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Crusoe

Salman Rushdie

‘Let me tell you, boyo, bach: I love this place, where green hills shelter me from fear.’

Don’t Flinch

Adrienne Rich

‘Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver / when you lift your eyes. It’s the glare.’

Einstein on the Beach

Hugh Seidman

‘So many thugs in any century how crush them all? / All passports stamped for the underworld’

Endpapers

Adrienne Rich

‘Consider yourself / a trombone blowing unheard.’

Eternities

Charles Simic

‘Could they be the same person?’

Face to Face

Tomas Tranströmer

ʻThe birds refused to fly and the soul / grated against the landscape.ʼ

Five Poems

Irene Solà

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

Five Skeins

Sarah V. Schweig

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

Force Visibility

Solmaz Sharif

‘Full or empty / was impossible to see.’

Four Poems

Peter Robinson

‘I swelter in the dusk / and chase the flies, abstractedly, / until I half forget them.’

From The Abstract Humanities

Sandra Simonds

‘let us / build the openwork fabric of our garden / on the fear in the body’

High Table

Craig Raine

‘The inescapable smoke of her gown’

Hymen Elegy

Safiya Sinclair

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

I Used to Go for Long Walks in the Evenings

Stephen Sexton

‘My celebrity accumulated like a kidney stone: / children, pets, even some corvids recognised me’