SoN: Sophie Collins & Richard Scott

We celebrate two of the most anticipated debut poetry collections of the year, both from Faber & Faber. Sophie Collins was featured in Penguin Modern Poets 1: If I’m Scared We Can’t Win alongside Emily Berry and Anne Carson, and edited the acclaimed anthology of translation Currently & Emotion. Her debut collection, Who is Mary Sue?, is a collage of prose and poetry, exploring the borders of identity, form, and the act of reading. This is innovative and captivating work.

Richard Scott’s pamphlet, Wound, won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets (the only award of its kind in the UK) in 2016 for its ‘unflinching look at the knotty roots of sexual desire from a strikingly original perspective’. His first full length collection, Soho, is an intimate and vital portrait of love, shame, and trauma, as queer and arresting as one could hope. With a reimagining of Verlaine, and a night stroll under the seedy streetlights of Soho, this is a collection brimming with tender joy.