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Haunting the Black Air
From the Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022
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Haunting the Black Air
Narrated by:
Anthony Joseph
Buy Now for ₹377.22
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Narrated by:
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Anthony Joseph
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Written by:
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Anthony Joseph
'A polyphonic exploration of memory, diaspora and sound' ROMALYN ANTE
'A kaleidoscope of image and word-power . . . A vital addition to the canon' MAGGIE HARRIS
'A work of rare formal daring and spiritual depth' PETER GIZZI
From the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning author of Sonnets for Albert comes a dextrous and versatile new collection spanning the emotional spectrum of unabashed joy and crippling grief
With musicality and verve, beloved poet and musician Anthony Joseph undertakes a bold new work, excavating the complex nature of feeling. Across London, New York, Trinidad and beyond, whether a funeral in New Cross or a house party in Mount Lambert, Joseph brings heart, soul and verbal ingenuity to the act of unifying life's beautiful fragments.
'Joseph is both a faithful heir and an agnostic rebel' ALI ALIZADEH
'An exceptional talent' BLAKE MORRISON©2026 Anthony Joseph (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic Reviews
Joseph is rightly celebrated for being able to do two seemingly contradictory things at once: to write with an incantatory sense of performance, and to engage with avant-garde cultural theory. These are poems that fit in a packed auditorium as much as they do in a 10,000-word scholarly article on formal innovation, which is something of a singular achievement . . . Approach Haunting the Black Air without intimidation, tune in to its frequency, and let it carry you through its dancing and lamenting, right through to its wistful and consoling final lines (Luke Kennard)
Joseph's follow-up to the T. S. Eliot prize-winning Sonnets for Albert sees his poetic approach become more radical. He pays homage to avant garde writers such as Will Alexander and Nathaniel Mackey . . . Joseph's unabashed lyricism shines through, finding beauty on dancefloors, city streets and in Trinidadian landscapes (Rishi Dastidar)
Anthony Joseph’s Haunting the Black Air is a polyphonic exploration of memory, diaspora and sound. Blending poetry, history and Caribbean cosmology, the collection moves with the rhythms of jazz, weaving personal narrative with shifting language. This work is attentive to breath, silence, resonance – and listens as much as it speaks (ROMALYN ANTE, author of Antiemetic for Homesickness)
Anthony Joseph writes as if language itself were a drumhead stretched tight across history, each line struck with precision, improvisation and risk. The gorgeous poems in Haunting the Black Air bend and fracture, accumulate and release, carrying grief, beauty, violence and love in the same breath where intellect and instinct dissolve into rhythm, and rhythm, in turn, becomes a form of knowledge. The result is a poetics that is as rigorous as it is sensuous, as grounded in lived experience as it is open to the surreal and the visionary. This is a work of rare formal daring and spiritual depth – a book of friendship that enlarges what poetry can do, how it can sound and how it can carry the weight of the world while still singing (PETER GIZZI, author of Fierce Elegy)
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