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Rachel Long’s much-anticipated debut collection of poems, My Darling from the Lions, explores shame, love and healing through her intimate poetic voice.
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize / the Costa Poetry Award / the Forward Prize for Best First Collection / the Jhalak Prize
British poet Rachel Long’s poems are so razor-sharp and witty that they stand out from the first line. Long is also founder of the Octavia Collective for Womxn of Colour (a ‘community-minded’ collective where women of color can safely (learn to) write poetry, a response to the lack of inclusivity within literature and the academy).
She debuted two years ago with the impressive collection My darling from the lions. This collection was nominated for five different poetry awards and was named one of the 100 must-read books of 2021 by TIME.
There is a vibrancy to her narrative poems that is extraordinary to find in a text; with dizzying precision, Long describes humorous, sensual and surreal scenes.
Sometimes, as a reader, you recognize yourself in the candid, uncomfortable moments Long shares; sometimes, on the contrary, the scenes are alienating. However, Long has a talent for making that alienation come across naturally nonetheless.
The collection can be described as a coming-of-age story, in which the speaker survives a tumultuous childhood and adolescence only to find himself in the confusing maze called adulthood.
Rachel Long creates relatable, human work that is sure to leave an impression that is sure to leave an impression long after she has once again traded the Rotterdam stage of Poetry International for her native London.
Long reveals herself as a razor-sharp and original voice on the issues of sexual politics and cultural inheritance that polarize our current moment. But it’s her refreshing commitment to the power of the individual poem that will leave the reader turning each page in eager anticipation: here is an immediate, wide-awake poetry that entertains royally, without sacrificing a note of its urgency or remarkable skill.
OPEN
This morning she told me
I sleep with my mouth open
and my hands in my hair.
I say, What, Mum, like screaming?
She says, No, baby, like abandon.
Rachel Long is a poet and the founder of Octavia Poetry Collective for Women of Colour, which is housed at Southbank Centre in London. My Darling from the Lions, first published by Picador in 2020, is her debut collection. She was born in London, and resides there today.
My Darling from the Lions:
Poems
by Rachel Long (Author)
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publication date: September 21, 2021
Language: English
Print length: 88 pages
ISBN-10: 1951142713
ISBN-13: 978-1951142711
Paperback
$14.98
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Haiku
After killing
a spider, how lonely I feel
in the cold of night!
Masaoka Shiki
(1867-1902)
Haiku
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From 12 to 15 June 2025, be inspired by Poet Laureates from all over the world! Poetry International presents the very first Poetry Summit, curated in collaboration with Poet of the Netherlands Babs Gons.
This anniversary edition of the festival brings together a line-up of only the most acclaimed voices, awarded with the highest (inter)national distinctions.
As representatives of their country, they will take part in lectures, discussions, workshops, interviews, debates and performances. So be there during this special anniversary edition, where the most influential voices will unite for once to celebrate the 55th anniversary of Poetry International Festival.
During the festival, the Declaration of future poetry generations will also be written and presented: a document on the importance of poetry, intended to secure its future for next generations.
Poets: Warsan Shire (United Kingdom) / Jean D’Amérique (Haiti) / Diana Anphimiadi (Georgia) / Simon Armitage (United Kingdom) / Kwame Dawes (Jamaica) / Maricela Guerrero (Mexico) / Alysia Nicole Harris (USA) / Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (Liberia) / Tom Lanoye (Belgium) / Luljeta Lleshanaku (Albania) / Momtaza Mehri (United Kingdom) / Nadia Mifsud (Malta) / Ramsey Nasr (Netherlands) / Derek Otte (Netherlands) / Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (Netherlands) / Esther Phillips (Barbados) / Astrid Roemer (Netherlands) / Ian Sanborn (USA) / Chris Tse (New Zealand) / Lyuba Yakimchuk (Ukraine)
More information on:
♦ Website 55th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam
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In een prachtig parlando, dat schatplichtig is aan de oude Perzische dichters, dicht Sholeh Rezazadeh in Neem ruim zei de zee over de kracht van de natuur en de onmogelijkheid om de ander te kennen.
In haar eerste dichtbundel komen we vertrouwde elementen tegen die ze ook in haar twee lovend ontvangen romans veelvuldig verwerkte: rivieren en zeeën, bomen en bergen, vissen, vogels en vlinders.
Net als in haar romans is de natuur geen achtergrond maar een echt personage, dat ziet en voelt, dat liefheeft en vergeet. De mens zelf is een feilbaar wezen dat wanhopig zoekt naar liefde en verbinding maar zich ook verbaast over het gebrek aan aandacht voor de ander.
Sholeh Rezazadeh (1989) verhuisde in 2015 naar Nederland en begon direct met het leren van de Nederlandse taal. Haar debuutbundel Neem ruim zei de zee kwam in 2024 uit en markeerde niet alleen haar poëtische entree in Nederland maar ook het begin van haar bredere missie: meer poëzie in Nederland. Rezazadeh weet dat poëzie verbindende kracht heeft, iets wat zij tijdens haar leven in Iran heeft ervaren. Poëzie is daar in de spreektaal vervlochten zoals spreekwoorden in het Nederlands.
in welke taal zal ik je woorden geven
zodat we elkaar opnieuw kunnen vinden
in welke blik, welke stilte
gaan we elkaar weer verstaan?
in welke regel moet ik het stotteren van de zon uitleggen
laag na laag, wolk na wolk
als we van elkaar slechts schaduwen herkennen
in welke taal kan ik je omarmen
zodat je blijft
( . . . )
Uit: boekenweekgedicht (cpnb 2025)
Titel: Neem ruim zei de zee.
Gedichten
Auteur: Sholeh Rezazadeh
Taal: Nederlands
ISBN 9789026371554
Genre: Poëzie
Bindwijze: Gebonden
Verschenen: 17-03-2025
72 pagina’s
5e Druk
Uitgever Ambo|Anthos
20,99 euro
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Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river.
The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker.
Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.
Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul.
Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the novels On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and The Emperor of Gladness. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he used to work as a fast-food server, which inspired The Emperor of Gladness. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts, and New York City.
The Emperor of Gladness
A Novel
By Ocean Vuong
Category: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Press
May 13, 2025
Language: English
416 pages
ISBN-10:059383187X
ISBN-13:978-0593831878
Hardcover
$30.00
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Fierce, frank, witty poetry about cancer diagnosis, treatment, remission, and end-of-life
Written in the last three years of her life, Andrea Werblin Reid‘s To See Yourself As You Vanish is a collection of unsparingly brave and insightful poems about her experience with ovarian cancer. Frank, fierce, and witty, her work does not hide behind cliches, platitudes, or tropes, but addresses the hopes, frustrations, fears, and longings that would be easy to leave unspoken.
She offers friendship and understanding to those who share her experiences and powerful insights for caregivers and those who work in oncology, hospice, research, and psychology. Of these poems, Reid herself said: “I have struggled with the implications of war metaphors and the perspectives they perpetuate since receiving my own cancer diagnosis.
People living with cancer and other chronic illnesses are not taking up arms, they are living as long and as humanely as possible: not to win or lose, simply to live.” The scenes in these poems are rich and spare, magical and sane, awful and special: “one bird comes to the end of his branch looking like a clever moustache. /one bird comes to the end of his song like an ordinary bird.”
ANDREA WERBLIN REID (1965–2022) is the author of Lullaby for One Fist (Wesleyan, 2001) and Sunday with the Sound Turned Off (Lost Horse, 2014). Her poem “Language is the Virus” was named a finalist for the prestigious Perkoff Prize from the Missouri Review and her work has been published in the LA Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Brooklyn Rail, Pank, Smartish Pace, and more.
THE COLOR OF WAITING
is hypnotic pink, under whose spell
you’ve been living for years
like a small fossilized creature.
or magenta, a bruise
that evolves,
(. . .)
then sharp as the serrated smiles
doctors have been honing for years.
waiting masquerades as the inflatable idea
of hope, waterproofed for safety, maybe,
devoid of vision, punctured that easily
To See Yourself as You Vanish
poetry by
Andrea Werblin Reid
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sales Date: 09-09-2025 !
88 Pages
Hardcover
ISBN 9780819502070
$26.95
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The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual.
These unforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost always compromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” These poems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I” that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our lives with.
In this book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and at others self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of the difficulties and joys of living in relation.
Keetje Kuipers’ newest collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and POETRY, and have been honored by publication in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Kuipers lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is editor of Poetry Northwest.
Lonely Women Make Good Lovers
Poems
By Keetje Kuipers
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
April 8, 2025
Language: English
Paperback : 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1960145452
ISBN-13: 978-1960145451
Regular price €17,95
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Women Poet’s Prize and Nan Shepherd Prize winner: Nina Mingya Powles publishes a much-anticipated second collection in July 2025
– In the Hollow of the Wave examines Orientalism, art and artmaking in a time of ecological crisis in distinctive poems that are elemental and tactile, shaped by memory and landscapes of the body.
Powles’ debut poetry collection, Magnolia, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Ondaatje Prize.
Nina Mingya Powles (born 1993) is a New Zealand poet and essayist. Born in Wellington, Powles has spent time living in Shanghai and London.
Her poetry and essay collections are inspired by nature and her Chinese – Malaysian heritage, and she has received a number of notable awards including the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize in 2018.
In the Hollow of the Wave (Poems)
by Nina Mingya Powles
Nine Arches Press
ISBN: 9781916760226
Publication date: 24th July 2025
Format: Paperback
72 pp
ISBN: 9781916760226
Price: £11.99
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Lie-a-bed
My darling lies down
in her soft white bed,
And she laughs at me.
Her laughter has flushed
her pale cheeks with red.
Her eyes dance with glee.
My darling lies close
in her warm white bed,
And she will not rise.
I will shower kisses
down on her sleepyhead
Till she close her eyes.
Gioja’s no happier fresh
from the South.
But my kisses free
Will straiten the curves of
this teasing mouth,
If it laughs at me.
Lesbia Harford
(1891-1927)
Lie-a-bed
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Under a Future Sky is a gathering of generations, a performance with ghosts anchored in Brynn Saito’s journey with her father to the desert prison where, over 80 years ago, her grandparents met and made a life.
Born of a personal ache, an unquenchable desire to animate the shadow archive, Saito’s journey unfolds in lyric correspondences and epistolary poems that sing with rage, confusion, and, ultimately, love. In these works, descendants of wartime incarceration exchange dreams, mothers become water goddesses, and a modern daughter haunts future ruins. To enter this book is to enter the slipstream of nonlinear time, where mystical inclinations, yellow cedars, and sisterhood make a balm for trauma’s scars. Altogether, the work enacts a dialogue between the past and the present; the radical ancestor and the future child; and the desert prison and the family garden, where Saito’s father diligently gathers stones.
Brynn Saito is the author of Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She has received grant support from Densho, Hedgebrook, and the Santa Fe Arts Institute. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times and American Review among other journals and anthologies. She was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Brynn lives in Fresno, CA, where she is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Fresno and co-director of Yonsei Memory Project.
Brynn teaches in the MFA program at California State University, Fresno. She’s co-editing with Brandon Shimoda an anthology of poetry written by descendants of the Japanese American / Nikkei incarceration, forthcoming in 2025 from Haymarket Books.
Under a Future Sky
by Brynn Saito
112 pages
August 15, 2023
ISBN-13 978-1636281070
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Hardcover
€20,99
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Bluebird
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
Lesbia Harford
(1891-1927)
Bluebird
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Il y a
Il y a des petits ponts épatants
Il y a mon cœur qui bat pour toi
Il y a une femme triste sur la route
Il y a un beau petit cottage dans un jardin
Il y a six soldats qui s’amusent comme des fous
Il y a mes yeux qui cherchent ton image
Il y a un petit bois charmant sur la colline
Et un vieux territorial pisse quand nous passons
Il y a un poète qui rêve au ptit Lou
Il y a un ptit Lou exquis dans ce grand Paris
Il y a une batterie dans une forêt
Il y a un berger qui paît ses moutons
Il y a ma vie qui t’appartient
Il y a mon porte-plume réservoir qui court, qui court
Il y a un rideau de peupliers délicat, délicat
Il y a toute ma vie passée qui est bien passée
Il y a des rues étroites à Menton où nous nous sommes aimés
Il y a une petite fille de Sospel qui fouette ses camarades
Il y a mon fouet de conducteur dans mon sac à avoine
Il y a des wagons belges sur la voie
Il y a mon amour
Il y a toute la vie
Je t’adore
Entre Bar-sur Aube et Troyes,
le 5 avril 1915
Guillaume Apollinaire
(1880 – 1918)
Il y a
Poèmes à Lou
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