Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss Books

Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Awardwinning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz...

Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. With wisdom and grace, the speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of fragmented relationships and trauma on his nascent...

I Think We're Alone Now is a bold and far-ranging second collection from a fresh and original new voice in British poetry.This was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective...

Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire draws together MacGillivray's extensive research into the life and work of Norwegian-Shetlandic poet Kristjn Norge, who vanished from Eilean a' Bhis in the Outer Hebrides in 1961. Comprising two previously unpublished...

Mapping the Futureoffers new work by all 30 writers supported byThe Complete Works project, including Warsan Shire, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Roger Robinson, Inua Ellams, Malika Booker, Sarah Howe, Will Harris, Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard, Yomi Sode...

Grounded in protest and solidarity, Subhaga Crystal Bacon's Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory is a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020.Epistolary in nature,...

Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals - both as a...

Tale of Ahmedis a gripping fictional account of the dangerous journey of a teenage boy, Ahmed, who travels from Afghanistan, across the Middle East and Europe, to seek refuge in England.Author Henry Cockburn lives at one end of a long trail stretching...

Winner of the 2024 LAMBDA Literary Award for Outstanding Bisexual PoetryConsumed with the accumulation of lost time and unfulfilled longing, Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen is an intricate exploration of things left unfinished or unsatisfied...

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky'sThe Shiningis an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape.Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel,both realized and imagined,...

Confessional and immersive, Michael V. Smith's latest collection is a broad tapestry that explores growing up queer and working class, then growing into an urban queer life.In these poems, we are immersed in the world of a young Smith as he shares the...

In a country where violence and the threat of violence is a constant weather for queer Black people, where can the spirit rest?With lush language, the meditative poems in the Isabella Gardner Award-winning Tenderness examine the fraught nature of...

In her loving Foreword to this expanded anniversary edition, Naomi Shihab Nye writes "Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry is one of the dearest, most appealing books ever published. These poems are tiny delicious American haiku affectionately...

A series of poetic remixes, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER might be considered a form of spirit possession.Each poem in this manuscript takes up another poet's work- a selection that ranges from Lorca to CD Wright, H Xun Hng to Sappho, Agha Shahid Ali to Ishrat...

Winner of The Laurel Prize 2023 Best UK First Collection, Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature's defiance.The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. This...

Five Fifty-Five quizzical poems concerned with time and mortality which ask fundamental questions about our lives, such asWhere have you gone?andWho were you anyway?In her first new collection since The Silveringtries to find out through conversations...

Although the consciousness of death is, in most cultures, very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the "death poem." Such a...

A primer serving to facilitate dialogue between those who have experienced the crushing arms of war and those who have not, at its foundation Black Snowflakes Smothering a Torch presupposes that many issues veterans face when reintegrating come not from...

Traveling the nation, Matt Donovan examines the paradox of a country plagued by gun violence yet consumed with protecting the right to bear arms.Matt Donovan's The Dug-Up Gun Museumconfronts our country's obsession with guns to explore America's...

In Michael Earl Craig's sixth book, poems resonate with an inscrutable logic that feels excitedly otherworldly and unsettlingly familiar.Whether he be writing about the cadaver that Hans Holbein the Younger used as a model, Montana as the "Italy of God,"...

In her latest book,New Life, Lambda Awardwinning poet Ana Boievi writes, "For my birthday I want a cake/revealing the color of my soul." Never saccharine, these poems are by turns cheeky and heartfelt, grounded and wistful, and above all-surprising. New...

Sandra Simonds's Triptychs is a brilliant intersection of poetic form and the passage of time.Crafted initially in strips handwritten on rolls of receipt paper obtained at a dollar store, then assembled into three textual columns that sit side-by-side on...

Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative NonfictionWinner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry CriticismOptic Subwoof is a collection of talks that poet and National Book Award finalist Douglas Kearney presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture...

In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness-erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding-without destination.Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive...

Former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and...

Hoa Nguyen's latest collection is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-"Fall-of-Saigon" and comprises a verse biography on her mother, Diep Anh Nguyen, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-woman Vietnamese circus...

2022 WINNER OF THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR POETRY Eschewing series and performative typography, Douglas Kearney's Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of...

A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021 An NPR Best Book of 2021 An Electric Literature Best Poetry Book of 2021 A Dennis Cooper Best Book of 2021In Hoardersreality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects our...

Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile explores the role of silence in a time of war.The war Hussain Ahmed accounts here is both physical and psychological, and the survivor within these poems uses his voice as a way to tell the stories of those who were lost...

With global climate disasters in the news every day, Glazova offers riveting insights into the natural world and is an important voice for ecopoetry.Readers see the Russian and English poems on facing pages.Glazova received the Andrei Bely Prize, one of...

A major avant-garde feminist poet and essayist, and a "successor" to Kim Hyesoon ("Autobiography of Death") and other groundbreaking Korean feminist poets;Bilingual (Korean and English) on facing pages;Blurbs by Don Mee Choi and Joyelle McSweeney;Yi Won...

'Here on the shore, twenty years later, my message in a bottle has reached dry land. Words about our life, his death but mostly love and our journey to the end.' - Olivia HarrisonOlivia Harrison presents Came the Lightening a book of...

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day...Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard has been loved and admired throughout the centuries. First circulated to a select group of friends, it was rushed to official publication in 1751 in order to...

This collection of poetry interrogates the impact of grief and partner violence on a family lineage, as well as the connections between sorrow and joy as they relate to poetry, women's writing, and the process of the "confessional."Inextricably woven...

Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award for poetryWinner of the Wren Poetry Prize selected by Ada Limn, Caitlin Scarano's collection wrestles with family violence, escaping home, unraveling relationships, and the complexity of sexuality.The...

Lyrical poems that engage with grief and loss and the toll of overdose and addiction with an activist bent.The title of Cry Perfume is an imperative to bottle sorrow in a beautiful vessel and shed the chemicals that cloud your sight. Written over a...

Recent books translated by the translators have won or been finalists for the Man Booker International Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the PEN Poetry in Translation Award, the Northern California Book Award, and other notable prizes...

A comprehensive selection of poetry from a poet whose worknothing is what it seems to be. Modern spaces are haunted by the past and the unreal. We cannot tell the encroacher from the encroached. Discontinuities in time and space and playful...

The Hopeful Hat is a posthumous collection from a poet whose work is informed by her keen eye for social injustice and, equally, by the breadth of her compassion.Poignantly, these late poems are also Satyamurti'snuanced poetic response to having her...

Anne Rouse is a keenly observant writer of spiky satirical portraits and shapely lyrics of the ordinary and the bizarre.Her perspective in Ox-Eye the term for a small cloud presaging a storm is one of apprehension in poems relating to personal and social...

Fairoz is a book-length poetry sequence in which Moniza Alvi explores an imagined teenage girl's susceptibility to extremism. The book's fragmented, collaging narrative draws together fairytale elements, glimpses of Fairoz's thoughts, and pieces of...

An exquisite collection from a poet at the peak of her powers, A God at the Door spans time and space, drawing on the extraordinary minutiae of nature and humanity to elevate the marginalised. These poems, taken together, traverse history, from the...

In The Conversation, Stephanie Norgate explores relationships between nature and the city, the past and present and character and writer. Shaped through both speech and storytelling, these visual, sensuous and imaginative poems celebrate friendship, even...

Second collection by young Scottish poet whose debut collection was shortlisted for four major first collection awards. These new poems concern witches, outsiders, and women who do not fit into society. The settings range from London buses and Edinburgh...

A collection of three distinct parts, the poems in Rebecca Perry's Stone Fruit nonetheless speak across their many common preoccupations: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form, our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise...

The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth and the oral tradition, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but now an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change. And there was indeed a Bronze Age...

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism. Her numerous international awards include the Lgion d'Honneur in 2009 and the Griffin Trust Lifetime Recognition Award in 2018 (she traveled to Canada to...

In Witness Back at Me, Weyman Chan continues to explore themes of dislocation and belonging by drawing on biography, myth, science, and the everyday. Chan's poetry is suffused with a collage-like immersion of stream-of-conscious voices, approximating the...