This book offers a new reading of Marcell Mauss' and Lewis Hyde's theories of poetry as gift, exploring poetry exchanges within 20th and 21st century communities of poets, publishers, audiences and readers operating along a gift economy. The text considers trans-Atlantic case studies across fields of performance and ecopoetics, small press publishing and poetry institutions, with focus on Joan Retallack, Bob Holman, Anne Waldman, Bob Cobbing, and feminist performance. Elizabeth-Jane Burnett focuses on innovative poetry that resists commodification, drawing on ethnography to show parallels with gift giving tribal societies; she also considers the ethical, philosophical and psychological motivations for such exchanges with particular reference to poethics. This book will appeal to researchers in modern poetry, poetry teachers, advanced students of modern literature, and those with an interest in poetry.

A remarkable new book in praise of marine fauna. Of Sea takes the form of a poetic bestiary of creatures living beneath, beside and above the water: in wetlands, salt marshes and the intertidal zone. In a sequence of 46 poems, Burnett captures the world of cockles and clams, rare moths and the humble earwig (to name a few) with a precise and dynamic lyric that seems always on the verge of music. 'Burnett is one of the UK's most original poets of the nonhuman world, and of our environmental moment. Innovative, dazzling, affecting poems that shimmer with intellectual acuity and emotional resonance.' - Rebecca Tamas

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's Swims documents wild swimming in lakes, rivers and seas across the UK, starting and ending in Burnett's home county, Devon. An evocative long poem split into chapters, Swims is interspersed with a sequence about the poet's father. This mesmerising, lyrical debut cuts a path through Britain's waterways, investigating the human impact on the natural world as well as nature's unmistakable effect on us.

'Exquisite, luminous and quietly radical . . . I loved it' Lucy Jones 'A fascinating, subtle and risk-taking book' Robert Macfarlane Glowflake, Rocket, Small Skies, Kind Spears, Marilyn . . . Moss is known as the living carpet but if you look really closely, it contains its own irrepressible light. In Twelve Words for Moss, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett celebrates the unsung hero of the plant world with a unique blend of poetry, nature writing and memoir. Making her way through wetlands from Somerset to County Tyrone, Burnett discovers the hidden vibrancy and luminous beauty of these overlooked places. She also takes strength from them as she recovers from her grief at her father's death. As she meditates on and renames her favourite species of moss, she finds a healing power in language, and draws inspiration from the resilience and tenacity of her plant - and human - friends. 'Burnett stretches the limits of prose, infusing it with poetic intensity to create a powerful, original voice' Guardian