*Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2019*Jay Bernard’s extraordinary debut is a fearlessly original exploration of the black British archive: an enquiry into the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in south London in which thirteen young black people were killed.Dubbed the ‘New Cross Massacre’, the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain.Tracing a line from New Cross to the ‘towers of blood’ of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice.A ground-breaking work of excavation, memory and activism – both political and personal, witness and documentary – Surge shines a much-needed light on an unacknowledged chapter in British history, one that powerfully resonates in our present moment.

    INTO THE DARK & EMPTYING FIELD is an interrogation of loneliness and its many masks. The book explores innocence as the price of knowledge in a host of voices that share an emotional truth. McKibbens offers a monument of understanding for even the bleakest pieces of our human conundrum.

    These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love. Provocateur and poet, she continually rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization. A crow watches over a deer addicted to road salt; Lake Ontario floods Toronto to remake the world while texting "ARE THEY GETTING IT?"; lovers visit the last remaining corner of the boreal forest; three comrades guerrilla-tap maples in an upper middle-class neighbourhood; and Kwe gets her firearms license in rural Ontario. Blending elements of Nishnaabeg storytelling, science fiction, contemporary realism, and the lyric voice, This Accident of Being Lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew.

    At turns lyrical, philosophical and obscene, Tamáss astonishing debut evokes the sexual prowess of nature as an organism that swallows and consumes. These are poems that unsettle the reader, taking them to dark, magical places where earth and blood, politics and pornography, intermingle; they celebrate poetry as a small, bright, filthy song.

     + + + ❝He was my Prince Charming; I wasn't his Cinderella.❞ [BASED ON A TRUE STORY] In this short story narrated from the perspective of an unsung version of Cinderella, Elliot Banks tells what it truly feels when you have an unrequited same-gender love with your straight close friend. ⓒ 2016 Fury Evan's All rights reserved.

    Exploring the interplay of adolescence and media, Dear Azula is a masterclass on how Generation Z see themselves reflected on screen, how they find themselves in characters when the world does not grant them the possibility. These poems pay homage to the cartoon characters who made us the wicked lovestruck people that we are. These ubiquitous stories of teen ghost boys and water bending women gave wonder to a generation raised by recession. In illustrious villains we learned our own glamour. In chiseled chins and 2D teeth we learned desire. In Dear Azula, I Have a Crush on Danny Phantom we bring the early 2000s renaissance of animation into our modern lives to unpack, celebrate, revel, and remember.

    At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

    Braiding together sexuality and divinity, conflict and redemption, The Lost Arabs is a fierce, urgent collection from a distinct new voice.

    But in a culture of relentless self-branding, and in a family subject to the intrusions and objectifications that attend fame, dissociation can come to feel normal.

    A bold story about the power of embracing your uniqueness. Sometimes, we need to take charge, to stand up wearing pink feathers - to show ourselves to the world in bold colour.

    In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.

    When Agnes finds Tilly's Dungeons & Dragons notebook, however, she stumbles into a journey of discovery and action-packed adventure in the imaginary world that was Tilly's refuge. In this high-octane dramatic comedy laden with homicidal fairies, nasty ogres, and 90s pop culture, acclaimed young playwright Qui Nguyen offers a heart-pounding homage to the geek and warrior within us all.

    With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself—and us—home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America--and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman.Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering Black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.

    According to The New York Times, Chin "is sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking." The Advocate wrote her poems, "combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform" and note "Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world."

    The poet crosses challenging threshholds, fear of commitment, of motherhood, shame and panic. 'I am proficient at beginnings,' Caroline Bird says. This book goes further and (with her characteristic energy and exuberance) risks the next level. People run on treadmills facing blue walls, burn talismans in their gardens, mime marriage with invisible wedding rings. Pilots bung bullet-holes with chewing gum. We cling on, to rickety rope-bridges, to something in the air, to one another. Bird's speakers exist in a state of suspension, trapped in liminal space between take-off and landing, a time of pure transition. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff-edge, close their eyes and step out into the air.