Small Hands

Winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection Mona Arshis debut collection, 'Small Hands', introduces a brilliant and compelling new voice. At the centre of the book is the slow detonation of grief after her brothers death but her work focuses on the whole variety of human experience: pleasure, hardship, tradition, energised by language which is in turn both tender and risky. Often startling as well as lyrical, Arshis poems resist fixity; there is a gentle poignancy at work here which haunt many of the poems. This is humane poetry. Arshis is a daring, moving and original voice.