Forthcoming Titles

Ragged Disclosures is a prose poetry collection that investigates liminality, intersubjectivity and the prose poetic sequence. These sequences combine to create a complex and distributed depiction of an intimate relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic in this era of climate change and political instability. As the volume considers the protagonists’ diverse experiences, it explores the development of connected poetic tropes while highlighting tensions between prose poetry’s compression and the countervailing tendency for sequential works to present an unfolding narrative arc. The inherent raggedness of the narrative gestures, combined with prose poetry’s condensed and suggestive boxes, is playful, contemporary and quintessentially poetic.

Anita Patel’s second collection of poetry takes us on a voyage into history, heritage, mythology and family. These poems scatter and drift through layers of time, across cultures and continents. They offer glimpses into past worlds and present realities. They pay tribute to the yearning of a migrant heart, the search for home and the tensile strength of women. This is poetry that peers through the cloudy lens of memory to examine the tattered web of relationships, language, landscapes and stories which make up a self.

In Bed with Animals is a personal poetic exploration of the horror and banality in one woman’s lived experience of gender discrimination. It examines the contemporary world through an ecofeminist lens and considers the way that women, the environment, and animals suffer exploitation. This incendiary debut collection unsettles with its heartfelt ferocity.

These are poems of love and loss, they imagine a world where hawks fly from the arms of lovers and disappear into a dying world, where golden fish rise from rivers and tangle themselves in hair, where molecules and mist carry messages of love through cites. In this collection, beginnings and endings slice across each other, modern and mythic intertwine, the everyday is stirred into a world of metaphor and incantation. Individual poems chime off each other, creating strands of narrative which circle the collection’s central symbol, the nekhau — small fish-shaped amulets crafted by ancient Egyptians and plaited through the hair of loved ones to ward off drowning. In a contemporary and at times imaginary world, the poems become nekhau, articulating the fears and dangers underlying love in order to subdue them. In doing so the poems transform many tropes of love poetry, repositioning them in contexts both everyday and otherworldly. The bodies in these poems fight against the mortality of love, they borrow lore and build new myths as a way to protect love’s fragility. Glistening with musicality and precision, these poems twist and shimmer like fish leaping toward the fears that have shaped them.