Mapping the Future offers new work by all 30 writers supported by The Complete Works project, including Warsan Shire, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Roger Robinson, Inua Ellams, Malika Booker, Sarah Howe, Will Harris, Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard, Yomi Sode and Karen McCarthy Woolf.
In 2008 the level of poets of color published by major presses in the UK was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry – an initiative spearheaded by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo – played a significant role in this change. Supporting 30 poets over a twelve-year period, The Complete Works produced an unprecedented number of prizewinners, including the Forward Prizes, T.S. Eliot Prize, Ted Hughes Award, Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have also gone on to judge every major poetry award, and to take on significant roles in academia and translation, publishing over 40 collections. The Complete Works has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry.
Mapping the Future is not just a magnificent anthology of some of the best UK poets, it is also an exploration on how poetry in Britain has become much more inclusive over the past 15 years: what has been won, and what is still being fought for. As well as poetry, the anthology also includes fierce essays re-drawing the map of British poetry by 10 of the 30 poets, touching on the most significant topics of our time.This anthology offers a timely insight into British poetry and how the voice of the ‘other’ continues to take centre-stage in pivotal times.
Mapping the Future is edited by poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, editor of the second two Ten anthologies in The Complete Works series, with Dr Nathalie Teitler, director of The Complete Works, with a foreword by Bernardine Evaristo.
9 Foreword by Bernardine Evaristo
12 Introduction by Nathalie Teitler
18 Preface by Karen McCarthy Woolf
ROUND 3
Raymond Antrobus
25 The Perseverance
27 Horror Scene as Black English Royal (Captioned)
Leo Boix
29 A Latin American Sonnet
29 A Latin American Sonnet III
30 Eucalyptus
Omikemi Natacha Bryan
32 Sirens
33 Home
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
35 Declaration
36 Pandemic vs. Black Folk
37 Dreaming is a Form of Knowledge Production
Will Harris
39 In June, outrageous stood the agons
40 The Seven Dreams of Richard Spencer
42 Scene Change
44 Take the origin of banal
Ian Humphreys
47 The grasshopper warblers song
48 Swifts and the Awakening City
50 The wood warblers song
Momtaza Mehri
52 Fledglings
54 I AM BRINGING THE HISTORY OF THE KITCHEN SINK INTO OUR BEDROOM AND YOU
CANT STOP ME
55 Imperatives
Yomi ode
57 Exhibition 2.0
59 12:05 in North London, Thinking about Kingsley Smith
60 An Ode to Bruv, Ting, Fam and, on Occasion, Cuz & My Man
Degna Stone
63 Walltown Crags
63 Proof of Life on Earth
65 over {prep., adv}
Jennifer Lee Tsai
67 About Chinese Women
71 The Yellow Woman
ROUND 2
Mona Arshi
75 Yellows
76 February
78 Arrivals
79 from My Little Sequence of Ugliness
80 from The Book of Hurts
Jay Bernard
82 Clearing
Kayo Chingonyi
86 Kumukanda
86 The Colour of James Browns Scream
87 Nyaminyami: water can crash and water can ow
88 Nyaminyami: epilogue
Rishi Dastidar
90 The Brexit Book of the Dead
91 Time takes a moment
92 Neptunes concrete crash helmet
Edward Doegar
94 from The English Lyric I
94 from The English Lyric II
95 After After Remainder
Inua Ellams
97 from The Half God of Rainfall (Act One, Book I)
Sarah Howe
102 Sometimes I think
103 Relativity
104 from In the Chinese Ceramics Gallery
Adam Lowe
109 Gingerellas Date
111 Elegy for the Latter-day Teen Wilderness Years
112 Reynardine for Red
Eileen Pun
115 Studio Apartment: Eyrie
116 Longways / Crosswise
Warsan Shire
120 Backwards
ROUND 1
Rowyda Amin
125 Genius Loci
125 We Go Wandering at Night and Are Consumed by Fire
Malika Booker
130 My Ghost in the Witness Stand
Janet Ko-Tsekpo
135 Yellow Iris
136 Streets
136 The Wilton Diptych
Mir Mahfuz Ali
138 Isnt
139 My Salma
Nick Makoha
142 Hollywood Africans
143 Mecca
144 JFK
Shazea Quraishi
147 The Taxidermist attends to her work
149 In the Branches of your Voice
Roger Robinson
152 Halibun for the Onlookers
153 Woke
153 Lisbon
154 Returnee
155 Blood
Denise Saul
157 The Room Between Us
158 A Daughters Perspective
159 Stone Altar
160 Golden Grove
Seni Seneviratne
162 Lightkeeping
163 The Devils Rope
164 The Weight of the World
Karen McCarthy Woolf
166 Excerpts from Un/Safe
ESSAYS
Raymond Antrobus
173 Bird Song and Resonance
Mona Arshi
179 Writing through a Pandemic
Leo Boix
185 Multilingual Writing and Translation: A Poetics of Resistance
Jay Bernard
190 Manifesto: Stranger in the archives
Malika Booker
194 She Will Name Herself Ghost: She Will Haul Up a Poetic Courtroom and
There Shall Be a Reckoning
Rishi Dastidar
205 Wanted: a screwball poetics. On why we should try to nd comedy in
poetry
Will Harris
216 Bad Dreams
Nick Makoha
218 The Black Metic
Momtaza Mehri
224 An Emptying: A Gathering
Karen McCarthy Woolf
228 It is lovely whenDiaspora poetics & the zuihitsu
Inua Ellams
239 On time, money and music
246 Acknowledgements
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf is the author of two poetry collections and the editor of seven literary anthologies. Shortlisted for the Forward Felix Dennis and Jerwood Prizes, her debut An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014) tells the story of losing a son in childbirth and was an Observer Book of the Year. Her second, Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet, 2017), explores gentrification, the city and the sacred, and was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry. In 2019 she moved to Los Angeles as a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar and Writer in Residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA exploring the relationship between poetry, law and the impacts of capitalism on black, brown and indigenous bodies. She is a fellow of The Complete Works, a nationwide professional development programme committed to creating more cultural diversity in mainstream poetry publishing; was included in its associated anthology, Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word (2010); and went on to edit the subsequent Bloodaxe anthologies, Ten: The New Wave (2014) and Ten: Poets of the New Generation (2017), also co-editing Mapping the Future: The Complete Works (2023) with Nathalie Teitler. After returning to the UK, 2021 took her to Brazil as an artist in residence at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia where she was researching new work that explores sugar and its cultural and material legacies. Nathalie Teitler works across the fields of arts, activism and academia. Born in Buenos Aires, she holds a PhD in Latin American Poetry (Kings College London, 2000). She has run literature programmes promoting diversity in the UK for over 20 years, founding the first national mentoring and translation programmes for writers living in exile, and is the Director of The Complete Works. In 2015 she founded the worlds first poetry-dance company, Dancing Words, which produces live pieces and films which have been shown at festivals around the world. Nathalie is the co-founder of Invisible Presence, a national programme developing British Latino writers. She co-edited Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers (flipped eye, 2019), the first major anthology of UK-based writers of Latin American heritage, with Nii Ayikwei Parkes, and Mapping the Future: The Complete Works (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) with Karen McCarthy Woolf. She was appointed Projects Manager for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships in 2018, and has been a director of Bloodaxe Books since 2021.
