Poetry

One of the most widely celebrated artists of his generation, Ed Atkins makes videos, draws, and writes, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world - from computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry - are hysterically rehearsed. A Primer for Cadavers, a startlingly original first collection, brings together a selection of his texts from 2010 to 2016. 'Part prose...

Afterimage: an image that continues to appear even after the original has ceased. Werner Kho’s debut poetry collection is both personal and yet universal, an exploration of the process of loss and how they come back to us in every different angle.Paperback: 43 PagesProduct Dimensions: 125 x 210 mmISBN: 9789811173219Published by Math Paper Press

So begins this astonishing, muscular sequence by one of America's best-selling and most acclaimed poets. Over 70 poems, each titled 'American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin' and shot through with the vernacular energy of popular culture, Terrance Hayes manoeuvres his way between touching domestic visions, stories of love, loss and creation, tributes to the fallen and blistering denunciations of the enemies of the good. American Sonnets builds a living picture of the whole self, and th...

This new poetry collection stands as a record of a friendship between two artists formed in the shadow of illness and mortality. Using the renga and haiku as departure points, Wee wrestles with the limits of art and of the document even as he summons werewolves, ghosts, and other myths. Faced with the inadequacies of witness, An Epic moves towards the living in reverse time, opening with obituaries and ending with a renewed beginning.Paperback: 85 PagesProduct Dimensions: 125 x 210 mmISBN: 97...

A poet of piercing revelations and arresting imagery, Pulitzer Prize winner Maxine Kumin is "unforgettable, indispensable" (New York Times Book Review). In And Short the Season, her stunning last collection, she muses on mortality: her own, and that of the earth. These deeply personal, always political poems blend myth and modernity, fecundity and death, and the violence and tenderness of humankind. Paperback: 112 PagesProduct Dimensions: 140 x 210 mmISBN: 9780393351187 Published by W. W. Nor...

In her first collection of new poetry since 2011's acclaimed Family Values, Wendy Cope celebrates 'the half-forgotten stories of our lives' with compassion, wisdom and wit. Cope continues to be the most generous of authors, sharing her experience of childhood and marriage and writing poignantly about the passing of time. In several of the poems she reimagines Shakespeare in unorthodox fashion; in others she offers heartfelt tributes to friends and to public figures including Eric Morecambe an...

In a world inundated by all kinds of texts that can be scanned almost as soon as they’re produced, and that as quickly shimmer away into oblivion, I am overjoyed to sit and read Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.’s much anticipated first full-length collection Aria and Trumpet Flourish. Even while observing the necessary ceremonies that we must accord our living, the poet never forgets “time’s swift tumble,” the “tar-spackled road” or its “hairline cracks.” Unlike the ostentatious noise made by certain k...

Nine years after his last volume of poetry, Felix Cheong makes a comeback - this time, a collection of poetic outtakes and more recent writings.  B-Sides and Backslides: 1986 - 2018 puts together an unrelenting and honest portrait of the poet as a young man - an undergrad hung up on T.S. Eliot - through the ups and downers of career and marriage, to middle age. It is at once an insightful mapping of his craft over 30 years and a typography of turns and returns of themes and images.  Collected...

At the conclusion of Bijoux in the Dark, John Yau states, "I did not write a hauntingly beautiful book." A line that contrasts with the book's introductory poem, in which hauntings and beauty abound. With all of Bijoux in the Dark, the answer is multifaceted as Yau disavows pretension and expectation and instead heeds a candor beyond categorization. Sonnets and pantoums abound alongside graffiti and Top Ten lists. Yau's work veers from satire, ekphrasis, and homage to imagined histories, surr...

With every full-priced copy purchased from www.booksactuallyshop.com, BooksActually will donate $5 to HealthServe, in support of their mission to serve, advocate and raise awareness of the needs of migrant workers in Singapore. Singapore is a migrant nation. Who truly deserves the title 'local', and how far removed is your average 'local poet' from the term 'migrant worker'? The anthology Call and Response gathers the voices of more than thirty 'migrant' poets, and pairs them with a creative ...

Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. In a collection with a taste for ventriloquy and wickedness, and a flair for vocal cross-dressing, the balance of power is always shifting in an unexpected direction - an ingénue masquerades as a femme fatale, a doctor appears more disturbed than his patient, and parents seem mor...

The first appearance of this award-winning writer's work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray's striking poetry to its originally intended form. Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray's sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been almost entirely unavailable for the ...

Enter, Fleeing is an enthralling new volume by one of the UK's most distinctive poets. The work gathered here displays Ford's power to amuse and startle, to move and disconcert. Some poems recreate moments from the poet's peripatetic childhood in Africa, America, Asia, and the Gulf, while others dramatise anarchic or violent encounters with a range of shadowy antagonists. Enter, Fleeing is without doubt this highly original poet's most eloquent and compelling collection to date.Paperback: 146...

For years now, I’ve been using the wrong palette. Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date. Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse. I’ve gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight, my overreactive motion sickness. 9 p.m., Hanoi’s Old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine. Voices outside the door come to a soft boil. – from “Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season” Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corf...

footnotes on falling is a collection of 44 poems about sub-optimal life choices. the poems constantly laugh at themselves because they are polite, and asian. they shuffle their feet sideways while declining eye contact. they indulge in wordplay because it gives them something to do with their fingers. they prefer to read out but also prefer this be done in private. they secretly would like you to bring them home.Paperback: 70 PagesProduct Dimensions: 125 x 210 mmISBN: 9789811152832Published b...

This is spoken word. This will make you feel things. This is a poet illustrating her own book. This is in alien language. This is an angry bedtime story. This contains occasional confessional explosions. This is a bit of sexy feminism. This is hipster monologue. This is angst that will not fester. This is a spiritual quest. This is sometimes grammatically incorrect. This is don't let anyone say you can't draw. Not even your own mind. Paperback: 38 PagesProduct Dimensions: 150 x 210 mmISBN: 97...

An anthology of Asian diasporic writers musing on the notion of home--and the possibilities of outsiderhood and belonging. Asian diasporic writers imagine "home" in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, this anthology moves beyond the model-minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong. Paperback: 320 PagesProduct Dimensions: 140 x 200 mmISBN: 9781936932016 Published by Fe...

Issue V of Half Mystic Journal is out now, a stunning compilation of contemporary art, lyrics, and writing in celebration of music in all its forms. This issue showcases the theme of cadenza: the saxophone laugh – the air of smoke and blue – the love affair as old-fashioned as it is timeless. Cadenza embodies swing jazz and tapping feet, midnight on cobblestoned streets, drunken solo out a three-story window, drowsy night and clumsy dance, serenade with the stars as a microphone. Issue V cont...

Eileen Myles' work is known for its blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral. At once intimate and open-hearted, her poems are a raw, complex and compelling diary of postmodern life and invite readers into astonishing new considerations of familiar settings, from the beginnings and ends of love and the imperatives of sexual desire, to the daily wonder of a poet's life in New York City and beyond - into lush-and sometimes horrible-dream worlds, imbuing the landscapes of her ...

an aunt teaches me how to tell an edible flower from a poisonous one. just in case, I hear her say, just in case. From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at o...

Sam Riviere's debut, 81 Austerities, began as a blog responding to the spending cuts, and went on in publication to win the 2012 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A sequel of sorts, the 72 poems in Kim Kardashian's Marriage mark out equally sharpened lines of public and private engagement. Kim Kardashian's 2011 marriage lasted for 72 days, and was seen by some as illustrative of the performative spectacle of celebrity life. Whatever the truth of this (and Kardashian's own statements re...

Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. A serial poem written at the beginning of each day for one year by the prolific poet and long-time editor Jocelyn Saidenberg, Kith & Kin imbricates dreams, waking, friendship, and grief. In reproducing everyday banalities of mourning, Saidenberg finds herself in proximity to others who are also with me, ones who mumble, who yell in rage, who are recently or long dead, who dream of me at night. Paperback: 65 PagesProduct Dimens...

Translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts A one-of-a-kind collection of work by little-known Late Tang poetic master Li Shangyin. Li Shangyin is one of the foremost poets of the late Tang, but until now he has rarely been translated into English, perhaps because the esotericism and sensuality of his work set him apart from the austere masters of the Chinese literary canon. Li favored allusiveness over directness, and his poems unfurl through mysterious images before coalescing into an emotional whol...

Language, art, religion, disaster, death, murder, adultery, and love, all come under the poet's attention as he continues to mine the rewarding  contradictions and frustrations of a broader existence. The final sequence is a series of lyrical propositions starting with "if".Paperback: 76 PagesProduct Dimensions: 125 x 210 mmISBN: 9789811173196Published by Math Paper Press

The poems in J. Michael Martinez's third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be coded with the trans-historical consequences of an imperial narrative. Engaging beautiful and otherworldly Mexican casta paintings, morbid photographic postcards depicting the bodies of dead Mexicans, the strange journey of the wood and cork leg of General Santa Anna, and Martinez's own family lineage, Museum of the Americas gives accounts of migrant bodies caught beneath, and fashio...

My Lot is a Sky is an anthology of poetry by Asian women. Named after a poem by Forough Farrokhzad, an influential Iranian writer and filmmaker, this collection provides a space for long-underrepresented voices to express themselves. Curated by Melissa Powers and Rena Minegishi, this book is not for those seeking work on what it specifically means to be an Asian woman today. You’ll find that the poetry within these pages is, really, about what it means to be human.Paperback: 58 PagesProduct D...

From one of the truly singular and beloved poets of contemporary Italy, these are poems of the self, the body, pasta, cats, the city and--always, and above all--love. This volume is the first substantial gathering of the best of Patrizia Cavalli's work from her first six collections, from 1974 to 2006, translated by a selection of renowned poets. By turns thoughtful and sly, sensual and comic, charismatic and profound, these are works perfectly attuned to the pleasures and pains of everyday l...

Who doesn't love haiku? It is not only America's most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere--Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, Hallmark's made millions off them, first-grade students across the count...

Cyril Wong's eighth collection hurls the reader into a private dream world; these dreams explore the finitude of the self, recasting the poet's past and shaping the future or daring to mine its dangerous potential. Paperback: 68 PagesProduct Dimensions: 125 x 210 mmISBN: 9789811173202Published by Math Paper Press

Translated by Alissa Valles The first uncensored, English-language translation of a Polish dissident poet's brave act of witness in post-World-War-II Europe. The Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki, born in a Nazi labor camp in Austria in 1943, became one of the most prominent poets of the New Wave generation of 1968, his poetry offering what Adam Michnik has called "a strange and beautiful marriage of Joseph Conrad's heroic ethics with a great metaphysical perspective." Krynicki is the author of a ...

Pantomime is a homily for the weary social actor, seeking a place of shelter. These poems meander through the performative in society, sieving through letters, anthems and declarations to find the ramshackle hut at the end of the road. Come, stranger, and walk with me. Paperback: 54 PagesProduct Dimensions: 125 x 210 mmISBN: 9789811173226Published by Math Paper Press

Translated by Babette Deutsch Although The Book of Hours is the work of Rilke's youth, it contains the germ of his mature convictions. Written as spontaneously received prayers, these poems celebrate a God who is not the Creator of the Universe but rather humanity itself and, above all, that most intensely conscious part of humanity, the artist. Babette Deutsch's classic translations--born from "the pure desire to sing what the poet sang" (Ursula K. Le Guin)--capture the rich harmony and sugg...

Poems of Rome ranges across the centuries and contains the work of poets from many cultures and times, from ancient Rome to contemporary America. Designed to accompany readers visiting the city--whether in person or in imagination--the book is divided into sections by place. Its pages lead the reader from the Roman Forum to the Colosseum, from the Vatican to the Villa Sciarra, from the Pantheon to the Palatine Hill, all seen through the eyes of poets who have been dazzled by these glorious si...

edited by Claude Rawson Alexander Pope is one of the most-quoted poets in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations; he is the source of such immortal gems as "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," and "To err is human, to forgive, divine." Celebrated for his incisive satires, most famously "The Rape of the Lock" and "The Dunciad," and for his philosophical verse, including the monumental "An Essay on Man," Pope united irony and wit with deep insight ...

Rindon Johnson and Ser Serpas are multidisciplinary artists and writers. Johnson is also the author of Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People and virtual reality book Meet in the Corner. Paperback: 62 pagesProduct Dimensions: 135 x 190 mmISBN: 9780997444650 Published by Capricious

In this electrifying and raw debut anthology, Maggie Nelson unpicks the everyday with the quick alchemy and precision of her later modern classics The Argonauts and Bluets. The poems of Shiner experiment with a variety of styles-syllabic verse, sonnets, macaronic translation, Zen poems, walking poems-to express love, bewilderment, grief, and beauty. This book, Nelson's first, heralded the arrival of a fully formed, virtuoso voice. Paperback: 84 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 97817...

Singapore Poetry Writing Month, or as we affectionately call it, SingPoWriMo. Write one poem a day for thirty days in the cruel month of April: that was the challenge we first gave the internet in 2014. In its third year, our anthology gathers the best of the 5,110 poems that were submitted in 2018. Daily challenging prompts reflected on the Singaporean condition, with verses written for every MRT and LRT station, poems that upgraded other poems that upgraded other poems and so on. We are pro...

sonnets from the singlish is a collection of 88 poems on love, language and the pursuit of laughter. the poems are loosely translated from the english-based creole language colloquially spoken in singapore, widely known as singlish. the poems were originally composed in the sonnet form, an archaic italian fourteen-line rhyming verse form that follows the rhythmic rules of iambic pentameter. people still write like this primarily for ease of formatting. they are most tolerable when read out lo...

Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous, and intellectually charged work. In her tenth collection, Spell, Lauterbach activates the many meanings of "spell": her sense that the world is under a spell from which it must awaken, to spells of passing weather, to her desire to spell out life's difficulties and wonders, and how sin-gle words (and their etymologies) might inform and enlighten our contemporary condition. In short poems, poem sequenc...

Sun Music collects Beveridge's best poems published over a thirty-year period, from 1987 to 2017. She has selected the poems from her award-winning collections, The Domesticity of Giraffes, Accidental Grace, Wolf Notes and Storm and Honey, and included 33 new poems which build on and enhance her previous work. Beveridge is an exacting poet, precise and controlled, and her formal discipline gives added intensity to her expression of emotion. The combination of clarity and dramatic force, invol...

The Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen's last poems and writings, selected and ordered by Cohen in the final months of his life. The book contains an extensive selection from Cohen's notebooks, featuring lyrics, prose pieces and illustrations, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker. An enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen's storied literary career, The Flame show...

The Games is a book of play with language. In Scots and English, it mucks about with sound poetry, found poetry, computer-generated poetry, dirty poetry and others ways to blur and bust the borders of genre. Its themes are ecology, power and sex: how can you have fun in a system that’s trying to take power away from you? The Games makes and breaks rules in an effort to live a full life in a full world. Paperback: 88 PagesProduct Dimensions: 136 x 216 mmISBN: 9781999679200 Published by Outspok...

As in life, she was a pain in the arsein death. He could hear her roaringall the way from the fifth circle,'Why the hell do you get to be in abetter circle than me, I'm wrathfulbecause of your lust -' Deploying a chorus of voices both ancient and modern to explore a world of sexual politics and singles cruises, dysfunctional families and psychoanalysis, awkward cohabitations and self-help guides for the would-be Dream Girl, this is the third collection from a unique poetic talent: observant, ...

In this, her second anthology of poetry, Maggie Nelson experiments with poetic forms long and short as she charts intimate landscapes, including the poet's enmeshment in a beloved city-New York-before and after the events of 9/11. The poems of The Latest Winter are rich with wit, melancholy, terror, curiosity, and love. Paperback: 106 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9781786994691 Published by Zed Books

A crucifix, a piece of underwear, a body part—these belong to a lover’s inventory that encompasses objects, places, sensations, and other memorabilia, providing springboards for memory and poetry. Mischievous, ambivalent, erotic to sentimental and profound, these poems serve as letters to past flings, lovers and exes, bearing messages about the challenges of desire, loneliness, and letting go.Paperback: 60 PagesProduct Dimensions: 125 x 210 mmISBN: 9789810945602Published by Math Paper Press

The poems of Wendell Berry invite us to stop, to think, to see the world around us, and to savour what is good. Here are consoling verses of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging; luminous hymns to the land, the cycles of nature and the seasons as they ebb and flow. Here is the peace of wild things.Paperback: 144 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780141987125Published by Penguin Books

Now a global poetry, the haiku was originally a Japanese verse form that flourished from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Although renowned for its brevity, usually running over three lines in seventeen syllables, and by its use of natural imagery to make Zen-like observations about reality, in fact the haiku is much more: it can be erotic, funny, crude and mischievous. Presenting over a thousand exemplars in vivid and engaging translations, this anthology offers an illuminating introdu...

Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from present-day London to North America, André Naffis-Sahely's bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: labourers, travellers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed.Paperback: 80 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780141984933Published by Penguin Books