The 87 Press

Tracy Fuad’s second collection of poems, PORTAL, probes the fraught experience of bringing a new life into a world that is both lush and filled with gloom. A baby is born in a brutalist building; the planet shrinks under the new logic of contagion; roses washed up from a shipwreck centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. PORTAL documents a life that is mediated, even at its most intimate moments, by flattening interfaces of technology and in which language—and even intelligence—is no longer produced only by humans. The voices here are stalked by eco-grief and loneliness, but they also brim with song and ecstasy, reveling in the strangeness of contemporary life while grieving losses that cannot be restored. Through Fuad’s frank, honest poetry, PORTAL vibrates with pleasure and dread.

'Her Black Woman’s voice rings true and deep and gentle, with an iron echo. It is merciless and vulnerable and far ranging.' —Audre LordeAlongside her invaluable contributions to social justice, Pat Parker (1944-1989) wrote five collections of poetry during her lifetime and is widely recognised as one of the leading African-American, lesbian-feminist voices of the 20th Century. Selected Poems collects her most loved works into an accessible volume, introducing new readers to Parker's fire for justice, tenderness, and vision for the world. This is the first time Pat Parker's poetry has been published in the United Kingdom. Readers interested in Pat Parker’s life may also enjoy The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974–1989, an archival work documenting their intimate friendship and important work as activist-poets.

Glitchwork tracks the uneven lineages of Central India, building on modernist legacies and reckoning with the spectres of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Mantra Mukim’s debut poetry collection is situated in a timeless, forested grid, poised on the verge of industrial erasure. This grid, a restless site of extraction and production, also brims with potential for lushness, fey ambience, and petite clearings. Its three long poems consist of fragments on a mysterious Cold War ‘plant’, remixes of Surdas (the medieval-Braj poet), notes on palaeolithic hands, philology of the line, anomalies in a lunar-roving vehicle, and the origin myths of Raipur.

Whiting Award 2025 Winner in PoetryThis extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena'ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena'ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Into this "distance between the learning and the telling," Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard. Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to "decide/who you must become."

Rooted in the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem, ? / Return is engaged in the act of looking back—toward an imagined homeland and a childhood of suburban longing, through migratory passages, departures, and etymologies, and into the various holes and voids that appear in the telling and retelling of history. The poems ask: What is feeling? What is melancholy? Can language translate either?

Something About Living is the brilliant third collection from acclaimed poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. It explores Palestinian life through the lens of language, revealing a legacy of obfuscation and erasure. What happens when language only permits ongoing disasters to be packaged neatly for consumption and subsequent disposal? Searing with insights from the perspective of a Palestinian in diaspora, Something About Living refuses to cede ground to nihilism and apathy, taking the reader through the difficult landscape of hope and futurity in the midst of an interminable, uncertain, and often devastating present.

Indian Winter begins with a narrator trying to write about a long-ago lover whose death he has just learned of. While on this journey into memory, he flees his current faltering relationship in search of new friendships and intimacies. Inspired by Antonio Tabucchi''s Indian Nocturne, and by the writings of Anais Nin, Rachel Cusk, and Carole Maso, among others, Indian Winter finds itself where the travel diary, the künstlerroman, poetry, and autofiction meet. But the heartbreak brought on by his unravelling relationship and his family''s inability to accept his queerness cannot be outrun; as he traverses India, our narrator can''t help but repeatedly encounter himself and the range of love and alienation he has within.

Tetra Nova comes with an editorial preface: “Multiple authors have attempted to rewrite this manuscript, which has become a collection of shadow puppets. There will be bold inconsistencies across time and setting, biographical details and costume design, laws of intermediate geometry, translator notes, citations, and overall plotlines, though every attempt has been made to fill in some of the gaps. Please forgive us.”An operatic, polyphonic novel that follows Emi Terazawa/Lua Mater — a performance artist creating a text that maps Vietnamese intergenerational stories across genocide, psychosis, and the resistance that follows. As the boundary between novel and performance blurs, hybrid selves tumble across each other: the Vietnamese-Japanese poet (Emi), an assassin (Lua), sisters, Chrysanthemum, Jigglypuff, a tiny panda. Part investigative document, part dreamscape, this ambitious debut novel traverses space, the mythic and the profane, into a song of humanity beyond trauma. Voices become durational, staged, fragmented, and unabashed. Presented as one final production, whether by cinema or live music, the heart of performance art ultimately grapples with the language of plague on a cosmological scale.

The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction — as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons. Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness. Once, “desire was an arrow, but now desire / is the field.” Pinto presides over this expanse, deciding, “I have three choices: to drift through life / anesthetized, to soften. . .” In that unspoken “or,” the merciful lacuna of that ellipsis, reside the lyrical mystery and medicine that feed this astonishing collection and strengthen resolve, both ours and the speaker’s: “The lake looks frozen, but it is not.”

The Nightmare Sequence is a searing response to the atrocities in Gaza and beyond since October 2023. Heartbreaking and humane, it is a necessary portrait of the violence committed by Israel and its Western allies.Through poetry and visual art, Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed capture these historic injustices, while also critiquing the role of art and media – including their own – in this time. Born of collective suffering and despair, their collaboration interrogates the position of witness: the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively participating in the catastrophic destruction of Arabs and Muslims overseas.With a foreword by Palestinian American poet George Abraham, The Nightmare Sequence is an insightful work of testimony that also considers how art is complicit in Empire. This transcendent book invokes the power of poetry and art to shift hearts and minds; it will serve as a vital record in decades to come.

Gabrielle Bates’s electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships. The book’s eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter while its own life is spared, and its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the “forbidden felt language” of sexual and sacred love. These poems conjure encounters with figures from scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild, and mothering as a shapeshifting, spectral force; they question what it means to love another person and how to exorcise childhood fears. All the while, the Deep South haunts, and no matter how far away the speaker moves, the South always draws her back home.In confession, in illumination, Bates establishes herself as an unflinching witness to the risks that desire necessitates, as Judas Goat holds readers close and whispers its unforgettable lines.

Dear Diaspora is an unapologetic reckoning with history, memory, and grief. Parting the weeds on a small American town, this collection sheds light on the intersections of girlhood and diaspora. The poems introduce us to Suzi: ripping her leg hairs out with duct tape, praying for ecstasy during Sunday mass, dreaming up a language for buried familial trauma and discovering that such a language may not exist. Through a collage of lyric, documentary, and epistolary poems, we follow Suzi as she untangles intergenerational grief and her father’s disappearance while climbing trees to stare at the color green and wishing that she wore Lucy Liu’s freckles.Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora scrutinizes our turning away from the trauma of our past and our complicity in its erasure. Suzi, caught between enjoying a rundown American adolescence and living with the inheritances of war, attempts to unravel her own inherited grief as she explores the multiplicities of identity and selfhood against the backdrop of the Vietnamese diaspora. In its deliberate interweaving of voices, Dear Diaspora explores Suzi’s journey while bringing to light other incarnations of the refugee experience.

Recupera is a book of interwoven essays and autofiction constellating around the complex nature of sisterhood. It follows two sisters as they recover from addiction. With a mix of epistolary form, lyric essay, and art writing, the work hopes to reach beyond conventional narrative towards something hybrid and multivalent. It is about the relationships between two sisters across Catalunya, Colorado and London– a bond which unravels and exposes its multifaceted nature through their narrative of addiction and recovery.

In Theophanies, award-winning poet Sarah Ghazal Ali testifies to women''s capacity for piercing and musical exegesis and asks: what more might a woman’s body hold after it has been hailed as a vessel for the divine? Braiding the scriptures of the Qur’an and Bible, Theophanies interlaces the spectacles of gender, faith, and family and unravels the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Drawing from art and music, Pakistani history, and cultural inheritance, these poems speak back against eons to the matriarchs of the Abrahamic faiths, the mothers at the heart of sacred history.