Amanda Gorman signs modeling contract after star turn at inauguration
Already a fashion sensation, the 22-year-old joins IMG Models, the same agency as Gigi and Bella HadidAmanda Gorman, whose performance of her poem The Hill We Climb during Joe Biden’s presidential...
View ArticleAmanda Gorman to be first poet to perform at Super Bowl
NFL says national youth poet laureate will recite an original poem honoring three people who have served during the coronavirusAmanda Gorman will be the first poet to perform at the Super Bowl next...
View ArticleBlack on both sides: the African diaspora around the world – in pictures
Sasha Phyars-Burgess’s Untitled features essays, poems and stunning photographs that delve into the black experience and the true meaning of ‘home’ Continue reading...
View ArticleRebels with a cause: powerful poetry to inspire change
From Audre Lorde to Amanda Gorman, poetry has long provided a potent way for people to speak up and bring about progressThe ecstatic response to Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”, the poem she wrote...
View ArticleThe Guardian view on: poetry in a pandemic | Editorial
To express the grief and dislocation of our times, only poems will doThe great Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie published a new poem on Twitter this week, prefaced by the briefest and most heartfelt of...
View ArticleBeautiful words for our troubled times | Brief letters
Snowdonia memories | Poetry | Downticks | Photo opportunities | PointlessJim Perrin transported me back 50 years (Country diary, 28 January). After climbing on the easier slabs of Cwm Silyn, two of us...
View ArticlePatricia Lockwood: 'That's what's so attractive about the internet: you can...
The ‘poet laureate of Twitter’ and author of the acclaimed memoir Priestdaddy has written her first novel. She discusses politics, finding her voice, and her experience of long CovidThe day before my...
View ArticleHow Edward Lear's artistic genius led to the Owl and the Pussycat
A new book containing unseen works shows the nonsense poet’s prowess as a natural history painterHe is best known for sending an owl and a pussycat off to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. But before...
View ArticleArlo Parks: Collapsed in Sunbeams review – silky and sublime
(Transgressive)Poetry runs through everything from trip-hop to neosoul on the 20-year-old’s gorgeous debut albumSince her emergence as a teenager, west London singer-songwriter and poet Arlo Parks’s...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Owl by Edward Thomas
The melancholy cry sounds an uneasy reminder of all those excluded from material comfortThe OwlDownhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;Cold, yet had heat within me that was proofAgainst the North...
View ArticleDante's descendant seeks to overturn poet's 1302 corruption conviction
Seven centuries after the poet was found guilty in Florence, Sperello di Serego Alighieri has begun a campaign to clear his ancestor’s nameThe reputation of Dante Alighieri needs little burnishing: his...
View ArticleTo hell with Brexit and Westminster
Martina Crowther-Menn wonders what Dante would make of the Brexit disruption in Dover, while Matt Richie looks forward to an independent ScotlandI enjoyed Ben Fletcher’s vivid image of Dante’s fifth...
View ArticleUS magazine Poetry faces outcry for publishing work by sex offender
New issue, dedicated to work by current and former prisoners, provokes uproar after it emerges one poet has served time for child pornography offencesThe US’s prestigious Poetry magazine has doubled...
View ArticleThe best recent poetry – review roundup
Apocalypse: An Anthology edited by James Keery; The Disguise: Selected Poems by Charles Boyle; Living Weapon by Rowan Ricardo Phillips; Slim New Book by Leontia FlynnPoets are first hypotheses, then...
View ArticlePoem of the month: Serenity Prayer by Brian Bilston
Send me a slow news day,a quiet, subdued day, in which nothing much happens of note, just the passing of time, the consumption of wine, and a re-run of Murder, She Wrote. Grant me a no news day, a...
View ArticleOn my radar: Jackie Kay's cultural highlights
The Scottish poet laureate on the joy of Bridgerton, her lifelong love of Ella Fitzgerald, and an inventive Shakespearean memoirJackie Kay is a Scottish poet, novelist and writer born in 1961 in...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Brumby's Run by Banjo Paterson
The bush poet’s stirring tribute to Australia’s semi-feral horses is tinged with regretBrumby’s RunBrumby is the Aboriginal* word for a wild horse. At a recent trial a New South Wales supreme court...
View ArticleMonique Roffey leads strong showing for indies on Rathbones Folio shortlist
The Costa winner is up for award honouring the best work of literature regardless of genre, alongside many other titles from small pressesFresh from winning the Costa book of the year award and topping...
View ArticleMrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden review – the poet's debut novel
Death is personified as an overworked black woman in a modern-day Pilgrim’s Progress leavened with caustic witIn poet Salena Godden’s debut novel, death is personified as a series of black women: one...
View Article'Love’s labours should be lost': Maria Stepanova, Russia's next great writer
The Muscovite’s work is arriving in English this year in three books of remarkable memoir, poems and essays that, she explains, reach for ‘the truth of the past’Years ago, Maria Stepanova visited the...
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