Books in the Salt Modern Poets series

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.

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.

In Michael Murphy's annotated edition of Kenneth Allott's Collected Poems all Allott's previously published work is combined with eighteen new poems, some of which have only recently come to light. The whole collection now represents the most complete picture of Allott, a man widely regarded as one of most exciting poets of the Thirties.

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.

In Galatea, her first collection, Challenger casts a poet's sensitive eye across the hours of a tumultuous century to create startling poems whose voice - resolute, compassionate, original - both celebrates and mourns the tensions of human nature.

Twisted, knotted, struck by events and emotions at our historical moment, these Drafts register and produce torques - exaltation and tension, torsion and force, in their symphonic and bantering surges. This book continues the long poem project that Ron Silliman calls "one of the major poetic achievements of our time."

In this powerful debut collection, Shamshad Khan struts with attitude from the poetic to the polemic; side stepping from the satirical towards the spiritual. She has a keen awareness of rhythm and the spoken word. With wickedly simple language she explores themes of power, loss, identity and love.

This is cosmopolitan one-man theater at its best. Words do not swallow the reader: they flow to a varied musical rhythm and make sense. Nikolayev's collection models a persuasive modern hero-an uprooted intellectual at home in diverse cultures who stares at the world through a unique pair of eyes.

Don Share's latest collection, Squandermania, is a book of poems that are slightly death-haunted and studded with references to marriage and fatherhood, geology and biology. It also revives a luminous, if complex, domesticity - not something most men take as their subject.

This collection of poems depicts an individual's perceptions and passions in times of war, and bears witness to the conflicts in the Middle East, 'the clash' between the West and Islam, and the ways in which a person's ideals, passions and language are affected by violent political and religious conflicts.

Tobias Hill's first full-length collection, Year of the Dog, won an Eric Gregory award in 1995. Dominated by images and narratives from Hill's stay in Japan, as well as other tavel poems, the book contains Hill's celebrated sequence 'A Year in Japan', with its sweeping filmic narratives of the poets encounters in a distant and strange world.

Filled with precise observation of the interior and exterior world, as well as lashings of wit, Smith's wide-ranging, often poignant lyrics take us on tour through history, ideas, people and places. He is the perfect travel companion in a sortie of the century and its cultural outputs.

Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre Prize In a ruined garden children play cowboys and Indians while their fathers fight the Cold War. The children grow up and discover the enemy are also people. The Empire shrinks to an opera audience. The Royal Family is reduced to waxworks.

From the depths of longing to the London Bombings Recital offers a poet's journey looking at our world over the space of a year. Taking the lunar cycle as its central theme, Siddique's book surveys our doubts, desires and dislocations and unites us in a celebration of love.

The Solex Brothers explores the fate of the individual - albeit a rather feeble individual - and of personal responsibility in a culture of absurd, inexorable forces. Farce navigating towards moral absolution in narratives at once Fauvist and Baroque, expunging the twee with a reformist's remorseless vigour.

David Hamilton revitalises American pastoral writing with an uncanny ability to conjure memories of childhood and moments of spiritual and physical encounter. His gift lies in combining these themes of discovery with a lyrical intelligence never far from natural speech, all delivered with sensitivity for people, place and natural beauty.

This is an important literary debut: the sound of a new, unique, captivating voice. The journey Capildeo describes with such ferocity and such an ebullient, unexpected sense of fun is also emotional, and she entices the reader into travelling with her. Undiscovered countries are here spread out before us, ready for exploration.

A unique collection of eleven poems, each quite different from the next, Elegies & Vacations explores the relationships of the living and the dead. Lazer's poems have an unusual emotional intimacy as he tests the ability of an experimental poetry to address emotionally charged subjects.

This book contains a long, new sequence of poems and prose by Frances Presley, as well as a selection of her work since 1996. It provides an important opportunity to see her recent work as a whole, and to appreciate how different sequences interrelate and develop, both in form and theme.

This book draws together a major selection of poems from 1984-2004. Including works on London, sport, boats, cartoons, food, the classics, the mystical, history, crime, and the North. A taut, rhythmic verse, with respect for word-sound and a cheering disregard for consensus on history, language and 'poetry'.

Imagination Verses is a moving and accomplished book of real lyric poetry. Hailed as a modern masterpice it is made available here in a new expanded UK edition. Rarely does a poet bring such talent and experience together in a single volume, it is a book of wonderous possiblities, warm, engaging and truly magical.

These are poems which welcome distraction and seem to have a lasting interest in registering and reproducing a sense of the uncanny. The strategies adopted veer between lyric mannerism and reconstructed second-hand words and, taken together, chart a form of investigative political thinking through the last three decades of the twentieth century.

In this selection of shorter lyric poems, celebrated Language poet Bruce Andrews offers his charismatic blend of satire, wit and jouissance, creating a dizzying picture of modern America. In these poems Andrews explores a more intimate and domestic register, further reminding us of the astonishing range of this contemporary master.