Dikt

The judges of the 2024 Forward Prizes for Poetry - comprising the poets Alycia Pirmohamed, Vanessa Kisuule, Daniel Sluman and Jane Clarke, and chaired by actor and comedian Craig Charles - read hundreds of recent books and individual poems before arriving at this anthology.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American masculinity. In Doggerel, Betts examines this subject through a more prosaic-but equally rich-lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put back together, the only witness often barks instead of talks. In these poems, which touch on companionship in its many forms, Betts seamlessly and skillfully deploys the pantoum, ghazal, and canzone, in conversation with artists such as Freddie Gibbs and Lil Wayne.Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a revelatory and faithful meditation on Blackness, masculinity, and those who accompany us on our walk through life. Balancing political critique with personal experience, Betts once again shows us "how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative" (Dan Chiasson, New Yorker)-and, in doing so, reveals the world anew.

"This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that the celebrated poet Frank O'Hara undertook for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, from 1950 to his death in 1966. It traces O'Hara's distinguished curatorial career at home and abroad, situating his work for MoMA's International Program within the Cold War politics of the day. Bringing together readings of O'Hara's poems and letters with a selection of illustrations, it is perfect reading for anyone interested in American art in the mid-20th century, curatorial and museum studies"--

The sixth collection of this profound dialogue between two major poets from opposite sides of the world takes on mortality. Provoked by near fatal accidents, family crisis, rising temperatures and forest fires in Western Australia, these poems confront the reality of death, and celebrate the arts of mortality in exquitite dialogue.

A powerful exploration of the diverse manifestations of “home”, extending beyond its mere physicality, through topics such as womanhood, spirituality, and immigration.

A poignant journey through womanhood, motherhood, mental health, and identity, with a unique lens on the biracial experience, offering solace and understanding amidst life's complexities.

Imagine having access to the finest debut poetry from a diverse array of emerging poets, all conveniently compiled in a single volume. The second instalment of The Central Avenue Poetry Prize maintains the exceptional standard set by its inaugural edition.

An intimate and immersive collection of heartfelt letters that capture the essence of romance through tender and sensual exchanges between lovers, self, and even pets.

This fully annotated volume presents all of Thomas's surviving poems, including those published during his lifetime and those collected after his death in 1953. Taken together, they showcase the linguistic brilliance, rhythmic inventiveness and sheer poetical genius of the great modern Welsh bard.

A companion volume to rhwng y llinellau (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas, 2013) which was Christine James's first volume of poetry. Once again, artwork portraying one woman radiates as the cover image, but this time, it's the woman from 'Diwrnod Marchnad', being Hywel Harries's cubic version of Curnow Vosper's famous work 'Salem'. -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

Lysende poesi. I 1994 ble den 21 år gamle kurdiske geografistudenten Ilhan Sami Çomak arrestert av tyrkiske myndigheter. Han sitter fortsatt innesperret, men drar likevel ut i omverdenen gjennom diktene sine så ofte han ønsker. Kropper kan innesperres, tanker ikke. Ilhan forlater jevnlig sin celle og tar del i en verden og et dagligliv som fortsatt finnes inni ham, slik han erindrer det fra 30 år tilbake i tid. Han opplever, registrerer og tar alle inntrykkene med seg tilbake til skrivebordet, hvor han omvandler dem til lysende poesi. Ordene smelter murene. Les selv og bli med på reisen hans  ]]>

I «25. september-diktene» samler Joakim Kjørsvik et utvalg av enkle, inderlige og ofte humoristiske kjærlighetsdikt han har skrevet gjennom de ti siste årene. De fleste er henvendt til et navnløst du, og slik sett er denne diktsamlingen en storslagen kjærlighetserklæring. Gjennom stadig nye, lekne, entusiastiske og overraskende måter å beskrive forelskelse og kjærlighet på, bidrar tekstene i «25. september-diktene» til en fornying av moderne og levende kjærlighetspoesi.

Winner of the 23rd annual PoulinPrize, Chaun Ballard’s gripping debut collection weaves childhood experiences,historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory thatcelebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban.Riddled with the ghostly voices of family andfriends, Second Nature is fearless inits wrestling with America’s fractured past and troubled present. In thesepoems, W.E.B. DuBois and Fredrick Douglas have a conversation, Michael Brownmeditates on the nature of the cosmos, Johnnie Taylor’s guitar sings insonnets, and the road Walt Whitman set out upon comes alive for a newgeneration.Through innovative re-imaginings of thesonnet, the pastoral, and the contrapuntal, Ballard engages with popularculture while examining the intricacies of all that is wedded together—form andcontent, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, husband and wife,and a nation long dependent on created binaries that serve to maintainstructures of oppression.Interspersed with quotations and inspired bythe rich legacy of poets who came before him—including poet Matthew Shenodawho provides an insightful Foreword to the collection—Second Nature isa testament to interconnectedness, a love letter to the deep roots that we comefrom, and a reminder of the myriad ways in which one’s identity is shaped bycommunity and country.­­­

janan alexandra’s debut poetry collection, COME FROM,weaves from English to Arabic, exploring the joint projects of longing andbelonging. Part love song for the speaker’s mother and part grief song forongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, underneath, andthrough language—feeling for its limits and possibilities. Drawingon both narrative and lyric impulses, alexandra invites readers into a worldbristling with family, memory, home, and inheritance—all in the wake ofdislocation and fracture. In one section of the book, we follow the speaker“back home” after years of separation; later, we encounter a series of parablesin the form of an Arabic abecedarian, through which the speaker recovers partsof her mother tongue—probing the gifts and wounds of language, invokingpersonal and communal histories marked with the long-durée of empire. This book searches forwhat might be possible if we dislodge our practices of belonging from the mythof wholeness, divest from nation and state, and instead turn deeply toward eachother. Here is a collection that pulses with warmth and vitality, heralding thearrival of a fresh and vibrant voice on the poetry scene. Clear and concise,accessible yet profound, COME FROM investigateswhat is deeply interior while reaching toward the world with tenderness andgenerous attention.

Sayumi Kamakura’s Applause for a Cloud uses the haiku form to attend to everyday life with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on miniature and maximum scales.Sayumi Kamakura’s poems marry accessible language with complex images, inviting readers to participate in their meaning. She often juxtaposes a surreal dailiness with a cosmological acuteness, invoking wonder on both miniature and maximum scales. The paradoxical frictions in her work resolve into moments of lucidity just as often as they perplex. Although she writes in the haiku tradition, her poems detour from the conventional parameters for haiku, such as syllabic restrictions and the use of a fixed seasonal reference. Her flexible approach to the long-standing form allows her to explore new emotional frequencies across a range of subject matter. The book’s four sections—everyday life in Japan, experiences in Morocco and Italy, her husband’s cancer diagnosis, and reflections on the pandemic—reveal the preoccupations of a poet invested in rendering her experiences with a mix of traditional and contemporary motifs alongside a subtle wit. The natural world is always close at hand. Yet, Kamakura uses environmental phenomena not merely to depict the world, but to create moments of stillness that usher the reader into her inner world.

Evolving and intimate, dragonflies is a personal journey through life's transformations. Graham Powell unfolds memories and moments in time; uncovering all that is lost and gained, and how we each grow into and out of ourselves, recreating the world afresh with every step we take along the way.

An English translation of Petr Hruška's poetry book Spatril jsem svou tvár (2022), awarded with Magnesia Litera, the most prestigious annual literary award in the Czech Republic.

With nearly a million followers on social media, Havva Ramadan's words have struck a chord with people all around the world. A Voice: Turning Pain into Power is a very personal journey dealing with loss, grief, heartbreak and love, and will resonate with readers everywhere, offering poetic comfort for troubled times.

A collection of forty-five poems and eight prose sections that explore walking, writing, and art making as divinatory practices.Which Walks begins with a prologue that introduces its themes of endlessly walking while aging and existing—even thriving—in this strange current world. It was also written in relation to the visual practice taken up by the author after an approximately fifty-year break. From the prologue: “An inveterate Blakean, she rereads The Four Zoas as well as his Laocoön with its assertion that “Practice is Art If you leave off you are lost.” This motto of her youth continues to work in her old age. Her witchiness is not a choice but how she is seen by others. It is a strong, if vexed, position from which to work and see.”

A new and selected collection of poetry from a legend of San Francisco’s literary community.From the early days of Gay Liberation to innovations in contemporary verse, Aaron Shurin’s has been a singular voice in American poetry. His work has unwaveringly maintained lyric presence while at the same time utilizing narrative tensions and structural constraints—especially in his chosen form of the prose poem. His queer eye has never wavered—yet his has never been a poetry confined to one audience, one mode. Elixir draws from a dozen books over a period of fifty years, presciently investigating issues of gender, homosexuality, identity, and subjectivity, via ecstatic diction, luxurious sound-scape, creative grammar, and radical form.

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood.Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, jzl jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

The poems in Fuel pick at the weave of oil-fueled world orders to interrogate the ways capitalist death-drive seeps into our unconscious lives.Traversing the underworld of Central Valley oil fields and champagne rooms, Stockton articulates blurry modes of extraction, consent, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and social collapse. Fuel illuminates the ways oil lubricates, saturates, and even drives our most intimate relations, ultimately infecting our inner worlds with fantasies of “The End.”

I Hope This Helps bends genre to engage poetry and poetics across both form and format, untangling epidemics of loneliness, isolation, and crises of mental wellness.As cultural fractures cross multiple axes, these poems seek to act as a balm, reaching out directly to acknowledge our experiences both collective and uniquely individual. Here poetry lives as music and film, as image and movement across fields both cosmic and poetic. Bashir grapples with personal and structural expressions of racialized violence with her signature wit and charisma across these tight, cutting poems of love, loss, travel, and belonging.

This collection consists of odes to the Mexican American, first-gen experience as well as surreal prose poems with cultural references and settings native to the Los Angeles area. The collection opens with odes to everyday images and symbols of the Latinx community. In an age of elevated racism, these odes seek to celebrate Latinx culture in the face of constant scapegoating, ridicule, and surveillance. Also, this collection explores surreal prose poetry both in the suburbs and barrios of Los Angeles and the larger American landscape. "A future prizewinner," according to former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, this collection seeks to celebrate the Mexican American experience while also exploring how surrealism and absurdism can lead to wondrous discoveries about the self, community, and the imagination.