48Kg by Batool Abu Akleen, translated by the poet, with Graham Liddel, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti and Yasmin Zaher (Tenement, £17.50)
This remarkable debut by a 20-year-old Palestinian, born and raised in Gaza, stands out among poetry of witness on the genocide there. It contains 48 poems, each representing a kilogram of bodyweight, with the book literally thinning as the pages turn. The final poem declares: “I die without a voice. / He skins me, flesh from bones. / Cuts me into forty-eight pieces. Distributes the parts in blue plastic bags / & throws them to the four corners.” Unlike the Muses who buried Orpheus’s dismembered limbs, the poem ends with the paramedic guessing “which of these bags / contain my flesh”. Written in Gaza between 2023 and 2025, Abu Akleen’s poems disassemble and painstakingly reassemble the body to interrogate injustice, death and grief. She creates a world where absurdity and reality, irony and humanity coexist – from the ice-cream man crying out “corpses for sale” while noting that “no grave buys them”, to death wanting to have a birthday party and picking “an arm the missile hadn’t shattered”. Abu Akleen self-translated 38 of the 48 poems, describing the process of translation as making “peace with death”, while writing in Arabic meant being “torn apart without … anyone there to recollect it”. The book articulates the vital linguistic bridge she establishes in the present between Arabic and English, and includes historical photographs of Gaza from 1863 and 1908 and the 2022 discovery of a fifth-century Byzantine mosaic, highlighting the city’s rich cultural history. Throughout 48Kg Abu Akleen transforms witnessed details into fragile interpretations: the “broken plates they make homes for their younger siblings”, the “moment War became a school”, and the “Ring Finger I lend to the woman who lost / her hand and her husband”. She notes that poetry gives “a form to feelings in order to understand them”, and these heartbreaking and risk-taking poems protest with uncompromising clarity and tenderness against continuing atrocities.
Paper Crown by Heather Christle (Corsair, £10.99)
This quirky collection captures everyday absurdity with humour and brutal insights: “I own like six nail clippers / and honestly can’t / remember ever buying even one.” Christle’s seemingly light, random poems excel at forging unlikely connections. In How Much for the Swan Boat, she spins virtuosic free-associations from the word “penny” – money, idioms, Penelope’s wait for Odysseus, and relentless self-questioning. This slim volume punches above its weight in range and scope. From a smoothie blender to board-meeting etiquette, the prefix “eff” to an Advent calendar, everything becomes collage under Christle’s deft touch: “writing is more like rolling / a one-pound rock around the yard / if you are into that kind of thing”. While some poems suffer from over-generalisation, the whole is a striking celebration of risk and beauty: “I want this world / to remain with me, this holy tumult.”
New Cemetery by Simon Armitage (Faber, £14.99)
“Reader, today / the poet has gone / to his shed … He has his themes”, Armitage begins ironically, introducing us to a sustained ruminative sequence about a cemetery built in his neighbourhood during the pandemic. With his signature Yorkshire vernacular, he brings precise locality and light-heartedness to death and grief – the “dirty clouds over Farnley Tyas”, or the “guitar-shaped” gravestone “with adjustable knobs/ for volume and tone”. Framing each poem with the name of a moth, Armitage investigates the complicated tension between natural and constructed habitats. The varied tercets he deploys – spare, rhymed or free-flowing – create an uncomfortable, fluctuating rhythm as the poet observes the cemetery’s progress, and the most memorable poems address his father’s death: “I should be sowing your ashes/ on Puddle Hill / or the bowling green/or the cricket field, / or across the stage / of the village hall.” Structured like burial plots, the poems of New Cemetery tap into deeply personal material while drawing on the laureate’s public persona.
Red Carpet by Steve Malmude, edited by Miles Champion (Carcanet, £14.99)
At the periphery of the New York School of poets, Malmude succeeded in maintaining a distinctive voice among peers including John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. This expertly edited collection showcases 65 years of intransigent poetics marked by meticulous craft and a down-to-earth perspective. Reading Malmude is like entering sideways into an encyclopedia of American history seen through the lens of working-class lives – moments like a “hard hat / kneeling in front / of a can of paint”. Nimble, observant and satirical, his vast canvas captures urban and suburban landscapes overshadowed by postwar inequality and climate change: “Spring is no longer / Henry David Thoreau’s / favorite season.” As Malmude ages, his lines grow shorter and more philosophical, meditating on craft and memory: “Poetry / as a dot / to stare at / in secret”. This long-overdue collection celebrates a mercurial, sharp-edged poet whose “tongue / touches the blade / of song” and reveals a new dimension to the New York School.