Lev Ozerov

‘A piece of boxwood, gripped in a vise, / waits on the workbench for his knife.’ Poetry by Lev Ozerov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, and introduced by Robert Chandler.

Cortney Lamar Charleston

‘Backtrack / to the bones of the matter, which are the bones themselves.’

Jana Prikryl

‘he cut out small talk / not hearing it, convincingly deaf to its nothing’

Miriam Bird Greenberg

‘Why wasn’t I better made / to refute assimilation’s maze’

Holly Pester

‘I went to Ilford alone / was handed a pink laminated square’

Sophie Robinson

‘you can call my price by any name and she will come just the same’

John Kinsella

‘Tryptamine skies and the forehand backhand falter / in earth’s revolutions’

Samantha Walton

‘though I’ve sat where torrents recall no slush / I’m drawn by your ceramic explosions’

Kate Duckney

‘At sunset the light is both nasty and nice / in my robe.’

Mary Ruefle

‘One of the loveliest possibilities / is that the truth is made of glass’

Diana Anphimiadi

‘Anyway, I did not die. / I lined the sky, inside-out.’ Translated from the Georgian by Jean Sprackland and Natalia Bukia-Peters.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

‘A life is an open thing / leaking out into / the air around it.’

Irene Solà

‘I wore off my tongue / like candy’ Translated from the Catalan by Oscar Holloway.

Momtaza Mehri

‘like pasolini’s dream of an african oresteia let us be ridiculous’

Fiona Benson

‘days I talked with Zeus / I ate only ice / felt the blood trouble and burn / under my skin’

Momtaza Mehri

‘salmaan the second son & his mama’s seventh seal by way of underwater & underemployment’

Eugene Ostashevsky

‘Making sense of a feeling is like building a boat from water.’

Chelsey Minnis

‘I’m going to smash the geraniums. / Do you mind, darling?’

Andrew McMillan

‘I hadn’t / realised it possible / that I might grow into kinder / ownership of my own looks’

Kristín Ómarsdóttir

‘cut a piece from a lip and put in a secret place’ – New poetry translated from the Icelandic by Vala Thorodds.

Nathaniel Mackey

Will Harris

‘a man caught my eye as I was about to cross the road / and asked to shake my hand. You have a kind face, he said.’

Chelsey Minnis

‘It’s dangerous like a very powerful doorbell. / Or a portrait covered with a blanket.’

Sarah V. Schweig

‘In my crumbling country every day, / people spend their lives standing in lines / to buy designer sneakers.’

Swati Rana

‘Imagine all the prodigal / People, hoping only to / Escape every human mistake.’

Amy Key

‘She is luscious / and plump like marshmallow; part edible baby, / part nosy neighbour.’

Sharmistha Mohanty

‘even more it was a wish for boundless spaces, a wish for the inexpressibly wide and broad, for the unharnessing of human life’ – New poetry by Sharmistha Mohanty.

Armand Garnet Ruffo

‘the earth will heal / eventually / magnificently / when our species / is gone’

Emily Critchley

‘to understand life / how to possibly / live in it / break it’

Dorothea Lasky

‘In this life // There is always time // To make a comeback’

ko ko thett

‘I rode bareback, I rode out all the revolutions.’

Tim Lilburn

‘The mountain rises and sleeps backward / into a cloud-captured sun’

Natalie Eilbert

‘Mina Loy has been a preferred voice in my head, echoing with a signature delirious chant as a kind of primordial poetry mother.’

Sylvia Legris

‘By the dog the minced oaths, / the god-wounds, the solemnly / declared chronical maladies.’

Natalie Eilbert

‘I was thick dough when you ran us away. I never / knew you.’

Benoit Jutras

‘Our nation is a spell of nerves and gas. We say yes to monsters, to elegies etched in our palms.’ Translated by Daniel Canty.