Michael Zand

Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across... A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers 'acting on a tip-off' and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape... An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery - first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking - writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention... These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe's new underclass - its refugees. While those with "citizenship" enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain's policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims' stories in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

The Messier Objects are a catalogue of astro-nomical bodies discovered and published by Charles Messier in 1771. In this new collection of poems, Michael Zand re-frames these objects as totemic symbols that celebrate the creative and social diversity of the human experience. "The Messier Objects" are thus meditations on the colour and complexity of the universe, and a rejection of a perceived drift towards cultural polarisation, simplification and standardisation.

One of five chapbooks published by Shearsman in the summer of 2012, The Wire is a collection of new work by the author of Lion (2010), consisting of the long title sequence and a some shorter poems.

'Lion' is a narrative of sorts, but it is necessarily disruptive and disjunctive: ideas and literary structures are questioned, even the fixed boundaries of language itself are challenged. 'Lion' is a meditation on the role of kinship in the development of cultural identity and the importance of rites of passage as cultural artifacts in the modern world. Ultimately, 'lion' is about the impact of the loss of identity amongst the Iranian diaspora, and the creation of myths of origin.