Flap Series - Böcker

In Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads, aliens and time machines, Lambrusco and apocalyptic first kisses, broken relationships and breast-shaped mountains are perfect companions for a delicate dance through Hill Valley, Wagamama and potato fields in Nepal. The language, open-hearted and burlesque, is lifted from hypnotherapy podcasts, ad agency jargon, the fine distillate of the worst things we think about ourselves. These are poems alive with tingling histamines and humming generators. They slip between lines of conversation, sneak into your bedroom at night, haunt your dreams.

The poems in Katie Hale's Breaking the Surface are populated with totems of our wild, essential truths- from the raven bearing witness to death, to the wolf's dark appetite. Hale interrogates desire in its different forms and unpicks the seams of myths, folktales and fairy stories, offering them up with new life. A self-assured debut.

The Sideways for It is a tour de force of poetic invention - adventurous, gleeful and illuminating. Crafted to read as the eye leads, the poems are experienced both as commentary and personal engagement, whether the subject is the shifting arrangement of intimate clothing in department stores or builders at work. Ian's work draws us into 'the silence of space,' urges us to observe the bridge cupping its shadow 'like a lover,' the clustered Xs of girls somersaulting and the 'delicate proboscis of the moth'. All the while one wonders how poetry so technical can be so human, how the writer can be 'so natural in his practised tricks'.

Grammar of Passage details a German family’s quiet lives as they are pulled into the gathering maelstrom of the first half of the Twentieth Century. Monika Cassel’s attention to detail in this début, tempered with a deep empathy brings individual moments to vivid life, deftly demonstrates how poetry can excavate and reinvigorate history.

Proudly staking a landmark for the UK's Latinx community, Katherine Lockton's début pamphlet, Paper Doll, strikes the poetry landscape as disruptively as a meteor scars earth with its impact. Documenting a shape-shifting existence between activist and survivor, immigrant and alien, lover and loner, this is a tract of the unseen made visible and given a striking, defiant vocabulary. Having fallen from a building as a child in Bolivia, Katherine seems to have retained an ability to stack images that zip along, only leaving an imprint of their meaning as the poem descends to its conclusion. This quality, combined with a contrasting directness makes reading Paper Doll a profoundly affecting experience. There is no smooth ride to be had here. As the poet puts it in the poem The Paper Doll Chain, “she will defy me; time after time/ teaching me how to live when she does.”

Portrait of Colossus is a searingly forthright début that navigates parenting, masculinity, racism and ambiguities of identity. It articulates, with skill and sly humour, the migrant experience from the perspective of the second generation, the ones who “know [England]/ more than everywhere else/ put together”. Brimming with vulnerability and pitched between the lilt of hooyo's admonitions and Ted Hughes' eye for the natural world, many of the poems reconcile disparate worlds, cultures and identities, firing them with the lyricism of Dawud's Psalms. Samatar seamlessly blends influences from Somali oral history, Ovidian tales and Homer’s Odyssey into a poetics that makes Portrait of Colossus cathartic, musical, emotionally satisfying as well as erudite.

Eleanor Penny's Mercy celebrates and shuttles between the visceral and vulnerable, the cruel and and the kind. It attends to the assumptions we may make about the civilised self, assumptions all too often proven hollow or insubstantial in times of crisis. Mercy is a dizzying yet finely orchestrated menagerie of dark fairytale, biblical allusion and metamorphosis, anchored by a sense of something intimate in every bright detail. A highly anticipated debut.