Anos Ku Ta MandaYasmina Silvas debut, Anos Tu Ka Manda, is as fresh and vital as her performance style. Combining English with strands of language from her home country of Guinea Bissau, her poetry so powerful, so listenable, combines a feminist outlook with a deep seated love of God, and focusses hard on issues surrounding the perception her Blackness and also her ownership of it. Her response is defiant, and also joyful and strong.

In reading the poems of this finely crafted and lyrical book

whatever kind of family brought them up

the Recusant

Formally inventive and intricately composed

Juanita Cox and Jeremy Poynting

The epistolary poems are composed in terza rima in tetrameter lines

from Barley Patch to Border Districts

Olesia Nikolaeva

Lancashire

and publishes a poem from the late Matt Simpson

The fire is the red hair of the poet’s

just about manage to live