Carcanet Poetry Launch, Stav Poleg and Joseph Minden, at Heffers Bookshop

Answerlands is a teacher's rhapsody, written out of anguish at the state of schools, the pressures of being in them and hallucinations brought on by the prolonged collision of errant imagination and disciplined reality. It's an attempt to dream about how true contact in education might be possible, both intra- and interpersonally.

Joseph Minden is a poet and schoolteacher. His first collection, Poppy(Carcanet, 2022), was a poetry Book of the Year inThe Daily TelegraphandHistory Today, recommended by the LRB Bookshop, and highly commended in The Forward Prizes.

The Banquet explores the fragile, intricate links between language and longing —how words can reconstruct great cities out of memories and dreams, tear them apart, or carry them from one place to another, as if each city, house and chamber were made of sonic and visual images rather than walls and bricks. Moving between the worlds of philosophy, theatre and poetry—from Dante’s Florence to Wittgenstein’s Cambridge; from Tom Stoppard’s theatre stage to the harsh landscapes of Rimbaud’s poetry-- The Banquet explores the ever-growing tensions between words and action, knowledge and ethics.

Stav Poleg's debut poetry collection,The City(Carcanet, 2022) was chosen for theFinancial Times' Best Summer Books 2022, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection, 2023. Her poetry has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, inThe New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, PN Reviewand elsewhere. A selection of her work is featured inNew Poetries VIII(Carcanet, 2021). Her graphic-novel installation, 'Dear Penelope: Variations on an August Morning', created with artist Laura Gressani, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Her theatre work was read at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and the Shunt Vaults, London, and most recently at Kettle’s Yard gallery, Cambridge. She serves on the editorial board of Magma Poetry magazine and teaches for the Poetry School on a range of subjects including poetry inspired by the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey and the cinema of Fellini. She lives in Cambridge, UK.

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