For more than a decade, the Barbican Young Poets programme has served as a base for experimentation, creative development and an ever-extending community of poetic practice. To Be Languaged Thus collects and celebrates work produced by poets of the 2023 cohort.


From horror movie tropes and hospital wards to the poetics of botany, a meditation on the colour blue, and many other points along the way, these poems stand as a compelling collective vision of what's possible in contemporary poetry.