Tag Archive for: Laurel prize

Inmates | Sean Borodale

The poems of Inmates stage encounters with insects at sites and moments of their refuge, torpor, hatching or fighting, of traversing a floor in the night or climbing a wall, of their death and decay – all in and around the house of the writer, with whom they are sharing time, as fellow inmates.

There is an urgency to these poems, emerging from the instant of their writing, and the close attention Borodale brings to his observation of the natural world results in poems of real intensity. Inmates is an attempt to co-exist with the natural world – examining it, intimately, at the edge of language itself, where the human voice begins to break apart.

The Threadbare Coat | Thomas A Clark

This Selected Poems celebrates Scotland’s most distinctive contemporary writer – a vivid minimalist, ruralist and experimentalist.

“The Threadbare Coat is a beautiful production, and an interesting selection” ~ Rupert Loydell

Stride Magazine Praise for Thomas A. Clark: “In short, one-breath clusters of lines, Clark meditates on the details one might observe during a contemplative and solitary walk through remote countryside. His diction is perfectly pitched and his grammar exact…this is about a man’s spiritual need for the humblest manifestations of nature.”

Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021. Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020.

Postcolonial Love Poem | Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book. It demands that every body carried in its pages – bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers – be touched and held. Where the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure
of bodies like hers and the people she loves. Her poetry questions what kind of future we might create, built from the choices we make now.

Animal Experiments | Anja Konig

In an era of tribalism, it’s rare to encounter one so committed to identifying the root of things as they really are, and then laying those findings bare with benign frankness. While the world ends around us daily, these pages offer a macro and micro view, in which we find ourselves both culpable and insignificant, and it is in this paradox that, perhaps, we might be redeemed.

Anja Konig’s is a voice we need now more than ever.