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.

Armand Garnet Ruffo

‘It was / a line that signaled absolute forgetting / and it made me want to weep into my drink’

Karen Solie

‘The Paying Guest rises in the middle of the night / to turn off the radio where no radio exists’

Daphne Marlatt

‘it’s rain / forest wet the same but different air’

Gary Barwin

‘the heart is an ocean-sized drum / a rat-sized jellyfish’

Dionne Brand

‘Now you are sounding like me, the clerk says. I am you, the author says.’

Kim Fu

‘I see them as a needlepoint sampler, / flowing script that reads: everyone suffers.’

Benoit Jutras

Emily Critchley

‘The piano eyes me / from its corner – / colluding with the past’

Vahni Capildeo

‘my every day is a being in of being / a mixity of worlds’

Anne Michaels

‘I told you how the bison woke / the earth / I knew you were listening’

Dara Wier

‘here we come / with our living // fruit baskets and / soon to wilt white flowers’

Jillian Weise

‘You want to get married? / We could die here // for lack of light’

Liz Berry

‘a cardigan / soft as a creature, smelling of birth and milk’ – New poetry from Liz Berry.

Danez Smith

‘the boy claps me between / his hands & i break apart like glitter’

Ocean Vuong

‘I’m too tired she said / to be this happy / & we laughed without / moving our hands’

Dara Wier

‘a style says conviction in indifference / conviction in style’

Kazim Ali

‘I haven’t learned very much in my life, I’ve just become a more / Choreographed disaster’

Karen McCarthy Woolf

‘May it not be / that they owe their fleshiness / to the cumulative effect?’

Andrea Brady

‘When we’re close to weaning / ourselves history gives us its reasons / to return’