Other books that might interest you

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  From The Elusive Muse's Lexicon

  Garry B. Grove

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  From the Elusive Muse's Lexicon is a second volume of poetry to accompany the earlier, "A Storm in Pandora's Tea Box". It touches upon a diverse range of subjects, from a homage to London's beloved River Thames, a trilogy of Coventry poems anticipating the City's role as UK City of Culture in 2021, tributes to departed musician friends, plus reflections upon sources of inspiration and sometimes consternation, as we navigate a course through life's amazing and often challenging journey.

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  Confessions of a MANAHOLIC

  P. Pierre

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  Newfound love or paradise lost? This poetry book exposes it all. Follow P. Pierre through her many do-overs in love.

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  Impossible Heat

  Ciara Maguire

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  'these basements that taught me to breathe;my body happening in the space between moonlight &the leather straps wrapped round an old dyke's wristgender split open like a crass piñata on the sticky floor'
  Ciara Maguire's poems explore the bright fields and dark corners of love. They are heartbreaking, sexy and addictive.
  'Impossible Heat is a work of claustrophobia, heat, and longing. Sexual ideation extends from the mind of the speaker to colour and consume everything. Long lines and rich cadences hold the reader in a vice, just as the speaker is offered no reprieve from her own intensity of feeling. Amidst the erotic, there is a profound hopelessness that doesn't stop the poems being witty and manic, as the speaker struggles with privacy and performance, with a
  fear of perception but a desperate need to be perceived. The emotional incisiveness of this work is stark, its euphony sumptuous.' Susannah Dickey
  'A nest-making of threads and mirrors, sapphic rorschachs revealing everything and nothing that might be told in the salt content of sweat and the tonguing indent of lyric. These generous poems drift through the gap someone left in your bedroom window. Here are dreams, tragedies of homosexuality, domestic horror shows, a cascade of utopian performatives, moonlight, a summer that may or may not ever end. What innocence is lost or won in love is felt in the sensory plenitude of our speaker's imagination. Maguire is a master of anaphora, list and simile. Impossible Heat surrenders to its own melting, poems yielding
  magical hyperobjects which metabolise into tender adhesives, binding us irresistibly to this book. This is a work of devotion, connection, eclipse, desire and discovery. Its charm is quietly devastating.' Maria Sledmere

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  Gigi & Dar

  Josh Azouz

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  'Private Gigi. One Direction awaits your commands.'
  A roadblock. Two young women armed with machine guns and Nutella. Days away from finishing the army.
  Gigi has a secret. Dar dreamt she'd be shot today. And there's a strange vehicle heading their way… Well, that's okay. Nothing ever happens here. Right?
  A comic tragedy about what we bury in order to survive, Josh Azouz's play Gigi & Dar was first performed at the Arcola Theatre, London, in 2024, directed by Kathryn Hunter.

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  Harbinger - Poems

  Shelley Puhak

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   “The speaker in Shelley Puhak’s Harbinger is no closer to knowing herself than I am, than we are, which is why we trust her. Each similarly titled poem holds a triptych mirror up to the artist and, in so doing, up to us all, so we may better see ourselves as we are. In ever-changing form.” —Nicole Sealey  
  A stunning meditation on artistic creation and historical memory from the winner of the National Poetry Series, chosen by Nicole Sealey 
  From “Portrait of the artist, gaslit” to “Portrait of the artist’s ancestors” to “Portrait of the artist reading a newspaper,” the poems in Harbinger reflect the many facets of the artistic self as well as the myriad influences and experiences that contribute to that identity. 
  “Portrait of the artist as a young man” has long been the default position, but these poems carve out a different vantage point. Seen through the lens of motherhood, of working as a waitress, of watching election results come in, or of simply sitting in a waiting room, making art—and making an artist—is a process wherein historical events collide with lived experience, both deeply personal but also unfailingly political. When we make art, for what (and to whom) are we accountable? And what does art-making demand of us, especially as apocalypse looms? 
  With its surprising insights, Harbinger, the latest book from acclaimed poet Shelley Puhak, shows us the reality of the constantly evolving and unstable self, a portrait of the artist as fragmentary, impressionable, and always in flux. 
    

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  Other People's Lives

  Dermot Bolger

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  Every night during a year spent in lockdown, Dermot Bolger set out on long walks through deserted streets, armed only with a pen and paper. Bolger follows in the footsteps of the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, using walks through his native city to allow his imagination free rein to revisit pivotal moments in his own life and speculatively meditate on the lives of others in a series of remarkable poems.
  The book starts with his parents honeymooning in a wartime Wicklow orchard and ends, eight decades later, as the poet dances with his partner in a Wicklow field. In between we encounter Nuala O'Faolain on a bicycle on Brooklyn Bridge; Grace Gifford Plunkett, defiant in her lonely final years; Herbert Simms, Dublin's brilliant, tragically overworked housing architect; and Patricia Lynch, writing The Turf-Cutter's Donkey in one room while her husband wrote communist tracts in the next. Interlaced with such real lives are imagined ones – a hardened criminal detailing prison life in haikus, a doppelganger exploring alternative pasts for the author. Taken together, these poems chart a dazzling constellation of experiences.

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