WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION

The Striped World by Emma Jones is a hypnotic debut from a thrilling new talent.

With their tidal imagination, the poems in this debut collection sweep between old worlds and new, seeking the lost and recovering the found among shipwrecks, underwater zoos and discovered lands. Emma Jones brings her inventive worlds dramatically to life in a series of vividly distilled meetings - of settlers and indigenous peoples, of seawaters and shore, of humanity and the wilds of nature. Here, tigers stalk the captive and the free, while Death encounters his own double and Daphne tells of her new leaves, 'They sing, and make the world.' The same might be said of the poems themselves in this restless and memorable search for belonging.