“What could be more timely than the wresting of new ways of saying from the hand-me-down matter of language; what more exploratory and exacting/exciting? Perhaps, in an era of frequently cynical and lazy language-use, an appetite has grown among readers for writing that doesn’t so much hit the nail squarely on the head, as refashion the very concept of the hammer” says Tiffany Atkinson, in her Introduction to this volume; a volume that is the record of a year of hard work, experiment, conversation, revision, and speculative play between the weight of tradition and the desire to find new ways of saying. What is immediately visible in these pages is the sheer variation in style and form, from the fragmentary and epigrammatic to the ranging and discursive, from the intimate to the global, from the playful to the elegiac. What is not visible is the mutual care and camaraderie of a group working together to encourage the emergence of each distinctive voice.
Here are the UEA Poets of 2018. Remember, you read them here first.