James Baldwin
An extraordinarily brave gay Black man writing about American racism in the mid-twentieth century. The novels and the essays. Radical honesty in every sentence.
Ross Gay
I’ve only recently discovered this man’s iridescent yet wrenching poems. Full of self-questioning and unrelenting courage, while also radiantly joyful at times.
Father’s Day by Matthew Zapruder
So hard to sum this book up in two sentences! I love his floating un-punctuated poems and the way they coax, with equal parts wit and pain, the weird and glimmering unconscious resonances of language up to the surface, creating a space for words to be free of mundanely utilitarian purposes.
Growing Pains by Isabelle Kenyon
Another superb collection by one of my favourite writers. Kenyon knows how to interrogate the violence inherent in dominant contemporary culture through her poems which are always masterfully poised between speech and song, between knowing and searching.
Chengyu Chinoiserie by Leung Rachel Ka Yin
I was floored by every poem in this exceptional debut collection: “what colour, when the heart dies? / and who / and where / and why does it sigh like the wind did / the night i decided to love you?”
Brendon Booth-Jones is the Editor-in-Chief of Writer’s Block Magazine in Amsterdam. Brendon’s work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, As It Ought To Be, The Blue Nib, Fly on the Wall, Ghost City Review, Odd Magazine, Peeking Cat, Scarlet Leaf Review, Zigzag and elsewhere. Brendon won the White Label Trois Competition for his debut chapbook, Vertigo to Go, which will be published by Hedgehog Poetry Press in October 2020.