We’ve had another brilliant year of poetry collections from some of the best performance poetry in the business, and we still have three titles to go in our autumn/winter schedule:

Interdimensional Traveller by DL Williams

9th December 2021

What’s it like to navigate between worlds, based in different dimensions? DL Williams is an interdimensional traveller, moving through the 2D, audiocentric world inhabited by the peculiar hearing people while negotiating the fantastical 3D world shaped by sign language and those who wield it. DL’s poems reflect a journey that has been far from easy, negotiating misunderstandings and cultural confusion while trying to figure out their identity and where exactly they belong.

DL Williams is a deaf queer poet working with British Sign Language and English. Working with such different languages has inspired a deep interest in translation and how her work can be made accessible to signing and non-signing audiences. She has performed around the UK including at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Albert Hall, as well as in America and Brazil. Several of her poems have been published, most recently in ‘Leaving: Award Winning Poetry’ ed. By Ted Stanley (2020) and she has collaborated with other poets, appearing in the online poem video ‘The House of the Interpreters’ as part of the Crossed Lines exhibition at the Science Museum, Sep 2020. DL’s poems cover many themes, from bilingualism to identity, to her beloved cats.

‘As a deaf, queer poet, Williams moves between the two-dimensional audicentric world of hearing people and the multi-faceted three dimensional world shaped by sign language – just as the poems in this book do. Featuring QR codes, images and videos of BSL poems performed by the author, Interdimensional Traveller spills out from the flat page gloriously.’

The Bookseller Disability Issue

That day she’ll proclaim her chronicles by Muneera Pilgrim

expected 30th November 2021

For centuries poetry has been a form of knowledge and a way of knowing for non centred people. In this collection Muneera recentres her voice and the voices of other people that are often times relegated to the sidelines or misrepresented in mainstream thought. This collection explores explores belonging, spirituality, gender race and identity as well as themes of girlhood, pop cultural, familial bonds and crushes, against the back drop of London and Bristol streets steeped colonial power structures that still live on. Despite that this collection is a story of love and a labour of love.

Muneera Pilgrim is an international Poet, Cultural Producer, Writer, Broadcaster, and TEDx speaker,She co-founded the Muslim Hip-Hop and spoken word duo Poetic Pilgrimage, and she is a co-founder of a new platform, Black Muslim Women Bike. She regularly contributes to BBC 2’s Pause for Thought, she is also a community artist researcher, a mental health worker and an alumni associate artist with The English Touring Theatre where she is working on her first play. She developed and delivered the educational and engagement strand of the Othello Project which accompanied the Richard Twyman’s version of Othello, and has since gone on to develop a number of other programmes, for The Poetry Cafe, Green Belt Festival, In Between Time and many more

I’m Hans Christian Andersen by Rachel Rose Reid

2nd December 2021

On the radio they said that Hans Christian Andersen wrote the Little Mermaid whilst he was avoiding the wedding of the person he loved. I thought ‘that doesn’t sound like a story that involves singing lobsters’. So I picked a book from my shelf, I sat down at the table, and I began to read. And as I read the stories, I remembered where I first heard them. You know how that is? You open one memory and a thousand more pour out.

Rachel Rose Reid is a storyteller who bridges the worlds of oral tradition and spoken word, from rock festivals to theatres, and campfires to concert halls. A BBC radio commissioned artist, award-winning performer and founder and curator of the Sofa Story Club.