Holly Pester's Cafés: A Meditation on Desire and Disappointment
Holly Pester's second collection, Cafés (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99), begins with a sequence of prose poems where the speaker embarks on an anti-epic quest to open her own cafe. The collection builds into a meditation on the nature of desire and disappointment, showcasing Pester's comic timing and linguistic flexibility. She wields language as a weapon against exploitative working conditions, endless monthly direct debits—"Even my egg subscription is a disaster"—and an intensifying cost-of-living crisis.
Juggling the demands of caring for an ageing parent, the excited desperation of a love affair, the "fudgy ordeal" of work, and the possibility of parenthood, Pester's speaker finds solace in the third space of the cafe, a meeting point and melting pot. "Here begins inspiration, here begins drama," she suggests. "I order another coffee in honour of circumstantial life." Ambitious and inviting, this confident collection confirms Fitzcarraldo's entry into contemporary poetry.
Wisława Szymborska's The Acrobat: Endurance and Astonishment
The Acrobat (Faber, £12.99) is a slimline selection of Szymborska's work, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, showcasing intimate poems that explore endurance and astonishment. Reflecting Poland's turbulent 20th-century history, Szymborska describes life during and after conflict, documenting war's violence alongside moments of resilience and poignant domesticity. "After every war / somebody has to tidy up," she reminds us. "Someone has to shove / the rubble to the roadsides / so the carts loaded with corpses / can get by."
With plainspoken wisdom and deadpan humour, these poems celebrate the ordinary in extraordinary times. Rooted in everyday human experience, Szymborska's poetry proves "The commonplace miracle: / that so many common miracles take place." The book ends with her 1996 Nobel acceptance speech, praising the world's inexhaustible wonder: "It looks as though poets will always have their work cut out for them."
Rachael Boast's Volvelle: Repairing Fragmentation
Named for a rotating paper chart designed to calculate sun and moon cycles, Rachael Boast's fifth collection, Volvelle (Picador, £12.99), offers varied poems on selfhood and the body's orientation in time and space. The collection is bookended by poems reflecting on bodily slippage and mutations—"body as climate – the otherness of bodies – / body image – body double – body of water"—speaking to an era of fragmentation and acceleration.
Several poems lament "senseless war," with hourly news footage of "buildings that look like bone" and "crowds / fleeing uncontrolled explosions." Boast finds reprieve in community, weaving other artists' work through her writing. For Boast, the poet's role is repair: "things fall softly apart / and have to be mended." Restoration is achieved through sustained care and attentiveness, "as a deer in the furrows / might stand to listen // for the world as a whole."
Victoria Chang's Tree of Knowledge: Grief and History
Victoria Chang's latest collection, Tree of Knowledge (Corsair, £16.99), continues her engagement with visual art. These poems respond to works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell, and Hilma af Klint, creating space to meditate on language, grief, and our relationship to history. The poems are haunted by a eucalyptus tree cut down on the poet's street, leaving a poignant absence. "I learned that when grief abandons its body, / what's left isn't what was there before," writes Chang.
Formed of evocative couplets that "balance the living / and the dead," the collection is punctuated by archival photographs of Chinese American life from the 19th and early 20th centuries, stitched with coloured thread. They reflect "the desire // to connect dead things to make a new thing." The long central poem relates the expulsion of 263 Chinese Americans from Eureka, California, in 1885, an ethereal piece answering Chang's question: "What am I to do with // all these seams. History that keeps growing back."
Lila Matsumoto's Talk a Blue Streak: Identity and Artifice
Through episodic prose poems, Lila Matsumoto's second collection, Talk a Blue Streak (Monitor, £15), tells a coming-of-age story set in the 1990s USA. The speaker is a new arrival, suddenly "living on a movie set called America," surrounded by "synthetic luxury I didn't get the wow of." Matsumoto relishes off-kilter language, chewing on unfamiliar phrases: "Riding shotgun, passing the buck, shooting the breeze."
Her musicality and playfulness offer a delicate meditation on identity and artifice, asking how the self is formed in response and resistance to culture. "Around this time I was increasingly experiencing life as a series of point-and-click computer games I played as a child," she writes, conveying a persistent dislocation. The speaker takes a naturalisation test to become a US citizen, evidence that the clearest vision of a culture comes from an outsider: "Now that I had renounced prostitution, communism, and genocide, I was, at last, an American."
