Kazim Ali

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

Nuar Alsadir

‘The wet in the air is like signal anxiety: life is about to / change.’

Gary Barwin

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

Gary Barwin

‘it’s philosophy / coming from everyone at once // like a ballgown worn by the sky’

Emily Berry

‘I am lying in the foetal position on a beach in the east of England.’

Liz Berry

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

Andrea Brady

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

Dionne Brand

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

James Byrne

‘Another kind of people hobgoblins / the minds of little men.’

Vahni Capildeo

‘Fingers twirl / composite stems whose colour / twist rock-candies, snake-ladders / precious yellow, less-rare green.’

Vahni Capildeo

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

Emily Critchley

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

Edward Doegar

‘You can’t control your face / The Empire has over-reached / Expressions // Have become flags’

Natalie Eilbert

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

Kim Fu

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

Kim Kyung Ju

‘Underneath the leaves that stack my upper lip / the reindeer do not share their love.’ Translated from the Korean by Jake Levine.

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.

Benoit Jutras

John Kinsella

‘They are superbly and viscerally unreal / and I feel their living drive’

Sylvia Legris

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

Zeyar Lynn

‘Do I have the heart to drink a glass of cool Coke?’

Zeyar Lynn

‘Our errors evolved into nature.’ Translated from the Burmese by ko ko thett.

Daphne Marlatt

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

Anne Michaels

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

Pascale Petit

‘His sheets smell of formalin. / She feels as if her insides // are outside her, in a freezer.’

D. Ptryrczwz

‘she was not among those / I’d expected I might meet’

Matthew Rohrer

‘Even astronauts describe / our air as thick enough to slice / and spread on toast for breakfast.’

Armand Garnet Ruffo

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

Natalie Shapero

‘If I had no money for every time / I saw a stock photo of an empty / pocket being pulled inside-out, I’d / have no money.’

Safiya Sinclair

‘Dammed my wet scream around those verbs / for a violence.’

Danez Smith

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

Karen Solie

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

Karen Solie

‘Profit / unites great distances, yet its heart / beats inside us’

Ocean Vuong

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

Jillian Weise

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

Dara Wier

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