Lobe

Winner of the 2024 New Poets Prize, judged by Holly Hopkins

A gold bangle, a barber’s shop and Diana Princess of Wales in an Indian wedding video. In Lobe, Cia Mangat navigates what we inherit and what we leave behind in a book which plays with private and public mythologies. These poems create a world of love and surveillance, where Diana’s revenge dress prepares for the paparazzi and aunties gossip in the threading parlor. Bodies are pierced and cut from magazines while the wedding halls beckon. Lobe is a book of resistance and reimagining, where Di escapes her buttercream wedding, a woman shaves her head and ‘george michael will sing every song you have ever wanted      to you /directly      accompanied by hundreds of thousands of people you love’.

Published May 2025.

Lobe! I love it. What a gorgeous debut. Playful, original, funny and beautiful all at once, these poems sing with the small intimacies of women’s lives and of family dynamics as well as navigating the journey to living in your body and your life on your own terms. Sublime. – Cecilia Knapp

Southall Broadway, a whole lot of aunties, and Princess Diana coalesce, in Cia Mangat’s pamphlet, to comedic, tender and sharply felt ends. – Bhanu Kapil 

Reading Cia Mangat’s superb pamphlet is like standing in a room full of mirrors, looking at your face reflected infinitely from all angles, morphing back through generations, each self staring back at the others, asking, am I the real one? – Caroline Bird 

Punk, princess, scissor-sharp, jewellike, each poem is a riot, is a revelation. This is the collection every (immigrant) mother, auntie, and all of her nieces, some nephews, and closest confidants have been waiting to gossip about. A thrilling new voice in poetry! – Rachel Long

Cia Mangat’s Lobe invites the reader into the lives of her characters through carefully observed, thoughtful poems that resonate and shine. – Holly Hopkins