Shortlisted for the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize Shortlisted for the 2022 Jhalak Prize Longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize Longlisted for the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize A teacher asked me a question, and I opened my mouth as a sort of formality but closed it softly, knowing with perfect certainty that nothing would ever come out again. Ruby gives up talking at a young age. Her mother isn't always there to notice; she comes and goes and goes and comes, until, one day, she doesn't. Silence becomes Ruby's refuge, sheltering her from the weather of her mother's mental illness and a pressurized suburban atmosphere. Plangent, deft, and sparkling with wry humour, Somebody Loves You is a moving exploration of how we choose or refuse to tell the stories that shape us.

The rise of nature writing as a cultural phenomenon is nothing new. Yet it has stirred questions relating to whose voices are privileged and heard in a space predominantly occupied by Western European traditions and writers. In Nature Matters, poets Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf seek to redress this imbalance. Their genre-defining anthology considers nature poetry from its historical roots to more recent flourishings, presenting how Black and Asian poets of past and present are decolonising this space. Committed to ecological enquiry and formal experiment, it explores fundamental themes such as climate crisis and the Anthropocene; protest and radical empathy; future ecologies; urban nature and the countryside; solitude and alienation. Revitalising conversations surrounding environmentalism and ecopoetics, this new gathering of voices is both urgent and inspirational.

'Quick before the story ebbs away.
There are things I need to tell you'

A work of great strength and equal delicacy, Mouth transports us to a world where violence hangs in the air, where beauty, pity and cruelty intertwine. The sequence at its heart, Palace, takes the overlooked women from the edges of Greek tragedy and places them centre stage, to tell unforgettable stories of survival and loss. With new depth and force, their voices set off echoes with women navigating the terrible reality and aftermath of war today.

As a human rights lawyer, Arshi saw power and its abuses, the structures of silencing set against refugees. As a poet, she charts the movements and migrations that change the course of our lives – from child to adult, from home to elsewhere, from grief to what lies beyond.

Winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection Mona Arshi's debut collection, 'Small Hands', introduces a brilliant and compelling new voice. At the centre of the book is the slow detonation of grief after her brother's death but her work focuses on the whole variety of human experience: pleasure, hardship, tradition, energised by language which is in turn both tender and risky. Often startling as well as lyrical, Arshi's poems resist fixity; there is a gentle poignancy at work here which haunt many of the poems. This is humane poetry. Arshi's is a daring, moving and original voice.

Following on from her Forward prize-winning collection, Small Hands, Mona Arshi's new book continues in its lyrical and exact exploration of the aftershocks of grief. These extraordinary poems, which see Arshi continuing with her experiments with form, relocate experiences in both past and future feeling, in both the intimacies of ordinariness and the collective experience of myth. Moving and discomfiting, these poems tune, in their acute emotional awareness of individual pain, to the dangers and unsettling violences of the contemporary world. Nevertheless, at the centre of this book is an overarching commitment to hope, in whatever form it takes, to the earth's tiny creatures, and its 'churning, broken song'.