Poetry

For poetry lovers, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) needs no introduction. His poetry remains both emblematic and enigmatic, and his name is indelibly associated with the ghazal. However, apart from some well-known verses, the larger public is unacquainted with his body of work. In The Essential Ghalib, veteran scholar, author translator Anisur Rahman presents an exemplary selection of Mirza Ghalib's Urdu couplets, translated in English along with critical commentaries. Using colloquial and contemporary language, the translations provide an accessible and pleasurable route to understanding Ghalib's poetry, while the commentary explores the multiple meanings of the Urdu original.

Arundhathi Subramaniam's poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women - women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down.Leaping from the past into a global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain one's spine through life's giddiest rollercoaster rides. Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to 'gatecrash into the present', how to 'go skinny-dipping in the self'. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom.

In Pretenders, her third book of poetry, Kate Potts asks: what is it like, as a daily, lived experience, to feel like a fraud or a fake? And what can 'the imposter phenomenon' - a sense that our true abilities and achievements, and other core aspects of our identities, are unreal, undeserved or mistakenly bestowed - tell us about who we are and how we relate to one another? Through lively and vivid poetic monologues drawn from original interview material, and through original poetry, Pretenders begins to consider individual feelings and experiences of fraudulence, pretence and persona in a wider social and historical context. The varied, hesitant, questing voices build to create a bold and innovative chorus. Pretenders shines a light on our value systems and hierarchies, unsettling notions of 'realness', self-assurance, and the self.

THE POEMSYou fell asleep on the tiles, a translucent peacock loomed, your sex opened and let out a very blue, very high flame.You wore a split veil, that morning. Silent, nailed to her chair, the seated woman writes. She cracks. The poems fidget, slip their fingers: they seek to enter. Perched on her shoulder, the poems whisper in her ear. She captures their messages: "I love the sacred contortions you offer me." The poems protest: "You're squeezing us too hard: careful, pet."More than descriptors, the words behave as commands or moves in a game-and the voice of the seated woman rises to play.

Myth, the much-anticipated debut collection from the multi-talented Terese Mason Pierre, weaves between worlds ('real' and 'imaginary') unearthing the unsettling: our jaded and joyful relationships to land, ancestry, trauma, self, and future. In three movements and two interludes, the poems in Myth move symphonically from tropical islands to barren cities, from lucid dreams to the mysteries of reality, from the sea to the cosmos. A dynamic mix of speculative poetry and ecstatic lyricism, the otherworldly and the sublime, Pierre's poems never stray too long or too far from the spell of unspoiled nature: "The palm trees nod / at the ocean / the ocean does / what it always does / trusts the moon completely."Friends 'with benefits' tour the wonders of Grenada's landscapes; extraterrestrials visit the Caribbean and the locals don't seem phased; red birds "saunter airily like tourists," La Diablesse lures helpless suitors to their dooms. This collection asks: How can myths manifest themselves in our daily lives? What do we actually mean when we say we love ourselves and others? And how do we pursue/create futures that honour our truths, histories and legacies?

Borrowing its title from a finance term-"the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists"-Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens.  What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor's arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that "climate change denial" first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth's biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime. Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast.