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Midden Witch by Fiona Benson (Jonathan Cape)
In her fourth collection, Forward Prize winner Benson adopts the voices of both the persecuted and persecutor to tell the human stories behind the history of witchcraft. Sudden interjections of quotidian concerns shrink the distance between us and these imagined, brutalised lives in poems that she enriches with the lexicon of spells, remedies and folk-tales.
New and Collected Hell: A Poem by Shane McCrae (Corsair/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
McCrae has been exploring the afterlife in his poetry for several years now, and here his reimagining of Dante’s Inferno is immersive in the best ways — captivating, terrifying and occasionally absurdly funny. His Virgilian guide is a sweary, shape-shifting robot-bird; this hell is home to faxes and HR departments. Yet the darkest corners of our collective fears and doubts also lurk in this unforgettable poem.
An Interesting Detail by Kimberly Campanello (Bloomsbury)
Campanello takes a quasi-archaeological approach to past and present in these grounded yet transportive poems. The Irish-American poet has a gift for drawing inventive, unexpected connections between objects and their meaning, be that historical or transitory, and the results will reward your time and re-reading.
The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha (Allen Lane)
Eight years after his debut, Kingdom of Gravity, won praise from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for charting the legacy of colonialism in Uganda, Makoha returns to a pivotal moment in Idi Amin’s rule: the 1976 hijacking of Air France flight 139, which also became a turning point in Makoha’s own young life. It’s the focus of an invigorating collection that summons Basquiat, Icarus and a cast of characters from literary and pop culture.
The Face in the Well by Rebecca Watts (Carcanet)
Watts’s third collection is a formally wide-ranging delight that packs an astonishing variety into its 60 or so pages. Among the most striking poems here are the first-person conjurings of childhood memories, in which the Suffolk-born poet adroitly reconstructs those snapshots that last a lifetime. This is a perfect volume to keep in your pocket on a day of travel.
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