This being said, I don’t have a firmer grasp on the book after having read it (possibly) a few more times than you have. This isn’t a book of ‘firm grasps’. Take the opening line from ‘A Quarter Mile of Voices’, a veritable thimblerig: ‘A loaf steals a bread of starving man’. Or this from ‘You Don’t Say’: ‘A gorgeous big lump of a horse of a bar / of English elm varnished with lightning.’ Sexton, though, is always safely at the wheel. If syntax is a journey, he knows a short cut that ends up being longer than the long way round, in the course of which he’ll reveal to you an entirely new prospect of landscape or of language.

The poems themselves are shuffled and dealt out of Cheryl’s tarot pack. The book as a whole has an architectural grace. Poems of love and friendship; of loss of loves and friends; of boyish joy (& the violent potential it contains); of making (& the violent potential it contains); of being alone and being forced to be alone together (‘Siamese Dream for the Cloths of Heaven’ is the best poem to come out of successive lockdowns I’ve read, and it hardly mentions it); of the future and the threats to it.

Cheryl’s Destinies’ achievement is the ability to survey our moment and its attendant confusions and anxieties, its heady mixture of decay and renewal, while managing to maintain a rareness of sympathy and integrity and a fascination with the possible – of what could have been, or what will be.

These poems take the form mostly of concrete passages, commanding pillars in the centre of each page, and feature appropriations from other texts, such as newspaper articles, Bible entries and her father’s diary. These texts’ significance lies in how they inform the author’s feelings regarding her own upbringing, one that’s likely plagued with the feelings of loss, and how she approaches the traumatic event. For me, the most striking use of this is the found poem on page 48 in which a young McConnell edits Psalm 23, ending it in “my enemies see/ me/ know/ my/ house.”

This religious language appears throughout the book and draws parallels between the pious and the every-day, particularly with the word ‘father’ and finding the balance between using this to describe the personal relationship between father and daughter and the holy connection between God and human. In this language, there are delicate and subtle political connotations, as religion is often used as the territorial and baseline identifier for the conflict in 1980s Northern Ireland that composes the context in which the murder of her father occurred in 1984.

Overall, this book is a generous offering from Gail McConnell to the reader that offers insight into her own journey of processing the events. The switching of voice between that of her childhood self and of her present-day self highlights the difficulty of this task at the time of the event (when she was only three-years-old) and now, 37 years later. The Sun is Open displays an account of grief presented through engaging and impassioned verse that reminds us of the personal impact that our country's violence has had for those who have lost loved ones.

The book ranges from acute societal observations as in ‘My Friend Bethany Rages at the News’, and ‘Female Candidate’ which examine how women are portrayed in the media, and the achingly intimate ‘Deliverance’, in which she writes of a child being born, ‘What is the word for when the light leaves / the body? What is the word for when it, at / last, returns?’ This range gives us the opportunity to access Baer’s sharp commentary on the ways women are constantly harangued about every aspect of their lives; their weight, their sexuality, their intelligence, but it also acts as a salve to this noise. Filtered throughout the collection are poems about love, told with tenderness and heart through the voice of a mother.

One of the best things about Baer’s writing is her tone of resilience and quiet encouragement in the face of the things which can knock us down or make us feel a certain way about ourselves. These poems say, don’t do it, you’re better than that, like in ‘Moon Song’ when she says, ‘You may be a woman of / commotion and quiet. Magic and brain.’ Most of the poems in this collection are short and blocky stanzas, reading like little kicks of truth and wisdom, and these deliver reinforcement, ’Life will rough you up. / Throw you to the / shore like a wave crashing’. This is a collection to read in one sitting, but to come back to again and again.

The twelve stories in this collection are full of bodies, people talking about bodies: bodies that surprise, support, and betray characters constantly, from the mundanity of a pedicab driver talking about weight loss, to someone waking up with a block of wood where their face should be, and from phone calls about top surgery to pervasive dreams of walruses.

Arndt’s use of language is imaginative and engaging — chandeliers of a casino “spaghettied from the ceiling” and a brother is “probably under a roll-neck of Xbox and bong smoke.” The frequently-unnamed narrators ask questions of the reader, usually about bodies; questions like: “Was it a universe-made law – some bodies need more space?” and “Instantly pregnant – was there any other way?” which rarely have a straightforward answer.

For all the seriousness with which these stories question what it means to be human, they keep a surreal playfulness of language. They are also full of uneasiness as plots leap just as the reader grows comfortable with the direction of the story. One moment the narrator is driving in their car, next they are in a crystal cave built in a parking lot swap meet.

Jess Arndt’s questions, leaps and playful language transform these stories into the undoable and the unavoidable; ultimately we must inhabit whatever body we have. Large Animals is a collection of stories that can be read and re-read. They will always reveal new joys and new insights about the ways in which our bodies move us through the world.

Kennard has the ability to feed our experiences back to us: ‘I have a friend who breaks into uncontrollable screaming at the first sign of small talk.’ 'The strength of Notes is in these moments of commonality between the speaker and reader that create an ‘Ahh Yes' moment of recognition. Anyone who has attended a party knows what it’s like ‘to want to disappear into the night with all the apology of a firework.’

Notes is more than a series of vignettes and its breadth of subjects is impressive. Using the great bard’s words as a springboard, the collection is less a conversation between Kennard and Shakespeare than Kennard and his younger self; at its heart, Notes is a book about family and the importance of settling down. The most affecting poems are the ones addressed to or about his son. If maturity is to improve on what has gone before, Notes is a book on the cusp of middle age.

Full of the ‘solemnity and regret’ that comes with family and ‘obligations’, Kennard knows that the past is the past and ‘nostalgia is just a self-microwaving cup of coffee’. There is enough of the old Kennard for the diehards to appreciate, but there is a tender wisdom that can only come from time and parenthood. Only those who know, know ‘Why is there a seven-year-old at this party?’.

The main theme of this coming-of-age novel is that of constraint: in both the content of the book and in its form. Our unnamed protagonist clumsily deals with her growth from school girl to adult during a time when information was not easily accessible via the internet as it is for those growing up today. Throughout, the narrator evasively alludes to sex in fearful language as though it were a hurdle she must overcome as opposed to a rite of passage that is deemed meaningful and exciting in our culture. While doing this, she manages to still communicate a deep tone of sensuality through the act eluding of the word itself.

The self-restraint of the protagonist is mirrored in the form of the book itself. Prior to being picked up by No Alibis Press for print publication, Seed existed as an interactive online story in which the reader moves through illustrated “story vines”. The physical novel stays true to this original layout as each chapter contains two strains of text in standard font and in italics that don’t always correspond to each other, much like the branches of a tree or leaves from the stem of a flower.

Walsh depicts the coming-of-age of this young woman with a sensitivity and reverence that does not mock the girl, but treats her with the care and respect that women typically do not receive during this developmental stage of life. She also manages to tell such a seemingly simple narrative that has been told many times before in fiction with such complexities and nuances that give the plot a breath of fresh air and space for readers to have their own interpretations on the story.

Alongside this, Ida is grappling with another adversary: her sister, Marthe. Ida’s feelings towards Marthe, rooted in a history of perceived preferential treatment, have been allowed to mutate from sibling rivalry into pernicious rage, fuelled by Ida’s anxieties regarding her own future, her inability to sequester those feelings amidst fraught family dynamics, and her perception that Marthe has been gifted the very things Ida feels she deserves. That first line comes into play again, reminding us that, despite being women, Ida and Marthe are, themselves, someone’s children, and are not immune to the infantilising regression that occurs when we are reminded of our status as offspring.

The irascibility Ida feels for others’ progeny she administers upon herself and upon Marthe, and as her pain permeates their relationship, there comes a denouement of quietly disastrous domestic upheaval. Although it ends abruptly, the novel’s conclusion is perhaps absolutely appropriate for a character who is left, once her unwieldy fury has exacted itself, with little to work with but silence, and time.

Hardisty respects craft, but not in some tired traditionalist way. There's a sureness to the language, where the syntactic and the sonic are in harmony with the sense – ‘our bodies // moisten in their beds / like bread’ (‘Elm Hill’). Nobody wants to be compared, but if you like Michael Donaghy or Frances Leviston, you’ll love Rose with Harm.

And the collection's eclecticism of subject is as dazzling as its formal nous. The speaker becomes a geist. One minute, we’re in Los Angeles where the ‘desert sands [sleep] | beneath the baking street’ (‘South Orange Grove’), the next we're back in Blighty, in a dream, where a retiring granddad declares he’ll drink away his pension in the pub, before morphing into a fish ('The Fish'). Yet for all its duende shapeshifting and continent-hopping with Hardisty as puppeteer, there’s a tender core here; this is most acute in the final poems about fatherhood, which are moving but specific and so authentic and devastating: ‘These months together are ours alone, / where I must play father-mother to your self / then deliver you to your mother’s home’ (‘Mercury’).'

This precision could fool you into thinking that this is a book of simple poems, but with this precision, Horrex pays such close attention to detail that the images shine. Unafraid to look at the minutia of the world (‘worms are teased to the grass by gulls’, ‘the veins/ of the roses’, ‘moth holes/ in the vacuum of the ovum’) and allow these smallness’s to illuminate what might be a bigger picture. I say might, because there is a charming hesitancy to these poems, they do not assume that they are illuminating anything, which is all the better when they finally do: ‘How like wishes to reveal/ themselves, even when they’re buried – the way ripples on an ocean wheel like fins.’

Mrs Jarndyce in Bleak House says: ‘Where I am out of humour, I come and growl here’. This is the idea of a growlery. And this collection is Horrex’s place to growl. Some of these poems are about attempts to become a mother, and it is in these poems that the growl is most felt: a deep guttural animal drone lining the heart of the book: ‘I am waiting for my body to snow’; ‘I stayed, hand shoved under my coat and jumper,/ til I felt a movement – a flutter – that was not, thank god,/ the moon dissolving.’

These poems live in the private wreckage of ‘this broken world’ and ‘its double gaze’ and the speaker finds provocative language to interrogate its colonial legacy. In her five “Notes on the State of Virginia” Sinclair turns antagonistic, uninvited questions back on their historical sources: “How does it feel to be a problem? The mute centuries shatter in my ear./ The aimed black spear. This body, a crisis./ A riot. A racket. The whole world whistling.” 

Cannibal reveals colonial thinking as a damned thing by way of medusas, mermaids, female Calibans, astronaut mothers, an Eve as the Anaconda. These bodies and voices nurture, ambush, devour, disassemble and reassert themselves “across the hijacked decades, inventing Paradise” to build a mythic collage of woman becoming beautiful, powerful, and monstrous on her own terms. In this reclamation Sinclair never shies from the body’s private violence and historical anger, self-hate and erotic desire, shames and joys. This rewilding and re-culturing of female identity is unflinching and unforgiving. Writing as her reclaimed Eve-Canibal, Sinclair invites her reader to move through this lush and hazardous Paradise but cautions: ‘Know nothing here will grow politely.’

Elsewhere, the collection vacillates between extremes of loquaciousness and concision. ‘Marigolds’, the books opening poem, is eight pages of linguistic magma: studded with just enough solid matter to let the reader know that something is happening beneath the poem’s surface, while remaining inscrutable in its own unpredictable flow. A sequence of poems each titled ‘O Spirit’ are stripped back to their most essential mechanics (some are as brief as two lines, but still manage to contain Chakraborty’s characteristic mixture of rigour and surprise). These extremes represent attempts to make language commensurate to the violence that is Chakraborty’s subject matter. In the book’s final sequence (a long text made up of small fragments) neither is abandoned (though Chakraborty is a poet with no compunction about exposing language’s inherent capacity to fail) but they are somehow combined to create a language that might just be enough.

Thapar propels discussion about Serious Youth Violence into a direction of compassion and collaboration, by being compassionate and collaborative. He gives the statistics on London’s psychogeographic landscape: ‘two out of three 13-18-year-old young offenders in the capital came from families that had broken down, 50 per cent of persistent offenders had themselves been victims of abuse and 90 per cent had been excluded from school at some point.’ Ending death on London’s streets is not achievable without cooperation between all areas of civic life, yet beneath the showboating of short-term solutions by successive governments and ‘market efficiency’, the amenities needed for genuine, trauma-informed public health have been sold off. Parts of the country where the worst cuts had been made to youth services also witnessed the biggest spikes in knife offences. 

Thapar analyses factors affecting youth today: overworked teachers punishing their way to peaceful classrooms; under-resourced inclusion departments; the school-to-prison pipeline disproportionately affecting Black students; hyperlocality and postcode beefs; hypermasculinity and the sharing of violence online for social capital as more traditional routes of obtaining validation become inaccessible. Pay youth and care workers properly; stop blaming young people for their own disenfranchisement. ‘Cut Short’ testifies to how much we can learn when we listen.

Many of the stories take place in the shifting consciousness of substance-altered reality, in living rooms and pubs that become mazes of uncertainty. McHugh is an expert at manipulating the narrative so that the reader is forced to empathize with the narrator’s own unreliable perceptions. In ‘Hoarfrost’ McHugh places us immediately into the shaky certainty of a woman attempting to save her marriage through swinging—a marriage built on the stories she’s told herself about how ‘you had to scrap for love.’ But lest the reader be lulled into a sense of false intimacy with McHugh’s characters, the self-aware final piece, ‘A Short Story,’ which begins like any other story in the collection, twists as McHugh breaks the narrative by asking ‘And what happens next? […] Does the story have to end like this?’ We are reminded of the fictionality of these pieces and as we are twisted about, the dark playfulness of McHugh’s words echos ‘You only mock the people you really like, so what harm?’ What harm if McHugh mocks us, dangling our investment over us, sure its only because he likes us? 

A short story collection for short story lovers: think Flann O’Brien’s metafiction meets Sally Rooney’s careful emotional extractions. 

Behind the façade of dark humour and sarcastic wit, these poems are laced with profound melancholy. The opening piece, “bed bugs” describes a zany night-time encounter with an owl and a beetle before morphing into a meditation on violating sacred places. “ode to my amazon packages” reveals a conflicted speaker who aspires to strike a balance between maintaining individual beliefs and succumbing to capitalist culture. The quirky “my lover, Batman” flows along with the speaker’s stream of consciousness and offers comedic relief to break any tension with ideas of “claustrophobic bat sex”.

Kristen reflects on the constraints of space – physical, mental and emotional – and the inevitable frustration of “breaking circularity” once a habit becomes all-engulfing. Her work explores a range of dualities; “in the deep blue” addresses the need for communication but also the sharp pain of silence, toxic like “corroded razor blades” making the zine all the more relevant because of the current global health crisis. “It’s about trying to bring love into the spaces where I might feel cut off from it,” she explained. Kristen searches her “orchestral brain” for meaning in a world of love, sorrow and confusion, the lone performer in her black-box “disaster theatre”.

Despite their punchy humour, the stories are imbued with melancholy. In “Flowers in Water,” a divorcé spends several months with his semi-estranged daughter. He never sees her again, but reflects for the rest of his life on that small window of happiness. And the stories are short; “The Cheerleader” fills only half a page. Yet, Sweeney navigates entire relationships in this span with a direct narrative style, pruning the stories to their essential elements with the eye of a poet. This is a sharp collection that combines the surreal and mundane, the cosmic humour and misery of being alive, told in a clear-sighted and wholly unique new voice.

Dhaliwal’s meditations on language are as expansive her travels. Languages often encourage possibility and self-exploration, intersecting and diverging as her speaker sees fit, as in the prose poem ‘In Istanbul’: “I dreamt in a language I understood vaguely […] When the word for Hello landed on my tongue in Turkish—mehraba, my mouth relished the taste in every crevice”. Yet languages can also be sites of friction and act to instil a sense of unbelonging. In ‘Migrant Words’, it is these difficulties that her speaker encounters: “somewhere I cannot now go/I buried some words from my dictionary of lament—/a language I spoke long ago”. 

Moments like this, it seems, encourage Dhaliwal to carry on; like in ‘Reading Natalia Ginzburg in East Cork’, though she “come[s] crawling/back to the mountains” at times, there is always a desire to pick up her “most worn-out shoes” and continue walking.

Knowing Susie, though, did little to prepare me for the experience of reading this blistering, disorienting book, a bildungsroman that hinges on the protagonist’s experience of a sexual assault, in language that grapples with the trauma of that event. Written in the second person, in a series of quasi-diary entries, Tennis Lessons immerses the reader in the world of this unnamed character, and makes frequent, brilliant use of simile: a man’s penis is ‘as substantial and rounded as a tube of roll-on deodorant’; his lips feel ‘like raw chicken fillets’. Like Michaela Coel’s recent TV series I May Destroy You, Tennis Lessons is a powerful and revelatory exploration of consent and trauma; like Alice Lyons’ debut novel, Oona, it conveys the protagonist’s estrangement from herself through the strangeness of its prose. In its fidelity to the truth of adolescent and young adult female experience, it is deeply relatable; in its linguistic imagination and playfulness, it is unforgettable. 

In the first story, ‘Endor’, Christine (the narrator) veers off into poetry to describe her boyfriend as Wallace Stevens might: ‘Competent’s pretty pejorative, I know. The dull diligence of it. But Sam was so competent’. Sam goes missing in Amsterdam, and when Christine has a breakdown, it’s utterly devastating (but also hilarious). Erskine’s weird is the sort that wins you over by making you complicit. When Christine adopts a paranormal being called Furfur who shapeshifts between a ‘deer’, a ‘little girl’ and a ‘monkey’, you think, Fair enough. In the second story, ‘Bryght Gehenna’, when teenage protagonist Jamie begins to lose his faith and starts performing satanic rituals in his bedroom, you think, Fair enough.

I love the Belfast that’s conjured – more full-on resurrection than mere ghost – through various means, including the use of words like ‘dopey’ (silly) and ‘boot’ (unattractive person).  I could go on, at some length, about how these stories delve into the colonial past that weighs so heavy on the city’s soul (a soul kept buoyant with the upthrust of psychological repression brought about by an unhealthy relationship with the dodgier aspects of Christian theology), but I’ll just say this: they’re important, excruciatingly entertaining and envy-inducing for anyone who writes or wants to.

Daunting challenges abound. In ‘How Do You Save The Rhino’ the speaker struggles to account for the complex “mathematics” facing conservationists of the Black Rhino. In ‘Pelicans’, the bird’s “seven-thousand-mile stare” aligns the distance of the bird’s migration to the distance we often feel between ourselves and others. But, as the title poem shows, crises can help us to develop tenacity and clarity. In it, Rice riffs lyrically on the story of Charles James Hall, “the kid in the news, surviving the flight into his own shadow.”

Grit and resilience animate the most hopeful poems in the collection. Despite all of the nightmares, the murderous figures, the dead boy “lolling” about in a speeding car, and the angry racist crowd at a football match, Rice reminds us that “[this] game is worth playing”. In “Bright Mustard Coat”, Rice shows his dedication to the game of poetry and progress, redirecting a familiar scene of Muldoonian circularity and entrapment, towards hope and perseverance. In the charming and humorous, final poem, Rice’s speaker locks eyes with a fox, and the pair wonder, as will readers of The Last Weather Observer, “what [will] happen next?”

In ‘Chronic Waiting Room’, the names of patients are mangled in the space between the nurse who calls them and the speaker of the poem who records them: ‘Shahido / Hulk? Dawn Carrier? Angela / Chart?’ In a later poem, ‘Amendment’, Toutoungi’s own name receives the same treatment. The poem begins as a deadpan imitation of a magazine correction (‘We would like to apologise to readers for the mistake / in last week’s issue and the misspelling of the name / Claudine Toutoungi’), before launching into a ridiculous and luxurious series of reformulations of that little sequence of sounds that have attended the poet, like a shadow, since birth: ‘Tutu Genie. Toutoulingini. Two / Tounge-y. Toutanjajee. Tao-Tao-Ngee. Tootle-Ingee / Tangerini’. In the poem’s final line, all this semantic play is revealed to be the expression of a frustration known intimately to those of us who’s names ask English people to expand their sonic resources, even slightly: ‘And furthermore she’s not as foreign as she sounds’.  

Toutoungi is a poet who takes the pun seriously as a poetic mode: in her hands wordplay is able to bring us beyond the sense-logic of denotation and reveal something about the ineluctable materiality of words, both spoken and written. And the effect of this is strangely liberating: an expansion of linguistic possibility that reminds us that what we may take for common-sense (that most pernicious mechanism of control) may be made to be otherwise.

The essay begins with a whirlwind of examples to show the ways our priorities, and our attention, have lapsed: CCTV shows a man drawing a firearm on a train going unnoticed until he shoots a disembarking passenger; Bell’s recent inability to write for hours uninterrupted; seven thousand years’ worth of porn on the internet. These snippets are interspersed with analytical prose about a self separate from the physical body, implications of call-out culture and consensus politics, and how spending so much time on our laptops, tablets, and phones allows businesses to turn a huge profit. Frequently, Bell’s picture of the world is very bleak; as she leaps from one subject to another, reading this can feel a bit like very satisfying doomscrolling.

Gradually, a solution emerges. Bell counters the commodification of our attention by suggesting that instead of allowing our slips in concentration to take us to social media/ a solitaire app/emails about discounts, we can train our minds to fall into critical and creative thinking. Bell asks us to, as Hannah Arendt says, “think what we are doing” so that we can reconnect with the world and “the parts of ourselves that have been outsourced to the screen” for the sake of ourselves and society.

Reading the book, I was struck by Burke’s unbridled curiosity and drive. Noticing that there was no Irish word for little person, Burke contacted Fóras na Gaeilge, an organization that oversees development of the Irish language. After just three days, duine beag, the direct translation of little person, was added to the Irish language dictionary. She became the first little person to appear on the cover of Vogue and assisted in creating the first little person mannequin. Her message is always the same: change comes when we use our voice and ask questions to challenge the status quo. 

Privilege, allyship, and inclusivity are at the heart of Break the Mould. Burke explains these concepts in an age-appropriate and simple way that the book could (and should) be read by adults too. Burke strikes the right balance between telling hard truths about discrimination and oppression and giving young people hope that they can make things better. Burke encourages her readers to think of their unique qualities and differences as superpowers to help them bring about change. 

This book would make a wonderful read for young people who feel different from their peers, and for budding activists, but we can all learn from Burke’s message: “You are enough as you are and the world can be changed by you, you don’t need to change for the world.” 

The Last House on Needless Street opens with the crime fiction trope of a missing child, dubbed by the media ‘the Little Girl with the Popsicle,’ but the work defies genre categorisation being part Gothic horror, part crime thriller, part psychological discourse. Ward draws on the suburban Gothic of the mundane, to find horror within the family unit. Ted has constructed his own family:  Lauren as his daughter; Olivia, the cat with her feline fluidity and sleek form; and his dead parents looking on from photographs.

Ward excels at unnerving the reader, in messing with our perceptions, dragging us kicking and screaming through brutality and revulsion, to tenderness and sympathy. At the heart of this work is a discourse on endurance and identity, and what transpires when the self is fractured. Plot in this work is wrought tight, delivering all that it sets up with its startling ending. Ward, perhaps knowing how unexpected and strange the work is, provides an afterword to explain how she ‘came to write a book about survival, disguised as a book about horror.’ Interventive, immersive, and disturbing – you’ll be thinking of this book long after the closing lines.  

In considering the title I spared the Google search and was relieved to find its meaning in a dazzling, lexical journey through ‘passerine’ at the geographic and temporal centre of the text. The speaker is more of a bird-understander (to borrow from the poet Craig Arnold) than watcher. Birds casually stray and violently strafe, sometimes across a single poem: “For the love of birds, I chase/ cats from the garden./ Still no wren this year./ Severed-head, cloud-/burst of feathers,/ claw lacuna on a back doorstep.” This skyward movement is also accompanied by a near constant occupation with cloud formations as a devastating, elegiac source. 

In Passerine mourning is an unpredictable and volatile act of love that forms in visuals, prose-poems, fragments, and telegrams. After penning letters for a year, Luckins asks Sophie ‘What more can I possibly tell you?’ but of course, she digs past the shallow question and the poem goes on. 

Passerine is a wonderous, fierce awakening out of a year of ‘hatefulness and rage,’ to an examination of grief unearthed and love endured. Despite its unsettled meanings, Luckins reminds us that ‘The world only asks us to love it […] The world is easy to love.’  

The book opens with a young woman preparing her murdered brother’s corpse for burial; harrowing, yet Zaynab’s meticulous ministrations and the memories they spawn are beautiful. While his wife sleeps, the husband of ‘In the Land of Kan’an’ is tormented with desire for the hustler in the ‘too-big white jeans’ he had sex with long ago, in a Cairo alleyway. The child bride of ‘Daughters of Manat’ terrorises her family into annulling her marriage; she seems invincible, which makes her unravelling all the more devastating. 

Alzayat is particularly good at showing the experience of being Middle-Eastern in post- 911 America. The affable stoner in ‘Summer of the Shark’ watches from his desk in a call centre, appalled, as the second plane hits the twin towers, and behind him a workmate says, ‘Dirty Fuckers’. 

Underpinning the collection is ‘Alligator’: the formally audacious telling of a true story, the murder by the police of a Syrian couple in Florida in 1929. Using snatches of sources, both real and imagined, Alzayat constructs a story of corruption and racism. Somehow it is the detail that is most affecting: the internalised xenophobia of a grandson of the murdered couple; the resolve of the family to never speak of the killings, to never speak Arabic. Conflicts of geography and language are at the heart of this book. To quote Mahmoud Darwish: ‘I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here.’ 

Wilentz’s poems trace this line through rituals that move the reader ‘through to a new feeling’ (‘A year with Two Springs’), whether that be learning string shapes in the game ‘Cat’s Cradle’, or the spine ‘curling and uncurling’ in ‘The Lioness’ and also in yoga, where it’s power lies in ‘making space within the body’ (‘The Story of My Neck’). In ‘Alsace Shabbat’ she writes ‘you longed/ for ritual and place—why you needed the candles—on a night/ when there were no candles around.// So you made some from the wax that coated the cheese’. The most ordinary of objects are transformed by the light cast on them in the poems—bolts of cloth become the robes of a queen, dried beans an offering, the body a source of light. Wilentz’s careful image-making celebrates everyday moments, imbuing them with meaning until they become expansive, filling in absences where things were lost.

The collection comforts through Wilentz’s unflinching acknowledgement of life’s darkness. She writes about her mother’s cancer treatments and bereavement. In ‘Belly of the Whale’, Wilentz recounts the story of Jonah in words that are easy to relate to in the grief that isolates so many of us throughout life, especially now: ’After days/ of not speaking to anyone,/ the sound of my voice/ echoes back to me/ like the voice of a stranger.’  But rather than feeling mired in this darkness, I found in it ‘a landscape where I could begin to grieve’ (as she writes in the collection’s titular poem). Grounded in the ceremonies and stories of Wilentz’s Jewish heritage, the collection is a welcome reminder of the seasonality of all things.

Translated from Dutch by David Colmer, in his second translation for The Emma Press, it is the form of ‘how the first sparks became visible’ that allows the content to excel. Written as a sequence but individually numbered under the encompassing title ‘friction’, these poems are loosely punctuated and rarely consistent in stanza or line length. This allows the reader to enjoy and interrogate all the opportunities a poetic line and line break can bring: ‘On this March day I am not in love / for twenty-five years now I have gone into spring / without being in love’. 

Atangana Bekono creates tension with ease, with repetition and imagery that is at once both looming and definitive: ‘we run laps around the black water / we water-ski across the black water / we flap like fish on the sand / after touching the black water’. This tension, at its best in the hunting pastoral ‘VII’, hits a crescendo in its closing stanza: ‘and I feel guilty / because I feel incomprehensibly attracted to the black water / like us standing on the edge of a cliff / a towering cliff, looking down’. Atangana Bekono stands on the edge of the precipice of expectation and experience with flashes of brilliance sparking across the page. 

The book may be seen as building upon the work of environmental philosopher Timothy Morton, whose study Ecology Without Nature goes beyond the deconstructive commonplace of saying that nature can only be designated as such from inside culture to argue that the concept of nature itself inhibits our understanding of the complexity of ecological interactions and the scale of our impact on other forms of life. Everywhere in Lafarge’s poems, she refuses the exceptionalism of the individual body: ‘she can no longer be considered detached as a gable end. // like a shared roof, she has implications / and is implicated’ 

This is a book whose parts (good as they are individually) work in concert to form a project of serious intellectual integrity. A forensic and clear-sighted examination of a toxic relationship in ‘A Question for Zeno’ is mirrored in the poisoned landscape of ‘Dredging the Baotou Lake’, whose titular location is a man-made lake in Mongolia formed as a result of mining minerals needed for wind turbines and solar panels. Personal and scientific truths are set alongside each other, in a way that does not relegate either to the status of metaphor, but condenses both to their essential dynamics of exploitation and reciprocity. This is a book which refuses to allow the ecological truth of mutual dependence to be abstract, but gives it form and flesh. 

But the poems are not limited to the past; with “Surnames,” the collection turns toward the present, as the narrator situates herself within the lineage she has established. In the poem, she describes herself as a “Russian girl with an Irish surname, / who was a Russian girl with a Jewish surname” and follows this pattern backward through multiple generations, acknowledging finally that her own name is the result of every name before her “opening and eclipsing the other / like a Russian doll.” And, as she is “eclipsed” into her family history, she looks to the future of the daughter she is pregnant with, already itemising the world into which she will be born and ascribing a new and unique language to her: “She is talking to me / from the womb, this girl / She is reading / in her native language”. 

Cosgrave was born in Volgograd, Russia, and moved to Dublin in 2016, but the collection is hardly limited to her own story; she processes issues of identity, trauma, and the concept of home with a delicacy and sincerity, as she invites readers to both learn her name and “Say it like it’s yours.”

“In the heart of every migrant, there is a windrose pointing home
and while the needles within your own cells

flicker back and forth, your father is steadfast in direction:
homeward, a course you have only ever imagined, a flight path

you have learned may never exist for you”

As she writes in ‘My Inheritance is to Long for [ ]’, identity is for Pirmohamed “a generation of crossings//becoming and unbecoming”, a space in which heritage and potentiality compete and intermingle.

Each poem treats the borderline with utmost suspicion—its influence is restrictive and at worst confrontational: “You know better than to feel welcome at anything resembling a border” (‘Welcome’).  Rather, if the body is a forest as the first poem contends, “loosened borders” offer emancipation. In ‘Endearments’, this unmoored landscape is where the speaker and her lover come together:

“We coexist
& exist within one another—

The way you disappear into the trees
& I follow.”

It is no coincidence, then, that a poem titled ‘Elsewhere’ ends on the curiosity of that word “belonging”.

Pirmohamed’s lyrical dexterity is fresh and full of wonder, yet rooted (if the poems allow such a word) in a belief in the possibility of language and poetic form. There is an openness to these poems that is both inquisitive and arresting; the voice that navigates them appears both natural and unique. Without fear of exaggeration, this pamphlet is stunning.

Dedicated to the poet’s late father, Breeze Block’s main theme is grief, exploring the myriad of constructive and destructive ways in which we come to terms with loss. For example, in the four-part poem ‘Dad’s still in a coma so I’m sent’, Hawkey injects humour and wit into a situation that is fraught with emotion, ‘Look at me, I’ve found the biggest chip in the world!’

Like Tony Harrison before him, Hawkey examines the anxieties of class identity as he moves through education and into the middle-class. The prose poem in the middle condenses many of the themes (lockdown, addiction, literature) into a series of vignettes that reverberate throughout. The love poems are the most affecting with ‘Chin’, the opening poem, a stand-out: ‘love will show in a myriad of complexions/love will shed in a myriad of complexions.’ In Breeze Block love is the cement holding the book together.

Published by Lumpen, an imprint from The Class Work project, a co-operative organising around working-class writers. Breeze Block is a reminder that the issue of class in society is and will always be a fitting topic for art. That Jake Hawkey writes about it with the utmost compassion and humour is a testament to the balance he achieves.

Each poem is untitled; each spoken in the voice of an immigrant guest, a woman of colour, adapting to life with a white host family in an unnamed new nation. Making away in a taxi from a scene where bodies are buried under mango trees, the speaker’s first home ‘explodes in the rear-view mirror’, and the remainder of the collection tracks her efforts to put down roots in a new land—as well as her struggle to feel truly accepted in a place where hospitality only ever feels performative. (A note on the title, at the end of the book, tells us that these poems are, in part, drawn from reflections on Kapil’s experience in university settings: ‘an outward-facing generosity or inclusivity that had not, always, matched the lived experience of moving through corridors and faculty meetings of the “mostly white” spaces that a private, liberal arts college in the United States so often is.’) 

Recently shortlisted for this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize, How to Wash a Heart announces Kapil as a singular force in contemporary poetry. It is an instruction manual for empathetic living.

There is violence and menace laced through Ephebos (‘Someone Else’s Child’ elegises Zak Kostopoulos’ fatal assault by police), as well as the insidious pressure of heteronormative society, the “phantom shackle around my wrist”. This makes the moments of deep-feeling tenderness all the more qualified and affecting. ‘Fragments of Emails from My Mother in 2011’ is a found poem of just that, and complicates the theme of queer emancipation from the stifled city: “we miss your voice/ your laughter/ your arguing”.

The pamphlet begins and concludes with breathing. The speaker of the opening poem grows bold through their devotional attention to sculptures (“glossy athletes,/ gods and heroes, in bronze”), yet despite this boldness, the imaginative transport of youthful queer desire is scuppered by the speaker finding it “harder and harder/to breathe” in a locked bathroom.

The last poem in the pamphlet, ‘Athenian Light’—in echoes of Cavafy and Mark Doty—describes this Greek light: “sweet and hued at sunset/ like the seeded flesh of figs”. Menace returns as the last stanza depicts a child learning to swim, while the poet recalls their father’s advice that “you can drown/ even in the clearest light”. The threat of drowning, being overwhelmed by circumstances, by distance, are a low-burning threat throughout Ephebos, but crucially the drowning never occurs, the difficult relationship not abandoned. The emphasis, and joy, in these poems is their ongoingness.

The novel is structured with swathes of white space, where chaotic musings occupy the in-between of inner thought and car-crash dialogue, brought to life by the motley of interactions with neighbouring patients. Feeney’s poetic tongue is felt in her sparse, lyrical acuity and her prose shoots like gunfire into the heart of female grief. “We’re seeing the inner lives of the character, and much like reality, that isn’t always going to be lovely,” said Feeney during this year’s International Literature Festival Dublin. “Our interior world is complex and it’s a complicated space.” 

As You Were achieves a sense of moral intensity defined by Sinead's secrecy and described by Feeney as bearing the weight of “unmotherly-ness". The novel contextualises female identity by leaving a profound stain on why and how we are stirred into the judgement of women. It argues how unlikeable female literary figures act as a corollary of the impeachable cultural standards women are held against, examined spectacularly through a dying woman's eyes.

During an interview, Kawakami expressed her admiration for Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights of Dreams. The influence is clear, especially in ‘Record of a Night too Brief’, as Kawakami’s landscapes mutate under the jurisdiction of a mercurial night. Similar to Soseki’s work, there is palpable helplessness, redolent of dreams generally. However, unlike Soseki’s, where patience in the face of the incomprehensible is rewarded, Kawakami’s dreamscape is more malevolent: questions go unanswered and unease permeates. In ‘Missing’, a girl’s brother vanishes without explanation. ‘Will I too just disappear?’ she asks.

With the first person, we might be tempted to assume the speaker an agent of control. The events of this book, however, arriving like non-sequiturs, render the protagonists as pliable to the narrative’s penumbras as the reader. 

Across the trio themes recur. There is love’s ability, be it familial or romantic, to make individuality mutable: its subsuming nature, how it alters. There is the fallibility of memory. There is grief, its permutations. There is the strangeness of intimacy, our imperviousness to it. What is impressive is Kawakami’s ability to elicit anhedonia from the sparsest prosaic style. Her talent for writing gesture and mood makes her work deeply atmospheric, and prone to lingering. 

If we expect her to mediate the theme of celebrity through the character of Harry Styles, she subverts this expectation in poems that utilize the rich texture and acute attention of this misjudged world. In the compact poem ‘Ever Since New York’, Ashley aims her fluorescent spotlight of appreciation and ‘celebritizing’ gaze on the usual faces known to any early city riser: the porter, the bagel cart worker, even the regular at the bagel cart. These are the characters often overlooked on New York’s sidewalks, but to Ashley they are the stars of the poem. 

In Ashley’s skillful and empathetic poem, ‘The Boy Who’, we find a boy in the midst of a drunken crisis having “kissed a girl just to impress his friends”. Ashley makes his experience central to the poem by relaying his stream of consciousness to the reader, thereby introducing us to another celebrity. This time he’s in a “borrowed jesus t-shirt… hiding in the bathroom of a house party”, rather than on a bustling city avenue. 

This is Ashley’s own gold light shining through this book: everyone is worthy of her spotlight. Such is the case in ‘Give Pop Music, Give Peace a Chance’, where one would expect an ardent case to be made for Styles or his music. Instead, Ashley choses to cast a grandmother peacefully watching her grandchildren playing in a park as the lead role, exemplars of why we ought to give peace, and indeed everyone, a chance.

Robinson reports on the broken political system that enabled disasters such as the Grenfell fire, which is fiercely remembered and commemorated in the opening section. In ‘The Missing’ spirits of victims float towards the sky, ‘finches darting deftly between them’. In ‘Ghosts’, someone moving into a refurbished flat in Grenfell is haunted by the family who once resided there: ‘You feel it as soon as you settle in your new flat, perhaps when you are making rocket salad with lemon dressing’.

Alongside the outwardly public and political, this book also contains poems that are intensely private: in ‘Grace’ Robinson details the premature birth of his son with raw emotion (‘if by some chance, I’m not here and my son’s life should flicker,/then Grace, she should be the one.’) And in ‘On Nurses’ he writes a love letter to the NHS, how ordinary care translates into extraordinary love, showing how often there is little that separates the public from the private.

Robinson writes with furious beauty, subverting anger so that therein might be found the seed of something beyond the emotion itself, a connecting tissue that links our common humanity. This book will prove to be important as legacies are rethought and history continues to be re-evaluated: A Portable Paradise is a powerful social document.  

With this book, Meitner gives us a document of America⎯specifically Southern Appalachia, its ‘apocalyptic sunsets […] like / a bruised clavicle’, in the 2010’s. We encounter political themes from gun violence and parenthood (‘I ask my son what he would do if someone came to his school with a gun’) to religious and racial identity (‘I am / neighbor and other. I am a Jew and the mother / of one white son and one black son.’). But that is not to say that this book takes itself too seriously (‘Holy Moly, if I have the gift of prophecy’).

Written in Meitner’s characteristic narrative style with fast-paced language and revelatory turns, these are poems of violence and survival, that show ‘beauty as it hurtles through darkness.’ Amid all of the frenetic energy of the poems, Meitner still manages to cut through the anxieties that plague the last and current decade, creating a relevant and original poetic world, her HolyMolyLand. This book is really good. Go read it.

We follow our protagonist through the ‘whirligig’ of days spent cleaning, cooking, parenting. (‘There is a peculiar contentment to be found in absenting oneself like this,’ she tells us, ‘subsumed in the needs of others: in such erasure, for me, lies joy.’) When she falls pregnant with a fourth child, the possibility of tragedy—of stillbirth—looms, but does not come to pass. And so, Ní Ghríofa settles into a new routine, caring for a daughter as well as her three sons; embarking on a quest to discover what she can about Ní Chonaill’s biography. 

This ‘female text’, then, is a messy, loud, joyous affirmation of life, warts and all (whether that life is lived today or was lived in the 1700s); a meditation on the relationship between bodies poetic and physical. In her quest for an adequate translation of her source poem, Ní Ghríofa is routinely disappointed: ‘Many of the translations I find feeble—dead texts that try, but fail, to find the thumping pulse of Eibhlín Dubh’s presence’. She rectifies this absence—the book ends with her brilliant translation of the caoineadh (or ‘keen’) in full—and Ní Ghríofa’s own pulse thumps alongside Ní Chonaill’s in this vital work. A Ghost in the Throat lingers in the imagination long after reading, revealing how texts can haunt us—and how we can haunt them back.