Poetry Club: Leo Boix And Mona Arshi
Join us in the intimate setting of The Coronet Theatre’s bar for an evening of powerful new poetry from two award-winning voices, Leo Boix and Mona Arshi. Both poets draw on deeply personal histories and urgent global concerns, weaving language that is at once intimate and expansive. From Boix’s dazzling sonnets of memory, migration and love, to Arshi’s lyrical meditations on silence, survival and the voices of women long unheard, this edition of Poetry Club promises an evening of discovery, connection and resonant truth-telling.
Leo Boix’s Southernmost: Sonnets and Mona Arshi’s Mouth will be available for purchase and signature in the bar after the reading where all are welcome to stay for a drink and chat to the poets. Books can be bought online when booking tickets or in person at Box Office on the day. Online purchases will be held at Box Office for collection at the event.
LEO BOIX
In Southernmost: Sonnets, Leo Boix takes us on a spellbinding voyage through time and imagination, from the Argentina of his birth – “the end of the world, the antipode” – to a new life in England.
Unearthing old grief, Boix explores the continent he left behind: colonialism’s violent legacies, dissidents disappeared by the junta, a young mother’s mysterious decline, and the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father cannot bear to acknowledge it. At the same time, the sonnets tell a story about love, through Boix’s intimate and original evocation of gay marriage.
Restlessly intelligent, intoxicated by Latin America’s landscapes and folklore, this virtuosic collection reveals the world’s interconnecting threads.
Leo Boix is a Latinx poet, translator and educator. His first English collection, The Ballad of the Happy Immigrant (2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Southernmost: Sonnets, his second, is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He has received the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize (2018), the Keats-Shelley Prize (2019) and a PEN Award (2021).
“Compelling… Beautiful and unsentimental” – Daily Telegraph
MONA ARSHI
In Mouth, Mona Arshi charts the movements and migrations that alter our lives – from child to adult, from home to elsewhere, from grief to what lies beyond. A work of great strength and delicacy, it is a collection where beauty, pity and cruelty intertwine.
At its heart lies Palace, a sequence that takes overlooked women from the edges of Greek tragedy and places them centre stage, telling unforgettable stories of survival and loss. These voices resonate with women navigating the terrible realities of war today. Throughout, Mouth meditates on the limits of speech and the unexpected power of silence: “sometimes / language picks us clean”. Mouth is the Poetry Book Society’s Autumn Choice.
Arshi’s debut, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. She has since published Dear Big Gods (2019) and the novel Somebody Loves You (shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, 2021). She is Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool, Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and co-editor of Nature Matters (forthcoming 2025). Before turning to poetry, she worked as a human rights lawyer, often representing refugees and women fleeing domestic violence.
“Delicately lethal; sharp-eyed and tender” – Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young
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