Launching The furthest island

“What a pleasure to discover Cherine El-Bash’s poems. Like swallows, they soar and dip between lands and languages, homes, losses, old and new loves. These are poems of depth and complexity, which urge us to think, feel and return again and again to them.”

Liz Berry

“Cherine El-Bash's poems seek the right words and story when different cultural experiences and languages are family inheritance. Silence is a character here, next to fulsome, lyrical expression. A fresh, exciting voice – one to watch.”

Ruth Stacey

“The furthest island brings together multiple strands and influences to give us poems that cast life and the surrounding world in a new light. Here, experiences are simultaneously familiar and strange, with unusual imagery and language used to powerful narrative and emotional effect. An unforgettable read.”

Sarah Leavesley, V. Press Prize judge

The furthest island is very nomadic and very rooted.

Winner of the V. Press Prize for Poetry 2024-25

ISBN: 978-1-7394122-5-8
32 pages
R.R.P. £6.99

A sample poem from The furthest island can be enjoyed below.

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The furthest island (with p&p options)

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On the day we moved to Finland

My mother was picking lice from my scalp

placing them one by one on my auntie’s kitchen table.

They tried to limp away but my sister was counting

            forty-three     and squeezing them 

between her eight-year-old fingers and the sixties wood.

It would be just us for three months.

I never thanked my cousin for the parasites –

to know my mother’s hands in my hair

her laughter in her mother’s tongue so close

to my own ears. She spoke words I’d forgotten

and she heard each one of mine.