Karen McCarthy Woolf

When reclusive billionaire Huguette Clark dies age 104, she leaves behind a suite of New York apartments, a meticulously upkept California mansion, at least one Monet and her vast collection of antique dolls. Having barely been outside for 50 years, the elusive Clark spoke to few--in this highly unreliable, semi-fictional miniature epic, the dolls tell all.

Theirs is a tale that takes us from their lavish Park Avenue home back in time to the slave plantations of Virginia and the palaces of Imperial Japan via the addictive hedonism of 1930s queer LA.

Joyfully irreverent, Top Doll is a story of love, betrayal, Barbies and ultimately, what it means to be human.

Top Doll

Seasonal Disturbances

Ten: The New Wave presents poetry from some of the most exciting new poets in Britain today. These ten poets were selected for The Complete Works 2 mentoring project, a groundbreaking initiative to promote diversity and quality in British poetry, created by the writer Bernardine Evaristo. Most of those poets have gone on to win awards and have their poetry collections published. Talented, adventurous, and culturally rich, these poets will open up new landscapes for the reader.

The New Wave

Mona Arshi

The rise of nature writing as a cultural phenomenon is nothing new. Yet it has stirred questions relating to whose voices are privileged and heard in a space predominantly occupied by Western European traditions and writers. In Nature Matters, poets Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf seek to redress this imbalance. Their genre-defining anthology considers nature poetry from its historical roots to more recent flourishings, presenting how Black and Asian poets of past and present are decolonising this space. Committed to ecological enquiry and formal experiment, it explores fundamental themes such as climate crisis and the Anthropocene; protest and radical empathy; future ecologies; urban nature and the countryside; solitude and alienation. Revitalising conversations surrounding environmentalism and ecopoetics, this new gathering of voices is both urgent and inspirational.

Vital Poems from the Global Majority

Nature Matters

Following her groundbreaking 2014 début An Aviary of Small Birds ( 'technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak' - Observer ), Karen Mccarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances. Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self. A sinister ceo presides over a dystopian hinterland where private detectives investigate crimes against hollyhocks; Halcyon is discovered as a dead kingfisher, washed up on an Italian beach. Lyrical and inventive, McCarthy Woolf's poems test classic and contemporary forms, from a disrupted zuihitsu that considers her relationship with water, to the landay, golden shovel, and gram of &. As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican émigré, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system. Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an 'activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love'. 'Sharp, vulnerable, and wise.' WARSAN SHIRE

Poets of the New Generation

An Aviary of Small Birds is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art. Here, birth paradoxically becomes the moment of death when, after a long labour, the baby's heart gives out. However, just as grief is not linear, so too the book follows an emotional rather than a chronological arc. Ultimately, it is a closely felt connection with nature that allows the author to transcend the experience and honour the spirit of her son.

Karen McCarthy Woolf

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