Bloomsbury Poetry – The Bell Bookshop

Haunting the Black Air

Emma — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

'Joseph is both a faithful heir and an agnostic rebel' ALI ALIZADEH
'An exceptional talent’ BLAKE MORRISON

From the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning author of Sonnets for Albert comes a dextrous and versatile new collection spanning the emotional spectrum of unabashed joy and crippling grief

With musicality and verve, beloved poet and musician Anthony Joseph undertakes a bold new work, excavating the complex nature of feeling. Across London, New York, Trinidad and beyond, whether a funeral in New Cross or a house party in Mount Lambert, Joseph brings heart, soul and verbal ingenuity to the act of unifying life's beautiful fragments.

Maryville

Emma — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION

‘Taylor’s poetry is as dangerous as it is dexterous . . . A wildfire blazing free’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO
‘Kaleidoscopic in its breath, structure and humanity . . . Both selfless and intimate’ ANTHONY JOSEPH
—————————————————–

From the T. S. Eliot and Polari Prize-winning author of C+NTO & Othered Poems comes an innovative collection exploring the scars, hopes and potentialities of dyke counterculture and the queer underground.

With a vividly sketched cast of characters, award-winning poet Joelle Taylor uses the Maryville butch bar as a lens through which to consider the underground histories of queer London. The violence and pain of oppression and the beauty and intimacy of community are rendered in awe-inspiring high definition in a collection as filmic as it is familiar. A hybrid chronicle, magic trick, prayer and insurrection, Maryville conjures ghosts back to their bodies, a community to their feet.

—————————————————–
‘Sexy, fearless – and ravishingly beautiful’ NEIL BARTLETT
‘One of the most powerful voices of our time . . . Joelle Taylor is a genius’ CACONRAD

Under the Blue

Emma — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

‘Breath-taking . . . Evans brings forensic observation and brave grace to turbulent waters and the infinitesimal rituals of care’ NANCY CAMPBELL

‘Evans hears the world around her like no one else; she paces from beauty to agony and back without missing a step’ NOREEN MASUD

‘Balances a hypnotically dreamy and filmic vision with a precise and unsentimental lyric voice’ POLLY ATKIN
————————————————————————

From the multi-award-winning poet: a new collection of soaring lyricism and desire, exploring the act of care and the consequences of loving

Under the Blue is an arresting, deeply candid exploration of both the shimmering beauty of life and the realities of care.

Through a series of glittering fragmental prose poems and evocative postcards, Suzannah V. Evans has produced a kaleidoscopic meditation grounded by profound humanity and empathy – about intimacy and togetherness, sickness and pain, what can be said and what remains unsayable.

————————————————————————
‘Catches us in the complexity of pleasure and pain that is being bodies in this world’ PHOEBE POWER

‘Understated, true and wise … A poetic waterlog buoyed by the rhythms of love’ ISABEL GALLEYMORE

Precious & impossible

Emma — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Featuring exclusive new work, Precious and Impossible gathers together over three decades of poetry from the T S Eliot Prize-winning Anthony Joseph.

With an introduction by Lauri Scheyer

For over three decades, Anthony Joseph’s work has explored the transnational vibrations of the African diaspora. Precious and Impossible brings together thirty years of Joseph’s poetry and lyrics – cementing his status as one of our greatest living poets and polymaths

‘Joseph is both a faithful heir and an agnostic rebel; a Black poet haunted by Africa’s past as well as a bilingual post-modernist amused by the possibilities of the future’ Ali Alizadeh

Owed

Emma — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

From a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient, a ‘rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the US’ (New Yorker)Owed is a book with celebration at its centre. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care. Spanning the spectrum of genre and form – from elegy and ode to origin myth–these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair. What’s more, they ask that we turn to the songs and sites of the historically denigrated so that we might uncover a new way of being in the world together, one wherein we can truthfully reckon with the brutality of the past and thus imagine the possibilities of our shared, unpredictable present, anew.

Mothersong

Emma — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A lyrical excavation of trauma and healing in the midst of early motherhood – the debut work of an endlessly inventive poet whose work ‘fizzes with energy, physicality, and the levitating openness of song’ (Rebecca Tamás)‘An essential read, poignant, powerful and provocative. I love the feeling in Amy Acre’s poems’ Salena GoddenAmy Acre’s debut collection is an unforgettable, unflinching excavation of motherhood, what it means to be a female artist, and what it means to be a poet with a deeply integrated community. This is a timeless work the like of which we haven’t seen enough of in the past, primed to last long into the future.‘Amy Acre is one of the best poets of her generation. Pure cinema, raw heart, and unparalleled technique. Read this’ Joelle Taylor, winner of the 2021 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry’Mothers, daughters, lovers, all the thrilling complexity of love and grief that the body must bear; these are poems which set the page aglow and make my heart spin’ Liz Berry, winner of the 2018 Forward Prize for Poetry

A method, a path

Emma — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The poems at the centre of A Method, A Path explore the turbulent transmission of historical and mythic voices that ‘reach across’ time and place, and a fierce rejection of the nationalist ideologies that have sought to ‘island’ them. Here, translation is a lived and open-ended negotiation, invested in the potential for magic utterance and ritual action in spite of language’s violence: ‘words / tear their wing bones / and grow new heads / in the wound (‘On Eglond’). Each poem or sequence gathers around a different instance of dialogue or communication with others: with other voices and languages, with other authors and found texts, with other species. They also mark a record of Evans’ interdisciplinary collaboration with other artists and performers through his work both as writer and sound artist. The physical and textual landscapes of the book move from the flooded and wooded terrains of Somerset and East Anglia, to the burnt hills of Andalusía in the company of Federíco García Lorca, the poems always inhabiting a place between Evans’ own words and external voices – whether via translation, haunting, or invocation. In this ‘tirelessly inventive, substantial collection of vivid lyrical work’ (Denise Riley, Eric Gregory Awards), the truant strangeness of the more-than-human world is made present in its ability to warp and transform the poet’s voice, where ‘even the ground under your feet is a fluid, malleable surface’ (Kayo Chingonyi).

Customs

Emma — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book AwardLonglisted for the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book PrizeA New Yorker Essential Read of 2022A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022An NPR Best Book of 2022A Literary Hub Best Reviewed Poetry Collection of 2022_______________‘Witty and incisive? [Sharif] masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief’ New York Times_______________The devastating second collection by Solmaz Sharif, author of Look, a National Book Award finalistWith Customs, Solmaz Sharif offers a series of poetic refusals, weighing nuanced questions about what it means to belong to a place. In the face of hard borders these poems seek a reckoning with the structures, in society, in language itself, by which these limits act on us.Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal; to navigate a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that can become a relentless challenge; a mutating shibboleth. Through the poet’s adept balancing of tonal and formal elements, these poems interrogate the ‘customs’ of the nation-state, of the English language, of the paces these systems put us through. But this work is not enjoined to a hopeless quest. Instead, the propulsive force that informs each line, each white space, and punctuation mark, is a powerfully galvanizing and healing force.Customs reminds us of the generative possibilities of restlessness, of seeking in each poem to refresh what it is a poem can be and do.

Content warning

Emma — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘A triumph … A wholly original and creative mind’ NEW YORK TIMES‘A multi-genre phenomena, it’s a triumph of a creative mind’ GLAMOUR‘Frightens and astonishes … Combines Maya Angelou’s passion and Sylvia Plath’s devastating self-inquisition’ GUARDIAN‘Emezi is a dream of a writer’ BOLU BABALOLA________________________A fiercely contemporary collection which renegotiates the contract between poet and reader in the light of this moment in human history, from the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek OjiContent Warning: Everything concerns itself with the fugitive nature of being in the world especially, but not exclusively, within blackness. The poems reshape possibilities for poetry by paying close attention to the author’s rhythm of thought, making a series of durable anthems from the noise of the contemporary moment.In this bold debut poetry collection, Akwaeke Emezi – award-winning author of Freshwater, PET, The Death of Vivek Oji and Dear Senthuran – imagines a new depth of belonging. Crafted of both divine and earthly materials, these poems travel from home to homesickness, tracing desire to surrender and abuse to survival, while mapping out a chosen family that includes the son of god, mary auntie, and magdalene with the chestnut eyes. Written from a spiritfirst perspective and celebrating the essence of self that is impossible to drown, kill, or reduce, Content Warning: Everything distills the radiant power and epic grief of a mischievous and wanting young deity, embodied.