Poetry

A poem seems a fragile thing. Change a word and it is broken. But poems outlive empires and survive the devastation of conquests. Celebrated author John Carey here presents a uniquely valuable anthology of verse based on a simple principle: select the one-hundred greatest poets from across the centuries, and then choose their finest poems. Ranging from Homer and Sappho to Donne and Milton, Plath and Angelou, this is a delightful and accessible introduction to the very best that poetry can off...

A Blood Condition tells a story of inheritance - the people, places, cultures and memories that form us. Kayo Chingonyi explores how distance and time, nations and a century's history, can collapse within a body; our past continuous in our present. From London, Leeds, and The North East to the banks of the Zambezi river, these poems consider change and permanence, grief and joy, the painful ongoing process of letting go, with remarkable music and clarity. Paperback: 80 PagesProduct Dimensions...

A Luxury: Omnibus Edition is simultaneously a time capsule and a time-machine. The first volume, A Luxury We Cannot Afford, bottled the lightning of poetry, prose and plays in 2015. The second, A Luxury We Must Afford, took a leap forward into the unknown future of Singapore. You will find something to please and pique every reader in this anthology. Hardback: 398 PagesProduct Dimensions: 140 x 205 mmISBN: 9789811809002Signed Edition with Dust Jacket is limited to 30 copies Published by Math ...

Hoa Nguyen's latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-"Fall-of-Saigon" and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. In turns lyrical and unsettling, her poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myt...

A Vertical Art gathers the expansive and spirited public lectures delivered by Simon Armitage during his acclaimed four-year tenure as Oxford University Professor of Poetry. Armitage tries to identify a 'common sense' approach to an artform that can lend itself to grand statements and vacuous gestures, questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, asserting certain fundamental qualities that separate the genre from near-neighbours such as prose and song lyrics, examini...

Jack Underwood's poetry debut, Happiness (2015), was celebrated for its unconventional and daring tone: 'conversational, arresting... weird, singular' (Guardian). Such qualities are on accomplished display in this anticipated new collection, as the poems mature and move on to a wide range of preoccupations, including imminent societal collapse and public unrest; the limits, myths and complexities of masculinity and fatherhood; and uncanny, often amusing scenarios, such as serving drinks to a ...

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe's spellbinding debut poetry collection explores love and the wounds it makes. Its first half is composed of five sections, corresponding to the five arrows of Kama, the Hindu God of Love, Desire and Memory. From 'stunning' and 'paralysing' to 'killing' and 'destroying', each arrow has its own effect on some body - a very real, contemporary body - and its particular journey of love. The second is a long narrative poem, 'A is for [Arabs]', which follows a different kind of j...

This startlingly original reworking of the Persephone myth takes us to the icy shores of Averno, the crater lake regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Here, the consolations of rebirth and renewal are eclipsed by the immediacy of loss - by a mother's possessive grief, an abducted girl's equivocal memories, a farmer's lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace but deepened understanding, its sorrow textured by the poet's luminous wit. T...

Borderline Fortune is a meditation on intangible family inheritance--of unresolved intergenerational conflicts and traumas in particular--set against the backdrop of our planetary inheritance as humans. As species go extinct and glaciers melt, Teresa K. Miller asks what we owe one another and what it means to echo one's ancestors' grief and fear. Drawing on her family history, from her great-grandfather's experience as a schoolteacher on an island in the Bering Strait to her father's untimely...

"Migrant. Citizen. Foreign Talent. Singaporean. Local. Expatriate. Immigrant. Permanent Resident. Migrant Worker.” What do these words mean, and how do they make you feel when you say them, or when you hear them said to you? When a border is crossed, when a passport is stamped, when you taste a familiar dish or hear a familiar accent – who truly belongs where, and to what or whom? This sequel anthology brings together more than seventy writers and poets with differing relationships to the wor...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by mid-December 2021. Click here to find out more about when your pre-order will ship. Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, Amanda Gorman’s remarkable new collection reveals an energizing and unforgettable voice in American poetry. Call Us What We Carry is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,” the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of t...

history is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn't It is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive, playful, dream-like poems, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present, while Cheryl translates from the future, showing us how we exist in all three at once. Reckoning with both public and private tragedies, the book is d...

Comic Timing, Holly Pester's extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase. Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection o...

Described as 'a rich, reverberative dance with memories of a haunted city' (LA Times), the poems of the prize-winning debut Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, draw on archetype, myth and Russian literary figures. Tightly realised domestic settings are invigorated with a contemporary relevance, humour and torment, and a distinctive, transcendent music. Paperback: 80 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780571369188 Published by Faber & Faber

2021 is the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, author of the long narrative poetic trilogy, The Divine Comedy. In a time of global pandemic, Dante's exploration of the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds and humankind's responsibilities to each other seems particularly relevant, and to commemorate Dante's anniversary we invited 70 poets from around the world to respond to Dante's famous work, assisted by a team of seven contributing editors: Paul Munden (UK)...

EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices is a landmark literary project, gathering the best works of local LGBTQ writers who emerged in the 2010s. These writings reveal the dreams, struggles and indomitable spirit of our queer community in a time of turbulence and transformation—a decade of highly visible protests and controversies, new labels for gender and sexuality, and a more fearless brand of cultural politics. This collection features texts written in English, Mandarin, Malay and ...

Far District, the transporting debut from the author of House of Lords and Commons, is structured as the spiritual journey of a poet-speaker caught between two cultures. As childhood memory is grafted to the world of imagination - shaped by books, art, music and travel - the two come together to develop a new vision of what 'home' might offer. Paperback: 112 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9780571369201 Published by Faber & Faber

Born in the United States into a secularized Hindu family, Amit Majmudar puzzled over the many religious traditions on offer, and found that the Bhagavad Gita had much to teach him with its "song of multiplicities." Chief among them is that "its own assertions aren't as important as the relationships between its characters... The Gita imagined a relationship in which the soul and God are equals"; it is, he believes, "the greatest poem of friendship... in any language." His verse translation c...

Hiddensee represents Annie Freud's most ambitious work to date, not least because it is a book about ambition and its necessity, the need to go beyond oneself, and to do what one cannot: Freud dives into other ways of thinking, other art forms, the taboos of illness and desire, and - spectacularly - other languages. This ambition has also emboldened Freud to pursue and confront the complex truth of herself: her German Jewish inheritance, her teachers, the remarkable minds of the exiled indivi...

How Now Blown Crow is a sequence of poems which follows the relationship between two divorcees starting a new life together after their respective marriages have failed. Between ghosts of past loves, quotidian domestic and natural spaces, states of sleep and wakefulness, and the desire for rootedness and migration, the collection spans several decades from youth into old age. How Now Blown Crow is a poetry collection about sustaining a relationship in spite of the dubious nature of love. Hard...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by late-November 2021. Click here to find out more about when your pre-order will ship. This collection is an exploration of the various meanings that ‘living with yourself’ can entail. How do you come to terms with your own failings? How do you live on your own, both literally and figuratively? And above all, how do you cohabit a body with a self that you cannot always understand? In this ...

From a maestra of invention (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. Women's voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must ...

A pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world's current and future fate--Some of the most important poetry in the world today (Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine). Ledger's pages hold the most important work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance (Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw), Hirshfield...

Living Weapon is a love song to the imagination, a new blade of light homing in on our political moment. A winged man plummets from the troposphere, four police officers enter a phone store, concrete pavements hang overhead. Phillips ruminates on violins and violence, on hatred and pleasure, on turning forty-three, even on the end of existence itself. His poetry reveals the limitations of our vocabulary, showing that our platitudes are inadequate to the brutal times we find ourselves in. And ...

“In Chinese, I am always 16,” observes Clara Chow in her debut poetry collection. These poems written in Chinese – and the author’s own English translation – are an experiment in bilingualism: How am I a different person in a different language? Simple, direct and heart-felt, this book is an attempt to connect with a fictional beloved, a love letter to a mother tongue, and a reclamation of a dormant self. 多情的人与多情的城相遇擦出了火花，而《几首烂情诗》诞生了。谁说情诗必须有对象？《几首烂情诗》是赵燕芬的第一本双语诗集，以一双带着童真浪漫的眼睛给平凡的世界添上了颜色。 Pap...

Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca (God squeezes, but He doesn't strangle)--the epigraph of Machete--sets the stage for a powerful poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there's an invisible hand at your throat. Tomás Morín hails from the coastal plains of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that ever-changing shore. In these poems, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire....

Some people are like monarch butterflies-solitary by nature, on a passionate search for somewhere. Critically acclaimed songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews presents her first poetry collection. This poetry collection reads like a transformation, me, the narrator, being the figurative Old Monarch. Documenting this journey, the book is separated into three sections, "Sonoran Milkweed," "Longing In Flight," and "Eucalyptus Tree (My Arrival to Rest)." In the first stage of my journey, I explore my ...

Translated by Chris Turner Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions. On Poetry includes two long essays in this slim volume. The first e...

Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the invasive species crisis, Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field's essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into ...

With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar's second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body's question, "what now shall I repair?" Here, Akbar responds...

Translated by Hedgie Choi This debut collection in English from Korean poet Moon Bo Young insists that you, as a reader, put down your expectations of what should be important or serious. While these poems are about god, death, love, and literature, they are also just as much about a hat with a herd of cows on it, science experiments on monkeys' attention, the eating of cherry tomatoes, weeping carrots, and pimple popping. The surrealism and humor in these poems allow them to travel so far in...

For the past fifty years, Louise Gluck has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form: the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Gluck has published to date, offering readers the opportunity to become immersed in the artistry and vision of one of the world's greatest living poets. From the allegories of The Wild Iris to the...

Translated by Mary Jo Bang Award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang’s new translation of Purgatorio is the extraordinary continuation of her journey with Dante, which began with her transformative version of Inferno. In Purgatorio, still guided by the Roman poet Virgil, Dante emerges from the horrors of Hell to begin the climb up Mount Purgatory, a seven-terrace mountain with each level devoted to those atoning for one of the seven deadly sins. At the summit, we find the Terrestrial Heaven and Beatric...

In Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webb turns poetry to an examination of the textures of class, youth, adulthood and death in the working communities of the West Country, from mobile home parks, boyish factory workers and saleswomen kept on the road for days at a time, to the yearnings of young love and the complexities of masculinity. Alongside individual poems, three sequences predominate: a series of 'Love Stories', charting a course through the dreams, lies and salt-baked limbs of multi...

Maurice Riordan's keenly anticipated new collection continues his agile exploration of time, both in its depredations and rewards, while also bringing a sceptical, enquiring intelligence to bear on the anxieties and vanities of our age. Here we have disquieting songs of a mutable self; a projected online deathbed confession; the soul haranguing the body; while encounters with ghostly feet and tongues of fire consort with riffs on Baudelaire, Rilke and Old English. These poems pulse with misch...

August Kleinzahler has earned admiration for his musical, precise poems that are grounded in the people, places and language among which he has lived. Snow Approaching On The Hudson is a collection of poetry that moves back and forth across the country and abroad, and through the realm of dreams, past and present, and inner and outer landscapes. The haunting, shifting atmosphere Kleinzahler creates is peopled by characters intimate, historical and imaginary. Kleinzahler's signature rhythmic p...

Translated by Kareem James Abu-zeid and Ivan Eubanks Cloud, mirror, stone, thunder, eyelid, desert, sea. Through a dead or dying land, Mihyar walks: a figure of heroic individualism and dissent, part-Orpheus, part-Zarathustra. Where he goes, the austere building-blocks of his world become the expressions of passionate emotion, of visionary exaltation and despairing melancholy. The traditions of the Ancient Greeks, the Bible and the Quran flow about and through him. Written in the cosmopolitan...

who are you when you're alone Starry Night, Blurry Dreams is a collection of graphic poetry about loneliness, love and existing in our world. a heavy heart is hard to carry hold on When words aren't enough to describe our emotions, this book will offer comfort, joy and a friend in the dark. we all have our own beautiful universe Hardback: 304 PagesProduct Dimensions: 203 x 254 mmISBN: 9781526635600 Published by Bloomsbury

An urgent, powerful examination of place and the ways in which all kinds of identities exist and collide. The poems in sulphurtongue ask how to redefine desire and kinship across languages, and across polluted environments. An immigrant family scatters over a stolen continent. Oracles appear in public transit, and online. Bodies are transformed by nearby nickel mines. Doppelgangers, Catholic saints, and polyamorists alike pass on unusual inheritances. Deeply entangled in relations both emotio...

How does poetry work? What should readers notice and look out for? Poet Lucy Newlyn demystifies the principles of the form, effortlessly illustrating key approaches and terms-all through her own original verse. Each poem exemplifies an aspect of poetic craft-but read together they suggest how poetry can evoke a whole community and its way of life in myriad ways. In a series of beautiful meditations, Newlyn guides the reader through key aspects of poetry, from sonnets and haiku to volta and sy...

For the poet and activist June Jordan, neither poetry nor activism could easily be disentangled from the other. Her storied career came to chronicle a living, breathing history of the struggles that defined the USA in the latter half of the twentieth century; and her poetry, accordingly, put its dazzling stylistic range to use in exploring issues of gender, race, immigration, representation and much else besides. Here, above all, are sinuous, lashing and passionate lines, virtuosic in their m...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by mid-November 2021. Click here to find out more about when your pre-order will ship. International best-selling author Lang Leav presents The Gift of Everything, a stunning hardcover gift book featuring her finest pieces to date, spanning across her world-renowned poetry and prose titles from Love & Misadventure to Love Looks Pretty on You. In addition, this beautifully conceived clot...

Foreword by Oprah Winfrey On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe. Her poem “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” can now be cherished in this special gift edition. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this keepsake celebrates th...

The poems in Carrie Fountain's third collection, The Life, exist somewhere, as Rilke says, between "our daily life" and "the great work"--an interstitial space where sidelong glances live alongside shouts to heaven. In elegant, colloquial language, Fountain observes her children dressing themselves in fledgling layers of personhood, creating their own private worlds and personalities, and makes room for genuine marvels in the midst of routine. Attuned to the delicate, fleeting moments that to...

The Mirror of My Heart is a unique and captivating collection of eighty-three Persian women poets, many of whom wrote anonymously or were punished for their outspokenness. One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe’eh, who lived over a thousand years ago) and there have been women poets writing in Persian in virtually every generation since that time until the present. Before the twentieth century they tended to come from society’s social extremes–many were princesses, some were en...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by mid-November 2021. Click here to find out more about when your pre-order will ship. Poets have always looked to the skies for inspiration, and have written as a way of getting closer to the power and beauty they sense in nature, in each other and in the cosmos. This anthology serves as a truly holistic and global survey to a lyric conversation about the divine that has been going on for ...

The Yemeni American poet Threa Almontaser’s incendiary debut asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser sneaks artifacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures. Speakers move with the force...

translations to the tanglish is a collection of the 44 greatest-ever poems from the tang dynasty and song dynasty, dodgily “translated” into (1) english; (2) 2021; (3) singapore; (4) a pandemic. so su dongpo never used zoom, and du fu never caught covid-19; so li bai never drank lagavulin and wang wei never went to little india. but hey, none of them ever spoke english either. flip on, or scroll down, or swipe through. in a world where every other poem is about the moon, our modern moon is a...