Winner of the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry
Shortlisted for the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize
Shortlisted for the 2020 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize
Shortlisted for the 2020 JhaLak Prize
2019 Book of the Year in The Guardian, The Irish Times and The White Review

Flèche (the French word for ‘arrow’) is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan’s young adult years, when she competed locally and internationally for her home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable (‘flesh’) and weaponised (‘flèche’), and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one’s need for safety alongside the desire to shed one’s protective armour in order to fully embrace the world.

Central to the collection is the figure of the poet’s mother, whose fragmented memories of political turmoil in twentieth-century China are sensitively threaded through the book in an eight-part poetic sequence, combined with recollections from Chan’s childhood. As complex themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and cultural history emerge, so too does a richly imagined personal, maternal and national biography. The result is a series of poems that feel urgent and true, dazzling and devastating by turns.

Mary Jean Chan was born and raised in Hong Kong. She is lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and lives in London. 

Chan has been twice shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2019. She has written poetry reviews and op-eds for the Guardian Review, and her literary criticism has been published in the Journal of American Studies and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. In Spring 2020, Chan served as guest co-editor at The Poetry Review. 

What to do when everything goes up in flames? Summon up Tom Sastry’s poems, with all their elegant, satirical and hurt-quenching power: here are nightmares and fairytales, museums full of regret, misenchantments and magic for dark times.

Whilst the accelerants of complicity and violence seep from these exacting poems, Sastry’s wit and stoicism slake the bonfire of modern troubles. They defiantly ask us: why do “the great marquees of England” stand empty? How old is your heart? Why aren’t we listening to the sea, and what it has to say? Funny, marvellously frank and often courageous, A Man’s House is on Fire urges us to take a long hard look into the flames and avert the disasters of the heart, home and nations that threaten to befall us all.

This much anticipated debut collection by poet Tom Sastry follows on from his pamphlet Complicity, selected by Carol Ann Duffy for the Poetry Business Laureate’s Choice and awarded the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice.

“Tom Sastry’s poems stare down the ridiculousness of the world we live in, and offer us ways to carry on in spite of it. These are poems of bright wit and astonishing vulnerability, with one eye always on the future. A Man’s House Catches Fire gives us the simultaneous pain and joy of being a human being; reminds us it is marvellous / that it still hurts.”
– Suzannah Evans

Tom Sastry was chosen by Carol Ann Duffy as one of the 2016 Laureate's Choice poets. His resulting pamphlet Complicity was a Poetry School Book of the Year and a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice. He is the co-editor with Suzannah Evans of Everything That Can Happen, a poetry anthology about the future published by The Emma Press. This is his first full collection.  An accomplished reader and performer, Tom has a growing reputation as a spoken word artist. A book of his performance poems will be published by Burning Eye Books in 2020. 

The Guardian's Poetry Book of the Month August 2019

So Many Rooms, the debut collection from Geoffrey Dearmer Prize-winning poet Laura Scott, moves with its own lyric strangeness, opening up different rooms and also different worlds.

'There can be no doubt at all that this is an exceptional piece of work. Scott has the capacity to capture drama in a small number of words, neatly arranged. Her poetry, in this way, is the quintessence of poetry. Her clarity, concision and quiet ambiguity are yardsticks against which I find myself measuring other poets. Its confidence and its consistency both suggest a poet who has arrived. She offers a comprehensive vision. We are watching a poet composing at the height of her powers. It's not even September yet, but I suspect it might be my poetry book of the year.'
- Joe Darlington, Manchester Review of Books

'I couldn't put it down and have kept returning to these poems, drawn in - and on - by their beauty and clarity. Her lyricism is like shot silk - it ripples with light.'
- Kate Kellaway, The Guardian

'These are intimate poems, grounded, yet dreamlike, revealing the beauty, gravity and power at the core of the everyday. They're all the more compelling because it's as if the poems are allowed to make their own discoveries with the poet knowing exactly when to step back, and when and how to intervene.'
- Moniza Alvi  

'So Many Rooms is beguiling and lyrically persuasive. Scott's fine formal control and her mesmerising shifts of imagery underpin poems of sensual intelligence, thoughtfulness and poetic beauty.'
- Sasha Dugdale 

Better known as a novelist and as author of the best-selling The Secret Life of France (Faber & Faber), Lucy Wadham brings her knowledge of France, and her experiences as an outsider, to her debut poetry collection. From the remote Cévennes mountains, where “a man and a woman sit bent / over their soup, her thoughts / silenced for years, rising like smoke” (Dissent), via Croatia, Italy and Scotland, with “The small boy with his square / of blue crochet, his broad brogue: / I’m gonnae call ma babby Finn MacCool” (Crossing Mull), Lucy’s skills as an observer strike at the heart of what it means to be human.

“Observant and imaginative, these poems stake out the world of experience and feelings with enough confidence to make the reader believe the poet must have been writing them for twenty years, not five. They have a wonderful sense of drama, and above all know how to begin and how to stop. The best poems here have a sharpness and brilliance that transcends the private material that can sometimes be powerful for the writer but not for anyone else. Rich in a sympathetic sensibility, they are outward-looking as well as inwardly analytical. And they manage to be funny as well.”

- John Fuller

Lucy Wadham was born in London and has lived for over 30 years in France. She is the author of three novels, Lost, Castro's Dream and Greater Love (all Faber) and two memoirs: the bestselling The Secret Life of France (Faber) and Heads and Straights (Penguin). She has spent most of her life in Paris and in the Cévennes mountains, where she teaches a creative writing course twice a year and also works as a writing tutor.

She has four children, has written for newspapers, theatre, film and opera, and is currently working on several TV scripts. Fold is her first poetry collection.