Polkadot Wounds
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:25th Jul '24
Should be back in stock very soon

Winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry 2025
Winner of the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize for Caribbean Literature 2025
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2024
Polkadot Wounds is a delight, wrestling with life in our restless times. Capildeo entices us to enter conversations with others (dead and living), amongst glimpsing reflections of encounters. Landscapes become 'landskips', playing on traditions of travel and nature writing, childlike spontaneity and movement across gaps. Dante's Divine Comedy frames untimely deaths and breakthroughs of joy, during the pandemic and in queer and far-flung communities. The title of the book is inspired by the stones of the ruined Norman castle in Launceston, Cornwall, and the local martyr, St Cuthbert Mayne, where Capildeo was writer-in-residence with the Charles Causley Trust.
'Anthony Vahni Capildeo is the best poet - the most creatively various, intellectually dextrous, uncomplacent and uncomplaisant - I know of in the UK.' - Vidyan Ravinthiran
'Polkadot Wounds is not a book to be read only once but a breviary for safekeeping and recitation in difficult weather.' - Jonathan Skinner
'Capildeo's poetic language is its own creature, a bestiary, fierce and tender, generous and resilient. [...] The poems demonstrate again and again how attention can be an act of radical hospitality.' - Tiffany Atkinson
- Winner of Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry 2025
- Winner of OCM Bocas Poetry Prize for Caribbean Literature 2025
ISBN: 9781800174252
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
100 pages