10 Poetry Collections for National Poetry Day

It’s been a very autumnal summer here in the UK — now, it’s time to prepare for the real thing. Rain will become heavier, branches will become lighter, and many-a-dormant-bibliophile will retire their flip-flops for flipping pages. But as the seasons change, so too do bookshelves. Stockpile for the cool breeze and falling leaves by pre-ordering a pile of shiny new books. (And it’s not like we’re biased or anything, but here are a few that we just can’t wait for! 👇)


A Painter & A Poet

Conversations in Colour

Alice Mumford & Sue Leigh

This exquisite volume, of paintings by Alice Mumford and poems by Sue Leigh, presents a unique dialogue between sight and language. Mumford’s paintbrush finds poetic resonance in Leigh’s verse and vice versa, revealing the shared threads that bind their creative experiences.

9781915670069 | Paperback | September 2023 | Find out more


Her Birth and Later Years

New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021

Irena Klepfisz

A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Irena Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. This book is the first complete collection of her work. 

9780819500168 | Hardback • Paperback | December 2022 | Find out more


In Springtime

Sarah Blake

In Sarah Blake’s epic poem of survival, we follow a nameless main character lost in the woods. In a stunning setting and with ominous dreams, In Springtime will take you into a magical world without using any magic at all—just the strangeness of the woods.

9780819500304 | Hardback • Paperback | March 2023 | Find out more


Suddenly We

Evie Shockley

In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious “we.” How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other?

9780819500458 | Hardback • Paperback | March 2023 | Find out more


The Wild Hunt Divinations

A Grimoire

Trevor Ketner

The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire is a stunning second collection from National Poetry Series winner, Trevor Ketner. Comprised of 154 sonnets, each anagrammed line-by-line from Shakespeare’s sonnets, the book refracts these lines through the thematic lens of transness, queer desire, kink, and British paganism. 

9780819500397 | Hardback • Paperback | March 2023 | Find out more


Egon Altdorf

Poems + Images

Egon Altdorf, edited by Michael Trevor

Altdorf’s earliest poems, written during military service and as a prisoner of war, reflected on nature, poetry and art. Presenting Altdorf’s poetry alongside his art, this is the first book to make Egon Altdorf’s poetry accessible to an English readership, revealing a powerfully interconnected vision shaped but not defined by war: a humanitarian outlook informed by a profound spiritual belief.

9781915670120 | Paperback | August 2023 | Find out more


Endurable Infinity

Tony Kitt

In Endurable Infinity, Tony Kitt creates his own tangential surrealism through wonder, intuition, and surprising connections. If the original surrealists of the 1930s sought to unleash the unconscious mind by bringing elements of dreams to the waking world with jarring juxtapositions, Kitt’s poetry is more about transmutation, or leaps, from word to word and phrase to phrase. 

9780822966951 | Paperback | November 2022 | Find out more


I Want to Tell You

Jesse Lee Kercheval

In Jesse Lee Kercheval’s sixth collection, I Want to Tell You, her searching, incantatory poems speak directly and forcefully to the reader in a voice that is by turns angry, elegiac, wry, or witty but always sharply alive. Crossing through the bewildering territory of grief, Kercheval argues with god and the universe about the deaths of people she loves. 

9780822967071 | Paperback | January 2023 | Find out more


Territorial

Poems

Alice Mumford & Sue Leigh

Territorial explores the bargains that women make to stay safe from violence. Set in a landscape of looming ecological ruin, the poems bear witness to the effects of drought on the California chaparral region and delve into difficult personal terrain to reveal patterns of abuse we inflict on the earth and each other.

9781915670069 | Paperback | September 2023 | Find out more


A Painter and a Poet

Conversations in Colour

Alice Mumford & Sue Leigh

This beautiful book, of paintings by Alice Mumford and poems by Sue Leigh, brings together exciting new work from the two makers. Collaboration is perhaps not the right word for a project in which paintings and poems sit side by side, each illuminating the other. Onlooker and reader are offered another glimpse, another view which may change the experience of looking and reading.

9781915670069 | Paperback | September 2023 | Find out more

What are your rainy day reads? ☕💬

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