Doubleday buys Ella Risbridger collection for 'new moment in poetry'

The Pool columnist and author Ella Risbridger has collated a poetry collection for Doubleday titled Set Me On Fire: A Poem for Every Kind Of Feeling, to be published next autumn.

The book "promises an anthology for a new moment in poetry”, Doubleday said, and offers "a collection of fresh, vibrant voices from poets all over the globe". 

Lizzy Goudsmit, commissioning editor at Transworld, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to the title by from Daisy Parente at Lutyens & Rubenstein. Doubleday will publish Set Me On Fire in hardback in autumn 2019.

"These are poems about eating and kissing and having too many feelings, about being outside and inside and loving someone so much you think you might die of it,” the publisher's synopsis reads. "They are about break-ups and getting back together and oh-god-it’s-complicated-don’t-ask-me moments. They are about wanting and waiting and having, about grieving and life after death and the end of the world.  They are, in other words, about being alive.”

Risbridger is a writer and poet who has written for the Guardian, Prospect, Grazia and Stylist, among others, as well as various regular columns for the Pool including, most recently, ‘My Life in Poems’. Meanwhile her debut, a cookbook, Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For, will be published by Bloomsbury next January. 

She revealed that the book started life as a birthday present for her best friend “who hates poetry”.

Risbridger said: "Happily, I have convinced her that poetry can be so much more than what we learned at school- and now, ideally, I’d like to convince everyone else too. We’re living in a mad, thrilling golden age of poetry, and I’m really looking forward to being able to reach out to the extraordinary poets who shape my life and asking them to come on board with Transworld.

She added: "So often poetry anthologies are dominated by straight dead white men, so I’m especially thrilled to be able to bring so many poets of colour, LGBTQ poets and female poets together in this book. These poems are radical, heart-breaking, hilarious and somehow completely true. I love them all."

Goudsmit says: "This is such a smart, moving, charming anthology. Ella somehow finds the perfect poems to illustrate the feelings that make up our everyday, the good and the bad, those we know well and those that are hard to describe. Her annotations are insightful and honest and thoughtfully explore the brilliant, powerful, devastating moments that make up a life. I couldn’t be more excited to publish this next year."