Bloodaxe Books
Nick Drake: poems on love and loss
updated
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early November). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
David Constantine: A Bird Called Elaeus
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Philip Gross: The Shores of Vaikus
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Marie Howe: What the Earth Seemed to Say
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To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early September). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
Nia Broomhall: Backalong
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Niall Campbell: The Island in the Sound
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Sarah Holland-Batt: The Jaguar
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Laura Wittner (trans. Juana Adcock): Translation of the Route / Traducción de la ruta
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Launched in 2021, the James Berry Poetry Prize is Britain’s first and only poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Its joint organisers are Newcastle University and Bloodaxe Books.
The three equal winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 each receive year-long mentoring during 2024-25 plus £1000 and publication of their debut book length collections with Bloodaxe in 2026. The 2024 winning poets will be mentored by poets Patience Agbabi, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and Jacob Sam-La Rose, one of the judges of the 2021 inaugural prize. There are five judges for the 2024 prize: Neil Astley, founding editor of Bloodaxe Books; poet Imtiaz Dharker, holder of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and Chancellor of Newcastle University; poet Theresa Muñoz, director of Newcastle Poetry Festival and James Berry Poetry Prize manager; Nathalie Teitler, diversity specialist and director of The Complete Works; and poet and professor Major Jackson, who holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in the US and has worked with Newcastle University on previous projects including Freedom City.
The winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize were Kaycee Hill, who was mentored by Malika Booker; Marjorie Lotfi, mentored by Mimi Khalvati; and Yvette Siegert, mentored by Mona Arshi. Kaycee Hill’s debut collection, Hot Sauce, and Marjorie Lotfi’s The Wrong Person to Ask were published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2023. The debut collection by the third winner, Yvette Siegert, will be published in 2025. Marjorie Lotfi's The Wrong Person to Ask was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for Winter 2023 and is on the shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2024 and the longlist for the poetry category of the Saltire Book Awards 2024.
More information about the James Berry Poetry Prize can be found here: bloodaxebooks.com/inclusive-publishing
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early October). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
Dzifa Benson: Monster
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Nia Davies: Votive Mess
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/votive-mess-1356
Helen Ivory: Constructing a Witch
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In the Lateness of the World (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/in-the-lateness-of-the-world-1059) is a dark book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history. Forché imagines a place where 'you could see everything at once… every moment you have lived or place you have been'. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and 'there is nothing that cannot be seen'. In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.
Collected Poems (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/collected-poems-1338), the first complete edition of Fleur Adcock's poetry, was published on her 90th birthday, superseding her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with the addition of five later collections published by Bloodaxe, Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid's Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems.
Shadow Reader (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/shadow-reader-1348) is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy. The poems bind this looming curse to the occupation of countries, the earth and its creatures, those who own the story and those who redirect it through art or artifice. ‘Does the warp look back at the one who is weaving and say, This is not how I remember it…?’ Imtiaz Dharker’s collection pays attention to wilful erasures, exclusions and also to places of sanctuary. This is poetry as music, as momentum, as the texture and taste of languages, joyously sensuous and rich in images. While it acknowledges the everyday and its shadows, it is also an irreverent, playful celebration of life.
A Change in the Air (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/a-change-in-the-air-1322) is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place. In luminous language her poems explore how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in the face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences these intimate poems of unembellished imagery accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love poems to our beautiful, fragile world.
Patricia Smith is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Unshuttered (Triquarterly, USA, 2023) and Incendiary Art (Triquarterly, USA, 2017; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2019), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. Her other collections include Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, and Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology – New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir.
Neil Astley filmed Jessica Traynor reading from her new collection at her home in Dublin in April 2024. The poems she reads here are: ‘Anatomy Scan’, ‘In the Birthing Room’, ‘If You Can Tame a Wildcat You Can Raise a Baby’, ‘Pit Lullaby, V’, ‘Pit Lullaby, VII’ and ‘Lullaby’. For more on the book see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/pit-lullabies-1293
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early June). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
Matt Howard: Broadlands
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Katrina Porteous: Rhizodont
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/rhizodont-1351
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early May). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
Amanda Dalton: Fantastic Voyage
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Imtiaz Dharker: Shadow Reader
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Katie Donovan: May Swim
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Shaughnessy is omnivorous and fearless, even as she stares down her terrors, whether the blaze, fizzle, or explosion of wild love between women, or the unquenchable pain of a son’s birth injury. She celebrates, too, revelling in the pleasures and powers of the body and the transcendence of art. Beginning with the youthful love lyrics of Interior with Sudden Joy, and opening onto the wily reckonings of Human Dark with Sugar, the unsparingly fierce mother-love and parallel worlds of Our Andromeda, the reverb-soaked coming of age and coming to consciousness of So Much Synth, the dark sci-fi prophecy of The Octopus Museum, before new poems that pay homage to women artists and their pathbreaking art, LIQUID FLESH collects an unprecedented body of work unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. It was followed by her sixth collection, TANYA (2023), published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2024.
Neil Astley filmed Brenda Shaughnessy reading from her Bloodaxe titles in April 2024 during Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland. The poems she reads here from LIQUID FLESH are ‘Dancing in My Room Alone’, ‘Head Handed’, ‘Miracles’, ‘Big Game’, ‘Identity and Community’ and ‘Blueberries for Cal’. A separate video is available of her reading from TANYA in Galway (youtu.be/UTDjAIkw6cg).
In the title poem, she explores the eternal quality of an intense touchstone relationship with Tanya, about whom she writes, 'Everyone’s not you to me… Worth loving once, why not now?' Shaughnessy leads us down into her generative core, exposing moments of spiritual and intellectual awakening, her love of art and the written word, and her sense of the life force itself, which is ignited by the conversation – across time and space – with other women. Tanya is her sixth collection, her first since LIQUID FLESH: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), which introduced her work to readers in the UK.
Neil Astley filmed Brenda Shaughnessy reading from her Bloodaxe titles in April 2024 during Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland. The poems she reads here from TANYA are ‘Saeculum’, ‘Moving Far Away’, ‘The Poets Are Dying’, ‘Afterlife’, and part XII of the title-poem ‘Tanya’. A separate video is available of her reading from LIQUID FLESH: NEW & SELECTED POEMS in Galway (youtu.be/Rns5Q0Bqfqw).
Small acts of salvage are often all that is possible, such as the permission given during the Covid-19 pandemic to go 2km from home. This allowed Donovan to swim at White Rock, her local beach, thus staying afloat through the fear of that brutal time and what came next – the death of her mother. In some of these poems the comforting delusion of rescue is highlighted as a flawed but human necessity. Other poems give voice to the remorse that is the haunting of a failed rescue.
Neil Astley filmed Katie Donovan reading from her new collection at her home in Dalkey, Dublin, in April 2024 ahead of the book’s publication in May 2024. The poems she reads are ‘Two Women, One Grave’, ‘Deluge’, ‘May Swim’, ‘The Seal’, ‘Stories’ and ‘Home to Vote’. Separate videos are available of Katie Donovan reading from her earlier books, Rootling (youtu.be/UsaPJYlAo2M) and Off Duty (youtu.be/519CWidNS8I).
Neil Astley filmed Katie Donovan reading from Off Duty at her home in Dalkey, Dublin, in April 2024. The poems she reads are ‘Labour’, ‘Dyno-Rod’, ‘Operation’, ‘What Can I Give Him’ and ‘Off Duty’. Separate videos are available of her Donovan reading from her other books, Rootling (youtu.be/UsaPJYlAo2M) and May Swim (youtu.be/nEVATgkq_Zw).
They will be reading live and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live.
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early April). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
Ellen Cranitch: Crystal
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/crystal-1344
Helen Farish: The Penny Dropping
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-penny-dropping-1345
Brenda Shaughnessy: Tanya
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/tanya-1346
(Published in North America by Alfred A. Knopf)
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Ellen Cranitch: Crystal
'Utterly mesmerising... This is what poetry at its best and truest can do. A wonderful achievement.’ – Stephen Fry
‘Tender and profound… honest and brave’ – Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return
Crystal traces the arc of one woman’s experience after the discovery that her partner is addicted to crystal meth. In a highly original poetic act of reclamation, it plunders the drug itself and makes of it an overarching conceit to articulate the devastating impact of living with a loved one who is utterly changed. Deeply felt, tirelessly inventive, this collection gives voice to addiction’s explosive effect within a family. At the same time it speaks universally and with urgency of the power of poetry to take one through the darkest of times. Crystal is Ellen Cranitch's second collection, following The Immortalist (Templar Press), which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best Collection 2018.
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Helen Farish: The Penny Dropping
'As a whole, it has all the coherence of a novel; but there is so much more to this beautifully realised lyric collection of the kind that she is a recognised master of. It is a masterpiece in both forms to a very unusual degree.' – Bernard O'Donoghue
The Penny Dropping offers an account of a cherished relationship from first meeting to eventual break-up. Distance gives the writer a retrospective clarity from which she does not flinch despite its challenges (‘Look at me,’ laments the speaker in ‘Pretty Woman’, ‘stepping back into the dress, / pulling up the side zip, smoothing it down, / as though that’s all it took.’).
But ultimately poems such as ‘No Point Now’ undo their own argument that the penny has dropped years too late, for the process of re-evaluating the past bestows on it a new and altered value. In ‘Films We Saw at The Phoenix’, the speaker recalls the lovers in one film whose relationship is also at an end, but who look back and ‘spread it out tenderly, the tapestry / of their love which they alone could see'. The immediate power of these poems is such that much is at stake on every page.
Helen Farish won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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Brenda Shaughnessy: Tanya
'Chief among the new book’s many subjects are love, absence and loss: how to live with or without them… [Shaughnessy] writes about love as being “timelessness itself”. This is a book in which the poet’s ability “to imagine and to wonder / fiercely” never flags.' – Amy Gerstler, New York Times
Brenda Shaughnessy is one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. In Tanya she weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors, and circles the mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss.
In this powerful gathering of poems about her own “influencers” – as well as poems on Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim and the young choreographer Lauren Lovette – Shaughnessy remembers the women who set her on her artistic path. In the title poem, she explores the eternal quality of an intense touchstone relationship with Tanya, about whom she writes, 'Everyone’s not you to me… Worth loving once, why not now?' We all have our own Tanya, and in this book we meet friends, mentors, sisters, lovers, who inhabit a verse classroom where Shaughnessy’s passion for literature – forged in her own formative studies, as in the poem 'Coursework' – is our teacher. In flowing stair-step tercets, Shaughnessy leads us down into her generative core, exposing moments of spiritual and intellectual awakening, her love of art and the written word, and her sense of the life force itself, which is ignited by the conversation – across time and space – with other women.
Tanya is her sixth collection, her first since Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), which introduced her work to readers in the UK.
They will be reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. The event will also include readings of poems from the new Bloodaxe anthology Soul Feast, which is also published in March 2024 and which features four of Jane Hirshfield’s poems as well as Sasha Dugdale’s translation of a poem by Elena Shvarts.
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early March). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
Jane Hirshfield: The Asking: New & Selected Poems
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(Published in North America by Alfred A. Knopf)
Maria Stepanova (trans. Sasha Dugdale): Holy Winter 20/21
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/holy-winter-20-21-1343
Neil Astley & Pamela Robertson-Pearce (eds.): Soul Feast: nourishing poems of hope & light
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/soul-feast-1341
They will be reading live and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live.
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early February). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
Fleur Adcock: Collected Poems
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/collected-poems-1338
Aoife Lyall: The Day Before
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-day-before-1340
Kerry Hardie: We Go On
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/we-go-on-1339
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Fleur Adcock: Collected Poems
Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships.
Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She has also written movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit.
This first complete edition of her poetry is published on her 90th birthday, superseding her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with the addition of five later collections published by Bloodaxe, Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid's Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining 'Against Coupling', 'Smokers For Celibacy' and 'The Prize-winning Poem' to modern classics such as 'The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers' and 'Things'.
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Aoife Lyall: The Day Before
Aoife Lyall’s The Day Before beautifully captures the ordinary moments in life that crystallise in the face of crisis and threat. Focusing on the earliest weeks and months of the pandemic, these intimate and meticulous poems mark the lived experience of someone who must navigate a world she no longer understands, exploring first steps and last breaths, milestones, millstones, emigration, fly-tipping and the entire world to be found in the space behind the front door.
Tender, challenging, and historically significant, The Day Before asks what it means when home is the one place you cannot leave, and the one place you cannot go.
The Day Before is Aoife Lyall’s second collection, following her widely praised debut, Mother, Nature, which was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book Award in Scotland's National Book Awards in 2021
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Kerry Hardie: We Go On
This is a book about the irreducible core of what it is to be human in a world that changes constantly yet repeats and repeats. It uses images that speak to a place in us that does not depend on fashion but braves that over-used word ‘archetypal’. It is mostly specific to a landscape the author knows very well yet sometimes ventures beyond, always with the awareness that fear is our constant companion, but also joy.
Its title echoes Beckett's ‘I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (from his novel The Unnameable), with something of this despair, while holding to the irrational conviction of ‘being enclosed by light’. Kerry Hardie’s work – as Claire Askew has noted – is ‘a dark and gorgeous hymn to mortality’. It recognises that all localness is part of humanness; that the dominance of one sort of humanness to the exclusion of another sort diminishes all humanness, representing both loss and the degradation of the whole. Knowing this, the poet resolves –
just to go on
and keep making stories
to tell to the children
the hungry
the hunted
the old and the haunted
to pass the time
mark the hour
find the answer
go on trying
Edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett, Out of Sri Lanka features over a hundred poets writing in English, or translated from Tamil and Sinhala. It brings to light a long-neglected national literature, and reshapes our understanding of migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. Poets long out of print appear beside exciting new talents; works written in the country converse with poetry from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Poems in traditional and in open forms, concrete poems, spoken word poems, and experimental post-lyric hybrids of poetry and prose, appear with an introduction explaining Sri Lanka’s history.
Out of Sri Lanka on the Bloodaxe website: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/out-of-sri-lanka-1327
Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire draws together MacGillivray's extensive research into the life and work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge, who vanished from Eilean a’ Bhàis in the Outer Hebrides in 1961. Comprising two previously unpublished manuscripts by Norge, Optik: A History of Ghost (1950) and Ravage (1961), this collection also includes rare original material, giving insight into Norge's troubled existence and mysterious disappearance.
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/ravage-1336
They will be reading live and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live.
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links.
Matthew Caley: To Abandon Wizardry
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/to-abandon-wizardry-1335
MacGillivray: Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/ravage-1336
Abigail Parry: I Think We're Alone Now
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/i-think-we-re-alone-now-1334
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Matthew Caley: To Abandon Wizardry
To Abandon Wizardry, Matthew Caley's seventh collection, explores a world where it's harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not. Where our political and cultural reality seems so unbelievable, we search for a plot and find one that comes from the Harry Potter playbook. Our sky proves CGI, our touchstones AI. Our screens full of wonders, our streets full of decay. We could nod at Deep Fake, QAnon, fake news versus the 'truth' of official news, all manner of waning national myth, or ponder the elsewhere we always think of escaping to, that will no doubt prove equally illusory.
Set within this almost parallel world, To Abandon Wizardry features a long central poem where someone enjoys an alfresco Americano in Shadwell, London, while in dialogue with a mesh-protected sapling that transmits all the polyglot talk of the city. Either side of this we encounter revenants, disembowelled wizards, talking horses and flying houses, as the book forges its aesthetic out of the simulation, hyper-association, and over-stimulation of living in the 21st century. And it's all true.
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MacGillivray: Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire
Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire draws together MacGillivray's extensive research into the life and work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge, who vanished from Eilean a’ Bhàis in the Outer Hebrides in 1961. Comprising two previously unpublished manuscripts by Norge, Optik: A History of Ghost (1950) and Ravage (1961), this collection also includes rare original material, giving insight into Norge's troubled existence and mysterious disappearance.
Optik: A History of Ghost, the opening triadic poem, typifies Kristján Norge's early work and is a meditation on Greek optics, horary ghostliness and illumination by fire. Composed in 1950, Optik draws on letters twelve and thirteen of the correspondence between scientist-inventor Sir David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott on natural magic, to isolate the figure of 'John Christ' whom Norge positions as a visionary homunculus created from the saline ash of alchemical phantasmic experiments.
Ravage is the centrepiece of the collection, a numinous tract written in the months preceding Kristján Norge's disappearance in 1961, convinced he was a demon. Washed up in a storm, subsistence on Eilean a’ Bhàis had proved an increasing strain on Norge, who felt his self-exiled status intensively. In response to both this isolation and the unexpected revelation of his demoniacal status, Norge evolved a complex amnesiac system, aware that if only he could forget this singular aspect of himself, then release might follow. Inevitably cryptic, this Norgesian schema has been recovered from fragments concealed at ten sites on the Scottish island. Norge's impression of Eilean a’ Bhàis as an underworld threshold leant weight to his suspicion that the island was indeed attracting the Sluagh nam Marbh, or Host of the Dead, a Gaelic westerly wind of malign voices that allegedly imparted the knowledge of his demonhood to him.
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Abigail Parry: I Think We're Alone Now
I Think We’re Alone Now was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.
So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.
I Think We’re Alone Now is Abigail Parry's second collection and is shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2023. Her first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019.
Marjorie Lotfi’s first full collection The Wrong Person to Ask (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-wrong-person-to-ask-1333) is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest. The Wrong Person to Ask is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for Winter 2023.
The James Berry Poetry Prize is the UK’s first poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Organised by NCLA with Bloodaxe Books, and supported by special funding from Arts Council England, the prize was launched in April 2021. Marjorie Lotfi and Kaycee Hill were announced as joint winners of the inaugural prize in October 2021, along with Yvette Siegert, whose debut will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025.
Kaycee Hill's Hot Sauce (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/hot-sauce-1332) is a searing first collection that captures the visceral vulnerabilities of navigating life on the cusp. Kaycee Hill frankly explores coming of age as a woman – and the intricacies of connection and memory – against an urban-pastoral landscape.
The James Berry Poetry Prize is the UK’s first poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Organised by NCLA with Bloodaxe Books, and supported by special funding from Arts Council England, the prize was launched in April 2021. Marjorie Lotfi and Kaycee Hill were announced as joint winners of the inaugural prize in October 2021, along with Yvette Siegert, whose debut will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025.
The James Berry Poetry Prize is the UK’s first poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Organised by NCLA with Bloodaxe Books, and supported by special funding from Arts Council England, the prize was launched in April 2021. Marjorie Lotfi and Kaycee Hill were announced as joint winners of the inaugural prize in October 2021, along with Yvette Siegert, whose debut will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025.
Kaycee Hill's Hot Sauce (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/hot-sauce-1332) is a searing first collection that captures the visceral vulnerabilities of navigating life on the cusp. Kaycee Hill frankly explores coming of age as a woman – and the intricacies of connection and memory – against an urban-pastoral landscape.
Marjorie Lotfi’s first full collection The Wrong Person to Ask (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-wrong-person-to-ask-1333) is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest. The Wrong Person to Ask is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for Winter 2023.
Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Matthew Caley, MacGillivray and Abigail Parry celebrating the publication of their new poetry books.
They will be reading live and discussing their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live.
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links.
Matthew Caley: To Abandon Wizardry
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/to-abandon-wizardry-1335
MacGillivray: Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/ravage-1336
Abigail Parry: I Think We're Alone Now
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/i-think-we-re-alone-now-1334
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Matthew Caley: To Abandon Wizardry
To Abandon Wizardry, Matthew Caley's seventh collection, explores a world where it's harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not. Where our political and cultural reality seems so unbelievable, we search for a plot and find one that comes from the Harry Potter playbook. Our sky proves CGI, our touchstones AI. Our screens full of wonders, our streets full of decay. We could nod at Deep Fake, QAnon, fake news versus the 'truth' of official news, all manner of waning national myth, or ponder the elsewhere we always think of escaping to, that will no doubt prove equally illusory.
Set within this almost parallel world, To Abandon Wizardry features a long central poem where someone enjoys an alfresco Americano in Shadwell, London, while in dialogue with a mesh-protected sapling that transmits all the polyglot talk of the city. Either side of this we encounter revenants, disembowelled wizards, talking horses and flying houses, as the book forges its aesthetic out of the simulation, hyper-association, and over-stimulation of living in the 21st century. And it's all true.
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MacGillivray: Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire
Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire draws together MacGillivray's extensive research into the life and work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristján Norge, who vanished from Eilean a’ Bhàis in the Outer Hebrides in 1961. Comprising two previously unpublished manuscripts by Norge, Optik: A History of Ghost (1950) and Ravage (1961), this collection also includes rare original material, giving insight into Norge's troubled existence and mysterious disappearance.
Optik: A History of Ghost, the opening triadic poem, typifies Kristján Norge's early work and is a meditation on Greek optics, horary ghostliness and illumination by fire. Composed in 1950, Optik draws on letters twelve and thirteen of the correspondence between scientist-inventor Sir David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott on natural magic, to isolate the figure of 'John Christ' whom Norge positions as a visionary homunculus created from the saline ash of alchemical phantasmic experiments.
Ravage is the centrepiece of the collection, a numinous tract written in the months preceding Kristján Norge's disappearance in 1961, convinced he was a demon. Washed up in a storm, subsistence on Eilean a’ Bhàis had proved an increasing strain on Norge, who felt his self-exiled status intensively. In response to both this isolation and the unexpected revelation of his demoniacal status, Norge evolved a complex amnesiac system, aware that if only he could forget this singular aspect of himself, then release might follow. Inevitably cryptic, this Norgesian schema has been recovered from fragments concealed at ten sites on the Scottish island. Norge's impression of Eilean a’ Bhàis as an underworld threshold leant weight to his suspicion that the island was indeed attracting the Sluagh nam Marbh, or Host of the Dead, a Gaelic westerly wind of malign voices that allegedly imparted the knowledge of his demonhood to him.
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Abigail Parry: I Think We're Alone Now
I Think We’re Alone Now was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.
So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.
I Think We’re Alone Now is Abigail Parry's second collection and is shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2023. Her first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019.
The Complete Works supported 30 poets from 2008 through to 2020, and has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. In her Foreword to the anthology, Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo explains why she was prompted to set up The Complete Works programme. A report she initiated found that in 2008 the level of poets of colour published by major presses was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry played a significant role in this transformation of the British poetry scene, producing five Forward Prize winners, two T.S. Eliot Prize and Ted Hughes Award winners, along with single prize wins for the Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have gone on to judge every major poetry award, publishing over 40 collections between them.
For more information see: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/mapping-the-future-1331 and ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJYqfzvGdjA
Both editors will be discussing the anthology with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, and will be joined by special guests including Denise Saul, Leo Boix, Nick Makoha, Edward Doegar and Will Harris, who will be reading a selection of their poems from Mapping the Future. A special video of other pre-recorded readings from the anthology will also be shown as part of the launch event.
To receive reminder emails for the event, please register via TicketTailor: tickettailor.com/events/bloodaxebooks/1026258. If you register to attend on TicketTailor you will receive an event link reminder by email by midday the day before the event. For those who can't make it live, the reading will be available on YouTube afterwards on this page.
If you miss the registration deadline, you can still watch live via the Bloodaxe YouTube channel.
To order copies of the anthology direct from Bloodaxe, please click on the links below (available via the Bloodaxe website from early October). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
UK: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/mapping-the-future-1331
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/mapping-the-future-the-complete-works/
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Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets
Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets is a new anthology bringing together work by all 30 Fellows of the Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme supporting British poets from diverse backgrounds. The anthology is edited by Nathalie Teitler, Director of The Complete Works, and Karen McCarthy Woolf, a Fellow of the programme who went on to edit the second two TEN anthologies featuring work by The Complete Works poets.
In her introduction to Mapping the Future, Nathalie Teitler recounts the history of The Complete Works, which supported 30 poets from 2008 through to 2020, and which has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. In her Foreword to the anthology, Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo explains why she was prompted to set up The Complete Works programme. A report she initiated found that in 2008 the level of poets of colour published by major presses was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%.
The Complete Works Poetry played a significant role in this transformation of the British poetry scene, producing three Forward Prize winners, two T.S. Eliot Prize and Ted Hughes Award winners, along with single prize wins for the Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have gone on to judge every major poetry award, publishing over 40 collections between them.
Mapping the Future presents new or recent work by Complete Works Fellows including Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Jay Bernard, Malika Booker, Kayo Chingonyi, Inua Ellams, Will Harris, Sarah Howe, Roger Robinson, Warsan Shire, Yomi Ṣode and Karen McCarthy Woolf. It also includes ten engaging essays re-drawing the map of British poetry, touching on some of the most significant topics of our time.
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Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. She is a Fellow of The Complete Works, and was included in its first anthology, Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word (2010), edited by Bernardine Evaristo & Daljit Nagra. McCarthy Woolf edited the subsequent anthologies, Ten: The New Wave (2014) and Ten: Poets of the New Generation (2017), also co-editing Mapping the Future: The Complete Works (2023) with Nathalie Teitler, all from Bloodaxe Books. Her first collection, An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014), was shortlisted for both the Forward and Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prizes. Her second, Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet, 2017), was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Dr Nathalie Teitler was born in Buenos Aires and holds a PhD in Latin American Poetry (King’s College London, 2000). She has run literature programmes promoting diversity in the UK for over 20 years and is Director of The Complete Works. She co-edited Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers (flipped eye, 2019) with Nii Ayikwei Parkes, and Mapping the Future: The Complete Works (2023) with Karen McCarthy Woolf. She was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, and was appointed Projects Manager for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships in 2018.
This video features poems from Leo Boix, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Ian Humphreys, Degna Stone, Rishi Dastidar, Adam Lowe, Eileen Pun, Rowyda Amin, Malika Booker, Roger Robinson, Denise Saul, Seni Seneviratne and Inua Ellams.
The Complete Works supported 30 poets from 2008 through to 2020, and has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. In her Foreword to the anthology, Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo explains why she was prompted to set up The Complete Works programme. A report she initiated found that in 2008 the level of poets of colour published by major presses was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry played a significant role in this transformation of the British poetry scene, producing three Forward Prize winners, two T.S. Eliot Prize and Ted Hughes Award winners, along with single prize wins for the Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have gone on to judge every major poetry award, publishing over 40 collections between them.
Hear poems from even more contributors at our live online launch event on Tuesday 17 October (7pm BST), when we will be joined by Denise Saul, Leo Boix, Nick Makoha, Edward Doegar and Will Harris, as well as anthology editors Nathalie Teitler and Karen McCarthy Woolf.
Watch live or later here: youtube.com/live/75BWs7oncw4
Mapping The Future on the Bloodaxe website: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/mapping-the-future-1331
For A Bird Called Elaeus – his small anthology of the vast original – David Constantine has gone particularly not just to the renowned love poems but also to poems that treat man’s dealings with the earth, his work and trades there, the creatures other than himself who inhabit it and the divinities whose care it is. He has quite often taken the liberty of bringing already urgent poems closer to home and our drift towards the Sixth Extinction.
Several times he expanded a Greek text; once or twice combined two poems into one; or wrote a poem of his own which he could not have written had he not read and translated the ancient words first. But most often he kept close, doing his level best to bring into my English what was so livingly there in the Greek.The Ancient World was not populated by humans harmless to Mother Earth, not at all: often they, like us, did the worst their means enabled them to do. Still there were laws. These things you must not do. Doing them nevertheless was understood as transgression of laws beyond the human laws. You offended Demeter at your peril. Understand that how we like, it’s the same now. And the peril is infinitely greater, threatens to be final, consuming the innocent with the guilty.
A Bird Called Elaeus will be published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2024. It is David Constantine’s seventh translation from Bloodaxe, following three editions of Friedrich Hölderlin, and collections by Henri Michaux, Philippe Jaccottet and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, including two books for which he received the European Poetry Translation Prize and the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation of Goethe’s Faust is published in Penguin Classics and his co-translation (with Tom Kuhn) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht is published by Norton. His own poetry is published by Bloodaxe and his fiction by Comma Press. He was co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2004 to 2013.
All three poets will be reading live and discussing their new collections with special guest host, poet John Challis. The whole event will be available afterwards on this YouTube page once it has finished.
In her first set, Courtney Conrad reads 'John 19:28' by Gboyega Odubanjo, in tribute to this poet, who tragically died in late August of this year. Gboyega's friends and family have launched the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation for low-income Black writers, and a link to donate to the fund in his memory can be found here: gofundme.com/f/gboyega-odubanjo-beloved-son-brother-friend
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early September). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
Jen Campbell: Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit
bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/please-do-not-touch-this-exhibit-1328
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/please-do-not-touch-this-exhibit/
Courtney Conrad: I Am Evidence
UK: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/i-am-evidence-1337
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/i-am-evidence/
Nicole Sealey: The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
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Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/the-ferguson-report-an-erasure/
Nicole Sealey: Ordinary Beast
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Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/ordinary-beast/
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Jen Campbell: Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit
Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals — both as a disabled person, and as an adult reflecting on childhood while going through IVF.
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Courtney Conrad: I Am Evidence
Winner of the 2022 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition
Courtney Conrad’s powerful work interrogates the tensions within Caribbean migration, gender-based violence and national politics. Migrating from Kingston as a teenager, she is unflinching in her attempts to capture the vibrancy and violence of her experiences in both the UK and Jamaica. Her poetry draws together subversive diasporic imagery, national political commentary and shatteringly personal narrative in its exacting response to the political corruption and violence she witnessed as a young girl in Jamaica in the wake of its colonial subjugation under the British Empire. The themes of her work stretch across state- and gender-based violence, religion, raw bodily introspection and lush cultural memorabilia that reimagines the warmth and blood of both her homes.
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Nicole Sealey
The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
In August 2014, Michael Brown – a young, unarmed Black man – was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. What followed was a period of protests and turmoil, culminating in an extensive report that was filed by the Department of Justice detailing biased policing and court practices in the city. It is a document that exposes the racist policies and procedures that have become commonplace – from disproportionate arrest rates to flagrant violence directed at the Black community. It is a report that remains as disheartening as it is damning
Now, award-winning poet Nicole Sealey revisits the investigation in a book that redacts the report, an act of erasure that reimagines the original text as it strips it away. While the full document is visible in the background – weighing heavily on the language Sealey has preserved – it gives shape and disturbing context to what remains.
The Ferguson Report: An Erasure is published simultaneously by Knopf in the US and Bloodaxe Books in the UK. Nicole Sealey’s first collection, Ordinary Beast (2017), is published in the UK by Bloodaxe at the same time.
Ordinary Beast
The ranging scope of enquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast – at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential – is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge.
Jen Campbell's first book-length collection, The Girl Aquarium (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019 and was a semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category).
Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/please-do-not-touch-this-exhibit-1328
Jen Campbell: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/jen-campbell
Jen Campbell's first book-length collection, The Girl Aquarium (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019 and was a semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category).
Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/please-do-not-touch-this-exhibit-1328
Jen Campbell: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/jen-campbell
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Ahren Warner reads a selection of extracts from the three sequences that make up I’m totally killing your vibes.
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Maura Dooley reads the poems 'Letters from Yorkshire', 'Out', 'Talks About Talks' and 'Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide', followed by an extract from ‘The Source’. She then reads several poems from her 2023 collection FIVE FIFTY-FIVE (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/five-fifty-five-1321): 'Fam', 'Quiver', 'Fine Wind, Clear Morning' and 'The Unforgotten'. Maura ends the reading with her Forward Prize shortlisted poem 'Cleaning Jim Dine’s Heart', from THE SILVERING (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-silvering-1108), and 'A Bunch of Consolation' from Five Fifty-Five.
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Clare begins with ‘My father was no ordinary man’ from FLOOD (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/flood-1187). Clare then reads a selection of poems from TOWARDS A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/towards-a-general-theory-of-love-1298): ‘Monkey Writes a Poem About His Mother’, ‘Rhosymedre: Prelude on a Welsh Hymn’, ‘Monkey and I Discuss the Difficulty of Working Therapeutically with Non-verbal Traumatic Memories’, ‘Monkey Joins a Dating App’, ‘Monkey Reads William Blake’ and ’Child Protection Policy’. Clare ends the reading with ‘Who knows what it’s like’, from Flood.
Her first book-length collection, Burning Season, was published by Bloodaxe in May 2023. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/burning-season-1323) The title poem from Burning Season won third prize in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry 2022. In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Yvonne reads five poems from Burning Season: 'The Flower that Breaks Rocks', 'The Gift', 'Burning Season', 'Ptarmigan', 'Rime' and 'Waterland'.
Matthew Hollis's second book-length collection, Earth House, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/earth-house-1320) In Earth House, Matthew Hollis evokes the landscape, language and ecology of the isles of Britain and Ireland to explore how our most intimate moments have resonance in the wider cycle of life. Beginning in the slate waters of the north, the book revolves around the cardinal points and the ancient elements: through the wide skies of the east and the terrain of a southern city, to the embers of places lost to us, to which we can no longer return.
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Matthew reads five poems from Earth House: 'A Harnser for James', The Diomedes', 'A Red Hairband in Iveragh', 'Deor' and 'Causeway'.
Her debut pamphlet, Skinny Dip, was published in 2022 by Enchiridion. Her first book-length collection, Ghost River, was published by Bloodaxe in 2023. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/ghost-river-1324) In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Kris reads eight poems from Ghost River: 'Rainier', 'Bodies of Water', 'Ghost River', 'Theoretical Geographers', 'Pseudotsuga menziesii', 'Passage', 'Northwest Passage' and 'Tectonics'.
In this reading at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, Imtiaz reads the poem 'Chaudhri Sher Mobarik Looks at the Loch' from her 2018 collection LUCK IS THE HOOK (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/luck-is-the-hook-1173), followed by 'Undone' from OVER THE MOON (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/over-the-moon-151) and then ‘The Trick’, also from Luck is the Hook. The rest of the reading features several new poems which will be included in SHADOW READER, forthcoming from Bloodaxe in May 2024. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/shadow-reader-1348).
Shadow Reader is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and earthy Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy. Imtiaz Dharker’s new collection pays attention to wilful erasures, exclusions and also to places of sanctuary. This is poetry as music, as momentum, as the texture and taste of languages, joyously sensuous and rich in images. While it acknowledges the everyday and its shadows, it is also an irreverent, playful celebration of life.
Notable for its moral engagement, Šteger’s poetry is acutely precise in its observation and concentration as well as multi-layered and technically versatile, ingenious and inventive, adventurous and playful yet serious in intention. Above all, his poems are incessantly curious in their investigations which the reader is invited to share – and he loves to ambush the reader with the unexpected.
Burning Tongues, his first major poetry book to be published in the UK, was published in November 2022 by Bloodaxe Books and was translated by Brian Henry. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/burning-tongues-1304)
Brenda Shaughnessy's first UK publication, Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/liquid-flesh-1303) At this reading at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts in October 2022, Brenda read poems from Liquid Flesh and spoke about her work with Bloodaxe Books editor Neil Astley.
Her sixth collection, Tanya, was published by Knopf in the US in 2023 and is due from Bloodaxe in April 2024. (bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/tanya-1346)
Out of Sri Lanka features over a hundred poets writing in English, or translated from Tamil and Sinhala. It brings to light a long-neglected national literature, and reshapes our understanding of migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. Poets long out of print appear beside exciting new talents; works written in the country converse with poetry from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Poems in traditional and in open forms, concrete poems, spoken word poems, and experimental post-lyric hybrids of poetry and prose, appear with an introduction explaining Sri Lanka’s history.
Out of Sri Lanka on the Bloodaxe website: bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/out-of-sri-lanka-1327
I THINK WE'RE ALONE NOW was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.
So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.
She reads eight poems from the book: ‘In the dream of the cold restaurant’, ‘Some remarks on the General Theory of Relativity’, ‘Speculum’, ‘Whatever happened to Rosemarie?’, ‘The Fly Dressers’ Guide’, ‘Giallo’, ‘The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space’ and ‘It’s the lark that sings so out of tune’.