Until recently, a wedding was no place for reinvention: everything from the location to the outfits to the language of the ceremony was decided by our particular cultures, religions and social expectations of gender and domestic roles; and of course, many of us were unable to get married at all. Now gay marriage is legal in Britain; heterosexual couples can have civil partnerships; we can get hitched in a yurt or a cave or on a rollercoaster.

But the old traditions die hard, and despite these apparent new freedoms, the word ‘wedding’ still retains so many connotations, controlling our imaginations in ways that can feel alienating or limiting. When it comes to the ‘wedding poem’, even a Star Trek themed do, with guests in bumpy skull-caps, can still translate the same old Shakespeare sonnet into Klingon.

This anthology aims to shake that up, featuring poems you won’t find on any ‘lists’ in your frantic Google search. Alternative poems for alternative weddings, be they small, huge, camp as Christmas, hilarious, glamorous, shot-gun, a third wedding held in a nursing home, or the low-key but profound culmination of a forty-year love. If you’re looking for a non-cringey wedding poem, or want to be reminded of the multiplicity of love, this is the book for you.

Caroline Bird’s selected poems, Rookie (2022), draws on two decades of work from one of the UK’s most popular poets. She won the Forward Prize for her collection The Air Year (2020), and has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2023.

Rachel Long is a writer and founder of the Octavia Poetry Collective for Women of Colour at the Southbank Centre in London. Her debut poetry collection, My Darling from the Lions, was published by Picador in 2020 and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Costa Book Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.