The Language of Now
Overview
Highly Commended, 2026 Forward Prize for Best Collection
In The Language of Now, Anne Caldwell crafts prose poems rooted in a northern sense of place - bogs and backstreets, weather and wild margins - while the wider world warms, falters and changes. These pieces thrive on juxtaposition: illness alongside birdsong, childhood memory beside urban grit, the tenderness of connection shadowed by pandemic distance. Caldwell's lines move with the down-to-earth cadence of prose and the lifted music of poetry, catching small beauties without looking away.
Real and fairytale braid together; memoir slips into myth; humans transform into birds; language is lost, recovered, remade. As the title poem notes, 'The language of now is short and full of gaps' - and Caldwell turns those gaps into breathing space, where grief, humour and wonder can coexist. The result is intimate eco-poetics that feels both consoling and bracing, offering quiet resistance as it teaches us how to notice closely, again, right now.
This item is Non-Returnable
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781915606815
- ISBN-10: 1915606810
- Publisher: Valley Press
- Publish Date: February 2026
- Dimensions: 7.81 x 5.06 x 0.18 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.18 pounds
- Page Count: 76
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