What are you reading? Watching? Listening to?

These days I read a lot, I listen to podcasts a lot. I read a lot of poetry. Here are some collections I have enjoyed over the last year:

Wagtail: this is an anthology of Roma Women's Poetry and it's excellent. Published by Butcher's Dog and edited, with an insightful foreword, by Jo Clement, it is full of beautiful and illuminating surprises. I learned a lot from reading it - in the best way.

Passerine by Kirsten Luckins: published by Bad Betty Press. These poetic letters not only mourn the passing of a friend, they also speak to all our anxieties about the endangered world we live in. The evocation of beauty found in the mind boggling wonders of the everyday renders everything precious and fragile. I keep coming back to this collection: it's quite breath taking.

Sea and Fog by Etel Adnan: a strange one, this, written by a Lebanese American writer and artist I had never heard of.  Because I love the sea and am also somewhat afraid of her, this collection of fragmented writing appealed to me when I came across it thanks to a course run by JR Carpenter. It is full of delicate, thought provoking insights. 

Fast by Jorie Graham: these are just brilliant, as you would expect from a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Not her latest, but I wanted to read this before reading Runaway, which came out more recently. I have read her previous collections and found them brilliant and difficult. This collection seems much more accessible but maybe that's because the topics of concern (Anthropocene, planetary death, death of parents, health) are so close to my own, I feel like we are on the same wavelength for these amazing, thrilling poems. She's brilliant with form, and these move at such a pace your feet don't touch the ground. Highly recommended.