Content Warning: Everything, Akwaeke Emezi (Bloomsbury Poetry, price: £7.99-£12.99)

As the title, Content Warning: Everything, suggests, here’s a book that pulls no punches, and holds at its heart a ‘warning’ for all who are born here on Earth: life is cruel, complex, and constant in its daily grind or even assault. Images of violence, use, and abuse tell of this starkly: but the ‘I’ of one poem (who may be the author) still manages to remain “soft”. Her rebellion is not to become hardened and “strong”, but to keep her sensitivity, and so remain affected by the world. A stance which brings us neatly back to the book title – because, once again, everything is affecting.

There’s a sense in the poems of Content Warning: Everything of a young person working things out, and much of this seems to involves self-work – investigation via a number of ‘self-portrait’ poems: self-portrait as cannibal; self-portrait as abuser – as well as questioning what they have been taught, and trained never to question, in particular gender and sexual ‘norms’, morals enforced by parents, and religion – this latter interestingly examined in another interwoven series of pieces that imagine Jesus in a number of “what if” situations.

In the end, Emezi returns to and retains notions of her inner self as a kind of “god”, and determines to continue honouring that innate sense of self. In this way, the book is highly inspiring, even as it is visceral, vivid, and – for some – shocking. A kind of anti-prayer book, working against set forms and inherited absolutes, this book’s hymn, if any, is to be who you really are, and it sings that song through a variety of forms, over and over again, with dedication, bravery, and intelligence. Just remember the title! But make sure you read, and read with these qualities in you, also.

God Complex, Rachael Allen (Faber, price: £10.99)

On to other conceptions of god now… In Rachel Allen’s hands, the term God Complex takes a negative spin, as a ‘complex’ which makes humans act as more than they are – to act badly, in fact. Here, the ‘god complex’ is both the human in romantic relationship, and in our relationship generally with the planet we inhabit, and which we are in the process of polluting and destroying.

In relationship, the ‘I’ of these poems finds their lover god-like – “I saw you divinely” – whilst also accepting their part in a relationship of “incompatible lovers”, in which he acts with “cruelty”. Allen, though, wants “lovers to find me so attractive / they want to end my life”. Images of twins and “twinship” point to the fact that ‘it takes two to tango’; the dark side of relationship, and the “Human predilection to love the enemy” are finely, thoughtfully, explored.

Troubled/troubling thoughts and ideas are brought to the fore in God Complex: “How to have sat, as a child, / at a murderer’s feet and not been murdered?”; a “virus skips through / blood types” and the poem’s ‘I’ states, “I would like to / become pregnant / with this animal”. There is something in us which desires our own destruction, and this is a book which explores that waywardness, with imagination, stark imagery, and many unexpected associative leaps: “Sometimes I feel the edges of my teeth bleed and taste / metal in my mouth, like a big iron dick”. Outside, in another poem, “A bird gags”, and so the natural world and the human are interlinked – that dick is a metaphor for how we treat the natural world.

God Complex is a book which holds a clear mirror up to that, and to us, and readers may not like what they see as a result. But, being so clever, creative, and compellingly written, it’s also one heck of a read.

A Pocketful Of Chalk, Claire Booker (Arachne Press, price: £4-£9.99)

Gods appear again in this collection, Pocketful Of Chalk, in the form of Paperwhite Narcissi, which are described as “little gods”, and then in the poem Grey Heron: “God of pond. / God of the turning tide”. The natural world is holy and full of wonder, here, and the beauty, mythology, and landscape of the South Downs are brought wonderfully to life, from fossils “tattooed in the strata” to the “sun’s slow yolk”, and everything in between. “Every particle of dust is breathing”, writes the poet at one point, and this is the sense I get from the book – that life and nature are alive, and to be treated as such.

However, Booker’s writing is a far cry from the sentimentality of traditional pastoral poetry; the writing is fine, intelligently composed, entirely lacking in cliche. Particularly enjoyable, for me, are those moments in which the author veers away from observation of landscape and, like Emezi (reviewed above), imagines her own ‘what ifs’, for example, a poem in which she contemplates the cow from the Hey Diddle Diddle nursery rhyme: “Would I hear udders slap / against moon rock”? Another poem, Framed Woman, gives us an image of a person trapped in a relationship, perhaps marriage, too: “She can’t quite spoon herself out / of his crabshell house”.

I like these feminist contemplations a lot, but there’s much more here to enjoy, and these are just one interwoven element in A Pocketful Of Chalk, which concludes with images of “beauty in the squander” and love “under every stone”. Magical, and marvellous!

Hollywood Or Home, Kathryn Gray (Seren, price: £9.99)

Exploring celebrity, with all its mayhem, monstrosity, melancholy, and magnificence, is the theme in Hollywood Or Home. Must have been fun! And, so, a sense of play and playfulness, inventiveness and questioning, infuses the poems here – from the outraged and outrageous (“today I read that Michael McIntyre is worth 50 million / dollars”) through to the dark underside of glamour (Sinatra opens / another vein for Ava Gardner”).

An illustration on the book’s cover shows a man drowned in a pool and a sexy woman as she walks – contorted, menacing – towards the viewer, like some kind of catwalk Frankenstein’s monster. What and who is made in Hollywood, and how these icons and iconography haunt and meld with us, are some of the themes here; others include memory, adventure, the “Sweet tourniquet of youth” and growing older. 

Particularly delicious, for me, is a poem called Lovely Young Men, which I would urge Seren to put online as it has all the hallmarks of a ‘viral poem’. Fresh, sexy, wry, and honest, the woman in it admits, in a sort of confession, to her lust for young men: “all you can think of is their unbridled cock”. What I love about poetry is how it takes a stance or presents an extreme, baring the mind and soul’s naturally multifaceted mode of being, which are mutable and capable of holding the opposite view at another time; with masterliness, Gray grasps the pen and unapologetically paints such notions.

Another poem, Nineteen-seventy-something, intimates in its wry, jaunty tone the groping, grasping sexism of that earlier decade: “Everyone was kissing you at parties – / and look at how you’ve grown! / There were uncles everywhere”. This is another poem I think would be wildly popular on the socials. (Can one be a poet and popular? I think one can…) Gray by name but certainly not grey by nature, this colourful, clever, courageous collection is utterly captivating.

The Writing Mirror, Stephanie Carty (Qualia, price: £5.99-£12.99)

I asked for a copy of The Writing Mirror after seeing Stephanie Carty tweet about it – and what a fantastic thing it is! Made for writers, it’s jam-packed full of intelligent, well-reasoned and research-led advice and exercises designed to help you understand yourself as a writer, to realise your own boundaries, and to grow beyond them. Being a successful writer means getting to grips with your own weak points – here, Carty supports the reader to explore their ideas on writing rules, anxiety, deadlines, rejection, goals, avoidance, playfulness, power, and much more besides.

Taking the form of a workbook, it’s something I can see would be incredibly useful to any and all writers, at any stage of their career. Although I’ve only perused the book, engaging in the odd exercise, I found these to be incredibly helpful – the true value of the tome would undoubtedly lie in the reader / writer undertaking all of the exercises within it.

The only book I can think of that’s comparable is Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way; as part of a psychology series, however, this book seems more science-led to me, and offers a richesse of modes and means for development which take the mind and emotions, beliefs and learned behaviour, into account. Easy to follow, with lucid, clearly written ideas and instructions, it’s a book that’s rooted in deep understanding and profound wisdom. All of which makes it a must-read, for any writer, or wannabe writer. The Writing Mirror is a truly brilliant book that I entirely recommend.