Something New Alternative Poems for Alternative Weddings

By: Caroline Bird

Published by Pan Macmillan, 2025-09-09

At Nigerian weddings, attendees ‘spray’ the dancing newlyweds with bank notes, money to be put towards their new life together. The breaking of the glass is a famous Jewish wedding tradition, and of course everyone knows about things old, borrowed and blue. The list of nuptial traditions is endless. Yet when it comes to finding the right poem for your celebration, too often the same old options appear. Something New reinvigorates the wedding-poem anthology with one hundred fresh and exciting choices to reflect the weddings of today.

For these poets, the weight of history is an invitation to elaborate on what editors Caroline Bird and Rachel Long call ‘the endless uniqueness of the heart’, to rewrite and reimagine everything a union of two people can be. Ranging from the sincere to the surreal, these poems celebrate marriage equality, joyful idiosyncrasy, and the simple domesticity of married life.

Ian Duhig and Clare Shaw offer slant interpretations of the wedding vow. ‘I want to get high my whole life with you’, declares Hera Lindsay Bird, serenading the manic romance of industrial carpet outlet stores and leather hot-pants. Written in 1992, Essex Hemphill’s proclamation that ‘Every time we kiss / we confirm the new world coming’ remains as prescient as it does defiant. Each of the poems in Something New gestures at the true and eternal purpose of a wedding: an invitation to bear witness to love in all its forms.