#verse

Centered on six women sharing a space in a derelict apartment tower and set in what may be the future, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its sweep, wit, and the sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, powered along by snatches of speech. “The woman is old, I hear children saying nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless.” Using the lenses of urban infrastructure, botany, folklore, choreography, and collective listening, Ruins, Child creates a new ethnography of place and an ode both to communal ruins and to resistance. In the vivacity of their telling, Scodellaro’s heroines obscure authority, setting afoot a radical freeing-up. “Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.”

In her first novel in verse, Anne Carson bridges the gap between classicism and the modern, poetry and prose, with a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. There is a strong mixture of whimsy and sadness in Geryon’s story. He is tormented as a boy by his brother, escapes to a parallel world of photography, and falls in love with Herakles—a golden young man who leaves Geryon at the peak of infatuation. Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, until that glass house is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles’ return. Running throughout is Geryon’s fascination with his wings, the color red, and the fantastic accident of who he is. Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative layered with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it’s like to be red. It is a powerful and unsettling story that moves, disturbs, and delights.

This groundbreaking anthology brings together one hundred deaf, disabled and neurodivergent poets from across the international arena, from emerging voices to world-renowned authors, and offers an urgent redress, unpicking many misapprehensions and misrepresentations.  The word versus means pitching one thing against another. To be versus versus, therefore, is a paradox, but paradox can be helpful – it can open a space for deeper thought. This anthology aims to be such a space. Here, the reader will encounter poems of love and pain, self-care and companionship; poems which challenge cultural, medical and political agendas and policies. There are war poems, poems as acts of witness and solidarity, poems which address the impacts of the climate emergency. There are humorous poems, nature poems, and much more. The selection also draws together poetry in a wide variety of styles and forms, and from different traditions, such as haiku, renga, sonnet, villanelle, prose poem, performance poem, and sign language. Building on the work of decades of disability justice advocacy, Versus Versus offers a poetry of assertiveness and immense vitality. The anthology draws upon a wide range of voices from across the globe, including many indigenous poets and poets of color. Writer based in the US  Agha Shahid Ali, Muhammad Ali, Kay Ulanday Barrett, John Lee Clarke, Meg Day, Kwame Dawes, Anita Endrezze, Megan Fernandes, torrin a. greathouse, Ona Gritz, Stephanie Heit, Linda Hogan, Cynthia Huntington, Rachael Johnson, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, I.S. Jones, Ilya Kaminsky, Jane Kenyon, Petra Kuppers, Stephen Kuusisto, Adrienne Leddy, Ada Limón, Airea D. Matthews, Lateef McLeod, Erica Mena, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Naomi Ortiz, Saleem Hue Penny, Lucia Perillo, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and heidi andrea restrepo rhodes. This anthology was prepared with the help of an Advocacy and Advisory grateful thanks to Karthika Naïr, Chisom Okafor and Daniel Sluman. Many thanks to the Royal Society of Literature and to the judges of the 2023 Literature Matters Awards for selecting this anthology as one of the winning entries. Cover image The book's cover features a square-shaped artwork by Polish artist, Julian Stanczak, entitled 'Concurrent Colors'. The painting creates an optical illusion of vertical moving curved lines in red and blue, giving the impression of moving waves or sand dunes. At the edges of the painting the lines thin out so that they resemble a comb effect. The painting has a darker blue framing band around it, filling the extent of the cover. The title of the anthology 'VERSUS VERSUS' is in a large red font at the top of the cover, and the subtitle, '100 POEMS BY DEAF, DISABLED & NEURODIVERGENT POETS', is in a large blue font underneath the square painting. The editor's name, Rachael Boast, is in a smaller red font beneath the subtitle.

In Stay Dead, Shapero examines performance, power, comedy, and despair through the lenses of method acting and abstract expressionism. The politics of labor and performance collide with comedy and tragedy in Natalie Shapero’s fourth poetry collection, Stay Dead. Shapero’s unflinching poems explore theories of acting, discourses of survival, privacy and publicity, power and punchlines, and the language of despair. This work explores how “your death place / is the birthplace you choose.” With appearances by Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Chris Burden, Studs Terkel, Anthony Bourdain, Gene Kelly, and others, Shapero investigates themes of method acting, abstract expressionism, and the production and commodification of intense expression and raw interiority. She offers sly examinations of labor and housing markets. She interrogates the influence of artists’ material conditions on the work they produce and the culture they shape. With a cutting, sardonic voice, Shapero asks what it means to be a working artist under capitalism; which individuals are permitted earnest extensions of the self; and “whether being born is worth it.”