Explore poetry
Reflections on shame in sacred spaces
Kate Duckney
‘At sunset the light is both nasty and nice / in my robe.’
Cassiopeia (three back-to-front songs)
Diana Anphimiadi
‘Anyway, I did not die. / I lined the sky, inside-out.’ Translated from the Georgian by Jean Sprackland and Natalia Bukia-Peters.
Every Day Was Ordinary
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
‘A life is an open thing / leaking out into / the air around it.’
Five Poems
Irene Solà
‘I wore off my tongue / like candy’ Translated from the Catalan by Oscar Holloway.
Though I Have Never Been to Ostia, I Have Seen the Place Where Our Dreams Died
Momtaza Mehri
‘like pasolini’s dream of an african oresteia let us be ridiculous’
Zeus
Fiona Benson
‘days I talked with Zeus / I ate only ice / felt the blood trouble and burn / under my skin’
Biscotti Boys / On Men Who Wear Living as Loosely as Their Suits
Momtaza Mehri
‘salmaan the second son & his mama’s seventh seal by way of underwater & underemployment’
The Feeling Sonnets
Eugene Ostashevsky
‘Making sense of a feeling is like building a boat from water.’
Two Poems
Andrew McMillan
‘I hadn’t / realised it possible / that I might grow into kinder / ownership of my own looks’
Two Poems
Kristín Ómarsdóttir
‘cut a piece from a lip and put in a secret place’ – New poetry translated from the Icelandic by Vala Thorodds.
Holy Man
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.’
Darling
Chelsey Minnis
‘It’s dangerous like a very powerful doorbell. / Or a portrait covered with a blanket.’
Five Skeins
Sarah V. Schweig
‘In my crumbling country every day, / people spend their lives standing in lines / to buy designer sneakers.’
Walk Laramidia
Swati Rana
‘Imagine all the prodigal / People, hoping only to / Escape every human mistake.’
Two Poems
Amy Key
‘She is luscious / and plump like marshmallow; part edible baby, / part nosy neighbour.’
Extinction
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.
The Reckoning
Armand Garnet Ruffo
‘the earth will heal / eventually / magnificently / when our species / is gone’
There Is No Light of the World But the World
Tim Lilburn
‘The mountain rises and sleeps backward / into a cloud-captured sun’
Best Book of 1996: The Lost Lunar Baedeker
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.’
Three Poems
Sylvia Legris
‘By the dog the minced oaths, / the god-wounds, the solemnly / declared chronical maladies.’
Golgotha
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.
Wallace Stevens’s Memory
Armand Garnet Ruffo
‘It was / a line that signaled absolute forgetting / and it made me want to weep into my drink’
A Sharing Economy
Karen Solie
‘The Paying Guest rises in the middle of the night / to turn off the radio where no radio exists’
The Blue Clerk
Dionne Brand
‘Now you are sounding like me, the clerk says. I am you, the author says.’
