Corsair signs final ‘luminous’ poetry collection by the late Saskia Hamilton

Corsair Poetry has announced it will publish All Souls, the final “luminous” poetry collection by the former prize-winning US poet, editor and teacher Saskia Hamilton. 

Hamilton died in June of a "devastating" cancer, the publisher said, through which she wrote, edited and worked on the poems in the collection. Deputy publisher Sarah Castleton acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Katie Dublinski at Graywolf Press, with publication scheduled for Ocotber 2023. 

Corsair says the poems and lyric fragments in All Souls transform compassion, fear, expectation, and memory into art of the highest order. “Judgement is suspended as the poems make an inventory of truths that carry us through night’s reckoning with mortal hope into daylight. Tenderness, courage, refusal, and acceptance infuse this work, illuminating what Elizabeth Hardwick called ‘the universal unsealed wound of existence’."

Castleton said: “This is a tender, revelatory collection of extraordinary courage, charting the small everyday moments of our daily lives and calling attention to the beauty of the ordinary world. With these poems Saskia shows how we make the unbearable, somehow bearable.”

Hamilton was an advisory editor at the Paris Review, and an editor of several works of poetry and letters, including The Dolphin Letters: Elizabeth Hardwick (Farrar Straus & Giroux).