The titular Nighbitch – or “the mother” – is a lapsed artist and curator turned full-time mother, whose days are devoted to the needs and whims of her two-year-old son. Her husband is absent for extended periods of time and her friends, like her art career, have gradually disappeared. She is also turning into a dog. 

This novel delights in its own surreal premise, as a woman living a suffocatingly ordinary life begins to undergo a horrifying transformation. Yoder vividly describes the mother’s body hair growing in thick, coarse patches; what seems to be a strange growth on her back is punctured with an X-Acto knife to reveal a large clump of fur – a tail. Her teeth become pointed. Her lust for raw meat becomes insatiable.

The werewolf-like transformation from woman to animal is both a thrill and a horror, for the reader and the mother alike. When Nightbitch leans into her animal side, tearing apart local wildlife and howling like a dog in a public park, there is a sense of rapturous joy that comes with the discovery of a new identity, a new way to be that is undefined by the stifling social structures often forced on new mothers. This also comes with a stark and self-effacing shame when this new animal identity clashes with the mother’s social sphere of perfect yuppie super-mommies.

These contradictions are the crux of the novel. The mother yearns to be understood, sending lengthy, desperate emails to the author of a possibly fictional book about mystical women in the hopes of finding someone who sees her for what she is. Her attempts to embody her new wolfish identity around the other mothers in her life makes her feel even more invisible – they find her shabby, unkempt clothes and wild hair to be, like, so boho.

Yoder relishes in this contradictory torment. The mother’s most freeing, exuberant moments of newfound dog-hood are packed with life, humour and horror clashing magnificently. Yet her wildest moments only leave a mess to be cleaned up before her husband and child can witness what she is becoming, capturing the struggle of craving both identity and acceptance at once.

Nightbitch never shies from its own strangeness. It is a three-hundred-page gauntlet of body horror, baby book clubs, hallucinogenic drug trips, contemporary art shows, domestic humdrum and complete physical and psychological metamorphosis. All this, to explore what identities a person might turn to when nothing else will do.

This word denotes ‘the speech habits peculiar to a particular person’. Inside, Bridgman’s world of voices, witty story-telling, religious satire, and playful lyrics mixed with experimental forms, makes so much happen, or so it’s said...

Bridgman may live in Vancouver, but in 'Litany for the Limavady Cow Killer' he sounds like an Ulsterman ('No feckin' brains'). This comes after ‘Bagpipe Music Redux (After Louis MacNeice)’, and ‘Mush-a Ring Dum-a Do Dum-a Da’, composed around ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ lyrics. The section named ‘Daftda’ (an anagram of the six counties) shows how Northern Ireland (both place and poets), are a prominent influence, with MacNeice described as ‘a beacon’ to Bridgman.

The abstract poems in Idiolect are particularly intriguing. Blacked-out lines in ‘Giovanna Comes Out to Her Italian and Irish Grandmothers’ align Italian and Irish language with Catholicism. The reader sees black-boxed-lines and then suddenly, Grandma Róisín exclaims, ‘O sweet baby Jesus!’ And Nonna Flavia cries ‘Madonna!’. Poor Giovanna... In a similar experimental tone, ‘The Ghost in the Machine: Modern /Irish Poetry Reimagined by the iPhone’ creates ‘ghost versions’ of well-known poems from writers like Sinead Morrissey and Paul Muldoon.

Ekphrastic poems like ‘Alick Always Took Her Leave’ stand out, describing a muse with ‘transfixing, sloe eyes’ and ‘bohemian flair’ who inspired ‘Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis &, finally, Yeats’ yet her ‘plunders’ were ‘unstained by perdition’. Likewise, this feminist voice arises in ‘Two Poems in Celebration of Beatrice Lennie’, where we see photos of Lennie’s sculptures and read Bridgman’s poetic reply to her political art.

Having covered life, death, compassion and humor, Bridgman finishes with ‘An Abecedary of Love’, describing how love ‘invades the voice, quadruples the pulses’ and ‘bathes and drapes every surface in light’. Idiolect as a collection does the very same.

Fitzgerald’s ability to amplify the specific sensual aspects of a given image is evident in the opening poem of the collection, the sonnet ‘First Cut’, which describes childhood memories of a chainsaw: ‘…the smoky/ upthrottling roar, spray of dust ejecting…/ the sweet whiff of danger’. Here, the dramatic (and unusual) image complements another nested theme in the poem: the measuring of both the visceral and imaginative spaces by which one occupies in the world, as seen in the lines, ‘…like cutting into pure fear/ to sunder it’.

These two aspects of the poem seem to merge towards its close in the lines, ‘watch that old riddle of capacity and bore’. A literal reading of the closing image of the poem, ‘watch that old riddle of capacity and bore’, indicates the capacity and bore of a power tool, where bore is a measure of the size of the engine cylinder. An alternative reading could be the capacity of the speaker to interrogate the world around them, and an engagement with the different means by which to do so, through poetry.

Similarly, in ‘Études’, imagery of rural Ireland is given a hyperreal quality as exampled by: ‘the ongoing arachnid whine/ of harvesters laying down swathes/ somewhere in Kilbarry’. This image puts me in mind of the festival of Lughnasa and, in Fitzgerald’s own words, its: ‘old motifs and oblique/ herewiths and whynots’. Again, this is reflected in ‘Pond Field Pond’ through Fitzgerald’s juxtaposition of the old and new. The pond is presented as: 'A discarded shield/ landed in a fringe of reeds,/ …/ …/ It’s always there — but never at the centre/ or the end of anything.'.

Another noticeable aspect of images in The Time Being is the tallying of the manufactured object against the natural world. In ‘Heritage’ the ‘dull flat snap’ of slate tiles on grass precedes the introduction of: ‘the mill/ that winnowed my life into this existence’. In ‘Xuhui’ this meditation is slowed down, as a kite bird ‘lazily figures-of-eight’ in the sky, while on the ground, a tug: ‘nudges/ steadily another steel hulk upstream.’

In this collection, Fitzgerald demonstrates a strong ability to capitalise on different sensory aspects of a given image, to situate them in place and time and, by extension, to interrogate that relationship between place and time.

Poems are written after Anna Akhmatova, Ciaran Carson, and Guy Coffette. In ‘Curracloe Revisited’, the narrator recalls childhood swims in her home in Wexford, a home that slips into many of Molloy’s poems. But she is just as easily at home in Moscow Station, St. Petersburg, or listening to Puccini in continental cafés. This multiplicity of place and identity becomes a central conundrum in ‘Naming the First Born’, as her own travels weave their way into the naming process for her daughter, passing from an Irish aisling, to a Spanish armada, to an ancient Greek battlefield, and landing on Grace.

The imagery in Molloy’s poems is often elegant—champagne, Fabergé, rose garden walks—but is tempered by unadorned images like her mother’s cancer wig, ‘unpretentious’ headstones in small Irish cemeteries, and fake tan applied with a sports sock. But what is most notable is Molloy’s ability to play with language. She deploys contranyms, internal rhyme schemes, and forms—notably the duplex, an invention of Jericho Brown’s—so deftly that the reader is only faintly aware of the word play at work. Her poems, too, delight in the language of plant and animal names and foreign words, such as the Scots Gaelic sgrìob, the ‘tingle on the upper lip / just before you take a sip of whisky’.

These are poems of departure, physically and spiritually, Anna Karenina stepping off the train platform, daughters becoming mothers, a doctor’s rogue ego disembarking to have nightly dalliances while his physical form sleeps next to his wife. The strangeness, honesty, and sensuality of these poems conspire to celebrate our ever-changing identities and the places and people we call home.

The design is a close up of “Jan Davidsz. De Heem I (New Order), 2014” by Gordon Cheung. In this surreal take on a traditional floral still life, the flowers seem to be blurring or “glitching” as if they’ve got faulty wiring and morphing into formless shapes, resonant of the bisecting chapter “Bloom” and its recurring image of a bloom of jellyfish. 

 Miller’s identity as a Malaysian-American poet is explored beautifully with questions of migration and family. The poem, “Glitch honorifics,” is formatted similarly to a family tree chart, holding ghost spaces in a lighter font. Miller reflects on the way language complicates the connection to family and home with comparisons of the simplified Chinese taught to her in school and the Hokkien dialect from Malaysia. The poem, along with the rest of the collection, is filled with a simultaneous longing for home and an acknowledgement that “home” is indefinable. 

“Proxima b” portrays the dissatisfaction of communicating with loved ones in different time zones. The final line, “my skin hunger could fill a galaxy” is visceral; that ache in your skin to be near your loved ones, to reach across a massive distance to reassure yourself that they still exist, is palpable in Miller’s use of the physics of spacetime. Along with “There is no specific word in English for” and “To become a dragon, first wear its skin,” the poem that keeps pulling me back in is “Homecoming,” a choose-your-own style poem of ‘what ifs’ surrounding leaving, or not leaving, home. I find myself returning to this collection when I am feeling out-of-place and am reassured that I am not the only person thousands of miles away from their hometown and finding the idea of “home” complicated. 

I have reread the lines, “the home you never stop leaving is wondering when you’ll return. It is ready to devastate you all over again,” so many times in the past month, knowing I have been separated from my home country for a year now and may not be able to go back for a long time, knowing that specific sense of dread that comes with visiting home knowing you cannot stay, partnered with such intense longing that you cannot stay away.

The speaker’s struggles with faith and adapting to new  surroundings stand out, while their perspective morphs and changes, with meaning being constantly filtered through this evolving viewpoint. As the writer charts her journey, which is both physical and spiritual, she latches on to what is distinctive about her new home and the culture she finds herself in, be that the non-human world in poems like “The girls arrive” and “Book of Metals, or food in poems such as “Susukino” or “Snow Festival.”

Food is a theme which recurs throughout the collection, often at times of crisis or distress. In the poem “The girls arrive,” which opens with a description of “stale rice,” and closes with the speaker listening to prayer, during which “a tarantula/scraggles out of [her] mouth”, Katchinska questions the dichotomy of what goes in and out of the body, and gives us a new image of alienation.

In this intensely personal journey, Katchinska uses a sonic mixture of different languages, place names, and religious language to create a dizzying and variegated mental landscape. ‘Here I Am’, the second poem in the collection’s introductory section, is one that could be thought of as being a blueprint of the collection, or at least a sharply focused image of what Katchinska achieves in this work. This poem tells two stories, (or two versions of the same story), and appears at once as its own translation, and as a reversed image of itself. The last two lines read: “how will she tell it?/will she tell it?” In the case of Aurora Town, it’s hard to articulate how exactly the story is told, but to the latter, we’re glad she did.

The titular poem, ‘Delta’ explores ‘geomorphological time’, oscillating from the past to the future: ‘We’re standing where the sea once was/ and will be relatively soon’. At the delta, ‘between this arm and that arm’, the speaker studies the ephemerality of humanity, witnessing a man ‘achieving/ something at a snail’s pace on a tractor’. The speaker moves – or is carried on the current of life – between New York, England, France, China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan. They also try and fail to understand the Covid-19 lockdowns, ‘this emergency, this rule’ during which ‘all that was metaphor returned to the body’.

Elsewhere, poems such as ‘Pie Bird’ and ‘Object Love’ turn away from the natural world and shelters in domestic spaces, noting the remnants of human lives (like the delta’s sediment deposited as ‘alluvial silt’). These poems, which are particularly strong, ground readers in manmade objects that are imbued with meaning. The ‘white pots of divers sizes’ offer comfort after the death of a loved one: ‘now you hug it to your unmotherly dugs/ and weep into it’. The pie bird, which supports and vents a pie, transforms into a living version of what it represents as ‘the steam escapes…through the ecstatic yellow beak’.

Toward the end of the book, the speaker muses on the boundary between life and death. An already dead father burns leaves because ‘this is the month for the rake/ and barrow’, a mother is ‘circumference and centre’ as she dies. The speaker looks back, returning to ‘the house that housed my mother as a child’ and studies how the natural world overtakes architecture. This book is a delicate examination of the natural world, human suffering, and the inexorable march of time as ‘the very nib/ of the present as it pushes on/ into something not yet lived’.

Beginning with two playful poems referencing the biblical Journey of the Magi, Jola charts her own personal journey from South Africa to Belfast. In doing so, she traces the trajectory of her own identity, and how entrenched and institutional cultural divides make it nearly impossible for someone from elsewhere to call Northern Ireland “home.” More specifically, Jola considers the victimisation of the Black female body between these cultures, writing: “Black woman is the most disrespected person/ Black woman is the most unprotected person”. Jola points to the history of the abuse and cultural erasure of Black women in poems like “Did You Come Here By Boat?” and “Brainless Skull,” deftly layering grotesque physical violence on top of the apartheid’s segregation and racist attitudes across multiple poems to show how it is possible for one to be alienated not just from their home, but from their own body.  

Jola asks, how can one feel “at home” in a place when one cannot feel at home in one’s own body? Poems such as “Can I Touch Your Hair?”, “Brussels (Will Fix Me)” and “Sarah’s Cake” show the othering of the Black body, and how it is viewed as something to be accessed by others for the “benign” purposes of curiosity, or for sinister alteration (several of Jola’s poems refer to FGM). Jola confronts us with polarities of how the Black body is appropriated and shows us that these attitudes are two sides of the same coin, in that they treat the Black body as something “for us,” rather than dignifying it as something “in itself.”  

Nandi Jola’s collection began with the Journey of the Magi, and like the Gospel story, quickly descends into violence as it details the “pain/bullet pain/riot pain/death/life/history” as Jola is caught in a matrix of identities “Somewhere between Africa and Belfast.” Through all this, the poet refuses to look away from the violent reality of both South Africa and Belfast’s histories. However, in keeping with the framing of the “Journey of the Magi,” she ends the poetry of this collection hopefully in “Tapestry of Love,” in which she writes of a collective, unified dance, where “history [remains] history”: “for we are one race/ of many colours/ many voices/ many dreams/ one unity/ one heart/ a tapestry of love.” 

From the mind that brought us Ormeau Freeway and The Indian Restaurant in Bangor, we as a society have been gifted a brilliant new collection.

The Business of Poetry takes on the burden of uplifting the oft unrecognised glory of iconic businesses that form the foundation of Irish capitalism, such as Sean Quinn and Moy Park, to the status that they deserve. His nostalgic poem “Jeff Bezos Names Amazon” is a chance to retroactively experience history being made. The reader is brought through the trillionaire’s mind as “the great rivers of e-commerce flow” through him while he makes a decision which affects all of us who’ve spent a silent 2am trying to fill an internal void with the purchase of material goods that will rot in a landfill for the next fifty years.

The poem that warmed my heart the most, however, was the meticulously crafted ode to an institution we all have benefitted from, the backbone of Western society, and my one true love - IKEA. O’Keefe’s tender ballad - “like a Nordic God you rise / from the west airport road - like some great Alpine dome” - is well-earned. Though this touching ode to the beloved provider of the “Berglund galvanised steel frame storage combination” may have been snubbed by the Faber Anthology of Love Poetry, to this reviewer, it is truly a love poem for the ages. 

O’Keefe’s use of mixed form, including Coleridgean ballad, Whitmanesque long line, and even a closing Shakespearean sonnet for the Lagan Weir Bridge, invokes the great poets of ages past and shows his mastery of the poetic arts. The use of mixed media stands out also as his poems are accompanied by photos of Game of Thrones characters, iconic Northern Irish landmarks such as the Titanic Museum, and elegant photographs of the poet himself. This collection of satirical business poetry is a breath of fresh air, and worthy of a place of honour on every true poetry lover’s bookshelf.

Cushla Lavery, whose family own the bar, is a young primary school teacher trying to navigate a world dominated by shame, booze and the inescapable threat of sectarian violence.

The trespasses in this story are pluriform. Cushla enters into a passionate affair with Michael Agnew, a married man. Michael, a civil-rights barrister and middle-aged, middle-class protestant, is in turn working in defiance of the sectarian establishment to highlight the civil and constitutional trespasses of the state’s judiciary and security forces against its own citizens. The legalistic, religious register of the novel’s title adds to the sense that consequences are inevitable. Whose trespasses will be forgiven? Who will pay?

Cushla is a brave sort. At the school, she protects the children from the insidious influence of the church as embodied by the dreadful Father Slattery. She is the only person to help the adorable Davy McGeown and his family, who live in hostile isolation on a loyalist estate (a ‘mixed’ family, claimed by neither side of the divide).

Cushla’s relationship with Michael throws her into alien territory. Michael and his crew fall within a spectrum of archetypal 1970s liberal middle-class Belfast protestants. They are interested in the culture of Ireland, and many among them are attuned to a colonial understanding of the political crisis. Nevertheless, some still appear to sneer at Cushla “like a good little native” when she gives them Irish comhrá lessons. Cushla gives as good as she gets, but the question of identity returns to her again and again. She ponders the connotations: “When something was clean and tidy, when it was as it should be, it was described as Protestant-looking. Even Catholics said it.”

Kennedy is highly attuned to the intersectionality of identity: gender and socio-economic class are as decisive as religion. This seems as true for the underlying power dynamics in Cushla’s affair with Michael (there being no Irish word for no) as it does for the miserable fate of the members of the McGeown family.

Trespasses is a beautifully wrought, tragic story, seeped in foreboding, and yet its extreme violence is no less shocking for its inevitability. With apparent ease, Kennedy tells a story that is at once entertaining and important, reminding us of the curricular and cathartic value of stories about the Troubles in the absence of a truth and reconciliation process.

Lucy wants to be amazed by the world, but isn’t quite able to make it happen. So, she travels. Anywhere and everywhere. Her various escapades only end up exacerbating what appears to be a chronic case of millennial ennui. ‘I ended up just wandering around,’ she laments at a popular tourist spot, ‘trying and failing to feel overwhelmed, or to have even just the slightest connection to my surroundings.’

Byrne’s writing is a raw unfiltered take on a young woman’s mind. She has no interest in fanciful sentences or flowery language and writes openly and refreshingly about sex. Even better, she does it hilariously. In ‘Ye olde Americana’ Lucy admits ‘in the space of six months I slept with three different men who professed Moby Dick to be their favourite novel, and I’d smiled to convey ‘impressed’ each time.’

Each story has a fish out of water feel to it, even the ones set in Ireland, Lucy’s home country. This is because Paris Syndrome is a never-ending search for a solid sense of self and connection. Lucy is unable to feel secure at home, so she hunts down ever and new and exciting places in the hope they will make her feel whole again.

Despite the dissociative atmosphere permeating every page, Byrne manages to make it funny. Most of the wit relies on Lucy’s self-awareness of her own pretentiousness and penchant for hypocrisy. In ‘And We Continue to Live’ her ‘sort of boyfriend but not really’ calls Lucy out for defending her trip to Chernobyl, despite previously telling him she despises dark tourism. 'So you're not actually going to visit Chernobyl on a package tour, you're meta-going to meta-visit Chernobyl on a meta-tour.' It’s moments like these that make Paris Syndrome intensely funny and relatable. Despite the postcard settings and beautiful backdrops, anyone can feel just like Lucy does at the start of ‘Ye Olde Americana’: ‘just another lost twenty-something, pretending to be above it, attempting to play the modern heroine.’

Under ‘L’ he describes himself as: ‘Looking at the gutter with his head in the clouds’. Amusing, yes, but revealing too: this poet is a realist and a dreamer and the range he covers in his poetry reflects that. There are wistful poems here, and angry ones. All display great empathy and poetic brio.  

Colin Hassard’s writing is brilliant on the page; but to hear him read his poems aloud takes them to an even higher level. See (and hear) for yourself! He is the writer-in-residence at Belfast’s Duncairn Centre, and there are many examples of his spoken word performances available online. 

Hassard seasons his work with those gripping images, those idiosyncratic forms of expression, that will make his fellow poets sigh: ‘Oh, if only I had come up with that’. In ‘Keys’, facing a moment of writerly self-doubt—we all have them!—he wonders whether he will be ‘…able to milk the moon for another melancholy poem’. He needn’t have worried. Age of the Microwave Dinner is testament to that and much more. 

Colin Hassard is a writer’s writer, then—gifted not only with great technical skill but also a genuine empathy for ordinary folk: those who are buffeted by the historical, psychological and economic crosscurrents that assail some of us more than others. He is a respectful writer whose conscience rises to violence and lesser acts of unkindness. In ‘Tommy’, a neglected boy, wise beyond his years, laments, ‘I love my Da // but I don’t like the person that he is’. Having found love, Hassard has not forgotten what it means to yearn for it—those innocent, exasperating times when: 

…it starts not knowing 
of thorns – ends not able to 
recognise a rose. 

Describing his youth in Belfast, Hassard recalls in his poem, ‘Potions and Elixirs’, growing ‘with roots stretched in ribcages like revellers through / the Entries, to sprout beyond the lick of the latch’. Pause here to savour that phrasing: the ‘lick of the latch’. Brilliant. He remembers summers ‘scorched on the right arm of bus drivers / who scowl as you break a fiver / for three stops’. Such palpable imagery—and all of it culminating in this: 

I bloomed into a man who avoids the heel of the loaf 
and talk of ‘us and them’. 

There’s a complex morality that informs these poems, but they are never preachy, never unsubtle. Colin Hassard holds up a lens, and sometimes a looking glass, for us to peer into. What troubles us and pleases us in what we see—refracted through these fine poems—is thus brought into clearer focus. In the end, we are sometimes reassured, and sometimes unsettled. We should expect nothing less from any writer of contemporary poetry. In Age of the Microwave Dinner, Hassard has given us all we could hope to find in a first collection, and more. It is a bravura performance to be sure. 

I had to buy it, captivated as I was by her bravado and boldness, her depiction of lesbian existence.

Raw, fierce, visceral, and often painful, C+nto reawakened memories of my own past. I lived in London in the period that Taylor depicts. I played pool in the Duke of Welly, hung out at the Fallen Angel. I’ve been in and outside lesbian venues attacked by groups of men. I’ve seen a friend knocked unconscious, felt the fist connecting with my face, blood filling my mouth. I didn’t expect to see these experiences reflected in poetry, and I certainly didn’t expect a collection that foregrounds lesbian oppression to receive the prestige of the TS Eliot prize.

In the preface, Taylor tells us, “There is no part of a butch lesbian that is welcome in this world.” ROUND TWO expands:

is it we are not camp enough to be your best friend

our closet a strata of fossilised clothes girl pelt is it

we are not funny enough for your talk show is it that a

woman without make up is a woman without a face?

Taylor eschews lesbian romantic relationships in favour of the camaraderie of butch subculture and the hostility that lesbians face, especially if they do not conform to the requirements of compulsory femininity. Violence against lesbians is little acknowledged, but Taylor demands that we bear witness, perhaps most powerfully in Eulogy, a mourning for lesbians murdered around the world. She carries these dead women within her and her rage and grief pours off the page.

This important and moving collection deserves the accolades it has received. Read it.

Natalie Haynes’ 2020 Pandora’s Jar presses the conceit further, conjuring a costume department full of mythical disguise readily repurposed for cultural and political expediency. Haynes, alternately serious and mischievous, excavates how the Greeks encoded psychology as myth, showing their enduring potency and how the female characters within its cosmology have been systematically misappropriated, distorted, and attenuated. But, also, how they may be reclaimed.

Her premise is simple. Protean and resistant to definitive readings, Haynes encourages us to peer past the strata of palimpsest and interpretation into each myth’s source, where we find something stranger and richer. The adumbrated tales of these women—Pandora, Jocasta, Helen, Medusa, the Amazons, Clytemnestra, Eurydice, Phaedra, Medea, Penelope—have taken root in popular culture as reductionist distortion. Through an accretion of mistranslation, excision, false exegesis, and misdirection we glimpse only partial renditions, and therefore only a partial understanding of these troubled, and troubling characters. Ancient misogyny is not glossed over here either, but contextualised. Within this patriarchy, Haynes argues, sits a kernel of female myths whose resistance, defiance, and power allows for a greater psychological acuity than most later iterations of them permit.

The titular tale of Pandora deftly illustrates this. Translating Hesiod’s Works and Days from Greek into Latin in the sixteenth century, Erasmus gropes for a word to convey pithos, meaning ‘jar’, but confuses it with puxos, meaning ‘box’ and conflates the myths of Psyche (who does carry a box) and Pandora (who does not). Centuries of false mythology incrementally coalesce around this reading, all hinging on this linguistic misstep. Far from a simplistic (and gendered) warning to keep away from women bearing strange containers, the jar instead suggested a conundrum for its original Greek audience. In addition to ‘hard work, grievous cares, and disease’ it also contains hope, and asks: is hope itself part of the trauma of living? Pandora is not herself the warning; she warns us. As Pat Barker observed: ‘History is then; myth is now.’ Haynes understands it is partly a question of tenses, and that myth is not ‘once upon a time’, but ‘everywhen,’ endlessly rejuvenating. Her meditation is part of that rejuvenation.

Each poem Kaminsky read was projected on screens either side of him. I, none the wiser, having come to listen to another poet at a following event, was compelled to hunt around the city’s bookshops to find the collection. No luck. Sold out. When I got my hands on it, several weeks later, I was afraid to read it. The lines and images I had obsessed over, I worried, were inextricable from the feverish experience of being utterly stirred at the event and that the solitary act of reading it would be sobering. After a few weeks of it in my bag, I read it. I read it again. I had nothing to worry about.

Tragically, the collection has taken on a new resonance as Russia continues its invasion and edges along Ukraine’s south coast toward Odessa, Kaminsky’s home city. Presented as a play with two acts and a Dramatis Personae, Deaf Republic is punctuated with illustrations of sign language (the poet hard-of-hearing since he was four), the means of communication for the occupied in the collection, and centres on a deaf boy killed by occupying soldiers:

‘The body of a boy lies on the asphalt like a paperclip. | The body of a boy lies on the asphalt | like the body of a boy.’

The collection has the undefinable ability to commit itself to the reader’s memory, and these lines are ones that cannot be shed. Initially, the speaker can only liken the scene to something so manipulated yet commonplace as a paperclip, before accepting the brutal reality of the scene; the scene has become familiar, imagination unnecessary. Rarely, but often in dark times, does the venture to the figurative, does the act of poetry, seem pointless. It is a horrible truth. Yet we, the readers, are told to ‘Observe this moment | –how it convulses–’. And so, we must observe.

It’s a slim anthology that gathers work both previously published and unpublished, by a broad range of writers: Francis McKee, Rebecca Tamás, Hussein Mitha, Juliet Jacques, Àkpà Árinzèchukwu, Adrien Howard, CA Conrad, Renee Gladman, Lisette May Monroe, K Patrick, and Hanif Abdurraqib. ‘Sleeper’, the introduction tells us, is ‘the name given to a car with an ordinary and unassuming exterior, but with a high-performance engine. Something extraordinary concealed within something we see daily’.

Fittingly, the themes of transport and mechanics become refrains across these pages. The book gathers reflections on Che Guevara’s single cylinder 1939 Norton 500cc; ‘the garage’s gaping mouth’; the MOT centre; the ‘collective engine sound’ that signifies desire; and, more broadly, the ‘human engine’, as Eliot might have had it. What drives us as individuals, Sleeper asks, and how are these drives bound up with wider, collective concerns (economic, political, environmental). ‘It may have been simply that what we needed no longer existed […] or that the very nature of looking had somehow become a problem for our eyes’, Gladman writes. What, she asks, are we driving towards when we participate in the democratic system (‘I began the day having to vote Yes or No…’).

If sleeper cars serve as reminders for us to look a little closer at what we typically take for granted, so too do the texts included. In Tamás’s ‘The Albedo Effect’, a reflected sunbeam prompts a reverie on the sweep of history: ‘Out of grifter light / comes the past, so must nastier than you / could have known, so much more tender’, a movement echoed in Árinzèchukwu’s ‘The Gift’: ‘I watch you watch the windows of the bus / de-transition into a landscape of a thousand memories’.

We’re left with the wail of the ambulance resounding, in Abdurraqib’s ‘USAvsCuba’: ‘speeding down the highway opposite us & disappearing into the sun & I don’t want to think that there might be a body inside of it & then all of the cars start moving’. Everywhere, there is motion. Rosie’s Disobedient Press comes, roaring, to life.

Compared to Sweet Home, Erskine’s writing here feels slightly more serious. In ‘Mathematics’, Roberta ‘divides herself into two teams’ to play a board game by herself, a trick Erskine’s characters know well, as they often adopt different personalities in public. Erskine also enacts this splitting of characters through name: in the eponymous story, Mrs Dallesandro is called only once by her first name Jennifer, a momentary departure from her identity as wife. Instilled in Dance Move is a particular kind of nostalgia of what could have been, the kind that drives a grieving mother to make her dead son’s favourite dinner over and again until she gets it just right, or the tension at the heart of ‘Golem’, where a mother and daughter have been hurt in a similar way and yet can’t speak to each other.

Although this collection is a neat microcosm of life and human emotion, Belfast readers will enjoy the small details that remind them so concretely of their city. In ‘Mathematics’ a look ‘up the road to the hills’ that hem in Belfast reminds us of so many of our streets. Then there are the ‘ceilings like icing’ of the fancy houses on the Antrim and Malone Roads, the ‘spangled lough’ as Drew Lord Haig gets off the ferry; there is an understated and confident authenticity in these stories.

The connecting tissue of this collection is music, often the soundtrack of reminiscence. In each story, music either rips a character from their dreams, like the loud dance music in ‘Mrs Dallesandro’, or roots them further inside them, like the waltz that plays in the background of a scene of unrequited desire in ‘Golem’. The word sonder comes to mind when reading Erskine’s stories, which allow us to see from so many perspectives, but never blurs the distinct identities of the characters.

Suppose A Collapse follows an unnamed speaker between Belfast and Madrid, where she meditates on her relationship with her mother, absent father and extended family. Fluid, perplexing and indefinable – this piece resists interpretation. McLaughlin’s writing is controlled, considered and poignant as she takes the reader on a journey, moving not only spatially, but through memoir, prose and poetry. The voice remains strong and confident, as it battles with definitions of the self: “Successful immersion means the body isn’t knowable, or someone that you know”. The stream of consciousness is vividly constructed throughout the text, as it moves from solid blocks of prose to deconstructed lines floating across the page: “It hurts, I said. It’s like the storm in my head broke the thunder directly above my flat, the lightning half a second before.”

In contrast to this, McLaughlin’s writing is also incredibly plainspoken and to the point; she references art, literature and film, reviewing it for the reader with great depth and precision. And this seems like a trick to divert the reader – a performance arranged to obscure the depth of emotional exploration that’s at the core of this book: “I am directing a performance for all the people of my life.” 

Art is how the speaker attempts to make sense of her world, of that which is absent, and in the same way this text is a guide for readers who feel a lack in theirs. And this is apt, as absence, what is not discussed or cannot be, is the hinge of Suppose A Collapse as it ponders: “Maybe art is the place to become obsessed with lack, with absence.”

The anthology opens with Daniel Bresland’s “The Eleventh Night”, a story in the tradition of Frank O’Connor’s lonely voice, where the tension of Ulster in July ripples with sensory contradictions. The story’s final image is as beautiful as it is melancholy: “The flags cast spectral silhouettes in the orange street lights.”

Sensory concerns are also at the heart of Keilan Colville’s poetry, where the land mutates “with humanity’s imprint”. Even the poet’s own feelings can make of the “sweet music of the Erne” mere evidence of the “unhappening” of the Long Summer (yes, that one). Colville writes water as if language were descended from it, uniting the water, the land and his words in contrast to our ephemeral selves by proclaiming that “what becomes the water cannot die”.

We return to the urban with Zara Meadows. Confident, righteous, and miles up the road from pretence, this cycle of sonnets asks important questions (“What’s the/Difference between empty and emptied, is it/The emptying?”), and grants us the quietly optimistic final line; “Tomorrow is a colour we are writing for ourselves.”

The individual and the universal again come together in Anesu Mtowa’s poetry with a striking vitality. These poems have a narrative arc of honesty about the harshness of life that consoles: “Yes, they have never understood,/but that does not mean there is any less sky.” The warmth of friendship, the subtleties of family and the experience of womanhood are all in here.

Meanwhile Grace Magee’s short story, “Scrubbing Day”, explores the gendered experience of domestic conflict as it hangs over the violent drama of the street below. Humour persists amidst the grime in the voice of Shannon’s mother who, after being told that it is bad luck to name the baby before the birth, retorts ‘Oh aye, it’d be terrible to have some bad luck.’

Nuanced wit is also at the heart of Caitlin Young’s prose. “Laundromat Girls” is a frank and uncompromising condemnation of the historical legacy and contemporary endurance of gendered violence and misogyny on this island. Young’s originality of image illuminates this piece, not least in the lasting vision of washing machines rocking their “images back and forth, like a motorized mother’s arms when their newborn’s colic kept them both up all night”.

These writers refuse to flinch in the face of the unavoidable awkwardness of this time and place.

Several poems in this collection speak openly around the idea of queer love and intimacy, a protest in itself as the topic’s taboo has left it broadly under-explored. Poems like McCann’s ‘Hook-Up’ and Hewitt’s ‘Dryad’ speak beautifully of queer sex culture as a form of intimacy that is often frowned upon by society, with the latter branding it “acts of secret worship”. McKimm also hones in on social pressures on queer people to remain hidden in ‘Because we could not dance at the wedding’, which delicately describes a clumsy hotel room waltz that, if the couple had performed in public, would have caused “a sober brawl”. Clarke takes this back even further in ‘In Glasnevin’ as she describes seeing the grave of two lesbian lovers who were not referred to as such on their shared headstone, likely due to erasure and a desire to avoid public scrutiny.

Reflection on this history is important, and complementing this are the optimistic hopes for the future. ‘Top surgery’ by Keohane shares the strange feelings of affirmation in one’s body for the first time, looking onward to a future in a more comfortable form: “is this mine?... Yes / this is your chest.” Bryce’s ‘Espresso’ anticipates a much sooner future – “while I wait for you / in this little coffee shop”, expressing a form of hope in a much smaller scale but hope all the same for a lifetime of waiting for the arrival of a loved one.

The poets in this soft yet daring collection do not dwell on the dark history of queer folk in Ireland so much as they reflect on it and look to the future: one made brighter by vital work such as theirs. Maddern’s project has created a space for these poets in the literary canon so that tomorrow’s young people do not have to look as hard as we did for queer literature.

This exactly crystallises Howe’s intention in her fourth collection of poems Magdalene (2017), a book that dramatizes and re-imagines a Mary Magdalene voice as a contemporary woman.

These poems are startling plainspoken, and almost free themselves from metaphor, often conversational, and full of pain-staking clarity. ‘Magdalene—On Romance’ describes Magdalene…in romance, as “a dog/instructing ducks”, before reaching the remarkable stillness of the final image: “The screen door banged a few times, then stopped./ How quiet the room then,/ when I sat in the white wooden chair.” 

In this book Marie Howe’s primary concern is Magdalene’s subjectivity, hijacked and transformed as it was by many over centuries by patriarchal and conservative theologies and societies. The first poem in the book, ‘Before the Beginning’, directly addresses Magdalene’s historic treatment, in the form of four simple questions: Was I ever virgin?/ Did someone touch me before I could speak?/ Who had me before I knew I was an I?”

Magdalene has no biography according to the Gospels except Luke’s record that seven devils were cast from her, and perhaps a crowning achievement of Magdalene is ‘Magdalene—The Seven Devils’; Magdalene tries to list each devil here, failing each time. “The first was that I was very busy.” “The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living.” “Ok. The first. was that I could never get to the end of the list.” This is a crucial and innovative book of poems by, I think, one of the most remarkable and humane poets writing.

Here, Andrew Rahal’s focus is not on finding destinations, but on meeting himself and others amid journeys. The poet hears Seamus Heaney’s call in ‘Postscript’: ‘Useless to think you’ll park and capture it/ More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,/ A hurry through which known and strange things pass’. The reader’s journey through this fourteen-poem chapbook mirrors Rahal’s non-hierarchical kaleidoscope of locales, from American deserts (‘The farther I drive, the faster my rituals shed like skin’), to pastel dunes with ‘teens drunk off neon’, then to Sappho (WA) where the animals are ‘just muscling through.’ 

Rahal investigates what new spaces bring to the surface of the self, aware that what one notices may reflect the self as much as any observed situation. In the brilliant, standout poem ‘Border Crossing’, the arbitrariness of map lines is exemplified by a dizzying and dazzling hustling together of images: ‘the bluegrass rushing under a train/ or the Bible Belt sky/ over/ a crayon blue Atlantic and/ a plane landing into European smoke/ and the endless transfers from tarmacs to towns/ back to tarmacs or churches’. Place becomes memory in ‘Bratislava’: ‘the rooftops curve and smile,/ as precious as a fragile painted wood,/ growing smaller and more inward.’ In ‘Nashville’, the speaker confesses, ‘I have cheated the pizza man, his home and backroads. I have lived on cul-de-sacs/ where I witnessed delivery drivers going in circles.’ In this lyrical homage to the journey, Rahal remains calm and upbeat about the personal and political challenges ahead: ‘I am heading west today and despite the rain and fog it feels bright and clear.’ 

In this horror novella Amanda, a successful young architect, is checking off life goals at a ferocious rate until a supernatural entity begins to turn her life upside down.

This is a novella that trusts the reader to understand when powers are shifting, and when a small detail will be vital down the line. It would be easy to lose your footing in this tale if it wasn’t for Gran’s straightforward, pared-back prose; the unravelling thoughts of Amanda power the novella. Here, the moments we really need to worry about are when the voice slips from “I” to “We”. Namaah (the unearthly and apocryphal antagonist) is with us, behind us, for every word of the novella from this point onwards.

The brevity of Come Closer is partly what makes it so chillingly effective; in just 150 short pages we are invited to watch an ordinary life implode. It is also full of horribly comedic moments. Already aware she is not quite herself, Amanda tells us that “no living creature looked at me favourably anymore… Yet here I was on my way to a psychiatrist’s office, trying to convince myself that I had a regular psychological problem.” This is a protagonist who tries to rationalise her way through every situation, a hallmark of Gran’s writing that makes the horror so convincing.

At one point Amanda tells us that “the most shocking truth was that, previously, I had been so stupid as to think I had any understanding of the universe at all.” Amanda is wholly disorientated, but Gran never lets the reader join her in this darkness - we are guided by the careful prose. Ultimately, in Gran’s hands, we are walked through a portrait of demonic possession that is not wholly dark, illogical, or resistible…

The poems in this pamphlet explore the poet’s grief, following the loss of her father, and also, in Zosia’s own words in a video (link below) ‘the friendships that help you navigate that grief, to help you live with and through it.’

So, yes we have grief and friendships, but the other main character in these poems is the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who (about which I know nothing and it definitely does not impeach my reading). Zosia elegises her father via Doctor Who because it was their shared territory: a ‘vocabulary of images’ that she has been gifted; a vessel. ‘The day is melted like a painted clock’ she says in ‘July 6’, ‘let’s dawdle brazenly’.

The second poem in this pamphlet (‘Here we go again’) made me weep, all of a sudden, in the queue to board my flight to Bristol this week and I've barely been able to read a poem since. Which is to say, I'm finding it difficult writing this critique; trying to find the words to say anything intelligent about these poems when each time I read one all I feel is emotion.

There’s an honesty in these poems, conveyed through language that is raw, open-hearted, simple, and yet at the same time, weaves around each part of itself, to complicate matters beyond (my current) comprehension: ' Imagine that my friends are patient with me; that they have offered me their ears and arms and company like Jelly Babies because I'm sad and we don't know what to do.' And I trust Zosia with my own ears and arms and put myself in her company, trusting her with the familiar (poetic) journey of grief.

‘Until we meet again we will / not meet again. Home is either coming or going / and I am always going. Until we meet again.’

An unmistakable sense of lostness surfaces in the opening poem “American Goshawk”: “The land beyond the pond had been logged/ and I lost the path in the refuse, the clotting punk” and the sense of lostness reappears in the disarray of American rust-belt towns, Welsh castles, British country-sides, churchyards, disused farmhouses, and recovery wards.

The long narrative poems that make up most of this collection venture both conversationally and historically into these spaces to praise their mystery and curiosity. Waldrep’s ear is closely tuned to questions of personal faith in crisis: “I have a fever and its name is God,” a patient remarks from a hospital bed. And walking through Ely Cathedral, the speaker discovers affirmations in the slow thrill of being alive in surprising detail: “Yes to praise, the soul’s milled dentures. It makes the slightest sound,/ like an animal licking itself.”

The Earliest Witnesses meanders into conversations with musicians, artists, poets, and philosophers such as Saint Ephrem, Ernst Chladni, Simone Weil, Syrian mystic Dadisho, Welsh St. Melangell and an omnipresent God; and further still, the ordinary encounters with friends and caretakers (hospital orderlies, sextons, gardeners, etc…) nurture a space for spontaneities, impieties, and intimacies to roam just as freely.

If writing is resistance, then this book resists the clamouring for reducible moral certainties and “the rage to classify, to collect” human errors and transgressions. The Earliest Witnesses grapples with pain, splendour, faith and love and Waldrep shines as a provoker of what we see and think. Line by line the reader can see belief transfigured on the page, gathering the urgency of agitations and testimonies that catch “the world readjusting all around, as worlds do.”

This novel features Charlie, a struggling filmmaker who lives in London. When her film gets accepted to the Cork Film Festival, she is given a chance to visit Clipim, the mysterious island off the coast of Ireland where her father grew up. When she arrives, a critique of her film causes her to reconsider everything her father has told her about his heritage—and why he left Ireland in the first place. 

While ultimately a thriller, the tensions of the novel competed with each other. The mystery of the island vied with the romance between Charlie and Maria, a local barmaid, and the friction between Charlie and her longtime friend, Laura. While entirely plausible, Charlie’s personal battles, such as her father’s worsening cancer and her foray into amateur pornography, felt too convenient. These sub-plots overshadowed the novel’s central tension, leaving me unsatisfied with the big reveal in its resolution. 

Despite this, I felt this was a fresh and compelling take on the thriller. It grappled with identity, notions of failure and success, and family duty while retaining a lightness through Charlie’s humorous narration. I found myself chuckling to myself often while reading, especially when introduced to Satan the dog. I enjoyed stepping out of my life and into Clipim, I’m just not sure I would visit again. 

The opening poem, ‘Pucks Lane’, takes the reader on a journey through Cleary’s native Whitehead in east coast County Antrim, which is also my hometown and Cleary remembers every yard perfectly: ‘past Haverons butchers / at the turn into something // past the Marine Bar / James & Molly at the fire // past the Rangers Club / where Paschal sometimes drank’. I, too, frequent The Marine and spent part of my MA introducing my classmates to its sailorly charm. The poem is populated with images of the dead, (some of whom I also knew), the past tense doing the unspoken work of commemoration and ending up ‘past Pucks Lane / always at the edge of something’.

This ‘something’ is always achingly beyond Cleary’s reach, such as his late mother in ‘Some Days’: ‘days without your cupboards / days without your spoons’ as he tries in vain to ‘hear the clock / chiming over your fireplace’. These are short and subtle poems whose economy hit home all the harder for it. ‘The Leaves’ is so devastatingly bare that it’s hard to process how it can be so affecting in only 22 words: ‘I knew in October / you’d go // but I didn’t say / because of the leaves // & their messages / & the silver birch tree’. 

The character of Esme in the middle section is an empathetic version of Berryman’s ‘Mr. Bones’, an invention Cleary resorts to when the dead will not answer: ‘& Mama & Dada vanished / Big Facey died in his yard / Esme I hope it’s OK / to tell you stuff like this’. 

The collection is a wonderful meditation on what it means to be alive while loved ones have gone to the ‘other place’ invoked by the title, and yet still Cleary manages humour in grief: ‘aye it’s a strange carry-on / me talking to the dead so much’. 

The story follows a former actress named Ayami over the course of one night and day during a blackout in the sweltering heat of a Seoul summer. But that sense of time is warped by changes in tense and perspective. Recurring motifs, like pockmarked faces, starched white hanboks, ‘skinny calves corded with stringy muscle’, and the drone of unseen radios, repeat throughout but bounce from character to character, melding them all into different versions of one another. Ayami herself is, at times, also possibly her German teacher, a pharmacist’s wife, her own mother, and a once-famous poet.

The fragility of borders between the characters, between dream and reality, and between night and day forms a tension throughout; in a memory of her childhood, Ayami recalls picking up a pebble in the road to reveal another mirror world beneath, where ‘Ayami was her future self or her past self. And she was both, existing at the same time’. This, she concludes, ‘was the secret of night and day existing simultaneously’. One such border that lingers at the corners of Suah’s tenuous reality is the 38th parallel dividing North from South Korea. In a final scene, Ayami repeats to herself, ‘Take me to another world’, a request she knows is impossible, as the train she’s on is limited by the hard border. These meetings of the ethereal—shadow people, ghosts, hallucinations—with realities like war, familial separation, and illness, merge to create a disconcerting and disorienting portrait of personal and national identity, trauma, and the myriad roles each of us plays.

This treatment of colour extends from scientific HTML colour codes to the ephemeral ‘The Good Kind of Green’. As a reader, we roam forests, seas, and skies searching for the gloomy surprise in each poem and we are rewarded well, especially in the prose poems where secrets are shared, “I remember you swearing that photography was the greatest liar of all, second only to poetry. I was just happy to know we were bound together in sin.” 

The realm of these poems extends beyond the natural world and is enriched by the appearance of other artists: Ansel Adams, Edward Hopper, William Morris. “Licking wallpaper is never a polite way to behave”, sometimes jocose, sometimes sincere, Mc Kinney asks the reader to consider an artist’s gaze and their impact on the landscapes they’ve captured and created permanence with.  

There is often a careful tension between the people in the landscapes. This is heightened in ‘Dampen’ where a canal boat is “anointed in kerosene and surrounded by forest singing evening…Thoughts never far from the children born as fires burn, into a world where everything is hopeful enough to make your throat ache.”   

We move quickly across land and water and back again in these poems. In the closing poems, ‘Distracted Kisses’, ‘Crest’, ‘The Assignment’, ‘Latency’ a sense of anxiety builds before we return back to the thing that first inhabited the rich landscapes of these poems, an “animal running through the storm.”  

Like all great works of art, Jess knew the colour palette mattered and the earthy tone of Weeding, like the colours evoked in 'The Good Kind of Green,’ is a beautiful thing.  

This collection asks us to look at what we romanticize and feel nostalgia for – the things we find comforting. Burns presents these comforts and refines them from the kind of comfort that comes from a local café where the baristas know your order, to the uneasy comfort of visiting the town where you grew up and being forced to notice the many ways the town has changed and the even more numerous ways in which you are different now too.

The thoughtful and vivid language of Country Music suits Burns’ attention to the details of the world. This intensifies the contrast between the ‘trash of living things’ on the beach where ‘bodies do not wash up… but show themselves at their leisure,’ and the gannet still diving for fish. Change (frequently for the worse) is everywhere coexisting with things that have always been there. Poem after poem, readers are confronted with the rippling effect of people’s choices. 

Country Music shows us a world of striking landscapes and wildlife simultaneously packed full of humanity’s messiness. Will Burns generously puts on a Merle Haggard record in the background while pouring a much-appreciated beer for us to wash it all down with. 

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.