Books by Denise Riley

A brilliant outing from one of the finest poets currently working in the English language. This is at once a sharply political and deeply personal book which explores just that intersection.'Wide-ranging, sometimes anguished, her poems are fascinating and often beautiful, and certainly more than usually thought-provoking' Guardian

A selection of the best poems across the career of one of our most critically acclaimed British poets, Denise Riley.

A collection of essays on the everyday workings of language and how language shapes our social and political existence.

Say Something Back will allow readers to see just why the name of Denise Riley has been held in such high regard by her fellow poets for so long. The book reproduces A Part Song, a profoundly moving document of grieving and loss, and one of the most widely admired long poems of recent years. Elsewhere these poems become a space for contemplation of the natural world and of physical law, and for the deep consideration of what it is to invoke those who are absent. But finally, they extend our sense of what the act of human speech can mean - and especially what is drawn forth from us when we address our dead. Lyric, intimate, acidly witty, unflinchingly brave, Say Something Back is a deeply moving book by one of our finest poets, and one destined to introduce Riley's name to a wide new readership.

In this extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary social politics, the author ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself? She studies why the requirement to be a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own subject.

Writing about changes in the notion of womanhood, Denise Riley examines, in the manner of Foucault, shifting historical constructions of the category of "women" in relation to other categories central to concepts of personhood: the soul, the mind, the body, nature, the social.

This anniversary reader brings together a fascinating group of thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic with an introductory overview from the editors which considers the development of theory and scholarship over the past two decades.