Shortlisted for the Live Canon Collection Prize 2025.
Shortlisted for the Cinnamon Press Literary Awards 2024
Shortlisted for the iOTA Shot Pamphlet Awards 2024.
Longlisted for the Plaza Poetry Prize 2024.
Finalist in The Snowbound Chapbook Award 2023.
Shortlisted for Wigtown’s Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize 2023.
Some Things I Do Not Know
A luminous work of mourning, written after the loss of the author's best friend to suicide. Published by Shearsman Books in 2026.
‘These immensely moving poems offer a tender, speculative reimagining of the last moments of a life alongside a wholly original account of grief. Amid tragedy, there is also light and humour, and this is when you know youre in the care of a writer who can tell the truth.’
—Anna Metcalfe, author of Chrysalis
‘This astonishing collection of tender elegies is alive and unflinching. Allen's poems are acts of devotion: intimate and erudite, intricate and self-questioning. They reveal how words both fail and sustain us in the aftermath of loss" —Laura Theis, author of Introduction to Cloud Care
‘Read this book when you want to be held, but don't know how. Here is a companion, to hold your questions' hand.’
—Brian Sonia-Wallace, Poet Laureate of West Hollywood
‘Profoundly holy and utterly sacred. The opening sequence honestly left me breathless.’ —Andrés N. Ordorica, author of Holy Boys
Twenty Twenty:
Treatments for Cut Flowers
‘I want to say right away that Treatment for Cut Flowers is a truly wonderful book. Deeply moving, beautifully written and heart-breaking. I cannot get over it... I began it this morning and I have lived with it all afternoon and all night. It is a remarkable book, the best book of poetry I have read for a long time and I have been reading a lot of poetry lately, giving up on novels and short stories. I kept marking with a pencil so many pages in the top left-hand corner. It is I think one of the most tender and loving and truthful books I have read for a long time.’
— Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient
Chosen out of 12,000 entries in the Erbacce Prize for Poetry.
Finalist in the Malahat Review Open Season Poetry Award 2021. Shortlisted for the 2021 Jane Martin Poetry Prize.
Longlisted for the Dead Cat Poetry Prize 2021.
Highly commended in the Wells Festival of Literature Prize 2021.
Read more on the Poetry and Covid website, which fosters and supports public conversation about poetry as a response to Covid-19.
‘Treatment for Cut Flowers reveals the power that can be found in offering up the personal. The book is a rare, intimate glance behind the curtain of mourning and remembering. Rooted in but transcending the year of its title, it offers up a chorus of voices that are able to serve as a light for our darkest moments.’ Sam Moore, All my teachers died of AIDS
‘Arthur Allen writes about grief with great honesty, generosity and beauty. In the "season / when all friends may and do die daily", this is a timely and necessary book of finely crafted poetry for everyone reeling from the loss of someone of "extraordinary dearness". These poems make you want to memorize and treasure lines on every page, and draw you to return and marvel at them again and again.’
Laura Theis, How to extricate yourself
The Nurseryman
‘An extraordinary debut that combines the awed wonder of early seafarers with a freshness and buoyancy that is essentially 21st century. Alternating between the late sixteenth century ‘FRAGMENTARY records of a Roote Gatherer, practiced of alchemical craft & in the spiritual use of fruit trees…’, lyrical meditations on the beauty of nature, and notes on the marvels encountered during the voyage, The Nurseryman takes us on a startlingly original odyssey that is at once an homage to the past as well as being a prescient ‘fable for the present.’
Jenny Lewis, author of Gilgamesh Retold
Longlisted, the Welsh International Poetry Book Award 2020.
Winner, the Eyelands Book Awards Poetry Prize 2019.
Third Place, Charter Oak Award for Best Historical 2019.
The Voyage of a Novel in Verse: An Interview with Arthur Allen.
Buy it here from Kernpunkt Press.
The Nurseryman is no mere survey of the intrepidity, hubris and horror associated with the northward course of old empire: far from enacting a parasitic relation to historical, scientific and folkloric corpora, Allen’s sinuous polyvocal navigation of manifold formal and discursive realms restores to intimate proximity the specters of long gone voyagers.
I.S. Rowley, The Undeliverable
Here Birds Are
‘I have not read anything like this, so intimate and also vast. These are wonderful poems, truly moving and beautifully written, with a great variousness in them.’
- Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient
Semi-finalist, the Claudia Emerson Chapbook Award 2016.
Highly-commended, the Fools for Poetry Chapbook Competition 2016.
Poems from the pamphlet were selected as finalists for the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize 2017 and the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize 2017, and long-listed for the Canberra International Poetry Prize.
Buy it here from Green Bottle Press.