It's an exciting time for poetry. More people are reading it than ever, sales have doubled, performance poetry has brought in a new audience, and social media has made it more accessible. It has been democratized. These are ten of the most interesting modern poets working today. They share their experiences of the world with humor and insight, experimenting with language and pushing the form forward.
1. Tishani Doshi
For writer and dancer Tishani Doshi, a poem is an act of reclamation. The title poem of her third collection, The Girls Are coming out of the woods, is a battle cry, a call to girls to rise up “wrapped in cloaks and hoods/carrying iron bars and candles/and a multitude of scau, collected/on acres of premature grass and city/buses, in temples and bars”. It is her most powerful collection yet. She writes about violence, aging, memory, and female bodies with language that is visceral and lyrical.
2. Hera Lindsay Bird
Hera Lindsay Bird has achieved that rare thing, she is as popular on Instagram as she is within the poetry community, with poet laureate Caral Ann Duffy calling her, “without doubt the most arresting and original new young poet”. Her poem is about trojan horses. Take Monica, Bird's viral poem about the character from friends. Behind the comedic narrative is a sincere expression of what it feels like to fall in love: “ I am falling in love and I don't know what to do about it/ Throw me in a haunted wheelbarrow and set me on fire/And don't even get me started on Ross”.
3. Luke Kennard
At 26, Luke Kennard was the youngest poet ever to be shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize. That was in 2007 for the Harbour Beyond the movie, and he has now published eight collections. His prose poems are experimental, irreverent, dark, and above all very funny. He writes about the personal and the political with self-deprecating hamour, dealing with subjects like death, envy, and national identity as he tries to find “serious uses for surreaslim”.
4. Hannah Sullivan
Hannah Sullivan began this year by winning the TS ELIOT Prize for her debut collection, three poems. Each of the intimate, inventive poems is taken from the stage in her life. The first is you, very young in New York, about a young woman in the city, unsure about her life and unfulfilled. The second, Repeat Until Time explores repetition and art, the subject of Sullivan's Ph.D., ans and the final poem, The Sandpit After Rain, examines the relationship between the birth of her son and her father's death. As the prize chair, sinead Morrissay attests, “rarely has such a significant poet arrived so fully-formed”.
5. Safiya Sinclair
“Isn't this Love? To walk hand in hand toward the humid dark, /enter the ghost web of the hungry, to consider some wants / were not meant to be understood. Some women “Safiya Sinclair's first collection cannibal is an exploration of postcolonial identity and the Tempest. Her writing is electric, her language rich and precise. She has won multiple awards for her poetry and the strict Rastafarian family has just been Purchased in a seven-way auction and will be published next year.
You must be logged in to post a comment.