The great poetry performers

This uproarious new collection is reminder, if we needed one, of why John Cooper Clarke is one of Britain's most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker's acerbic pen – and that's just the first poem.

Hear John read his new work: get the audiobook here.

You'll find 'I Wrote the Songs' in collection The Luckiest Guy Alive which, on release, was the first new book of poetry from Cooper Clarke for several decades. From the ‘Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman’ to a hymn to the seductive properties of the pie – by way of hand-grenade haikus, machine-gun ballads and a meditation on the loss of Bono’s leather pants – The Luckiest Guy Alive collects stunning set pieces and tried-and-tested audience favourites. 

John also reads the audio edition of this collection, which you can find here.

Ruminative, wise, with a newer, more contemplative and metaphysical note running through, this is a book engaged with the big questions and the emotional states in which we live and create. Taking its bearings – and title – from prime numbers, Divisible by Itself and One is concerned, ultimately, with integrity: how to live in honest relationship with oneself and others.

Kae reads the audio version of this collection: get it here.

In poems of immense clarity, lyricism and skill, Brown shows us a world where disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighbourhood, and trauma runs through generations. Brown makes brilliant and subversive use of Bible stories to address the gay experience from both a personal and a political perspective.

The Tradition by Jericho Brown is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction. His poems address fatherhood, race, queerness, worship, trauma and more with precision and clarity. In his own personal style, the duplex – a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal and the blues – Brown has created a daring and revolutionary collection. 

Recognized as one of the great poets of modern times, and as a deeply respected and influential political and cultural activist and social critic, Linton Kwesi Johnson is also a prolific writer of non-fiction. In Time Come, he selects some of his most powerful prose – book and record reviews published in newspapers and magazines, lectures, obituaries and speeches – for the first time. Written over many decades, it is a body of work that draws creatively and critically on Johnson’s own Jamaican roots and on Caribbean history to explore the politics of race that continue to inform the Black British experience.

A wise, sometimes rude, and piercingly candid account of Holly McNish's memories from childhood to attempted adulthood. This is a book about growing up, about flesh, fruit, friendships, work and play – and the urgent need to find a voice for the poems that will somehow do the whole glorious riot of it justice. It will leave the reader in no doubt as to why McNish is considered one of the most important poets of the new generation.

Want to hear more? Holly reads the audio edition of Plum, available here.