Other books that might interest you

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  Bangers (NHB Modern Plays)

  Danusia Samal

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  It's club night and the tracks are spinning. Set against a backdrop of precarious lives in urban London, two headliners crossfade between stories of love, sex, and losing their creative spark.
  Bangers follows the highs and lows of two strangers as they struggle with their own pasts, while hurtling towards each other's futures. All the while, the DJ continues to play, dropping samples and words of wisdom. In the end, it's not the last track that counts, but the one coming up next...
  Featuring original music inspired by early noughties and present-day R&B and Garage, Danusia Samal's exhilarating play was first co-produced by Cardboard Citizens and Soho Theatre, and directed by the former's Artistic Director Chris Sonnex. It toured community venues across London, before a run at Soho Theatre, London, in 2022.

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  After the Act

  Billy Barrett, Ellice Stevens

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  Abseiling lesbians! Queers in classrooms! Perverts panicking parents!
  Thatcher's Section 28, which banned the 'promotion' of homosexuality in schools, was the landmark legislation that silenced a generation, offered a global blueprint for LGBTQ+ oppression and galvanised a movement.
  Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens's After the Act is a funny, camp and unapologetically queer musical about how a moral panic gripped a nation – and a community decided to fight back. Its inspiring, often heartbreaking, stories of teachers, students and activists impacted by the legislation are accompanied by a joyously exuberant score written by Frew and inspired by the music of the 1980s.
  It was first produced in 2023 by the award-winning theatre and film company Breach at New Diorama Theatre, London, before performances during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and a UK tour in 2024.

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  Eggenwise - and Other Poems

  Andrea Davidson

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  Can you feel homesick and at home at the same time? Ever felt lost for words but full of things to say? Meet Andrea Davidson.
  In Eggenwise, Andrea explores moving to a different country, learning a new language, growing up and falling in love through poems that notice the remarkable in the everyday: a salted parsley sprig, thundering raindrops on windowpanes, and the buzzzZZZzzz of a pesky pet fly.
  Through warm and conversational verse, Eggenwise invites you to step into the author's new home in Belgium, to roll your tongue around new words, savour their sound and share your own story through poetry…
  Fully illustrated throughout by Amy Louise Evans.

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  The Accounts

  Katie Peterson

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  The death of a mother alters forever a family’s story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all. The Accounts narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in the wake of that loss. The title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth—a physical account, a psychological account, and a spiritual account. It is embedded in a long narrative sequence that tries to state plainly the facts of the last days of the mother’s life, in a room that formerly housed a television, next to a California backyard. The visual focus of that sequence, a robin’s nest, poised above the family home, sings in a kind of lament, giving its own version of ways we can see the transformation of the dying into the dead. In other poems, called “Arguments,” two voices exchange uncertain truths about subjects as high as heaven and as low as crime. Grief is a problem that cannot be solved by thinking, but that doesn’t stop the mind, which relentlessly carries on, trying in vain to settle its accounts. The death of a well-loved person creates a debt that can never be repaid. It reminds the living of our own psychological debts to each other, and to the dead. In this sense, the death of this particular mother and the transformation of this particular family are evocative of a greater struggle against any changing reality, and the loss of all beautiful and passing forms of order.

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  A Life Sentience

  David Catford

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  This  poetic book tells the story of David, a farmer born in 1960s Australia who was expected to carry on his family’s traditions on the land. We follow his life from birth to an imagined death, spanning a turbulent time when small rural communities across Australia collapsed.
   
  David’s  plans are upended in the 1990s as the country suffers deregulation of the grain markets and the onset of a devastating ten-year drought. He and farmers like him have their lives forever changed, swept away by harsh economic forces and drought as family farms shut down.
   
  The  book captures in verse the destruction of a cherished way of life for David, his neighbours, and rural towns. It recounts the tragedy of dreams broken when long-held farming traditions become unsustainable. By  telling one man’s story, it memorializes the wider loss of community 
  and livelihood faced by farming families across Australia in recent decades.

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  Sometimes Therapy Isn’t Enough

  D. R. Nguyen

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  “Sometimes Therapy Isn’t Enough” finds the author coping with mental health struggles through poetry. The book is divided into four chapters taking the reader on a raw emotional journey through anxiety, addiction, depression, and grief. 
  “Some people are so broken  
  They mistake abuse  
  For love”

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