A White Review Book of the Year 2022.At the volcano's edge, in exilic space, at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, or in the acid clouds of Venus, Mina Gorji's Scale traces life at its limits. The poems range across scales of distance, temperature and time, from vast to minute, glacial to volcanic, Pleistocene to present day, constellation to millipede. Adapting to the cold of a new continent opens a chromatic investigation of feeling. Shifting between scales, from insect to ancient star...

A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (January 2020). Among Mina Gorji's poems in New Poetries V (2011) was one about Houdini entitled 'The Art of Escape' which returns here as the title poem. This colourful and vivid first collection continues the course of Mina Gorji's meticulous explorations of 'the strange and sometimes darker side of nature' and the different forms and meanings of escape: dandelions crossing the ocean, the journey of a gall wasp from Aleppo to England, the transformati...

Media commentators have noted a rising public tolerance to the use of rude or offensive words in modern English. John Lydon’s obscene outburst on 'I’m a Celebrity…' only provoked a handful of complaints – a muted reaction compared to the furore following his use of the f-word on television twenty-eight years earlier.This timely and authoritative exploration of rudeness in modern English draws together experts from the academic world and the media – journalists, linguists, lexicogra...

Tucked away along a shady path towards the north-east edge of Hampstead Heath is a sign: Women Only. This is the Kenwood Ladies' Bathing Pond.Floating in the Pond's silky waters, hidden by a canopy of trees, it's easy to forget that you are in the middle of London. On a hot day, thousands of swimmers from eight to eighty-plus can be found waiting to take a dip before sunbathing in the adjoining meadow. As summer turns to autumn and then winter, the Pond is still visited by a large ...

THE TIMES NATURE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019!Shortlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize!Shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Award 2019!If you enjoyed Raynor Winn's The Salt Path, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, Chris Packham's Fingers in the Sparkle Jar or Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk, you'll love The Easternmost House.Within the next few months, Juliet Blaxland's home will be demolished, and the land where it now stands will crumble into the North Sea. In her numbered days living in t...

In his trademark style, Richard Mabey weaves together science, art and memoirs (including his own) to show the weather's impact on our culture and national psyche. He rambles through the myths of Golden Summers and our persistent state of denial about the winter; the Impressionists' love affair with London smog, seasonal affective disorder (SAD - do we all get it?) and the mysteries of storm migraines; herrings falling like hail in Norfolk and Saharan dust reddening south-coast ca...

“Unforgettable. . . . An outstanding adventure in its lyrical, utterly compelling, and heartbreaking investigations of the world of diamond smuggling.” —Aimee NezhukumatathilFor nearly eighty years, a huge portion of coastal South Africa was closed off to the public. With many of its pits now deemed “overmined” and abandoned, American journalist Matthew Gavin Frank sets out across the infamous Diamond Coast to investigate an illicit trade that supplies a global mar...

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary, profoundly original American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Born of a rigorous questioning of heart, spirit and mind, they have become indispensable to many American readers in navigating their own lives. Bl...

A fresh selection of the finest poems—some previously uncollected—by one of our finest English-language poetsWhy write poetry? For the weird unemployment.For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strikedown along your writing arm at the accumulated moment.For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verbbefore the trance leaves you. For working always beyondyour own intel...

This collection of new and previously published poems by Steven Heighton, author of the Governor General’s Literary Award winner The Waking Comes Late**, showcases a defining lyric poet of his generation.**Selected Poems 1983–2020 is Steven Heighton’s seventh volume of poetry and the first since his Governor General’s Literary Award–winning collection, The Waking Comes Late. Incorporating a grouping of previously unpublis...

*Finalist 2020 Golden Crown Literary Society Awards *Shortlisted 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial AwardPoems that give full attention to a world in shambles, a world in which “mercy is failing.”Maureen Hynes, in her fifth book of poetry, speaks tenderly yet vehemently about the threatened worlds that concern her. From Toronto, where she lives and walks the city’s afflicted watershed, she turns her attention to the near and far, shifting it from th...

Winner of the Trillium Book Award for PoetryIn Intruder, acclaimed poet Bardia Sinaee explores with vivid and precise language themes of encroachment in contemporary life.Bemused and droll, paranoid and demagogic, Sinaee’s much-anticipated debut collection presents a world beset by precarity, illness, and human sprawl. Anxiety, hospitalization, and body paranoia recur in the poems’ imagery — Sinaee went through two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy ...