Rites & Trials

Rites & Trials: Coming of Age Poetry is a charged walk through the years when everything changes and nothing feels simple. From latchkey kids and playground humiliations to queer awakenings, family breakdown, faith, friendship and first loves that don't quite survive the night bus home, this anthology sits in the messy middle of growing up and refuses to look away.

Curated by editor and poet Alan Parry, the fifth volume in The Broken Spine's Slimlines series gathers distinctive contemporary voices from the UK, Ireland, the US and beyond. These poets move between school corridors, cul-de-sacs, church pews, student halls, hospital wards and nightclub queues, mapping the small decisions and private catastrophes that shape who we become. The result is a collection that feels at once intimate and panoramic: snapshots of youth that carry all the weight of adulthood pressing in.

Across its pages you'll find:

• Coming-of-age in all its registers - the giddy anticipation of first kisses that never quite happen, the sting of bullying and exclusion, the thrill of finding your people at gigs and in back rooms, the strange relief of leaving certain streets behind.

• Queer, neurodivergent and outsider perspectives that treat identity, desire and gender not as "issues" but as lived experience, stitched through the fabric of ordinary days.

• Poems that tackle trauma without exploitation - confronting abuse, suicide, grief and mental health with clear-eyed honesty and care, rather than spectacle.

• Formally varied, fiercely readable work - from narrative pieces and lyric fragments to experimental monologues and sharp, voice-driven poems that beg to be read aloud.

• A through-line of music, film and pop culture, showing how songs, books and screens become lifelines when everything else feels unstable.

The collection opens with Parry's own "Summer," a tender, uneasy meditation on football, gender expression and secrecy, and moves through standout pieces like Catrin Mari's hospital-tight "Walk," Molli Russell's eerie woodland encounters, Sam Szanto's boarding-school reckoning, Katie Jenkins' Larkin-inflected "Wild Oats," Mana Misaghi's gender-questioning "Narcissus," and Evalyn Lee's devastating "How Trauma Works." Together with many other poets, they build a chorus that captures the shock, absurdity, danger and possibility of youth.

As part of The Broken Spine's acclaimed Slimlines series, which includes titles such as After Hours: Beat Culture Made New, Last Light: Apocalypse Poetry, High Rise: Brutalist Poetry, and Glow: City at Night Poetry, Rites & Trials continues the press's commitment to politically aware, emotionally direct, and stylistically bold poetry. The design by Alan Parry and Andrew James Lloyd, paired with a striking cover image, makes this a collection you'll want both to read and to keep on show.

Whether you're a reader of contemporary poetry, a fan of coming-of-age stories, or someone who recognises their own adolescence in its bruised humour and hard-won tenderness, this anthology offers pages you'll return to.

Rites & Trials: Coming of Age Poetry is for anyone who has ever felt too young, too old, too strange, too sensitive - and has kept going anyway. Add it to your shelf and step back into the years that made you, with language sharp enough to cut and generous enough to heal.