The Sun is Open by Gail McConnell

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers    

The sharing that Gail McConnell offers of the grief of seeing, as a child, her father shot dead in front of their raw feels very precious and intimate.

Running over a little over 100 pages you can encounter it as a whole, but each page can also be a poem in itself – there is both/and within the form as there are many layers of dichotomy within the content.

It resists simplistic interpretations, and it resists a reduction of her father’s life to the moment or manner of his death.

Unknown by Anna Rose James and Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell

buy it from abebooks.co.uk 

This is a powerful and punchy collection that refreshes our imagination about a great selection of women, some historical some mythical.

Jack

Before man/woman legal boundary

double-speak, she sat about shabby grass,

tuck skirts into drawers, drew imaginary sword,

surveyed man’s world and judged it

lacking. Before man/woman legal

boundary double-speak said no, she watched

boys/girls courting, rutting, disgust

in her tears and bones. Before man/woman

legal boundary double-speak cried sin, she

fell in love and love and love with girls

who looked like her in line and curve

and mind, and judged them fair. Before man/

woman legal boundary double-speak

thrust and stabbed through realms

of fabric, she watched the life she knew;

knew in young, sad bones she’d have to tear

the boundary designed to keep her our,

rebuild the world.

Lumen by Tiffany Atkinson

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers  

Consent

On the raido it wasn’t tyranny

she just said

all the men that have assaulted me in my life

have been nice guys

in a voice that made me think of when your finger

pushes through the cellophane and touches cool meat

FLESH you think with your flesh

I was cooking dinner like a citizen

The interviewer was like woah

I put the chicken down and walked outside

The lawn the herbs the ornamental tree

What a sharp and unexpected boredom

Have I Have I given my consent O lazy

girl if you don’tburn down suburbia

where can you go with a pretty mouth Who

will you bury in ankle-length yesses and pearls

Mum arises in the backdraft of my cigarettes

though so long into the dark herself she has

poor working syntax and is flat-out knackered

Kid she spells on the threshold Even the wind

that cannot read or bone a chicken knows its own mind

Gen by Jonathan Edwards

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers  

Song of the Retail Park Tree

All day, the sun umbrellas outside Caffe Nero

mimic me. I am brought

en masse from a gardening supply store

in the Midlands and will be paid for

in 36 easy instalments. My watering shedule

is outlined in the staff handbook. My roots

do not go deep. Somewhere, in an office in the city,

there is a version of me

in blueprint. Here, a gull harvests

french fires from a McDonalds carton

on the pavement in front of me

and cries. Nobody will ever carve a heart

into my truck, my bark. No one will ever

pick fruit from me, in this, in any weather.

All day, that awning outside Subway flutters

its eyelashes at me. I am background,

atmosphere. I am freezing

my tits off. The kid who plays

peek-a-boo behind me

is called off by his mother towards

Iceland. Somewhere, in an office in the city,

a slightly greener version of me

flickers on a screen. Sometimes,

the wind runs a hand through my hair, but mostly

tired people sit on the bench in front of me

and smoke. I shade

no lovers. No birds will ever build

a nest in me. Nobody will ever call me home.

Erased by James McDermott

Buy it direct from publisher 

James brings together some “found poems” and creates others by playfully redacting words from other texts, texts of oppression – for example blotting out the “not” in Section 28, so it reads that local authorities shall promote the acceptability of homosexuality. Doing so in highlighter pink acts to the power of turning these texts of terror into texts of joy.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2005

 Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk 

I put tabs on the following poems

Jairus by Michael Symmons Roberts

Conversation by Mario Susko

Oh by C. K. Williams, in particular these lines:

“...gone, truly gone, and isn’t it unforgivable, vile,

to stop loving someone, or to stop being loved; we don’t mean to lose friends,

but someone drifts off, and we let them, or they renounce us, or we them, or we’re hurt,

like flowers, for god’s sake, when really we’re prideful brutes, as blunt as icebergs.”

Empire of Dirt by Thomas Stewart

 Check Book Finder for the best place to get a copy  

This is a strong collection of poems, with a range of images opening up views on the complexity of masculinity and the constraints that it surrounds so many with.

The Outrage by William Hussey

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers  

In projecting forward to a near future in which the UK has become a totalitarian state Hussey reminds us that progress is not a one way street – an ever-growing sphere of liberty, justice, and equality is not an inevitability. Rights won can be lost again. This might be an unwelcome and sobering reminder, but it does us good – putting us on notice to defend our liberty from those selling the snake-oil of easy fixes to society’s challenges.

The strength of that idea almost excuses the moments when the plot is a little thin – when victory comes it probably comes too easily – those with power and privilege don’t left go without a fight, this would perhaps have been better framed as the first part of a trilogy, in which Eric and Gabriel win a battle but not yet the war.