New and Collected Hell by Shane McCrae; The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha; Father’s Father’s Father by Dane Holt; Hardly War by Don Mee Choi; Minx by Karen Downs-Barton

New and Collected Hell by Shane McCrae (Corsair, £12.99)
This volume brings together all the poems where McCrae meshes Dante with metamorphic machines from the world of Transformers to deliver a distinctly American hell. Its Americanness may explain why the cover shows a raven straight out of Poe, but don’t be fooled – McCrae’s guide through hell is a big grey robot seagull called Law: “fucking shithead follow me”. As well as borrowings from Dante and his translators, McCrae’s eclectic mind recycles Kafka in a giant hundred-legged beetle with an orange belly, a different voice calling out of every leg: “look at me I’m a huge success you / Want to know how I got to be where / I am?” It’s refreshing to return to Dantean satire, and here the poet’s target is corporate America. God, whose squeaky voice sometimes comes out of the seagull’s belly, is “the boss”, and at the very heart of hell we meet a stream of bank executives, all queueing up to walk into a coffin where their bodies are, in a witty contrapasso, quite literally liquidated – POP! – each suit emerging with “a pink mush dripping quietly inside it”.