Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi (Bloomsbury, £12.99)
It may seem a frightening idea that everything in one’s life requires a content warning, but fear isn’t the currency in Emezi’s mighty poetry debut. The book begins with What If My Mother Met Mary, a whimsical yet poignant conversation over a game of Scrabble. Emezi is an expert in transtemporal, transcultural exchanges. In What If Jesus Was My Big Brother, we are told “he turns / my water into Ribena”. Outrageously spiritual yet relentlessly self-exposed, the poems recycle biblical materials to articulate deep-seated familial wounds with scarcely an ounce of self‑pity. Alternative realities generate raw self-portraits, giving voice to harrowing experiences of domestic and sexual violence. Emezi has combined Maya Angelou’s passion and Sylvia Plath’s devastating self-inquisition to create an edgy music that frightens and astonishes.
The Hopeful Hat by Carole Satyamurti (Bloodaxe, £10.99)
Posthumous poetry collections occupy an uncanny territory: the newly dead speaking back. Written after the removal of her voice box and part of her tongue due to laryngeal cancer, The Hopeful Hat is a masterclass in premonition and departure. Satyamurti has written some of the most discomforting meditations on the human voice. Like blind Tiresias seeing the future, she touches the peculiarity of aftermaths: in Inheritance, what would happen to “the Zanzibar chest, / the cupboard with the painted birds” “after I’m dead”. She’ll be remembered for big-hearted, socially responsible poems that are intent on change but reconciled to limitation. This is a moving book that feeds our yearning for hope, while also questioning the meaning of hopefulness.
Toys/Tricks/Traps by Christopher Reid (Faber, £14.99)
Turning Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality on its head, Reid’s version features “my father’s morning cough” and “his car on the driveway / refusing to start”. Reid is a fine craftsman of poetic understatements: his poems often catch us off guard by excavating the mundane and refurnishing the obvious. In Toys/Tricks/Traps, he invites us to a private cinema showing his childhood memories. Echoing Lewis Carroll’s perverse inventiveness and Edward Lear’s tongue-twisting music, Reid combines humour and rhyme to help us see sense in nonsense. Jokes aside, the book contains many poignantly candid poems that are self-mocking about “the elusive self, / the imp of oddness”. At 73, he remains invigoratingly impish.
The Fourth Sister by Laura Scott (Carcanet, £11.99)
Anton Chekhov’s interrogative power of storytelling flows through Scott’s dazzling second collection, which questions our obsession with conclusiveness. These eclectic poems range from Jules et Jim to Goya’s Black Paintings, “peeled and pulled from the walls after he died”. Strongly rooted in reality, the poems hinge on the hidden meaning of word play, and the thrill of witnessing a line unfolding beyond its reach. We’re engrossed not because something is being understood, but because it is deeply felt. Scott is also game to explore the darker corners of life, with poems describing dying parents as “the punchline of a joke you don’t quite get”. Her meticulously constructed poems exhibit a unique comic timing that gives them an elusive spontaneity.
