This is the first substantial selection of poems by SuAndi, whose work – as performer, writer for stage and arts curator – has recently been celebrated by the award of the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is an honorary fellow, for services to literature across her career, which recognised her poems’ fierce, vividly powerful and dramatic depictions of women’s lives – in Manchester, the city she grew up in – and of Black communities and the lives of those whose voices are not often heard, even now, in contemporary British literature.

In this selection, the rhythms of speech and performance echo off the page. Though she is as at home with the dramatic monologue as the lyric and the ballad, SuAndi’s poems defy easy categorisation and make visible on the page a remarkable trailblazing writing career.