Although the EFL remains closed to readers at present, you can still get your hands on our books through our Click and Collect service – and we’ve got a lot of new books to choose from. The following is a selection of poetry collections that have recently arrived here at the EFL.
Will Harris. 2020. RENDANG.
RENDANG is Harris’ debut poetry collection. It was a Poetry Book Society Choice and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2020. Lyrical and sometimes surreal, Harris’ poems examine the complexities and contradictions of identity and self, culture and language. Harris explores these topics through a variety of approaches, including the long poem form and ekphrasis. Both witty and insightful, the scenes Harris portrays move between the everyday and the dreamy unreal.
Marvin Thompson. 2020. Road Trip.
Road Trip is Marvin Thompson’s debut poetry collection and a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Published in March 2020, Road Trip explores heritage, identity and fatherhood from the perspective of a Black British poet based in south Wales, and addresses the continued effects of colonialism. Thompson utilises both traditional and contemporary poetic forms, including the sestina and the villanelle, to reflect on his own personal experiences, as well as creating stories around vividly imagined fictional characters. The natural world is a recurring theme, often used to evoke tenderness both within characters and the reader.
Carolyn Forché. 2020. In the Lateness of the World.
Published in 2020, In the Lateness of the World is American poet and human rights activist Carolyn Forche’s fourth poetry collection by Bloodaxe, and her first collection for seventeen years. With a focus on migrations and borders, returning to topics such as war, history and genocide, this collection once again presents the reader with Forché’s ‘poetry of witness’. Here Forché’s poems aren’t just recollections of traumatic events, but political acts and events in themselves. These poems urge social consciousness and impel the reader to awaken and engage with the world around them.
Danez Smith. 2020. Homie.
Homie is Smith’s latest poetry collection, published in 2020. It follows their 2017 collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, which won the 2018 Forward Poetry Prize, making Smith the youngest-ever winner of the award, as well as the first non-binary poet to do so.
Homie touches on many themes – intimacy, queerness, love, suffering, racism – but at its heart it is a collection about friendship and the loss of one of Smith’s close friends. Moreover, the theme of friendship is applied not just to Smith’s close circle but expanded to include acquaintances and strangers too, for example in the first poem of the collection, “my president”, which praises a whole community of people, from Smith’s grandmother to cab drivers, from single mothers to teachers and nurses.
Sally Wen Mao. 2019. Oculus: Poems.
Sally Wen Mao’s second poetry collection, Oculus, explores the damage done by exposure and objectification – on camera, in film, on social media – to women of colour. Historical figures such as Ruan Lingyu, a Chinese silent film star of the 1930s, and Afong Moy, the first female Chinese person to immigrate to the USA in the nineteenth century, are empathetically reimagined in Mao’s poems. In particular, the Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong, whose career was marred by racism, features repeatedly in a sequence of wildly inventive poems that move across time and space. Mao shines a light on the things we filter out, the silenced and the marginalised.