Heritage Aesthetics by Anthony Anaxagorou (Granta, £10.99)
Featuring the same kaleidoscopic imagery and expansive reach that characterised Anaxagorou’s debut, Heritage Aesthetics grapples with the way colonial history haunts the present moment, shaping the contours of institutional racism in contemporary Britain, as well as the complexities of familial relationships as individuals negotiate the legacies of intergenerational trauma. Intertextuality pervades the collection, as in the title poem where excerpts from a book of philosophy are woven through a recollection of racist attacks, first in a pub: “England scored a man wearing the classic / white shirt with three lions stitched on / rushed over grabbing him in the way men do / when they know they’re winning”, then at the hands of violent police, while the reader’s own prejudices are simultaneously called out:
you’re expecting to see
the boy here or maybe
you’ve built an impression
of him:
hair type
complexion
race/ethnicity
religion
education
In another poem, which opens with a quote from a “magazine published in British Cyprus, 1958”, the speaker confesses: “I love this country… / but its yesterday is father-terrifying”. Through a keen attentiveness to the complicities and possibilities of language, Heritage Aesthetics reveals how disclaiming a country might be the most honest method of loving it.
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen (Bloodaxe, £12.99)
Chen Chen’s second collection displays his signature blend of humour and pathos set against a backdrop of the Trump presidency and the twin pandemics of Covid-19 and Covid racism. To be Asian American, Chen intimates, is to be taken “through the wound of it”. Throughout the collection, death, crisis and grief sit cheek by jowl with survival, resistance and glimpses of hard-won joy. In Summer, the speaker’s wellbeing hinges on a fragile object in the face of impending loss: “I have a canoe that gives me therapy my insurance won’t cover. The man I love calls from Colorado, unaware of my canoe. / It offers a better kind of cognitive behavioural, in very turquoise water. / The man says his mother is dying & I say I know but nothing is clear.” The seasons serve as a recurring metaphor, signifying an unyielding desire for wonder despite the collective trauma pervading the American body politic. In the book’s final epistolary poem, Chen writes: “You wrote / that I write with joy. / When really it’s toward, / walking to / the school of / try again.” With its exquisite blend of melancholy and exuberance, this is a life-affirming book for our troubled times.
Cane, Corn & Gully by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa (Out-Spoken, £11.99)
This formally inventive debut centres on an interdisciplinary approach to poetry that fuses a knowledge of dance and poetics to explore Barbadian history and heritage. Kinshasa excavates the stories of black women who fought – and continue to fight – against slavery and oppression. The potent link between movement and speech is crystallised in the prose poem Preface: And if by Some Miracle, featuring a speaker researching the Trans-Atlantic slave trade who is devastated that she “could not find a single word from an enslaved woman in Barbados”. Then, the speaker begins to dance, which leads to a moment of epiphany: “I immediately browsed through every description I could find of an enslaved person moving (at 2 o’clock in the morning). I discovered the enslaved were speaking, constantly.” Erasure poems and dramatic monologues abound, weaving a powerful tale of defiance: “when young cane reaches maturity it grows a thick shell, / only when you break its neck / is when you hear it hiss de resurrection song”. Through scintillating poetry that moves and mesmerises, Cane, Corn & Gully writes the marginalised narratives of Barbados back into history.
Slide by Mark Pajak (Jonathan Cape, £12)
This poised and visceral debut offers the reader suffering and respite as it mingles quotidian tragedies with moments of subtle yet unmistakable beauty. In a poem about queer discovery and adolescent desire, violence is the prelude to tenderness as a knife is brandished, a boy blindfolded, followed by a kiss and a revelation: “He pulls his blindfold. Looks / the older boy full in his up-close face. And sees / that he’s bleeding, everywhere, under his skin.” Pajak’s writing pulses with a rhythmic intensity which compels the reader not to look away. In Spitting Distance, “a live rifle shell” is described as “a gold seed in the earth”, one that ends up in the speaker’s mouth: “I suck hard / on the blunt bud, drawing out / its deeper flavour”. In another poem, the mundane ways in which we exploit our fellow creatures are rendered painfully evident: “My job, to shine a torch / through the bars for the dead hens / then pack them tight into a bin-bag. / All the time my mind chanting: / there’s only one hen, just one / ruined hen”. These poems don’t shy away from our shared complicity, instead encouraging us to take a long look at the hard world we live in.
