Noon

Zain Rishi

Two brothers wrestle, a bird lies in a young boy’s hand, an entire field lives within the eye of a needle.

Noon is a sparkling debut from Birmingham-born poet Zain Rishi, exploring home, family and faith.

From the heat of the school relay and his grandmother’s Kashmiri chai to the images of a young man kissing a city goodbye, these poems chart a coming-of-age journey across place, sexuality and family ties.

Rich in its interrogation of language and inheritance across generations, Noon announces Zain Rishi as one of the UK’s most exciting new voices.

Wellwater

Karen Solie

Wellwater demonstrates a poet writing at the height of her powers. In poems that are supple, philosophical, bracingly honest and ribbed with erudition, Wellwater conducts a self-interrogative conversation with a culture in crisis and a natural world on the brink.

Thresholds abound, ‘doors between dimensions’ where past selves or lost loved ones speak to us again: ‘death is not Saskatchewan’ shrugs one encountered soul, ‘we don’t all know each other in this place’.

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize

回 / Return
Emily Lee Luan

Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, 回 / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history.

The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?

Crush: Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Richard Siken

The twentieth-anniversary edition of the influential first poetry collection by Richard Siken, described as some of the “best American poetry of the 21st Century (So Far)."

Since winning the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, Crush has become a modern classic. This twentieth-anniversary edition includes a new introduction by award-winning poet Dana Levin and a new afterword by the author.

Plastic

Matthew Rice

Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in a factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet.

Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis and satire, Bplastic is based on Matthew Rice’s experience working in a plastic moulding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labour in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Troubles’ society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film and the visual arts.

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Quiet

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s debut collection, Quiet, circles around ideas of black interiority, intimacy and selfhood, playing at the the tensions between the impulse to guard one’s ‘inner life’ and the knowledge that, as Audre Lorde writes, ‘your silence will not protect you’.

The poems teem with grace and dignity, are artful in their shapes, sharp in their intelligence, and possessing of a good ear, finely attuned to the sonics that fascinate and motivate the writing ‘at the lower end of sound’.