Slip-ups, skirmishes and the sidelong glance characterise Claudine Toutoungi's "Two Tongues", a surreal and startling second collection that takes on the dislocations and double takes of modern life and weaves from them poems of wit, grit and delicio...

Answering a call to go feral, these poems are part invocation and part prayer, re-imagining the form of the confessional poem by exploring the nature of confession from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. In This Red Metropolis What Remains, Le...

From one of the editors of Carcanet's anthology of "Ethiopian Amharic Poetry" ("Songs We Learn from Trees", 2020), comes a collections about growing up in a hungry country and wondering how to be happy.

There are two menus in a Beijing restaurant, Rachel DeWoskin writes in the title poem, "the first of excess / second, scarcity". DeWoskin invites us into moments shaped by dualities, into spaces bordered by the language of her family (English) and th...

The poems of "Take Nothing" are embedded in connections to family and landscape, to memory and possibility. They especially explore and distill those indelible, sometimes small, moments that cumulatively shape the arc of a life. These can be as surpr...

"The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons" imagines a human mission to Mars, a consequence of Earth's devastation from climate change and natural disaster. As humans begin to colonize the planet, history inevitably repeats itself. Dystopian and ecopoetic,...

"In 1968-1969 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides", wrote Helene Cixous, esteemed French feminist, playwright, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. Instead of suicide, she began to dream...

"To love is to act" – "Aimer, c'est agir".  These words, which Victor Hugo wrote three days before he died, epitomize his life's philosophy. His love of freedom, democracy, and all people – especially the poor and wretched – drove him not only to wri...

What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? Such questions – bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life – animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has often been obscured. Julia Reinhard...

Douglas Crase is best known for a single book of poems, "The Revisionist" (1981). In the year of its publication John Ashbery urged Carcanet to consider it for British publication and now, thirty-eightyears later, the book appears together with the c...