World Poet Series – serie

This remarkable collection is a selection from Adelaide Ivánova’s award-winning book the hammer (o martelo). This unsettling work considers both sexualised violence and consensual sex through a single narrative voice. It explores post-rape experience in a morally bankrupt justice system and offers potent expression of female sexuality – within and beyond the bounds of marriage – in poems that are challenging, profound, and darkly comic. Ivánova’s work is a form of impassioned resistance that delivers a necessary shock to the system. Includes an afterword by Emily Critchley.

"Ivánova sings of bodily fragmentations and argues that these ruptures are the only way of representing the whole body in an unjust system. The hammer, in poems that frame the pamphlet, is both judgment and weapon, is language and physics, is inevitable and not: a tool of interrogation and resistance."- Annie Fan, Modern Poetry in Translation

My Tenantless Body is the celebrated Sichuanese poet Yu Yoyo’s first publication in English. It presents a sensitive yet forceful new voice that leads us through the haunted nightscapes of China with dark wit. The book’s young protagonist veers in and out of focus: her thoughts always intensely clear, her feeling never simply clarified. In these poems the oblique and the plain-spoken seem to cross paths, picking one another’s pockets along the way. Includes an afterword by Rebecca Tamás.

"One reads in Yu's pointed lines a disappearance of the poet herself; not only in her predominant idiom (a searching, imperative voice), but in her stark depiction of contemporary China's bleached cities and sullen interiors, with hardly any room left for the expressive first-person".- Theophilus Kwek, The Poetry Review

Víctor Terán has been described as the most 'personal' poet of the Zapotec Isthmus of Oaxaca, Mexico. His poems, highly lyrical and imagistic, explore two deep passions: the electricity that passes between bodies in love, and Terán's fierce devotion to the Indigenous land and language of his birth.

This carefully curated selection of poems, drawing from the whole of Terán’s poetic oeuvre, is translated into English by his long-time translator and interlocutor, the poet Shook, working from Spanish bridge-translations made by the author.

There is an afterword by Leo Boix.

Poet, activist, educator, lawyer and diplomat, Corsino Fortes (1933-2015) was Cape Verde's ambassador to Portugal and Angola. Writing in Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese, his first collection was published to great acclaim in 1974, the year Portugal’s Estado Novo regime collapsed, leading to the decolonisation of Cape Verde and other African colonies in 1975. Corsino Fortes's poems offer vivid and often hallucinatory glimpses of the land, sea and people of his country - word-scapes rooted in the earth and the body. This is a wider selection of this seminal poet's work, translated by Daniel Hahn with the poet Sean O'Brien.

Vénus Khoury-Ghata is an outstanding figure in contemporary literature, with a prolific output in both poetry and prose. She is celebrated for her immersive landscapes and folkloric narratives, drawn from her upbringing in Lebanon but expressed in the language of France, where she has lived since 1972. In Khoury-Ghata’s poetry, Arabic and French literary traditions merge like water from the river and the waterfall. Her mesmeric sequences plunge us into a semi-surreal world where humans and trees, plants, animals and the elements themselves are intertwined and yet forever fluid – a world where we are urged to leave our ‘voices behind’, to ‘listen better’. This book presents an extended extract from her 2018 collection Gens de l’eau, and includes an afterword by Karen McCarthy Woolf.

"River-fresh and supple in Marilyn Hacker’s English translation, Khoury-Ghata’s voice has the authority and cadence of the practised story-teller. While morally alert, she avoids message-preaching, dodges abstraction. Symbols are never merely symbolic but tangible objects, weighed in the hands, felt under the feet. Readers will find themselves spellbound into a circle of enchanted childhood as they follow the narrative rhythms and shifting moods - sometimes joyous, sometimes elegiac, and sometimes expressing a fine defiance."

- Carol Rumens

Mona Kareem is a stateless poet, born in Kuwait, whose work has been internationally acclaimed for its power and immediacy ever since she published her first collection at the age of 14.This World Poet Series book, translated into English by the poet and translator Sara Elkamel, brings together poems from Kareem’s three collections as well as new, unpublished pieces. It centres on themes that recur frequently in Kareem’s poetry – exile, estrangement, city life, the journey to womanhood – offering an overview of Kareem’s 20-year poetry career, in English, for the first time.

Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi is one of the leading African poets writing in Arabic today. Born in Khartoum, Sudan, he has lived in exile in London since 2012.

The poems in this World Poet Series book emerged in the aftermath of Al-Raddi’s arrival, when he was separated from his wife and children for nearly five years. During late, uncertain nights awake in a strange city, he would write brief, mystical, often stream-of-consciousness texts to post on Facebook, his primary means of communication with loved ones in Khartoum. These texts grew over time into A Friend’s Kitchen, a profound collection that deals with both the spiritual incomprehensibility and physical reality of exile. It is rendered into English by the translator Bryar Bajalan working with Al-Raddi’s friend and fellow poet Shook.

An acclaimed writer in multiple genres as well as a journalist and academic, Karin Karakașlı has repeatedly turned to poetry to chart complex emotional geographies – both her own and those of her country, Turkey. Her highly cinematic poems are powered by music, metaphor and a fascination for the mechanics of language itself. Running through her work is a deeply held belief in the emancipatory potential of words. Following on from her 2019 chapbook History-Geography, this new selection brings together poems from Karakașlı’s 15-year career, vividly translated into English by translator and writer Canan Marașligil working with British poet Sarah Howe.

English PEN Award Winner.

Ribka Sibhatu is one of the foremost poets of the Eritrean diaspora and a prominent activist for refugee rights. The present selection captures the scale and range of her achievements to date, from recent poems of direct political intervention, through her decade-long effort to record the oral folklore and myths of Tigrinya tradition, back to her earliest taboo-breaking lyric poems. Sibhatu has devoted a considerable amount of her creative energies to the assemblage and recording of Eritrea’s folkloric canon, a body of oral literature which has been handed down through the ages in the form of ‘aulòs’, which literally means ‘Please give me permission! I have something to say publicly in rhyme!’. Naffis-Sahely has worked closely with Sibhatu for over 10 years, making translations of her poems and fables to bringing them to the attention of English speaking audiences. His dedication to making her voice heard has resulted in this new publication, which includes an afterword by Sasha Dugdale.

This publication was supported by funding from the EU's Creative Europe Culture Programme.

"Naffis-Sahely’s translation captures the poet’s intricate weaving of multiple worlds – fable and grounded reality, elegiac and absurd, spiritualised emotion and reportage. Through [Sibhatu's] poetry she allows us to step into her unique gaze as an artist and activist in self-exile..."- Devina Shah, Modern Poetry in Translation

Mohan Rana’s intricate metaphysical poems are subtle, like water they define through transparency. His poems undertake the deceptively simple process of understanding things as they are, in their ordinary brilliance. This selection of profound, contemplative verse – so often concerned with memory and time – is an excellent introduction to one of Hindi poetry’s most enthralling voices, and includes an afterword by Alison Brackenbury.

"What gives Rana’s poetry its magnetic quality is that, despite its philosophical profundity, his work is vividly accessible."-Lucy Rosenstein

Diana Bellessi’s trail-blazing poetry has been a source of inspiration for successive generations of Argentine poets. For fifty years, her work has confronted social, ecological and colonial exploitation with poetry of ethical and lyrical integrity. This is the first single-author selection of her work to appear in English, drawing on six of her most vital collections. At the heart of the book is a sequence of sensual love poems that helped to establish a new directness in Latin American queer poetics. Includes an afterword by Mary Jean Chan.

“The apparent simplicity of Bellessi’s verse often belies a keen attention to imagery and musicality that Leo Boix brings vividly to life in the English translation.”- Mary Jean Chan

Gagan Gill is one of the most respected poets writing in Hindi today. Her poems give voice to the unheard – whether of a foetus or a bride, the abused earth or the animals upon it. This selection, featuring work from each of her five collections, demonstrates the musical and visual originality of her verse, which is constantly finding new expressive possibilities in simple everyday language. Includes an afterword by Helen Charman.

"[Gagan Gill] combines stark images with rare expressiveness: expressiveness composed of silences, gaps, absences, disruptions, of pulsational pressure which goes beyond language."-Lucy Rosenstein