It’s been a wonderful year for poetry at Granta. We’d like to share with you some of our most popular poems:
‘It’s dangerous like a very powerful doorbell.
Or a portrait covered with a blanket.’
A poem from Chelsey Minnis’s new collection Baby, I don’t care, published by Wave Books. Three additional poems from this collection were also among our most popular posts, see below.
‘I would be happiest if there were
a whole village of radish people,
as many radish people
as there are buffet people
I hope for each radish person
a “sister person” in the room
I am half radish myself’
From the poem ‘How We Met’ by Mary Ruefle.
‘do you have a problem in your life? no.
buddha says: look on the internet & you will surely find one i mean a problem.
i had 107 problems & i named them all to keep them safe (each of them is called ‘<3’)
& then i kissed them on the back and sides, i brushed their hair & called them my baby diamonds.’
From ‘<3’ by Sophie Robinson, published in her new collection Rabbit, out with Boiler House Press.
‘I was handed a white laminated
square with a number on it
I will be called by the number not
by my name I lied
on the form that asked if there was anyone
at home’
A poem by Holly Pester on the abortions we have forever.
‘I don’t try to seem very intelligent anymore.
I am beyond such effects.
Like a false limb full of stolen pearls.
Do you want me to write a poem?
Then hold my flask.’
From ‘Greatness’ by Chelsey Minnis, one of the poems we published in July.
‘You have to steel yourself
From the garden
Be who you are poets
Cold creatures
With no other thought
But to thrive, then kill’
From ‘Snakes’ by Dorothea Lasky.
Image © UpNorth Memories
