Nine Arches Press

Pain Songs, Daniel Sluman’s fourth poetry collection, is written through the personal experience of chronic pain, examining the ways the body and the world interact and intersect. Tender and often sensual, we encounter the internal weather systems and shifting states of the bodily self, challenging conventional ideas of wellness and illness. Reflecting on love, family, and relationships, the poems explore intimacy, fertility, pregnancy, and what the repercussions are of living inside a body that feels like ‘an alarm that rings and rings’. Sluman’s poetry, with its immense lyric clarity, brings the human song of the self alive by witnessing its pains and pleasures intimately.

Folkish is a trickster figure masquerading as a poetry collection. Full of ghosts, worms, saints, and Northern English folklore, Kym Deyn’s debut is playful, spirited and absolutely furious – moving between the alive, the legendary, and the haunted in endlessly inventive forms. Between deep time and mischief, Deyn’s poetry hungers and sharpens its spells – casting curses on bad landlords, exhaustion and poverty. These poems know intimately the coexistence of darkness and light, the mirror’s slippery surface, and all that moves like magic in the depths of forest and root, containing multitudes – “a million sipping leaf-mouths, now quiet and peaty”. Here, poetry is an act of wild transformation – boundless and entirely distinctive, unafraid of reconfiguration and re-enchantment.

Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar blooms with poems determined to do the generous work of love and hope – using the power of language to make change, express desire, and imagine the world as we'd like it to be. Dastidar's poems, with their deft skill in moving from the surreal to the profound, are a perfect burst of joy in challenging times, effervescent and seriously playful, romancing cityscapes and bursting with wit. POETRY BOOK OF THE MONTH, The Observer, March 2026

Light Year by Jennifer Wong is a meditation on time, distance and proximities, a reimagining of history, its galaxies of personal truths and epiphanies. These poems move through spaces of change and upheaval, mapping a poet’s constellations of friendships, love, and healing. In the light that reaches us, we experience the many journeys undertaken - that of a migrant, mother, friend or lover, in poems that look at what is broken and what is held dear in life.

In The Infernal Garden, Gregory Leadbetter’s poetry leads us into dark and verdant places of the imagination, the edge of the wild where the human meets the more-than-human in the burning green fuse of the living world. This liminal ground becomes a garden of death and rebirth, of sound and voice, in poems that combine the lyric with the mythic, precision with mystery.Responding to the intricate crisis in our relationship to our planet and the life around us, the garden here assumes a haunting, otherworldly aspect, as a space of loss, grief and trial, which nonetheless carries within it the energies of regeneration and growth. At the heart of this bewitching book is the force of language itself – at once disquieting and healing – through which we are drawn to the common roots of art, science, and magic, in exquisite poetry of incantatory power.

To live is to lose, to grieve is to be human. Part elegy, part lament, part love song; Julia Webb''s fourth collection Grey Time is a powerful examination of what it is to love and lose, of our relationship with both grief and the dead. Exploring the many facets and nuances of loss, Webb explores what happens before and after the sudden death of a loved one and how our relationship with them changes over time as new secrets are revealed and old hurts heal.This book is not defined by death, however, as these refreshing, evocative poems study and witness the myriad losses of a lifetime. Julia Webb turns her forensic eye on the complexity of unresolved relationships; on what is said or not said, how people behave under duress, how violence can creep into our lives, as well as exploring her own recently discovered neurodivergence. Grey Time is a revelatory collection that takes bold leaps, binding the strange and surreal to the everyday – to make possible a place where a one mother turns owl, and another mother will teach her son how to fly.

Erica Hesketh’s debut collection In the Lily Room tells a story of early motherhood. It examines a new mother’s journey through mental illness, her relationships with her body, her baby and other people, and the often surreal landscape of mothering, against a backdrop of a changing and uncertain world.A dreamlike birth sequence full of eels, foxes and floodwater empties onto a London postnatal ward, where reality sets in. Rudderless and anxious, the new mother writes notes to herself, joins support groups and tries medication. She climbs into myth and prayer, nightmare and song, criss-crossing her neighbourhood with a pram, until she starts to feel better. Hesketh''s poems speak of the many things motherhood can mean, the structures it is made to fit inside. Clear-eyed and full of hard-won love, this a story of one of the most common experiences there is, told in a dazzlingly original way.

Is your retirement plan dying in the climate wars? Are you getting on with things in the meantime? In Life expectancy begins to fall, Tom Sastry asks how we normalise an apocalypse, taking us on a tour of bad coping strategies, unwelcome epiphanies, and striking reminders of what we still have.Part-elegy and part-satire, these poems do not show you what to do in a crisis, nor do they promote the cliches of positive thinking that tell you how to be a good worker, an effective activist or a spiritual person. Instead, quietly and persuasively, Sastry develops a subtle meditation on hope. The poetry shows us as we mostly are, lost in the enormity of it all and busy with other things. Explore a world where ‘pessimism is complicated by love’ and optimism is found hiding in moments where ‘nothing happens, in the most lavish way’.