Aurora Leigh (1856) is an epic poem by English Romantic poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Described by Browning as “a novel in verse,” Aurora Leigh is primarily the story of its titular heroine, an intelligent woman and ambitious poet whose talent is matched only by her skill for self-doubt. Although it is narrated in the first person, the poem also concerns itself with the character Marian Erle, a woman rescued from a life on the streets by Aurora’s cousin Romney, who loves both women in complex and varying ways. Recognized as one of the most important poems of the nineteenth century, Aurora Leigh is notable for its use of the epic form—traditionally masculine, and concerned with subjects such as war, history, and the gods—in order to tell a story centered on talented and uniquely independent women.

Born in Florence to a Tuscan mother and English father, and encouraged from a young age to study the classics and learn Latin and Greek, Aurora Leigh develops not only the desire to become a famous poet, but the talent and intelligence to achieve her dream. What she has in ambition and skill, however, she lacks in confidence, and, after moving to England as a teenager, Aurora struggles to make a name for herself in the competitive literary environment of London. While in England, she meets her cousin Romney Leigh, a dedicated and idealistic social worker who dreams of using his inheritance and family estate—Leigh Hall—to alleviate the suffering of the lower classes. Aurora Leigh is a dramatic tale of romance involving Marian Erle, Lady Waldemar—a beautiful aristocrat—and Aurora herself. As each of these women navigates their relationship with Romney, and as Romney tries and fails to bring meaningful aid to the poor, Aurora finds that her art means nothing if she cannot learn to love herself as much as she loves others.

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With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Winner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.

Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions captures a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.

By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.

Erasing Frankenstein showcases a creative exchange between federally incarcerated women and members of the prison-education think tank Walls to Bridges Collective at the Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI) in Kitchener, Ontario, and graduate and undergraduate students from the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Working collaboratively by long-distance mail, the artists and contributors made the first-ever poetic adaptation of Frankenstein, turning it into a book-length erasure poem. An erasure poem is an example of "found art," a poem created by piggybacking on an existing text; the words that are not part of the poem are erased or blacked out, and what is left is the poem. This book presents the original erasure poem alongside reflections from participants on the experience.

Covering the most productive period of J.H. Prynne's career, this new volume collects all of the recent poetry of Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. Prynne's austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they are in the life work of J.H. Prynne. 

When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005, followed by a further seven along with a group of uncollected poems to the third edition of Poems (2015).

The decade since Poems (2015) has been the most productive period of Prynne’s life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2024. To have added these to a fourth edition of Poems would have more than doubled the size of that volume. Poems 2016–2024 is therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the mostly unchanged contents of 36 texts written since Poems (2015), from Each to Each (2017) to Alembic Forest (2024), as well as the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022). The 26 Impromptus comprising Memory Working, originally published by Face Press in three separate editions in 2020 and 2021, appear here as a complete sequence.

A brand new collection from award-winning poet Marianne Chan. 

A coming-of-age narrative, Leaving Biddle City details one Filipina American speaker’s experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia mythologized as “Biddle City.” Through prose poems, pantoums, ballads, flattened haikus, and thematic autobiographies, Chan maps a territory of intergenerational conflict, racial alienation, and memory and forgetfulness. What’s achieved is a work of play and meticulous beauty, a collection that reframes how we may understand ourselves, our histories, and the places where we are from.