Shooting to Kill, the second poetry collection by ex-con poet Nick Moss following the Koestler Award-winning poems of Swear Down (Smokestack Books, 2021), is a fine example of poetry as resistance. The book confronts state violence and terrorism in the UK, and in the Middle East, and gives vital voice to their victims. Poems depicting the gritty reality of domestic prison life are juxtaposed with devastatingly powerful poems of horrified document on the ongoing carnage in the carpet-bombed open prison that is the Gaza Strip (or what's left of it).

The more polemical poems are interspersed with excerpts from speeches and articles, the platitudes and icy rhetoric of politicians, that jostle for dominance of traumatic narrative. Shooting to Kill is political poetry at its most relevant, powerful and uncompromising.

Shooting to Kill, Poems by Nick Moss, ISBN9781912710713, £12, available here.