Notes on The Sonnets

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021
Longlisted for the Rathbones folio prize
A Poetry Book society Recommendation

Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare''s 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party.

A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar.

Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, No...