To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on the links below. If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:

Philip Gross: The Thirteenth Angel
UK: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-thirteenth-angel-1310
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/the-thirteenth-angel/

Aleš Šteger: Burning Tongues: New & Selected Poems
UK: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/burning-tongues-1304
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/burning-tongues/

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Philip Gross: The Thirteenth Angel

Philip Gross’s new collection The Thirteenth Angel is shortlisted for the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize, the winner to be announced in January. He previously won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2009 for The Water Table. 

The Thirteenth Angel was recently named as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Winter 2022. This new collection deepens Philip Gross’s conversation between the metaphysical and the acutely physical, between the long view and the here and now.

Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol, and latterly South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 27th collection, The Thirteenth Angel (2022), is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022 and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It follows eleven previous books with Bloodaxe. He now lives in Penarth, South Wales.

‘Philip Gross’s The Thirteenth Angel is a book with its finger firmly on the pulse of the sounds of the contemporary world... Gross uses language which is precise and sharp one moment and then veers into a familiar colloquial style the next, which makes him intensely readable.’ – Mona Arshi, PBS Selector, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2022

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Aleš Šteger: Burning Tongues: New & Selected Poems

Aleš Šteger was born in 1973 in Ptuj, Slovenia, where he grew up, then part of the former Yugoslavia ruled by Tito, which gained its independence when he was 18. He published his first collection at the age of 22, Chessboard of Hours in 1995, and was immediately recognised as a key voice in the new generation of post-Communist poets not only in Slovenia but throughout central Europe.

Notable for its moral engagement, Šteger’s poetry is acutely precise in its observation and concentration as well as multi-layered and technically versatile, ingenious and inventive, adventurous and playful yet serious in intention. Above all, his poems are incessantly curious in their investigations which the reader is invited to share – and he loves to ambush the reader with the unexpected.

His influences are mainly European, including the Serbian master poet Vasko Popa, as well as German and Spanish-language poets he has translated into Slovenian, such as Bachmann, Benn, Huchel, Neruda and Vallejo. He has added his own strand of writing to the distinctively European genre of prose poems in pieces which describe everyday objects in minute terms, only to explode in the imagination through what he perceives in them. He is also known for his prose books and experimental writing including his Written on Site pieces.

Burning Tongues, his first major poetry book to be published in the UK, is translated by Brian Henry.  Aleš Šteger has read at festivals all over Europe, including at the Ledbury and Newcastle Poetry Festivals in 2019.

'Šteger has become one of the most significant European poets of the new century.' - Carolyn Forché