After the Formalities

By Anthony Anaxagorou

• Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize
• A Poetry Society Recommendation
• A Guardian Poetry Book of the Year
• One of The Telegraph's Best Poetry Books of 2019

A knife is pulled. An Uber driver is racially abused on the day of the Brexit referendum. A father bathes his son in ice water. A schoolboy drives a drawing pin into a map of the world. The threat of violence is never far away in Anthony Anaxagorou's breakthrough collection After the Formalities. Technically achieved, emotionally transformative and razor-sharp, these are poems that confront and contradict; poems in which the scholarly synthesises with the streetwise, and global histories are told through the lens of one family.

Anaxagorou 'speaks against the darkness', tracking the male body under pressure from political and historical forces, and celebrates the precarious joy of parenthood. The title poem is a meditation on racism and race science that draws on the poet's Cypriot heritage and is as uncomfortable as it is virtuosic. Elsewhere, in a sequence of prose poems that shimmer with lyric grace, he writes, 'I'm your father & the only person keeping you alive.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penned in the Margins
• Release date: Nov 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781908058737

Anthony Anaxagorou

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot award-winning poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and educator. His poetry and fiction has appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts, and has been published in The Poetry Review, The Feminist Review, Amnesty International’s Words That Burn and John Berger’s The Long White Thread of Words. He won the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Hospital Club’s H-100 Award for most influential people in writing and publishing. He has toured extensively both in Europe and Australia. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a poetry and live music night in London, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.