Caroline Bird: 8 books

In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her...

Extending the vigorous world she created in her previous collections, Caroline Bird’s The Hat-Stand Union is a book about isolated people. Some are isolated within a couple, some in a crowd, some have actively chosen to retreat, and others are frantically trying to join forces with something, anything:...

One tragedy Two parts Four explosive plays Agamemnon faces an impossible choice, he is a father commanded by the gods to sacrifice his daughter. In doing so, he will lose his wife, Clytemnestra and bury his child, Iphigenia. Ever present over his shoulder, the Chorus awaits Iphigenia’s...

Packed with wry comedy, satire, and wordplay, this collection of poems celebrates life as an early 20-something. The extraordinary verve and compassion of the verse reveals the anxiety of new responsibilities and contains a vast array of imagery, including prophetic videos, a moon colonized by bullies,...

The war is over. Beyond the prison walls, Troy and its people burn. Inside the prison, the city’s captive women await their fate. Stalking the antiseptic confines of its mother and baby unit is Hecuba, the fallen Trojan queen. But her grief at what has been before will soon be drowned out by the...

In this pitch-black comedy, fatal chemicals combine with ruthless ambition, biscuits, bureaucracy and moral ambiguity. Set in the near future, Britain has reinstated the death penalty. Relatives are weeping in the witness gallery, the journalist clicks her pen and the prison governor gives the thumbs...

Ferociously vital, savagely humorous, and self-mocking, this poetry collection focuses on a world that is inhabited by failed and successful relationships during the dizzying crisis of early adulthood, offering insight into the pleasures and pains of growing up.

An angry orphan escapes a grey town on the back of a hurricane. She lands in a mysterious country of tiny people and wicked witches, where the trees carry bazookas, the crows recite slam poetry, and a mouse can blow your head off. In just one day, this little girl revolutionizes an entire nation. She brings freedom, and colour. Her name is DOROTHY.