Say Something Back – Denise Riley
Riley is luminous, a poet’s poet – surgically precise and immersed in the feels
The Tradition – Jericho Brown
Such an extraordinary and deft excavation of blackness – blackness as ‘Legba’, blackness as contradiction, blackness as narrative.
Thomas and Beulah – Rita Dove
A classic – the ease of these lines: ‘We could take a tune/ and chew it up, fling/ it to the moon/ for the crows to eat’.
Brutal Imagination -Cornelius Eady
Startling, pared back and as timely as ever.
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem – Ed J N Tod
Wonderful, wide-ranging compendium.
Amanda Holiday’s chapbook ‘The Art Poems’ was published April 2018 as part of New Generation African Poets (Tano). She completed the Poetry MA at UEA in 2019 and has published her poems in journals internationally. This year she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and founded the UK’s first crowdfunded poetry press Black Sunflowers. She starts a Techne AHRC funded PhD in Poetry, Race and Art in October.