Books in the Salt Modern Poets series

Tackling the loss of the poet's mother - as well as themes of motherhood, birth, death and marriage - this poignant collection explores how we grieve and remember those we love.

Sing Me Down From the Dark explores the highs and lows of a ten-year sojourn in Japan, two international marriages, a homecoming, and the struggles of cross-cultural relationships. It is full of light and dark, as if the writer herself has been 'caught off guard' in the making of these poems.

The Meanwhile Sites is a book about development sites and their relationships with people, and the oppositions of marginality against mainstream, renewability against finitude, utility against intangible value, and the changing forms of physical, cultural and psychological landscapes in a post-industrial age.

Formally-innovative, comic, surreal and deeply poignant - Evans's poetry is a restless delight as he tackles almost anything: lost invoices, hearing aids, fruit flies, migration, bin lorries, road signs and love's strains and pleasures.

Semmens' new collection is a loosely structured sequence of surreal fantasies in which famous figures from (mostly) the past - sometimes singly, sometimes in unlikely pairings - make incongruous, anachronistic appearances in modern settings and situations.

Since 1986, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been writing a long poem in canto-like sections, grouped in nineteen units. The individual poems fold over each other, using repeated elements to construct a sense of memory and traces or reminders of prior statements. Their themes involve history, gender, mourning and hope, all in "socio-twisty" language.

A tenth anniversary edition of Chris Emery's black comedy debut, Dr. Mephisto, made simultaneously available in print and electronic form. Flamboyant, funny, poignant and excessive, Emery's modernist work is a picaresque, historical road show of hell from the brink of the 21st Century.

`Love Me Do' offers a fresh and distinctive look at how we live our lives. Lydia Macpherson's poems are closely observed, tender, witty and often intensely personal, with subjects ranging from knitting to the far reaches of space, via a Voodoo Barbie and a skeleton under the bed.

Emery's new book presents a dazzling array of voices: art dealers, TV stars, killers, cowboys, poets, coat check boys, checkout girls, composers, priests, gods, angels, winners, losers, lovers, the newly born and the dearly departed.

Heat Wave seeks to unsettle and wrong-foot; it refuses to adopt a sententious or holier than thou attitudes regarding the many crises which confront us. The poems subvert as well as entertain.

Heartbreaking detail permeates Hardisty's deftly musical debut. These are love poems, conjuring relationships just beginning, gone astray, turned wrong, or fading from view.

Peterkin explores the expectations and limits of being human with lashings of wit and sometimes a disquieting note of threat. Mad cap, extravagant, urban and questioning, this is a collection no one will forget.

The Book of Revelation serves as a lonely planet guide to this outrageous place in time. Rob A. Mackenzie's apocalyptic nightmare vision encompasses the rags of Empire, political turpitude and blindingly oppressive headlines in a grimly comic phantasmagoria of twenty-first century turmoil.

A poem sequence that interweaves scenes and stories in a soundtrack that sweeps through modern Los Angeles. A cop and a hooker become a lover and a beloved, who, line by line, scene by scene, reveal their affair in a bitter script that tours the city streets, taking in actresses and immigrants, beauty school students, dreamers and discontents.

Mark Burnhope's poems peer out over disability, faith and prejudice. They visit town and sea, husband and wife, monuments to grief built of snow, steel, stone. They take us to a talking tree and an outcast crew including Pinocchio, Queequeg and Quasimodo. But at their heart, there is great warmth.

Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. These poems are clear, direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery, but head right for the heart of shame, laying bare the terrors of parenting, loss, regret, and falling in love with the wrong people.

Event, the first book by Australian poet Judith Bishop, is the work of a border-crosser. Emotionally intense, formally inventive and musical, with influences ranging from Ted Hughes and Elizabeth Bishop to Yves Bonnefoy.

Lake Shore Drive is John Wilkinson's most public, openly political and expansive book - wide-ranging and variously vernacular in both scope and form - en route between New York City, East London and the Welsh, Cornish and Indiana shorelines.

In this collection, Peter Daniels looks at his life as an older gay man, his London neighbourhood, his furniture, other people's gardens and London's creatures.

Cracked Skull Cinema offers poems on culture and society, colonialism and its legacies, media and power. Set between these are homages and reflections on middle age, on life's loves and losses.

Amit Chaudhuri's new collection of poems makes a fresh, spiritual accommodation with the world. The poems often take their themes from sweets named and eaten, meals remembered, and matches these with meditations on culture, people, time and identity that slowly unfold as much in the mouth as in the mind.

Zoo is Tobias Hill's third collection of poems. It shows the growing maturity of a voice already distinctive three years ago, when his first collection was noted for its 'grand irony and playful humour, with episodes of tenderness and even charm'.

The Tidal Wife is concerned with islands: both as physical landforms and as emotional states; the need to retreat and be cut off as much as the need to reconnect and come to trust the pulse of one's internal tide.

Radio Nostalgia uses a range of personas and historical locations to examine our sense of community and what our lives can mean.

Fourth collection from award-winning poet Luke Kennard departs from previous outings in its scale and range while retaining his trademark wit and humour.

Schedule of Unrest selects from John Wilkinson's collections of poetry published from 1974 to 2008. A growing readership is seeking ways into an impassioned and beautiful body of writing. The unfamiliarity of its surfaces and soundscapes have too long delayed its appreciation.

The Mystic and The Pig Thief is, in part, an elegy. It is also a book about the pain of being imperfectly assimilated, a book about being torn between the culture you come from and the society you're obliged to live in; a book about being pulled both ways while belonging to neither camp.

The Ophelia Letters explores the interaction between self and place, and the way the normal can become strange and freighted with magic.

'Selby's ringing titles evoke not just a subject but a sensibility, and her versatile forms and deftly run-on lines very persuasively re-enact the thrill of sense experience and the shape of thought.' Chandrahas Choudhury