This verse novel tells the story of Xiomara, an Afro-Dominican teenager in Harlem, finding her voice as a slam poet and discovering how love, family, school and spirituality can pull in far too many directions at once. “I’m where the X is marked/I arrive battle ready” she writes as she navigates the difficult world around her. Follow her on her poetic journey in this first novel by Elizabeth Acevedo. 

This illustrated anthology mixes established and new voices in celebrating the array of urban birds which live around us. From barn owl to wren via herons and robins - and plenty of gulls and pigeons - the poems offer a fresh perspective on the urban nature we so often ignore in our hurried lives. From Fair Acre Press, a small independent press based in Shropshire.

Making their 50th anniversary, the revolutionary Harlem reggae poets and fathers of hip-hop have released a new album. It carries their sonic campaign against racism and inequality from its roots in the civil rights era into the America of today, and includes tracks dedicated to the late artists Prince and Notorious B.I.G. Founding member Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin sadly passed away earlier this month so we urge you to listen to this important record.

This playful collection from Kate Davis is full of innocence and wisdom and wonder. The title sequence tells the story of a young girl with polio and her attempts to find ‘the footpaths of herself’ - but the whole of the book is open to the joys and complexities of landscape and the body. Poignant details - the smell of nettles, a woman reaching for a handrail in Debenhams - add weight to larger concerns - bodily autonomy, the science of sinkholes. A sparkling debut published by Tom Chivers’s Penned in the Margins press.