Seren

Banshee Press

In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lenses of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports – the high jump.

Formally inventive, these poems speak in a vulnerable, rapturous voice that urges us to reimagine our possible selves, while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters. Taking us from the arroyos of New Mexico to a West Cork farm in winter, these meditations on beauty and the elusive nature of love are insightful and hard-won: the spirit triumphs, even when the body falls.

Prototype

rock flight is a book-length poem that follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.

Carcanet

Rebecca Hurst's first collection, The Iron Bridge, bridges memory and observation, noting the detail of the natural world and our changing relation to it. The book's places are made familiar by walking. It encounters other worlds alive with new and recovered ideas and images – from the folk traditions of her Sussex childhood, to archival encounters with a nineteenth-century nurse-explorer, and her undergraduate training as a Kremlinologist. Her language is deeply rooted, as keenly aware of etymologies as of history. Shaped by myth, history and desire, the poems of The Iron Bridge are theatrical, fierce, music-infused.

Jonathan Cape

One in three women in Britain have an abortion. For such a common procedure, it has not been the subject of a dedicated book of poetry - not, at least, until now.

Amelia Loulli opens this fearless, frank, absorbing debut with the words 'I'm going to tell you what happened', and that is precisely what she does. With these careful, generous, insistent poems, we are led through the experience of abortion and surprised at every turn. There is vulnerability and despair, there is the shame and silence too, but there is also the constant, steady pulse of compassion, tenderness and wonder at the world.

Slip is a daring book, not just in subject but in style: skilfully worked, integrating the rich terror of nursery rhymes and folk tales with the bland banalities and euphemisms of social interaction, of medical techniques. It is also, sadly, a necessary book - provocative and transformative poetry about women as mothers and survivors. A cry of fury and a cry of love.

Jonathan Cape

This searingly powerful first collection about Ukrainian identity is a howl of anguish and an elegant counter-song against totalitarianism.

With this searingly powerful first collection, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight gives the current war in Ukraine some much-needed human focus, while examining its brutal aggression within a wider and more accurate historical context.

Central to this book is ‘a timeline of hunger’, a lyric sequence which examines the legacy of the Holodomor (‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian) – Stalin’s man-made famine of the 1930s. This long poem opens in Kyiv in 2021 – ‘brief visitations / of appetite / I devour / beetroot / its juices / running / down my lips / blood / of the past’ – and closes in Donetsk in 1929: ‘we burst the balloon / skin of tomatoes / between our teeth / seeds running down chins / like confetti / & we already know / every meal / should be celebrated.’ Through the poet’s sensitive approach to the historical, moving from that genocide of the early 1930s, then on through the Second World War, the Chornobyl disaster, to modern-day invaded Ukraine, we understand that within their ‘bones Holodomor / lives on’.

Both a howl of anguish and an eloquent counter-song against totalitarianism, this is a book about invasion, war, destruction and death, but also about the bonds of humanity, family and a history of oppression – about staying alive while always hungry.