz or a portrait of the History Club on its annual outing. Then spirit of place is richly imagined, whether in the form of ‘Juggy’, the ‘simpleton’ sleepwalking through the estate, or the humanised tumbling paddy, both clumsy celebrant and instrument of refinement among the furrows. Elsewhere in the collection, Frank Ormsby demonstrates his skill with the resonant short poem. These pieces, mostly in haiku form, constitute a running tribute to the Japanese and Chinese poets he claims as his ‘oriental fathers’. Frank Ormsby is by turn movingly elegiac and wryly determined to allow death its dominion in the face of mortality and his experience of Parkinson’s disease.Frank Ormsby's retrospective, Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2015, and followed by his later collections The Darkness of Snow (2017), The Rain Barrel (2019), and now, The Tumbling Paddy (2026).

Twinning is well embedded in Lawrence Sail’s family: himself the son of a twin, he also has a twin sister and – youngest of his four children – twin daughters. His book's title Double Takes reflects the poems’ central concern with many aspects of duality – whether manifested in the context of human relations, translations, ‘the moment saved from time’ or the touchstone of mortality. In some instances, juxtapositions and counterpoints bring affinities to light; in others, distance and difference. A number of the poems address the political and the public: the plight of refugees, a photo of Putin beside Gorbachev’s coffin, Brecht’s take on the ways of the world. Others confront the hard consequences of illness. Most of all, these are poems that pay proper attention to their subjects, and which amount to an appreciation of beauty and balance, however precarious, as in ‘Moving Out’, where it is only being ‘on the brink of removal’ that makes it possible to ‘engage with the ins and outs’, and to benefit from ‘the startle of those double takes / which reinterpret truth’. Lawrence Sail's retrospective, Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, was published by Bloodaxe in 2010, and followed by his later collections The Quick (2015), Guises (2020), and now, Double Takes (2026).

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Come to the Cabaret - on tour somewhat erratically in the North. Sample its impassioned ballads, phantasmata, and despairing satires. The cast includes a suicidal Pict from Galloway, Morayshire's unsavoury Third Corbie, and the demented Edinburgh surgeon, Scrapie Powrie. Appearing now at the House of Fear, King Shit-Click's Palace and Bede's World. In this new collection from W.N. Herbert, the verse veers from the Whitmanic to Dunbar-like flytings, and the language lurches from Scots to English through all half-way houses. The result is a big bad anxious trip through the Information Age with one of the most various of contemporary poets. W.N. Herbert is a highly versatile poet who writes both in Scots and English. Sean O'Brien has called him 'outstanding - a poet whom nothing - including what he terms "the Anchises of the Scots Style Sheet" - will intimidate'. For Douglas Dunn, his was 'the best writing in Scots - thoughtful, studied, clever - I've seen in years'. Jamie McKendrick admired his 'vibrant' poetry, his 'ear for the sensuous music of Scots' and his 'ability to effect sudden shifts of scale that bring the human and the cosmic face to face'.

For nearly three hundred years Scotland and England were the Laurel and Hardy of nations. For nearly two hundred years The Prelude was a poem by Wordsworth. Something had to give. As Britain begins to resemble a cut-up by William Burroughs, and the heritage of Robert Burns is flushed down a lavvie in Leith, one verse-monger steps forward to do battle with (or possibly for) cultural chaos. Bill Herbert’s Laurelude is in three sections: The Laurelude is a blank verse myth about Ulverston’s Idiot Boy, Stan Laurel. Othermoor depicts a cubist version of the North where the Wild Boy himself, the late Bill Burroughs, rewrites the rules. And The Madmen of Elgin squashes both Lost Boys and Solitary Reapers into Middle Scots verse forms for a pre-millennial song-and-dance. Like Oliver Hardy this volume refuses to be slim: it bursts all borders, literary and political, creating a zone where the Hollywood musical meets the Jolly Beggars, where lament bumps into love lyric, where the dictionaries go to die. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

An exiled poet in an English seaside asylum… A winter night spent in the spooky penthouse suite of Ceausescu's vanished daughter… A scientist trying to calculate the heart's square root… All these figure in The Man in the White Suit, Nick Drake's first full-length collection, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. It portrays and celebrates a richly varied cast of characters whose secrets and histories are the central thread of the book, ranging from life studies of those caught out by exile from central Europe or caught up in the strange aftermath of the 1989 revolutions, to intimate love poems and portraits of those learning the arts and mysteries of dying.

Glyn Maxwell’s precocious, proli?c talent established him as one of the brightest talents to have emerged in British poetry over the past two decades. His debut collection Tale of the Mayor’s Son (1990) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. His second, Out of the Rain (1992) won him the Somerset Maugham Award. His third collection, Rest for the Wicked (1995), like his second, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He has since published several books with Faber and Picador. The Boys at Twilight lines up all the star poems from his three Bloodaxe collections. This is not just early but vintage Maxwell: the lad bursting on the scene with his strange narratives and edgy syntax, then transforming himself in the course of these three books into a modern master whose formal skills and much celebrated imaginative gifts have been surpassed by very few of his contemporaries.

Kathleen Jamie is one of Britain's leading poets. Her work is intelligent and subtle, her language inventive and refreshing. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is a selection from her early collections, from times of change and travel. It reveals the generous range of her concerns, from life in the wilder parts of Pakistan and Tibet to the 'difficult questions' of identity posed in her much celebrated collection, The Queen of Sheba, which was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Dead is a seminal volume in modern Scottish poetry. Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, it was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. It includes most of her poems from Black Spiders (1982), A Flame in Your Heart (1986), The Way We Live (1987), The Autonomous Region (1993) and The Queen of Sheba (1994).

Martial is alive and kicking in Brendan Kennelly's latter-day Dublin versions of the Spanish Roman poet. He is a satirist trying to define generosity, happiness and love, with scurrilous candour and piercing clarity, in brief punchy poems. But no matter how savage his attacks, he is always playful and compassionate. He is a sharp, visionary writer who knows the world about him and is in touch with the world within himself, at once bewildered, attentive and bitingly articulate. Martial Art is a book that packs a punch.

Peter Reading was one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking – as funny as he was disconcerting. Over four decades he became our most skilful and technically inventive poet, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, phony media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can now be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems. This was published in three volumes from Bloodaxe: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and Poems 1997-2003 (2003). He subsequently produced two later collections, -273.15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010). He died in 2011. The collections included (in full) in Volume 3 of his Collected Poems are: Work in Regress (1997), Ob. (1999), Marfan (2000), [untitled] (2001), Faunal (2002), Civil (2002) and d (2003).

Ann Sansom’s poetry overturns the reader’s expectations. Her poems often present human dramas in which people are seen as acting out their versions of themselves in their own fictions – what Stanley Cook called ‘an authentic Northern mix of realism and imagination’. In Praise of Men and other people was her first new book for nearly a decade, a welcome return for a quietly authoritative, resiliently gritty poet whose debut collection Romance won her many admirers.

Sir Gawain & the Green Knight is a classic Arthurian tale of enchantment, adventure and romance. This splendid new translation – by one of the world’s leading poets – has already been acclaimed in America. The original poem and W.S. Merwin’s modern version are comparable in stature and imaginative power to another medieval epic, Beowulf, in Seamus Heaney’s rendering.All Camelot is merry with Christmas revelry when an enormous green-skinned knight with brilliant green clothes rides into King Arthur’s court. This giant throws down a sinister challenge: he will endure a blow of the axe to his neck without offering any resistance, but whoever delivers the fatal blade must promise to take the same in a year and a day. When the young Gawain beheads him, the Green Knight grabs hold of his severed head and makes off on horseback. The poem follows Gawain’s adventures thereafter – shockingly brutal hunts, an almost impossible seduction, and terrifyingly powerful adversaries – as he gallantly struggles to honour his promise. Capturing the pace, impact and richly alliterative language of the original Middle English text – presented on facing pages – Merwin brings a new immediacy to a spellbinding, timeless narrative written many centuries ago by a master poet whose identity has been lost to time. Modern and Middle English parallel text edition.

Tatiana Shcherbina has been described as ‘one of the most significant figures in contemporary Russian poetry’ (Kommersant’). In her recent work the elegant and ironic narrator meditates on love, disappointment and loss against the backdrop of Russia’s social collapse. Sometimes her poems take the form of overtly political statements (‘Dictatorship, democracy’), sometimes new capitalist Russia is reflected merely in the emotional plane – in a poem on lost love she claims she has paid the highest rate: cash.Whilst her themes are timeless, Shcherbina’s settings are distinctly contemporary. She writes about sitting at a computer gazing into the Microsoft Windows; her poems are full of supermarkets, printing cartridges, TV, the environment; she considers applying make-up, drinking alone, falling asleep to the sounds of films in the next room.Tatiana Shcherbina is one of a generation of Russians who have been to travel frequently in Europe. She has lived in France – and sometimes writes in French – and her Russian poetry is filled with an awareness of other ‘European’ culture. She has even been criticised for a supposedly anti-Russian stance, yet she understands absolutely what is happening in Russia and is in no way an outsider. Hers is also the stance of a woman challenging Russia’s patriarchal and chauvinist society. However, Tatiana Shcherbina’s poetry is not primarily political, but literary, and she shows great versatility in different forms and genres. Her playfully meditative essays form the perfect counterpoint to her sophisticated and self-aware poetry.Russian-English dual language edition.

Josephine Balmer's 'Chasing Catullus' ventures into border territory, the no-man's-land between poetry and translation, juxtaposing new poems with fresh versions of ancient texts, brazenly reimagining classical literature, wittily subverting epic works, overwriting the past like a palimpsest. But there is a more personal journey here too. 'Chasing Catullus' presents a dark odyssey of the soul, descending in and out of the underworls as Balmer responds to the death of her young niece from cancer, exploring difficult times and dangerous emotions with compassion and humour. The poems push back the boundaries, blurring differences between ancient and modern, familiar and unfamiliar, giving voice to contemporary loss and grief.

Cheryl Follon is a feisty new Scottish writer who presents a wild carnival of bawdy tale-telling, songs and boisterous monologues - all in a rowdy spirit of earthy celebration. The poems of All Your Talk - her first collection - are lucid and lusty, direct and daring, spiced with down-to-earth humour and a lively, often wicked wit. Rooted in ballad and storytelling traditions, she describes her poetry as 'like boiling an old turnip and straining off a contemporary soup'.

From cosmology to infidelity, gentle truth to the fiercest of fairytales, this first collection from Kona Macphee tells an outsider's story in a voice that sings with the music of language. As a coin tossed or untossed, a snowball, a course of IVF, the thread of fate weaves itself throughout the poems in Tails. Can we learn to change our destiny by releasing the hurts of the past, while still embracing our fragility and ultimate mortality? Exuberantly lyrical, occasionally bleak yet never bitter, these poems explore the ambivalence of hope in the face of loss, and the redemption to be found in celebrating the transitory.