Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
Highly Commended, 2026 Forward Prize for Best CollectionIn The Language of Now, Anne Caldwell crafts prose poems rooted in a northern sense of place - bogs and backstreets, weather and wild margins - while the wider world warms, falters and changes. These pieces thrive on juxtaposition: illness alongside birdsong, childhood memory beside urban grit, the tenderness of connection shadowed by pandemic distance. Caldwell’s lines move with the down-to-earth cadence of prose and the lifted music of poetry, catching small beauties without looking away.Real and fairytale braid together; memoir slips into myth; humans transform into birds; language is lost, recovered, remade. As the title poem notes, ’The language of now is short and full of gaps’ - and Caldwell turns those gaps into breathing space, where grief, humour and wonder can coexist. The result is intimate eco-poetics that feels both consoling and bracing, offering quiet resistance as it teaches us how to notice closely, again, right now. 6
