Author: Emery, Chris

Poetry

Published on 3 November 2025 by Salt Publishing in the United Kingdom as part of ‘the Salt Modern Poets’ series.

Paperback | 80 pages, Not illustrated
129 x 197 x 8 | 80g

Wonder asks how we live with history, with absence, with longing and how we keep returning to the difficult beauty of the world.

In his fifth collection of poems, Chris Emery explores the nature of wonder in its various forms of awe, reflection, and the marvellous. The poems range from the absurd, to the historical, the comic and fantastical dropping us into stories and places we never quite expect.

The collection considers where and how we live: in the city, in the country, on the coast, or elsewhere and the strange lives we endure in often disparate communities, connected to each other through history and nature, and sometimes separated by it.

As with Emerys previous work, the poems reveal the intimate and fleeting in human experience, and can delve into the mundane, reverie or dreamscape, each lyric serving to illustrate the joy of common experience, all expressed in musical and arresting language that never avoids the freight of emotion.