{"title":"Forward Prize 2026 Shortlist","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"unsafe-by-karen-mccarthy-woolf-pre-order","title":"Unsafe by Karen McCarthy Woolf \u003cb\u003e Poetry Book Society Choice Spring 2026 \u003c\/b\u003e","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe third collection from firebrand poet, essayist, and editor Karen McCarthy Woolf, winner of the RSL Jerwood award, whose volume \u003cem\u003eBittersweet\u003c\/em\u003e introduced a generation of readers to Black British Poets in the Nineties.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e'A true writer. Vulnerable, hilarious and wise' WARSAN SHIRE\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eA disenchanted walk on foot through the afterlives of colonialism, Unsafe illuminates the effects of gentrification on those who live at its sharp end. 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Eliot Prize-winner Sarah Howe, navigating the complex inheritance of family, language and colonialism – and forming a portrait of a mother in search of her past and herself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Unearthed in a clear-out, a picture calendar she’s kept – hoarding, I’ve learnt, is a mark of the emigrant – across continents and time.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo begins Sarah Howe’s extraordinary new collection, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At the heart is her own mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight. Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? 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Across poems of heartbreak and honesty, memory and mourning - and through unlikely companionship with a widowed Mary Shelley - Catherine Redford's debut collection is visceral, profound and alive with what it is to be human, to have lost, and to find ways to continue to love.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Emma Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56846155415934,"sku":"9781915628541","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1331\/9925\/files\/1769163436_f56c975b-9f54-48e6-8120-c8a2bdd0de1e.jpg?v=1769173332"},{"product_id":"hide-me-under-the-blood-and-i-shall-be-satisfied-by-keith-jarrett","title":"Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied by Keith Jarrett \u003cb\u003e Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2026 \u003c\/b\u003e","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePublished 26 March 2026\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eKeith Jarrett’s dazzlingly lyrical new collection asks how we process violence when it’s lionised in our language, on city street signs, in the edicts of a vengeful god. Its title borrowed from an unknown songwriter, this book is a palimpsest, layering known and unknown verses: those sung in Pentecostal churches or whispered in silent worship, texted to a 3am suitor or redacted from a eulogy. These poems are requiem and carnival: for the dead, the buried, the erased, the forgotten. They are magnetic, musical, scorched in glitter, skanking on the offbeat. 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Birds appear throughout these pages, not simply as subjects but as symbols and messengers, witnesses to war, extinction and exile. Mythic birds from the\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eRamayana\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003efly alongside city pigeons and wild peacocks, forming a living archive of flight and disappearance. Here, love and desire emerge not as consolation, but as a form of radical presence – one of the last ways we remain tethered to the world. 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Even as war and extinction press close, Doshi keeps turning us toward astonishment, toward the tender fact of being alive together in a world that is breaking and still unbearably radiant.' – Aimee Nezhukumatathil\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'\u003cem\u003eEgrets, While War\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003edraws on everything from myth and family history to the metaverse, to create a word-weather, a landscape of individual imagery which we apprehend on our skin. An original and sensory exploration of beauty and loss in the environment and in the body.' – Imtiaz Dharker\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'These terrific poems are a document of history, survival, and the recurring need for transcendence. Running through them is something obdurate and strong: an appetite for life, a \"greed for the bloom\". 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The elegiac series of poems Kala Pani reflects on the history and legacy of Indian indentured labourers in the Caribbean. Following the experience of women in the moment of rupture as they cross the ocean, these poems hover at the border of what is known and unknown. Other poems navigate stories from Gallagher's mixed heritage, from the Windrush generation to the sod houses in Ireland. She explores the tension between historical and personal silence ' what can and can't be spoken about. But stories are retained in the objects around us, from a pair of earrings made from stolen gold to a painting of a waterfall in the childhood home. The poems look through windows, emerge from darkness, and traverse spaces 'on the edge of things' where land gives way to water. 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Poised, fecund and inventive, Dumont’s poetry speaks to these times – with a visceral sense of how it is to navigate fracture, interrogate the unfathomable elements and attempt to live a joined-up life’ — Linda France\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e‘This is writing as sure and complex as the flow of water, weaving its wide reflections on the world, on place, on family, on natural processes and the sheer play of language, always with the steady tug of the personal story beneath’ — Philip Gross\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eIn her unflinching and tenderly obsessive collection, \u003ci\u003eSculling\u003c\/i\u003e, poet Sophie Dumont explores a deeply personal relationship to the River Avon, as she circles the curses that unravel from a canoe club.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the age of sixteen, Sophie Dumont trained to be a canoe coach before her own coach and partner of three years died suddenly in an aquaplaning road accident, which led to five of his organs continuing at least seven people’s lives. 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