With Love, Grief and Fury contains love poems, for people and the planet. Grief poems brimming with compassion, mourning what was and contemplating what could be. And poems of fire and fury that will kick some ass, tell the truth and inspire change and hope.

Over thirty years after she first stormed the UK poetry scene, the trailblazing and award-winning writer Salena Godden has produced her most audacious and definitive collection to date. Like a big sister's arm around your shoulder, With Love, Grief and Fury is important and nourishing for the soul.

Prizes

Short-listed for Books Are My Bag Readers Awards - Poetry 2025 (UK)

Incredible . . . [Salena is] more glorious than ever, and this book again proves that she's a poet of the page as well as one who can command a stage . . . dashingly clever and full of wit, speaks from the heart and acts from there, too * * Buzz Mag * *
Heartfelt and surreal, uncompromising and tender, Godden holds the poem in the palm of her hand like a hummingbird -- JOELLE TAYLOR
Sheer brilliance, every verse a revelation! This book belongs amongst the classics, and Godden herself is one of the greatest living British poets -- NIKITA GILL
Godden's verses are firing on all cylinders and display how she is a master at arriving at universal emotional truths. Revelatory and heart stopping -- MONA ARSHI
Like a heart turned inside out . . . joyous and utterly revelatory -- EVIE WYLD
In these poems Salena reveals, with exquisite craft and tenderness, the sacred and profound -- HEIDI JAMES-DUNBAR
Read these poems then listen to Salena read these poems then go and watch Salena read these poems. She is a master of every incarnation this art form may take and I am constantly in awe of her. This collection brings so much joy and makes me determined to live more, lust more and love more -- HOLLIE MCNISH
One of the most fearless and beloved voices in contemporary literature; a writer across genres and a master of performance who brings sparks of energy to the stage in ways that are powerful and tender. Her heart beats loudly for the community. It's as though she has spun the world on its axis with this collection, noting the areas of anguish, the climate, people power and grief. With Love, Grief and Fury urges us, irrespective of race, class or gender to stay awake to the world, its beauty, its pain, its anger, and its resilience. Poems for the unheard that hold truth to power. They do not shy away from anguish or injustice, but within them there is love, wit, and the stubborn pulse of joy. To write and perform with such honesty is an act of bravery. To tell truths that may unsettle is to take on the sacrifice of activism, the knowledge that not every ear will welcome what must be said. Salena's poems are for all of us. They are an invitation to remember that whatever divides us, our humanity must never be forgotten * * Poetry Book Society * *
This is a book I will return to over and over and over again, a book everyone should have on their shelf. Salena's poems are all at once intimate and tender, vast and powerful, compelling, funny, delightful, precise, and always always bursting with life -- CECILIA KNAPP
This book is so hopeful, so full of life -- BABS GONS

Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage. Her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People's Book Prize, and was shortlisted at the British Book Awards and for the Gordon Burn Prize. Her most recent books include the literary childhood memoir, Springfield Road and poetry collections Pessimism is for Lightweights and With Love, Grief and Fury, which was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Award and received a Special Commendation from The Poetry Book Society. 'Dirty Old Men', published in WLGF, was highly commended by the Forward Poetry Prize 2025 in the Best Single Poem - Performed category. Her work has been shortlisted for the 4thWrite Short Story Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, Jerwood Compton Foundation and the Bridport Poetry Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.

salenagodden.co.uk | @salena.godden