Carcanet Press Ltd

Jorie Graham has long used her remarkably self-renewing gifts to confront the threats posed to the planet and to our humanity. Her recent work – collected in [To]The Last [Be] Human – followed by the acclaimed To 2040 – constitute a wake-up call regarding the ecological, technological, spiritual and political risks we face in the ‘new world’ we are creating. Graham now speaks to that world in 2026, with particular focus on the forces of destruction we have unleashed across the globe. Urgent and unflinching, these poems test how the human spirit might endure under conditions set to undo it. Killing Spree is a book of vigilance and resistance, insisting that imagination and love remain forces of survival. Here, at the height of her powers, Graham offers not consolation but clarity, guiding us through catastrophe toward what cannot be taken from us. One of the most celebrated living American poets – winner of the Forward Prize 2012 and Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1996 – presents a poetry against numbness, insisting on the need to understand, respond to and act upon political reality in her new collection, as confrontationally titled as it is scrupulously crafted.

Leontia Flynn is one of the key poets of her generation. This first selection of her work reveals how her poetry, so often pained, funny, and heartfelt, also describes a life lived in the first quarter of the twenty-first century with unmistakable freshness and vivid clarity. Flynn brings dark humour and tenderness to her characteristic subjects: childhood inheritance, the North of Ireland and its history, physical fragility, mothers and single motherhood, love and loss. Bringing together work from her five previous collections, this Selected Poems, in its variety of forms, registers the trajectory of a life: the awful and exhilarating experiment of existing in a turbulent world.

Words will go their own way, and carry the poet with them, on many a wild goose chase, in and out of the past, haunted by and revisiting the island where he came of age. In the new collection from the Welsh Forward Prize-shortlisted poet, nature writer and editor of the eco-literary magazine Archipelago, McNeillie explores his deep sense, in his older age, of not belonging anywhere other than in mind and in the wild. McNeillie recovers and renews Pytheas the Greek’s exploration of fourth century BC Britain and Thomas Pennant’s account of Wales, but A Wild Goose Chase lays these historical accounts of the natural world beside the author’s own experiences. The poems’ moving and not unmelancholy late recollections blur temporal and spatial boundaries as they stay alive to the impacts of climate change and globalization.

Longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2026This is the first substantial selection of poems by SuAndi, whose work - as performer, writer for stage and arts curator - has recently been celebrated by the award of the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is an honorary fellow, for services to literature across her career, which recognised her poems' fierce, vividly powerful and dramatic depictions of women's lives - in Manchester, the city she grew up in - and of Black communities and the lives of those whose voices are not often heard, even now, in contemporary British literature. In this selection, the rhythms of speech and performance echo off the page. Though she is as at home with the dramatic monologue as the lyric and the ballad, SuAndi's poems defy easy categorisation and make visible on the page a remarkable trailblazing writing career.

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2025Shortlisted for the Forward (Jerwood) Prize for Best First Collection 2025Shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Lit Prize for Caribbean Literature 2026Longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2026A California Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2025A Poetry Book Society Commendation'How the noise in my head grows and grows,splinters into phantoms and shapes,graceless muses for her cot-mobile. How I terror.'Moving from colonial to post-colonial St Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women's lives, and what they hand down to one another. Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut's remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie's powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegise and celebrate her subjects.

Finalist for the Governor General Literary Awards 2025Shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Lit Prize for Caribbean Literature 2026Longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2026'Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state.' So begins Lorna Goodison's astonishing new translation of The Inferno by Dante, a poet she once described as 'uncompromising as an Old Testament prophet, stern as a Rastafarian elder'. This Jamaican Dante, a quarter-century in the making, is as much transformation as it is translation: the poet's narrator, its Dante figure, is now guided through an underworld by Goodison's great Jamaican predecessor Louise Bennett, 'Miss Lou' in the book. Goodison draws on the entire continuum of Jamaican speech yet securely grounds the action in Dante's formal architecture, bringing an entire world to life: we encounter other poets, including Goodison's friend Derek Walcott, as well as Caribbean politicians, reggae innovators and other public figures. Here, she recreates the journey through the 'unpaved and rocky road' of Dante's Hell for a contemporary audience and attempts to do for Caribbean vernacular what Dante did for his Italian language in the fourteenth century - endow it with an entirely new vocal music and power.

In her vibrant third collection, Rebecca Watts shines a light on the tender, spontaneous, creative and creaturely aspects of the self, and asks how we might nurture and shield these from the many physical, psychological and social forces predisposed to keep them down.Wearing a variety of costumes, or none at all, the characters in these dramatic poems play hide-and-seek, guarding their vulnerabilities while yearning for greater connection with others and the world. Animals, as totems and spirit guides, swim, run and fly across the pages. Children tiptoe and improvise their way through landscapes designed to curtail and bewilder them. Adults curate their own funerals, befriend spiders, try to love each other, and go to war. Poets and other heroes ? Brontë , Heaney, Plath, Yeats, Mary Poppins ? are confronted, reflected, refracted and left echoing anew.