This summer, we’re bringing you poets from around the world, each experimenting with style and form to create tenderly written and beautifully personal poems. From Amber Dawn laying bare the complexities of chronic pain and PTSD, to Kyo Lee exploring the Asian American diaspora, queerness and girlhood, these writers all present their lived experiences in unique, thoughtful ways. So, take a breath and delve into some truly magnificent debuts, heartfelt collections and important anthologies.

End of Empire by Marissa Davis
Penguin Books – USA | 9780143138471 | PB | £17.99 | Out Now

From a prize-winning poet whose work “points to an unfathomably bright future for the canon” (Danez Smith), a stunningly lush collection about desire, mythology, and our fraught and ecstatic relationship with the natural world.

A collection as remarkable for the force of its feeling as for the range of its vision, End of Empire explores personhood, and especially Black womanhood, within an ecological framework. Inspired by the language and landscape of the poet’s rural Kentucky hometown and the ways that inherited religious and political narratives shape our relationships with our surroundings and ourselves, these poems reckon with the ways the speaker, their body, and their natural and ideological surroundings continuously remake each other.

Harbour Doubts by Bebe Ashley
Banshee Press | 9781917161008 | PB | £10.99 | Out Now

Bebe Ashley’s prizewinning second collection charts the poet’s efforts to qualify as a British Sign Language interpreter. Intershot with enquiries into the nature of language as it is spoken and signed, and the process of leaving and finding home, Harbour Doubts is a collection that tangles with the burning desire to communicate in the isolation of a late capitalist, post-pandemic world. It’s also a love letter to the delights of linguistics and language, a three-dimensional exploration of words and the body. Bringing together meditations on language as mediated through sound, sign, vision, and film, this exciting sophomore collection cements Bebe Ashley’s reputation as a fearless experimenter.

Unsilenced: Poems for Palestine edited by John Portelli
Daraja Press | 9781998309542 | PB | £23.99 | Out Now

A collection of poems that convey profound emotions and serious reflections on the ongoing situation in Gaza and Palestine since the Nakba. The anthology seeks to express the moral outrage felt by poets from around the world, highlighting the perceived double standards of the West regarding international law and the suffering of the Palestinian people. The poems examine the daily realities of life and philosophical perspectives on the human condition, using nature as a motif to articulate emotions and explore themes of homeland, childhood, exile, genocide, and war.

All proceeds from the sale of the collection will be donated to Gaza, demonstrating the poets’ commitment to fostering positive change through their art. Contributors include diverse voices from various countries, each recognising the urgency and necessity of addressing the inhumane actions perpetrated against Palestine.

Forgotten Necessities by Jared Singer
Button Poetry | 9781638341222 | PB | £15.99 | Out Now

In his anticipated second collection, Forgotten Necessities, Jared Singer wears love and loss on his skin. Through spell-bindingly immersive storytelling, Singer digs to the roots of our deepest woes and cradles our joys with utmost tenderness. Intimacy and vulnerability ache across the time and space of these poems. Forgotten Necessities holds its sadness sacredly and builds shrines to the hope that follows. Persistent reminders of the small kindnesses that make a life meaningful to the living and the dead. A brilliant follow-up to his debut, Singer’s Forgotten Necessities is itself a necessity, a haunting that heals.

Buzzkill Clamshell by Amber Dawn
Arsenal Pulp Press | 9781551529790 | PB | £16.99 | Out Now

As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire. With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby – gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.

i cut my tongue on a broken country by Kyo Lee
Arsenal Pulp Press | 9781551529776 | PB | £16.99 | Out Now

Lotus flowers, youthful hunger, and other temporary beauties intertwine to tell this coming-of-age story, a set of pulsating poems that move toward a distant memory or a flaming future. Kyo Lee’s intimate debut poetry collection is simultaneously a vulnerable confession and a micro study of macro topics including lineage, family, war, and hope. i cut my tongue on a broken country explores the Asian American diaspora, queerness, girlhood, and the relationships between and within them, pushing and pulling on the boundaries of identity and language like a story trying to tell itself. i cut my tongue on a broken country documents a search for love. It’s a eulogy for the things we gave up to get here. It’s an ode to tenderness. It blossoms and bleeds in your hands.

WASH by Ebony Stewart
Button Poetry | 9781638341208 | PB | £15.99 | Out Now

WASH brutally dissects black womxnhood for all its blood, beauty, sacrifice and strength. Ebony Stewart’s praise and pleas for the lives of black womxn create a devotional space for healing. Stewart’s third collection is uncompromising and emotionally raw. Through trauma and recovery, black girlhood comes of age in WASH, journeying through moments of self-discovery, mental illness, love and heartbreak. Stewart reckons traditional definitions of womxnhood, exploring its complications, its communities, and its queerness. With a distinct, lyrical poetic voice, WASH tells a story of queer, black womxnhood that perseveres. A collection that will bring you to tears and brighten your day, Ebony Stewart’s WASH cannot be missed!

Wild/Hurt by Meg Ford
Button Poetry | 9781638341215 | PB | £15.99 | Out Now

The reader can follow multiple paths that mirror the choices, experiences, and struggles one makes when reclaiming themselves in the face of sexual abuse. While being intensely personal, Wild/Hurt moves resonantly through memory and healing in a way that can speak to many survivors. Through its hardships and suffering, this collection comes to realise and love the intimate parts of itself. Ford’s work encompasses a survivor’s entire personhood-growing from their trauma, discovering and celebrating queerness, and living and loving with disability. Wild/Hurt is a rich, heartfelt collection that makes the reading an experience, telling a new, remarkable story with each reread.