Gaia Holmes’ third collection with Manchester’s ever-reliable Comma Press is a bittersweet gem. Writing mostly in a kind of disciplined free verse, Holmes runs her eye across a wealth of strange material, exploring the private dreams of pylons, the curious properties of sinkholes and how best to react when transforming into a sea horse. Yet
For his debut collection, In the Flesh, Adam O’Riordan demonstrated a leaning towards the past and a fluidity of form, both of which bent naturally to his rich, allusive style. As Andrew Motion writes in the blurb for this new volume, here is a poet with ‘tremendous delicacy of feeling and expression’, and so he
If anger is an energy, then so is love. This collection, a much-lauded finalist for the American National Book Award, comes fizzing with both. The author, Danez Smith, is a vibrant young black poet whose writing flows most often between tender, elegiac confessionals and the incantatory charge of the performance pieces for which he is
News Brief * Going about my day, sometimes I glimpse the news corralled in the narrow margins of my bright screen, and often it depresses me. Like today, a life reduced to two lines small enough to cover with my thumb: Man shoots himself in mall. No one hurt. How quickly we forget these strangers
Leila Chatti Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet. The recipient of a scholarship from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and prizes from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest and 8th Annual Poetry Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets, her poems appear in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Tin House, Narrative,The Missouri
