Push the Boat Out: Double Bill: Yvonne Reddick & Momtaza Mehri

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As much meditations on family, love and loss as burning elegies tackling the big issues of our time, Yvonne Reddick and Forward Prize winning Momtaza Mehri bring us their new collections in this genre-bending double bill.

Reddick’s Burning Season is a book of fire and survival, climate change and nature’s defiance. Combining poems with nature diaries and lyric essays, Reddick traces a family history of involvement in extractive fossil fuel industries alongside a paradoxical love of mountain landscapes and the natural world. Burning Season is longlisted for the 2023 Laurel Prize, and its title poem was a prize winner in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry.

Written in lyric, prose, erasures and text messages, Mehri’s debut collection, Bad Diaspora Poems, traces ripples of movement and displacement to and from the Horn of Africa, connecting transnational and intergenerational stories of loss and life-altering intimacy across Mogadishu, Cairo, Damascus, Naples, Tunis, and London. Cities to inherit, to “love from a burning distance”, to flee, to reconverge in. Cities in which to start again, from the ashes. Bad Diaspora Poems won an Eric Gregory Prize and the 2023 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.