To celebrate the virtual launch of our three latest collections, we asked our poets to share a selection of poems from their new books.

How To Wash A Heart, Kapil’s first full-length collection published in the UK, depicts the complex relations that emerge between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Drawn from a first performance at the ICA in London in 2019, and using poetry as a mode of interrogation that is both rigorous, compassionate, surreal, comic, painful and tender, by turn, Kapil begins to ask difficult and urgent questions about the limits of inclusion, hospitality and care.

In this audio clip, Bhanu Kapil reads from How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry, 2020).

The Station Before travels across time and space. Nothing is secure: memory destabilizes with its resurrections; seeing cannot be taken for granted; borders fluctuate and crossings abound. Though not afraid to draw on many sources, these poems explore how thinking masks a fragility, the knowledge of our mortal selves.

In this audio clip, Linda Anderson reads the poems ‘Fire’, ‘Disturbance’, ‘Adagio’ and ‘For Example, My Hand’ from The Station Before (Pavilion Poetry, 2020).

Juana of Castile (commonly referred to as Juana la Loca – Joanna the Mad) was a sixteenth-century Queen of Spain, daughter of the instigators of the Inquisition. Conspired against, betrayed, imprisoned and usurped by her father, husband and son in turn, she lived much of her life confined at Tordesillas, and left almost nothing by way of a written record. The poems in Citadel are written by a composite ‘I’ – part Reformation-era monarch, part twenty-first century poet – brought together by a rupture in time as the result of ambiguous, traumatic events in the lives of two women separated by almost five hundred years. Citadel is a daring and luminous debut.

In the below videos, Martha Sprackland reads the poems ‘A Blow to the Head’, Juana and Martha in Therapy’, ‘Pimientos de Padrón’ and ‘Dappled Things’ from Citadel (Pavilion Poetry, 2020).