Preorder: Publication day 12 Jan 2026
 
'...I’ve learned/ 
There are some things you can fake:/ 
Blondeness, wit, intelligence: / 
Marriage.'
 
In her debut poetry collection, These Are the Things We Have Lost, Janice Warman chronicles a journey from her South African childhood to the landscapes of motherhood with unflinching honesty. From pregnancy 'high on hormones and Pellegrino', to second weddings, these poems capture intimate moments of love and loss.
 
With a journalist’s precision and a poet’s sensitivity, Warman's voice moves between continents and decades. A celebration of life’s joys and an elegy for what inevitably slips through our grasp.
 
"It’s a hard thing to put your friend into the ground.
It closes over her as if she is something it has found
and wants; her deep chuckle, her sideways glance,
unerring way of seeing through bullshit, 
the clean dance of her mind."
 
About the Author
 
Janice Warman is an award-winning writer of YA fiction, non-fiction and poetry, financial journalist, and a creative writing tutor at Share Community for disabled adults, based in East Sussex. Her poetry has been published in magazines in the UK and South Africa, in The Hey Nonny Handbook, the women’s literary survival guide (Harriman House), in Ballet, a poetic and photographic tribute to her mother (Susakpress/Spiralbound) and in English textbooks in South Africa. She is a past winner of the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society Folio Competition. 
 
Janice Warman says... “Growing up in apartheid South Africa affected me profoundly; this world has fed into my work as a journalist, non-fiction and Young Adult writer, but has never penetrated more deeply than into my poetry. Being a feminist in a country that was inherently violent towards women, particularly black women – birthing and growing your own children and how that takes you back to your own childhood in that faraway place – grieving your mother while she is still alive and suffering with dementia thousands of miles away. Poetry is the means by which I write most deeply and passionately about my real life, the life that runs below my work life like an underground river. The things that demand that I take up my pen.”