Launch reading with Jane Clarke, Carolyn Forché and Chase Twichell
Do join Bloodaxe for this launch event for our new October titles. Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley will be joined by Jane Clarke, Carolyn Forché and Chase Twichell. All three poets will be reading live from their new poetry books, followed by a discussion about their work.
This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/p1cB6hjTCeY
If you register to attend on TicketTailor you will receive an event link reminder by email by midday the day before the event.
For those who can't make it live, the reading will be available on YouTube afterwards below or via the same YouTube link: https://youtube.com/live/p1cB6hjTCeY
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links. (Books will be available to order from early October.)
Jane Clarke: Coracle
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/coracle-1404
Carolyn Forché: Otherwhere
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/otherwhere-1406
Chase Twichell: Things as It Is | The World It Was
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/things-as-it-is-the-world-it-was-1405
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Jane Clarke: Coracle
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Jane Clarke’s Coracle explores what it means to care for each other and the natural world in the midst of social and environmental jeopardy. With a timeless lyricism her poems attend to lives, language and landscape. Her finely observed, distilled and intimate poems reflect on our kinship with all living things. The coracle, a small, simple boat used from antiquity to the present day symbolises our shared vulnerability and resilience. Heart-stirring and wise, this collection – her fourth – faces the reality of loss while celebrating acts of restoration that inspire hope.
Jane Clarke's previous collection, A Change in the Air (2023), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for Ireland's Farmgate Café National Poetry Award, as well as being longlisted for the Laurel Prize.
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Carolyn Forché: Otherwhere
Carolyn Forché is one of America’s most important contemporary poets – renowned as a ‘poet of witness’ – as well as an indefatigable human rights activist. Over five decades, she has crafted visionary work that has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, enquiries and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other.
Her meditative poetry has a majestic sweep, with themes ranging from life on earth and human existence to history, war, genocide and the Holocaust. Her retrospective, Otherwhere, is published fifty years after her debut, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1975. It includes selections from that book and from four subsequent collections published by Bloodaxe in the UK: The Country Between Us (1981/2019), The Angel of History (1994), Blue Hour (2003) and In the Lateness of the World (2021), and opens with If there is ink, a group of 16 new poems. According to Joyce Carol Oates (New York Times Book Review), Forché’s ability to wed the “political” with the “personal” places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine and Denise Levertov. Jane Miller called Blue Hour ‘a masterwork for the 21st century’.
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Chase Twichell: Things as It Is | The World It Was
Tell the truth. No decoration. Remember death. These are the demands Chase Twichell has made of her poems for over half a century. One of America’s most prominent poets and a longtime student of Zen Buddhism, Twichell seeks to perceive what Shunryu Suzuki called things-as-it-is.
These two books, published here in tandem, confront fundamental questions about the nature of the self: childhood trauma, the fate of a damaged planet, marriage and widowhood. Twichell’s poems – spare, unflinching, and exact – are distillations of reverence and grief. With language at once precise and intimate, she compels us to consider what it means to be conscious in a world where beauty and joy endure amid ecological and political crises.
Chase Twichell has published nine books of poetry, including Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in 2010. Things as It Is followed from Copper Canyon Press in the US in 2018, and that collection is now published here for her UK readers together with her latest collection, The World It Was (2026).
[15 August 2026]
