John's New Year Picks 2026
Selected by the Bookshop
2026 promises an embarrassment of riches for poetry enthusiasts. Long-awaited debut collections from Graeme Richardson and Lily Blacksell, the return of Zoë Skoulding (with the magnificently-titled Do I Look Like an Atmosphere?), Patrick Davidson Roberts' lyric explorations of martyrdom and exile, and 152 previously-unpublished Dream Songs by John Berryman, edited by Shane McCrae; what a treat already, and it's still only January. (And for heavens' sake, pick up the magnificent Wellwater by Karen Solie, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize earlier this week, if you haven't already.)
From the publisher:
Rooted in religion, grounded and earthy, the debut collection from the Poetry Critic for the Sunday Times delivers frank and humorous poems about mortality, desire, and the joys and griefs of fatherhood.In Dirt Rich,…
From the publisher:
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025Wellwater demonstrates a poet writing at the height of her powers. In poems that are supple, philosophical, bracingly honest and ribbed with erudition, Wellwater conducts a…
From the publisher:
Life Immediately is a dynamic debut collection containing womanhood, music, the natural world and the comedy and calamity of human relationships. Lily Blacksell’s writing showcases the expansiveness of language, but…
From the publisher:
Taking its title from a line in Hôtel du Nord, a 1938 film of doomed romance, Do I Look Like an Atmosphere? brings background into the foreground, and asks us to pay close attention to that which we inhabit and change.…
From the publisher:
Patrick Davidson Roberts’ Divided Tongues is a structurally expansive and thematically intricate collection that navigates national identity, violence, myth, and displacement with tonal precision and rhetorical urgency.…
From the publisher:
The never-before-published poems of one of the great American poets, edited and introduced by Shane McCrae.Only Sing is a continuation of John Berryman’s vast project The Dream Songs. These 152 never-before-published…
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