Showing results by publisher "Faber & Faber" in World Literature

Flèche (the French word for 'arrow') is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan's young adult years, when she competed locally and internationally for her home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche'), and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one's need for safety alongside the desire to shed one's protective armour in order to fully embrace the world.

Jack Underwood's debut collection, Happiness (2015), was celebrated for its unconventional and daring tone: 'conversational, arresting...weird, singular' (Guardian). Such qualities are on accomplished display in this anticipated new collection, as the poems mature and move on to a wide range of preoccupations, including imminent societal collapse and current riots; the limits of masculinity and complexities of fatherhood; as well as uncanny, often amusing scenarios, such as serving drinks to a gathering of 15 babies or group kissing in Empathy Class.

In this intimate and vital debut, Richard Scott looks into the places not everyone sees or chooses to see. Against the backdrop of London's Soho, he creates an uncompromising portrait of love and shame, questioning our sense of the permissible and the perverse. Scott takes us back to our roots: childhood incidents, the violence our scars betray, forgotten forebears and histories. The hungers of sexual encounters are underscored by the risks that threaten when we give ourselves to or accept another. But the poems celebrate joy and tenderness, too, as in a sequence reimagining the love poetry of Verlaine.

When My Brother Was an Aztec is a work of courage and invention - one that foregrounds the particularities of family dynamics and individual passion against the backdrop of Western mythologies and a deeply rooted cultural history. Natalie Diaz's arresting debut explores a brother's addiction and its devastating effects on a household, while offering a political critique of our nations and their pasts. It acknowledges absences and uncomfortable silences, as well as conjuring vivid voices and presences, from Antigone and Houdini to Huitzilopochtli and Jesus.

Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book. It demands that every body carried within - bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers - be touched and held. Where the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, Black and Brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

A 'howdie-skelp' is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It's a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Paul Muldoon's striking new collection include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an 'affront' to good taste.

Hannah Sullivan's debut collection is a revelation - three long poems of fresh ambition, intensity and substance. Though each poem stands apart, their inventive and looping encounters make for a compelling unity. 'You, Very Young in New York' captures a great American city in all its alluring detail. 'Repeat Until Time' begins with a move to California and unfolds into an essay on repetition and returning home, at once personal and philosophical. 'The Sandpit After Rain' explores the birth of a child and the loss of a father with exacting clarity.

Look We Have Coming to Dover! is the most acclaimed debut collection of poetry published in recent years as well as one of the most relevant and accessible. Nagra, whose parents came to England from the Punjab in the 1950s, draws on both English and Indian English traditions to tell stories of alienation, assimilation, aspiration and love, from a stowaway's first footprint on Dover Beach to the disenchantment of subsequent generations.

The poems gathered here: elegies for the poet's musician father; tales of the love lives of gods and the childhoods of psychopaths; troubled encounters between men and women; odes to movies and the male anatomy; studies of art and ambition, politics and parenthood. Other voices enter the fray. And in the fourth part of Paterson's ongoing poem 'The Alexandrian Library', the poet-as-amateur scientist - from a weather station at the top of Ben Nevis to the cellar of The Arctic - bears witness to the imminence of man-made extinction.

Maurice Riordan's keenly anticipated new collection continues his agile exploration of time, both in its depredations and rewards, while also bringing a sceptical, enquiring intelligence to bear on the anxieties and vanities of our age. Here we have disquieting songs of a mutable self; a projected online deathbed confession; the soul haranguing the body; while encounters with ghostly feet and tongues of fire consort with riffs on Baudelaire, Rilke and Old English. These poems pulse with mischief and macabre humour, making for a pungent and haunting listen.

The Built Moment is divided into two sections. The first, 'The Sea Is an Edge and an Ending', is a sequence of poems about her father's disappearance into Alzheimer's. It is not a narrative of illness so much as a meditation on the metaphysics of memory loss. What does it mean only to exist in the present, for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free? The second half of the book is called 'The Bluebell Horizontal'.

Catching a sudden look of defiance from his granddaughter inspires Hugo Williams to take up his pen and write this deeply moving new collection of poetry - the first since I Knew the Bride (2014), short-listed for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. He navigates assuredly from thoughtful reminiscences of childhood and accounts of the war, through various climes and sensitively drawn relationships, to grim humour in the hospital ward and growing older with its attendant doubts and disappearances.

Matthew Francis' latest collection celebrates the richness of nature and of our responses to it. The pleasures of summer are emblazoned in the colourful wings and evocative names of butterflies, while a nocturnal encounter with an earwig becomes a joyous incantation to the 'witchy-beetle, forkin-robin' of dialect. His love of history, embodied in his acclaimed Mandeville and The Mabinogi, gives rise to a sequence based on Robert Hooke's microscopic observations.

Reid was born in Hong Kong and, thanks to the roving nature of his father's employment, spent some of his childhood in foreign places. Most of the locations in this book, however, are the Britain of the 1950s and '60s - perhaps, at this distance in time, no less exotic. As the poems move from pre-verbal experience to adolescence, the younger self is captured in scenes that illuminate the steps by which a man - a poet - has been raised.

The Floodmeadow draws us into a seething pastoral where lightning threatens and thunder gathers, pylons and powerlines hum, and steel-framed gates sing out into the wind. In these incantatory pieces, everything is present at once. This is a visionary collection that invokes other times, dimensions and soundscapes to tell out some word of beauty and abundance in the here and now.