SPAM DEEP CUTS 2025

[S P A M P R E S S P R E S E N T S: D E E P C U T S 2 0 2 5]

SPAM Deep Cuts returns for 2025! From 2018 - 2022 we asked our SPAM Zine, Press and Plaza contributors alongside dear poet pals to select a few choice titles to highlight the excellent work done in poetry over the last year. After a hiatus, SPAM returned for 2025 so it only felt apt to bring back this much-loved tradition. We know the difficulties faced by small presses at the moment and applaud the beautiful works being published nonetheless internationally and at home. We want to give these poets and publishers a much needed platform and to encourage you all to support them in anyway you can <33

At SPAM, we've had a busy past year, joined by Maya Uppal in January as Assistant Editor and starting our new in person reading series AFK (Away-From-Keyboard) at The Doublet in Glasgow. We've missed putting on regular nights and this new iteration allows us to curate a selection of readers (and now also sound artists) with a special zine available exclusively on the night with donations currently going to the North Gaza Fund. Our last AFK in November was an extra special one, featuring long-time SPAM legend Han alongside poets including River MacAskill, Suki Hollywood and again + again (Rosie Roberts and Alison Scott) as well as poetry karaoke! Keep your eyes peeled for future events as we'll have more in the new year!

On the Plaza, a new series, Digital Dreamland, was curated and edited by SPAM editor Maria and guest editor Maisie Florence Post, publishing a range of critical work, poetry, and hybrid writings from explorations of the poetics of memory online, digital distraction, hyperconnectivity, short fictions of glitched stops and starts, a poem between AI and a girl, and more.

Our two press publications this year were Life Sized by Leo Bussi and Sick Story by Maria Hardin; we felt extremely lucky to work with two writers we have long admired and to launch their books in Glasgow at Good Press and Mount Florida Books.

Next year will be SPAM's 10 year anniversary (ikr!!!) so we have some extra special events and publications upcoming, stay tuned! We continue to be extremely grateful for the support: to everyone that has performed for us over the years, bought pamphlets, written for us, attended an event, we love you all!

Thank you also to all contributors of Deep Cuts this year and prior! You can check out 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 and 2018!

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George Abraham & Noor Hindi (eds.), Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket Books)

Heaven Looks Like Us is a project of futurity as much as it is a project of memory, of sovereignty beyond statehood, of a Palestine free to imagine itself beyond annihilation, exile, occupation, genocide. A coming-together of poets across generations and geographies, living and martyred, the lyric of these poems interrogates the terms that dictate our consumption of literatures of resistance. Who is allowed to be called a poet of the resistance? The poets in this collection present the reader with contradictions, futurisms, feminisms, queerness, wryness, yearning, rage, humour, grief; Noor Hindi and George Abraham have put together an anthology of the Palestinian political lyric that insists on looking at the present as much the past. From Leena Aboutaleb’s hymn-like poetics tracing the hauntology of a broken national imagination, to the shock of late Dr. Refaat Alareer's self-prophesying lyric, "If I Must Die", written only to be fulfilled by his murder by the Zionist entity in his own home even as this anthology was being assembled, the collection marked, for me, a visible moment when the familiar machineries through which peace and violence have been widely narrated seizes, breaks, and can no longer be coerced to turn.

— Dipanjali Roy

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Batool Abu Akeem, 48KG (Tenement Press)

‘a final witness statement./ I carry it/ I rock it every day’—three lines from ‘12 Kg.    The scream’ that now I carry every day. Once you’ve read 48KG. you can’t not carry it. And everyone in my household has now read 48KG. It’s compelling poetry and it comes in numbered salvoes of facing page translation from the Arabic into English by the poet and three others. I can only comment on the English. It is stunning. Imagine the Death poems of Emily Dickinson or Paul Celan reforged in Gaza. The collection counts down in poems numbered from 48Kg to 1Kg, paradoxically voicing what it is to come to the point of visceral bodily annihilation where ‘I die without a voice’. This is life-changing, powerful, honed lyric, lyric as the only kind of shrapnel a body should absorb, the kind of lyric form forged under genocidal duress—‘no one should have to write their poetry from inside death’s dominion’, Max Porter observes ,‘but Batool Abu Akleen has done it’. And now 48KG is in the world, everyone should read it.

— Jane Goldman

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Yahya Al Hamarna, My Voice Cannot Be Bombed (Iskra Books)

The sharp, inhospitable contours of "dilapidated roofs, “prison cells”, “cruel dawns”, displacement tents, and incessant bombings form the lexicon of rubble from upon which Yahya Al Hamarna builds his buoyant imagination of a sovereign, dignified future for Palestinians in My Voice Cannot Be Bombed. Al Hamarna is a melodious, generous — and often direct — poet. “I miss sitting with the moon without missiles,” he writes. In his keen expressions of juxtaposition, his romance with a now-denied everyday existence (“my jars of olive oil”, “lentils”, hair combs”, a cup of coffee, a book of plays) comes into conversation with the lived reality of a writer enduring ongoing genocide. "I will meet you soon, GAZA," the collection begins, and the speaker walks us through the city as traces upon traces, in memory, in dreams, as resistance, as yearning, as a means to survive —an inventory of life for those who are, as yet, for now, despite it all, alive.

— Dipanjali Roy

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L. E. Aves, Vocalism, Measure, Concentration (Drest Aft)

This book floored me. It reads like a poetics handbook, a meditation journal, and a quietly radical manifesto all at once. Aves traces how breath becomes rhythm, how rhythm becomes thought, and how attention becomes a line of verse. I loved how the book moves between tiny, precise observations and sudden, sweeping statements about art and care. It made me want to listen harder to my own work, to other people, and to the world around me.

— Aaron Kent

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Ed. by Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts, Some Lines of Poetry: From the Notebooks of BpNichol (Coach House Books)

A must for all bpNichol fans.

— Richard Capener

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Tessa Berring, Joke Book (Silent Academy)

Poetry is a joke. That auratic haze around obscure sentence construction and grammatical overload that gulls an audience into thinking you’ve spotted some secret pattern or other, moving on the surface of the lifeworld. But maybe you have. But surely you haven’t. But why do I feel so woozy then? Tessa Berring knows why jokes are funny and it’s nothing to do with mother-in-laws, and she knows why poetry is mysterious and interesting. A series of tiny pieces playing on the structure of the tee-up and punchline. “Did you hear about the snowdrops in the oilwell? In the oilwell? Yes. No.” You’ll like this. Not a lot. No, wait, a lot! You’ll like it.

— Greg Thomas

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Eloise Birtwhistle, Splenectomy (Stewed Rhubarb Press)

There is a swimming across thresholds in this beautifully addictive long lyric: between ecology and the body, between blood and bacteria, the clinical environment and medical history, the sea and the air, image and text. The narrative of the spleen across centuries takes us into this wide ranging orbit, as a sign, a material entity, a poetic symbol. There is a generosity in the language, room to breathe between the fragments and words, a desire to read back, to be pulled under again and again. A tender entry into the bewildering space of recovery, where the body is parted. A startling and exciting debut.

— Kirsty Dunlop

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Hannah Brooks-Motl, Ultraviolet of the Genuine (The Song Cave)

I’ve had Brooks-Motl’s poem ‘Unusual Facts’ up on my wall since it was published as a broadside by Milwaukee-based press Arrow as Aarow. Nice to have its ‘busy, mixy surfaces’ in portable form in this new book, which like all her work makes the ‘thinky’ and the ‘feely’ interact in fresh ways. The title poem begins with the line ‘This is a story about phrasing’, which seems correct because many of Brooks-Motl’s poems seem to be animated principally by the friction of ‘phrase-ideas’ as they’re rubbed against each other. As well as being super learned and informative the book is full of gross, gorgeous things carried over into language for the first time, like ‘a luscious rash // I have learned to say’. This is a poet who makes me feel at once very alert and actually pretty relaxed, which is rare!

— Oli Hazzard

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Imogen Cassels, Silk Work (Prototype)

I keep returning to the sonnet “Felicity” in here, which drops the word “awhile” just before a quote from Hamlet (it’s acknowledged in Cassels’s (very funny) endnotes). So much for being about happiness, or luck: this is actually a poem haunted by the call to “absent thee from felicity awhile”, to bear witness to grief. So much for that move being sombre: what the poem actually says we should do “awhile” is “throw / off your clothes spread wide”. So much for accepting that metaphysics ultimately has to work itself out in the real stuff of this world (“Spirit is a bone”, as Hegel says): for such working-out to be complete, that real stuff has to mean the soft, the casual, the flippant as well as the bonily ponderous (“all hail is cashmere”, as Hegel didn’t say). If I’ve managed to get the hang of Silk Work – and I really doubt I have – it’s about keeping up with all these tonal deflections and deflations, as if suddenly becoming chatty mid-lyric is the most serious thing in the world. Also, I swam in the Chesapeake Bay this year, and it had basically no point of connection I can see with the sequence “Chesapeake”, but thinking about each makes me happy. 

— Jack Belloli

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Poppy Cockburn, Naked Oyster (If A Leaf Falls)

An immersive and expansive collection. I was originally introduced to Cockburn’s writing through her Instagram which I thought both embodied and undermined everything that the ‘Instapoetry’ phase seemed to be about. The collection can be overpowering in its singularity and breadth.

— William Kherbek

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Tom Crompton and Dom Hale, Mud Ramps (Gong Farm)

‘Tom and Dom’ sounds like an ill-fated comedy duo on children’s television. The kind that left the nineties cocaine-lean and now do adverts for high-street locksmiths. I loved the way Mud Ramps evokes a yomp across Lancashire hills, and yet was also a deep, loving dialogue about what art, friendship and poetry are capable of. It is like Last of the Summer Wine, except if Compo and Clegg were reading Fred Moten and Tom Raworth.

— Andy Spragg

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Jimmy Cummins, Flight Unit (Veer2)

I love Jimmy, and really anything he does. Flight Unit is an opportunity for all of us to catch up with over twenty years of his writing, his both being in the world and for it. The everyday rests alongside one of the world’s first true cities, the sea is heard, the nerve is one of those things you learn to write towards or you don’t. One of my favourites here is about being defined by the ringing of the phone. He is very definitely here. I have seen him. 

— Andy Spragg

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Rainer Diana Hamilton, Lilacs (Krupskaya Books)

It’s kind of messed up but I knew I would write about this book for Spam’s Deep Cuts before I’d even read it. Such is the experience of love: when it arrives it feels impossible to imagine a time outside of that. So why do I love it? I love it because it’s full of sensorial-escape-hatches into memories about friends, writers that influence(d) and the music we listen to when we make our meals. I love that the em dashes force the senses into remembering themselves, so that by the end of the page I’ve forgotten what recollection I’m supposedly reading about. I love it because of its aesthetic sensibility, the “sonic boom’ that’s re-experienced, the New Narrative-inflected stages of want and marble-rolling moments of clarity, “so that you briefly understand yourself / as an especially fast-moving tree.”  

— Leo Bussi

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Miley Dixon, Fast Icicle (That is Poetry Press)

These covert poems drop their meltload fast then, oh, so slow, as if a brain were prevaricating about its final destination in oblivion. Lingering the while over petty entanglements and localised resistances, their fragments refuse easy resolution, with queer eruptions immanent and imminent, as steam is to simmer, simmer boil.

— James Ayton

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Jacken Elswyth with CAConrad, A Cast of Flowers (Lanterne Records)

Our experimental poet luminary is always in exchange with the queer fellow-travellers they meet along their nomadic way. Here, CAConrad’s five poems are paged between risograph stereoscopic flowers in a sort of cd-insert with a recording of Jacken Elswyth’s banjo improvisations. The track titles (like ‘Other shimmer compass’ and ‘Queer shine plunging’) reveal a sort of word hinge between CAConrad’s poems and the instrumental tracks, with the choppy rehearsed fragments of both adding up to embody their true throughlines; both artists know that we start with the oral cultures we inherit and flower forwards from there.

— Iain Morrison

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Elvira Espejo Ayca, Kirki Qhañi Container of Andean Poetics (INCA Press)

It’d be worth reading this collection of Andean song poems for its glossary of Aymara words alone. Take ‘chullumpi’ – all at once the word means ‘grebe’, ‘waves made in a lake by the grebe’ and the pattern ‘in the long hair of the llama when the wind blows’. But, of course, it’s in the rhythms and flow of Espejo Ayca’s ritual poetry that such beautiful language finds its true context. With this collection, Espejo Ayca - artist, weaver and curator of Bolivia’s National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore - successfully casts into English the Aymara song poems passed down to her by her grandmother. With at least eight different contributing translators, and multiple generations of voices, Kirki Qhañi is a collaborative project, too. One that executes a dexterous poetics of address, breath and nature ‘in which is reproduced puluy puluy puluy puluy / an infinite path puluy puluy puluy puluy’.

— Dylan Williams

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Mark Francis Johnson, 51 Fauns (H*d*ng Press)

I’ve always felt that the wonder of Mark Francis Johnson’s poems lies not in their innovative cut-and-splice approach to language, but in their ability to shape and accrue considerable feeling out of a medium full of ostensible contradictions—meditative yet piecemeal, bathetic yet epiphanic, abrasive yet brittle. The poems in 51 Fauns combine elements of the pastoral with a scathing, almost surgical, look at our contemporary mindfuck of a world. All the while, poetry, in being crumpled apart and taped back together, attempts real psychic integration and societal mending.

— Jennifer Soong

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Francis Jones, STORM DRAIN (Veer2)

‘growing and growing and then growing tiny’, writes Francis Jones and here we are sucked inside the drain of breathless unrequited time held by work, bosses, and listless little landlords. Cracks, whirs, comma splices, cut through exhaustion and suppression in this swift dancing pamphlet, which holds such space and attunement to the cascading intertwining of abundance, joy, heart-voms, mechanical shamework, sun glints. I’m obsessed with Francis Jones’s use of language and I keep coming back for more; I can hear their friendship and care through the ‘keep split babe’, ‘I can’t say it alone’, ‘I can see you coming//towards me//my life.’ I let myself unfold amidst its unafraid churn.

— Kirsty Dunlop

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Sam Furlong-Tighe, Crowd Work (Macha Press)

Sam is an artist of alarming integrity, is a writer of Repair, is a leaner-inner-toer [sic] the generative buzzsaw of category-error(s), is one of the noblest Forces I’ve ever had glancing contact w/. Akin to their contemporary Scott McKendry, they’re one of the very few socialists-in-deed, someone w/ a comprehensive active humanism that rests in the Real past the Thought. This is not common in literature, as I do not think it is common most anywhere else. I am not such a person, I am a person who thinks about thought to the point of inaction that cannot be confused w/ the virtue of wu wei, I can only bow in wonder when faced w/ such people -- &, more critically, when faced w/ their art, which is both an extension of this Attitude [which is not an Affect] & something entirely Itself, beyond biography & the thought-terminating path into the glass putty bog of Scene For Scene’s Sake. The motive of the work is the work of the motive. This is its self as it is every thing. Yes. / Yes.

Sam is in their own category of plural-null category, but if I were to categorise them I would say that they & Maurice share something of that same Zukofskyian free-play w/ an eye on the heating bill & the body’s fixed pluralities.

— Charlie McIlwain

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Kay Gabriel, Perverts (Nightboat Books)

I found Perverts in the South London Gallery bookshop (a VERY good bookshop imo) and as soon as I saw it, I couldn’t believe my luck. These poems are gossipy, pluralistic, intelligent and a healthy reminder that no one does funny poems like the queers (<3). It’s always a welcome relief when an œactually interesting person decides to let you into her life especially when that invitation includes the meticulous and careful ‘documentation’ of Gabriel and her friends/lovers’ dreams. But what I found myself really surprised by was the way Gabriel’s dream poems move effortlessly between the singular and the collective and back round again. It’s like warm butter on toast. I want more.

— Leo Bussi

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Remi Graves, coal (Monitor)

This is such a beautifully made book in coal black covers which you must tilt to make the title 'coal' catch light, and inside a beautiful poetics of 'necrogeomancy' queerly conjuring Paul Downing, a fugitive Black Cherokee man, a fleeting transmasc presence who powerfully meets our gaze from the most moving and singular photograph at the close of the collection, and from his few recorded utterances in the meagre archival records of a London asylum circa 1905, following his steps back to Blackfriars Bridge, floating with him 'on fictive memory', Remi Graves holding to our ear the black coal amongst the brief inventory of his personal effects so tenderly and with such exquisite lyric aplomb.

— Jane Goldman

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Hao Guang Tse, White Dust from Mongolia (If A Leaf Falls)

Tse’s pamphlet is a response to the unfinished film of the same name by the Korean-American avant-gardist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The film was to be the story of an amnesiac coming into memory during the Japanese occupation of Korea, but police harassment in Seoul in 1980 forced Cha to abandon the project. Tragically, Cha was murdered in New York two years later. In his response, Tse eschews any attempt at finishing Cha’s project on her behalf. Instead, the pamphlet revels in the infinity of possibilities generated by the film’s incompleteness - a state of potentiality that Tse expands to its maximum aperture. We’re offered ‘White Dust From Mongolia: Noctilucent Clouds Shining Through The Wind’ and ‘White Dust From Mongolia, Windborne Chorizo From Galicia’. And all of this against a backdrop of poems with a curious loping quality, where mysteriously living dust accretes in the ruins of a dying climate.

— Dylan Williams

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Dom Hale, First Nettles (The Last Books)

What hits you first are all the birds: obviously the one on the gorgeous cover but then the ‘creak of woodpeckers’ and ‘the false sparrow’s outrageous vow’. It feels decadent in this day and age to be granted just this much of Hale’s gift for lyric, for chuntering on ‘mockingbirdily’ – way over a hundred, small-print pages of the stuff. And to have so much amidst ‘this horrific nationstate / of wholesale birdlime’, the degradations and catastrophes that this poetry documents even as they threaten to stop its flight. Then, around the collection’s midpoint, when I got to the ‘ouzel gorge’, it hit me. There’s an ‘ouzel cock’ at the heart of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Dom is our Bottom - the worker exposed to the beastlimost extreme of alienation who nevertheless chooses to walk up and down with his ‘last human songs’, in the hope that our visions and dreams might become concrete. And who leaves us with a call to ‘let yourself be translated’, to join the comrades to and with whom these poems are written, ‘like animals […] dripping in their origin’. ‘I will never not stand next to you.’ They shall hear that we are not afraid.

— Jack Belloli

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Dominic Hand, Anarcadia (Veer2)

Dominic Hand reaches further into realms of language than lots of other poets dare to, hauling back material to build a scale model of nature. In Anarcadia, his latest sequence, the pastoral tradition crashes like a storm across the landscape of the present tense, flinging up a spray of ‘runaway / seasons and false starts’, floodwaters and polytunnels, thinktanks and blind spots. ‘Rife with hybrid vigour’, the busy livestream of these poems generates ‘an animate / climate’, both a record of disintegration and a map of how to navigate it. Whenever I read Hand’s poetry, it feels like accessing the feeling, not the feeling filtered, which seems valuable, and strangely rare.   

(Forthcoming Dec 2025/Jan 2026)

— Rowland Bagnall

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Jake Hawkey, But & Though (Picador)

The work is self-evident. It sings for itself. Jake’s like that -- there is something terribly humbling in how he doesn’t seek to humble you, or at least not w/out humbling himself in greater measure, Thomas à Kempis as a Belfast schoolteacher, our poet laureate of keeping on who does not confuse keeping on w/ resignation or moral-blunting, a writer who doesn’t bind himself to fashion but also doesn’t look away from the present [that’s a very tricky thing to manage -- I don’t]. Jake doesn’t feel the need to ironise, to worry about being perceived as too sincere, or to worry about whether his sincerity is sincere enough. It is possible that empathy towards humanity & one’s status as a human being is only possible when one is utterly truthful about the absolute worst of it & oneself & continue to seek to empathise w/ both, not regardless but because of those things. [It’s this approach that means that Beckett comma Samuel remains among the most compassionate language-artist to have emerged w/in his respective Languages in the 20^th century -- but I would say that now-wouldn’t-I.] Jake is reporting the Things That Happen [Maurice Scully, hey!] following The Principle of Song [Denise Riley, hey-hey!!], his Song & Song itself. Things are taken apart, security falls away, but not w/ things-fall-apart inevitability or rhetorical superiority. Trauma is presented w/out garlandry, failure w/out efforting to bolt on a moral punchline. Tape spools, unspools, layers are removed & replaced, there’s a willingness to look straight into the perceived absence of things that addiction seeks to feed & itself feeds, the negative generative cost, the fear of repetition, the exhaustion that comes from seeing someone dying over & over.

— Charlie McIlwain

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Laura Henriksen, Duvall, Shelley (Newest York Arts Press)

I’m a ride or die Laura Henriksen stan and am in love with her new book which I had the great pleasure of “editing,” by which I mean drawing hearts and exclamation points on every page and changing nothing. Duvall, Shelley is a bit of a psych out because the Shelley in question is…Percy! and/ or Mary! But also Shelly Duvall screaming in the Shining! It’s somehow about the Gothic poets we know and love, also horror movies, also this amazing thing bats do where they pass each other blood snacks from mouth to mouth, being a bad girl, being a good girl, the amazing stepmother from the Hellraiser cinematic universe, and the American Southwest. It feels like being at camp gossiping with your new bestie and braiding her hair and Jason Voorhees or some poem equivalent is about to show up and make the summer really memorable.

— Courtney Bush

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Erin Honeycutt, Dear Enheduanna (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Okay, so this is the publisher’s blurb but I think it’s a fair description of both the book and Honeycutt’s dirty, funny, clever approach in general: “Part prayer, part performance, part poetic treatise, Dear Enheduanna writes out to the high priestess and first known author then swallows whole the epistolary form. Pulp decay as publishing tactic. These are conjuring poems; poems coming after collaboration—entanglement as conceit, as kink, as communion pleasure tactic. Smuggle in a sexy mirror, smuggle in a double-headed dildo, smuggle in a sentence then feel it read back: the author is reader is author is reader.”

— Susan Finlay

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Hasib Hourani, Rock Flight (Prototype)

Displacement, economic warfare and violence are explored in this terrifying, exceptionally beautiful and formally breathtaking book length poem. I was lucky enough to hear Hasib read from this work earlier in the year and I’ll never forget that reading.

— Colin Herd

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Interwoven - Poetry celebrating connectedness (Renard Press)

A gorgeous project by a young and active publisher, bringing together many interesting voices together in a celebration of what makes us human, what keeps us together in poetic form. History is a big part of my favourite poems For Keeps by Fiona Mossman and I am sleeping on a Piece of Queer History by A.W. Earl, but many of the poems observe and collect objects that keep humans together, some times quietly, other times more directly. You have to read the whole collection to really savour it. Highly recommended!

— Luca Fois

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Kevin Killian, Padam Padam: Collected Poems (Nightboat Books)

Killian was such an important writer, and it feels like he is only now getting the recognition he deserves - which unsurprisingly comes via the ever wonderful Nightboat Books!

— Susan Finlay

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Molly Ledbetter, Air Ball (After Hours Editions)

First of all, Air Ball’s form is addictive to me. It’s so soothing to read one full sentence at a time with space in between, especially when those sentences which are given space to breathe are carefully tracking the internal logic of a mind as strange and beautiful and funny as Molly’s. The poems take on the subject of comedy and tragedy at the same time in the very raw style of stand-up comedy of decades past. One gets the feeling of the lone comic in a spotlight in front of a brick wall talking to an audience of people half-listening to their musings on life and death and art. I love it. It’s giving Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts and Lenny Bruce singing All Alone.

— Courtney Bush

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Jazmine Linklater, Snagged on Red Thread (Monitor)

While still a work in progress, I had the privilege of watching Jazmine read from Snagged on Red Thread a couple of times before its publication. These were nervy, crushingly sceptical readings, beset by the doubts that assail all poets who attempt to engage with the crimes and genocides our governments partake in on ‘our’ behalf: ‘should I even be reading this?’, ‘is this enough?’, ‘who is this meant to satisfy?’. The readings would invariably end before the poem did, leaving you with the mangled taste of unending complicities, from sleepovers to drone strikes, the bite from knowing all of your language is inadequate and something more urgent must take its place. Yet, Snagged on Red Thread is more than an image of the totalising wrongness of the world we live in. It moves through the carcassed reality around us – idyll in terror, action in withdrawal – to think of resources that make resistance to it not just imaginable, but inevitable. The violence is all here, in red. No matter where you are you can pull at it.

— Mau Baiocco

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Taos Lopez, Damage (The Creative Writing Department)

A novella told through a sequence of prose poems built around a single refrain shouldn’t really work over more than 200 pages, but somehow it does. It’s actually addictive. “Damage knows what it’s like to die…Damage hides her money in the pages of a novel. Damage will never trust you. Damage is bliss.”

Damage becomes person, noun, verb, symbol and obsession. The cumulative narrative reads a bit like a heavy-metal version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, also bringing to mind The Virgin Suicides and Breakfast at Tiffany's i.e. a lineage in which male narrators project, mythologise, and reveal themselves through their fixation on an enigmatic female figure, which is fine imo—it’s useful to know what goes on in there. 

— Poppy Cockburn

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Alex Marsh, Holding Pattern (Chaff)

A poem can be a good place and Holding Pattern is full of them: ‘another daily poem / from behind the moon’, ‘some rainwater property / filled the car / with sparked air’ or ‘light woofs / against the sky.’ The poems here are little vignettes, discourses or scenes, peripatetic glances at leaving London and being hosted by a larger and stranger body which might go by the name of England or Lewes. Rarely longer than a page, the poems are packed at every moment with a hilarious, beautiful or outright impossible turn. Like all the songs that are half-remembered and evoked in this pamphlet, Alex Marsh discovers that the replayability of a fuzzy object is endlessly more interesting than its straight telling. If I had to pick something from this year to keep going back to, it would be this, so much to quote from and so much generosity to give: ‘I love ludd not ceasar / the sleepers swim mirrors / a whole galaxy blew up to us.’

— Mau Baiocco

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Alex Mazey, RIVAL STREAMER : AI SLOP X BRAINROT (IN)FINITITY WARRIORS (Trickhouse Press)

I think it’s getting released in 2026 but I got to read it this year for a blurb. Top marks. Will destroy your brain.

— Richard Capener

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Iain Morrison, Notice Period (Archiving the Contemporary)

Iain Morrison is one of the writers artists and thinkers it’s most joyous to have as a peer, and in this series of works he traverses and en-verses what it means to be part of an artistic community. In works that build poems out of notes taken in artists talks he considers the social as the poem. I want to use the word chronicler, but it isn’t the right one because these poems don’t tell of the times but make them.

— Colin Herd

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Stephen Nelson, Oak & Loch/ Ash & Offering/ Wake and Waulk (Self-published via email in three parts. Follow @afterlights70 on Instagram)

Scotland’s mystic master of vispo. I don’t normally care for non-semantic vispo (or indeed the term “vispo”, which seems to ghettoise itself), but there’s a lyrical rhythm to Nelson’s work that keeps the eye scrolling and fluting down the page. And an unabashed connection to nature in the context of emotional healing and spiritual questing that gets me. It gets me in the sense that it understands me. Words are broken vessels. There’s something else that they should be used for but we don’t know what it is. When we die we will either know or we won’t. Nelson’s work should be better known. I have to stop because the baby is grunting.

— Greg Thomas

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Neil P. Doherty (translator and editor), Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets (Dedalus)

I was lucky to attend the introduction to modern Turkish Poetry that Neil Doherty and Gonca Özmen gave at SoundEye in 2025, and they carried the exciting news of this anthology, now published. It is a brilliant selection of very different writers (so something for everyone – and everything for this someone), expertly introduced and including Özmen’s own remarkable melding of modernism and song. Look East, folks.

— Richard Price

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Ann Pedone, The Best Kind of Love (If A Leaf Falls)

If a deadpan feral register exists, this is what’s adopted in Ann Pedone’s chapbook-length surge, that swerves rapidly between sex, academia, bodily fluids, domestic chores, memory and back to sex.

The lines are genuinely weird and specific, enjambing at intervals that consistently throw you off, forcing you to really read. 

‘I’m chewing on your right / nipple hair for the third time today’

‘…the first / time I took your cock out of your / pants I named it a river a / cheap plastic purse…’

It’s playful, sexy, but deeply wtf, underpinned by a wisdom that knows how to laugh at itself: ‘…many men have wanted to fuck / me because of my great emotional / fragility…’

My favourite moment is the office eros:

‘…you texted to say that the soft / buzz of the Xerox machine was / making you super hard…’ 

Filtering sexiness over a too-often dull world certainly is one of the best kinds of love, I think. Read it aloud to a crush.

— Poppy Cockburn

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frank r jagoe, Significant Others (Prototype)

Dizzyingly inventive and grotesquely erotic, I marvelled at the very many ways the bodies in this collection ooze and leak their languages, constantly exceeding boundaries of species and form.  This queer and profoundly ecological babel of a book felt more akin to performance in how it articulates the many ways a body can speak, beyond the privileging of the written and verbal in the colonial western tradition. Amidst the stone births, the catfish in piccadilly circus, the caressing of limestone cliffs,  there's something hopeful at the deliciously sticky core of this book: how entangled we always already are: 'woodlouse crawling across finger, lichen populates limestone… you and millions of invertebrates that come together to make this encounter- You are not alone. Remind yourself: you are not alone'.

— Jack Young

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Nat Raha, Apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books)

This collection conjured for me the lyrics of the MC Spen G, featuring on Mala’s Anti War Dub (Digital Mystikz, 2006): put down the nine and live righteous. Raha’s communal lyrics are punctuated by a grammatology of breath that comes alive during performances of this work which overlay the poems through vocal loop. Here is a poetics of opening ostensible closures of form through numerological arrangement; but the nine is both weapon and the laying down of stakes, a yearning towards solidarity as the nine’s function through a marxist transfeminist galvanisation of Geist Phänomenologie amongst ‘citizens/of nowhere.’ In ‘werk[ing] this filth’, Raha’s tender address to beloveds abandoned by the state turns the reader’s attention to the (queer, brown) body as a site of nationalist violence and towards the relocation of that subject within the social ecology of grime music in which the historical continuum of anti-racist and anti-colonial resistance is so fevered.

— Azad Ashim Sharma

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Deryn Rees-Jones, Hôtel Amour (Seren Books)

Hôtel Amour’s cover features wallpaper like the melancholic wallpaper of a loneli hotel. Hôtel Amour is about a hotel in Paris and heartbreak; it made me nostalgic for the poem ‘In Paris With You’ (c. 2006) by James Fenton that we learnt in Grainne O’Riordan’s literature-of-love a-levelle classes (beloved) so long ago now. It is quiet, & an introversion. It gave me a new orientation. Hôtel Amour speaks from a gendered perspective that doesn’t invoke scrunched-up-ness: & as I listened to Deryn Rees-Jones discuss it thru most glitchy Zoom crackles of a Transport 4 Cymru moving wifi arena travelling again back from Lerpŵl to Aberystwyth it turned out Deryn Rees-Jones oscillates between Wales and Liverpool too. Hotels are a sanctum for some / they seem to be so for me. Thank you, Hôtel Amour.

— Amy Grandvoinet

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Karenjit Sandhu, gestalt (the87press)

The latest uncategorisable adventure in praxisy poetics from Sandhu sees her set forth into the Panchayat archive in Tate’s holdings. These poems make their own gestures of holding - what Sandhu calls ‘alternative documentation’ of the activities of the Panchayat’s collective of South Asian and Black artists - and also their own gestures of loosening archive’s tendency to restrict or stay. In a favourite moment, the second person protagonist, in the inspiration born out of frustration at the limitations of research, sits ‘in the middle of your upturned table: now your boat. And off you sail –’.

— Iain Morrison

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Richard Scott, That Broke Into Shining Crystals (Faber)

Utterly courageous and devastating, the precision and emotional resonance of the images and symbols here arrested me like no other book I read this year.

I feel like we are in a geological turn in a lot of literature I'm reading at the moment, yet rarely have I read such a tender unearthing of rocks, "molten-rose heat of the world' (Red Tourmaline), 'Ashen-eyed onyx boy' (Onyx). There's a reaching towards deep-time, an excavation of the fossilised and brutal nature of trauma and yet, the 'boy is igneous'. When viewed through such poetic and microscopic attunement to emotional and physical landscape, you can even witness the rocks moving.

— Jack Young

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Ian Shore, Separate Dying Ember (Chamber Door Press)

I was mesmerised by these syncopated incantations on the unanswered questions of the anthropocene - is death the great leveller of the ever shifting post-Cartesian human-animal caesura still haunting our poetics and when will sex be fun again and just how toxic can a corpse get?

— James Ayton

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Tara Singh, (Fragments) ( 🟒Fr⚘gm∞nts⮾) (Five Leaves Publications)

I enjoyed the ways Tara plays with forms and languages to explore intergenerational and personal mythologies. You could find formal experimentations via the burning haibun, fugue, concrete poetry, duplex, dsm, among others. There is such richness, attentiveness, and kindness in Tara’s treatment of painful subject matters, which range from illnesses, gender-based violence to colonialism. Diasporic experiences manifest in delicious turns of phrase, for example: “I spoke / now I spook”; “we intone, / mud to lotus bloom”. Tara is adept in condensing what it means to both belong and deviate. Their book feels like a journey of learning how to hold our many selves.

— Tim Tim Cheng

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Emily Skillings, Tantrums in Air (The Song Cave)

There’s something generous at the heart of Emily Skillings’s poetry, a willingness to show her workings, make mistakes, to do her thinking there in front of you. Tantrums in Air shows us the process of the world becoming-in-real-time the poem, the gentle tug-of-war between one’s thoughts and observations, the two braiding together like the double helix of a strand of DNA, ‘where little nodes of language cling, / lichen-like, to what will have them.’ These are helpful, thoughtful, human poems – funny but not un-serious, intelligent but not remote – humming along just like the rest of us, aware that ‘There is no finish on the day / it just kind of slumps over / and there’s another one / to stab you like a cartoon predator’. 

— Rowland Bagnall

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Maria Sledmere, The Indigo Hours (Broken Sleep Books)

Good Press’s online emporium says Maria Sledmere’s The Indigo Hours is ‘poetry’ and also I’ve heard it more commonly described a ‘novella’: as ever, ‘what isn’t poetry?’ said all the despairing gardes de avant? Maria Sledmere asked if I’d blurb this tome ~ of course I said Yes, and felt its deep, cool, blue waters swirling and washing the dirty feet salty eyes of the many. Like I said in the blurb, it is vulnerable and precarious midnight wandering in the pulse~beat outdoors – a time you’ve forgotten now somewhat but requires revisitation, tempering, tlc. It is of swimming pools, of retrospection, an ode to intensity and its recalibrations. It is a sapphire sequence of misty colonnades through disparate places and yet always one that is: you. Thank you, The Indigo Hours.

— Amy Grandvoinet

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Karen Solie, Wellwater (Picador)

The rhymes are bunched and scattered amongst normal Solie topics: roads, plants, wavelengths, agriculture, rent and the hazards of intimacy. Stings of personal insight arrive during encounters with capitalism’s material burdens and abrasive circuits, never too far from a deity who isn’t always available. There are also, as usual, several weighty and high-definition descriptions of sonic experience, like a voice of ‘panic shredding / the far edge of the vowel like a flag-end / in relentless wind’. I thought I’d love Wellwater immediately but it took me a while – I was a-guzzle for the customary thumps of understatement, the barbed elegance and spiny wit in which she captures moments of regrettable behaviour. They’re very much here but they won’t be rushed.

— Ed Garland

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Jennifer Soong, My Earliest Person (The Last Books)

When I’m reading Jennifer Soong I have this hallucinatory sense that I am actually in the presence of the inner voice of a person. This sensation, pleasurable and arresting in its own right, also has the effect of turning up the volume on my own inner voice, as it interrupts and annotates and disagrees and is sent off on tangents by the extraordinary music and argumentation of the poetry. That combo creates its own choral sound which the poems themselves anticipate and make room for: ‘the sound of friction is a joint endeavour’. This is meditative, analytical poetry, for sure; it’s also a poetry of massive, crazed desire, and disarming frankness: ‘Every attempt, now / is an attempt at everything’.

— Oli Hazzard

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SoundEye Festival

I don’t know if it’s just me but it feels that over the past few years the poets have been scattered. Small presses and magazines have closed down; government and university grants dried up; online spaces where poetry once thrived have been annihilated by algorithms, slop and ads; fledging poetic careers snuffed out upon hard, cold contact with reality. Live poetry readings have remained stubbornly well-attended, and some have even become fashionable events you would want to be seen at. But even then, the experience of the live poetry reading has always been fleeting and too bound up in the limitations of the life around it to produce much beyond itself. Audiences are atomised, awkward and, in the brief time available, the only form of sociality that has any time to assert itself is that of hierarchy: between poets and their audience, those in the know against those who are curious, the existing groups against the rest.

If there is one under-utilised resource in poetry it is the poetry festival. By sharing the entirety of days, the routine of a space and all the other routines we have to carry out to reproduce ourselves daily, a form of collective and non-hierarchal experience is forced to take hold. Perceptions shift: poetry is abundant and welcoming, a concrete practice of life, not something to be excised from it and occasionally displayed. Poets from different generations mingle freely at the reading, the pub or the dancefloor. You compare notes. You remember more about what you heard and felt than you thought possible — your own mind is no longer, truly, your own.

The lovingly resurrected SoundEye festival in Cork represented all this and more. To me it was a road trip, a speeding ticket, a shoddy hostel, oysters and Beamish, Trevor’s house, gathering for Callie, a cabaret, Izz Cafe and of course the readings — the best I’ve seen from Peter Manson and Nisha Ramayya; the deep carrying in language of Maggie O’Sullivan and Catherine Walsh; electric and hilarious reads from Sean Pierson and Ellen Dillon and a stunningly candid meditation on losing a daughter by Keith Tuma that has lingered in my mind in the months since, something shifting how I think about grief in language. Poets I had known and poets whom in all likelihood I would never have heard of were it not for the festival. We will need more of this.

— Mau Baiocco

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Mark Staniforth, Fuck America: Sonnets (FryUp Publishing)

The first sonnet fucks Alabama, the next fucks Alaska, and so on through the rest of the ailing imperialist territory. ‘Sonnet’ in this collection means 14 people, places, objects and phenomena related to a single state, arranged in a list beneath its flag. Quotations would be pointless. You’ve got to read the whole incantatory catalogue and marvel at its copious, laconic, livid and toxic verbal force. Like a small furious cousin to On Kawara’s data-books, or a maladjusted Whitman-bot stuck on automatic, Fuck America registers the inventory of an impoverished empire, drunk on its own waste, cursing its components, after realising its totality is melted beyond repair.

— Ed Garland

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Alina Ştefănescu, My Heresies (Saramande Books)

Dedicated to the author’s maternal grandmother, My Heresies is a volume of genealogical and cosmological sprawl. The provocation of the ringèd tongue which graces its baby pink cover was irresistible to me when I saw it on a booktable at AWP. Even more so the opening line, ‘I am eating raw violets’, with its present continuous of ritualistic snacking baroque. The taste of violets I imagine as dark, soapy and peppery-sweet. Reading these poems is like discovering a whole other cluster of receptor cells, a ‘lolling’ and ‘lascivious’ lyricism in dialogue with Paul Celan, Hoa Nguyen, C. D. Wright, Adorno and Maximus the Confessor, among others. In this book we have statement, arpeggio, apostrophe. We have ‘contrapuntal karaoke’ and ‘miscarrying / a thing alone; the minting of portmanteau (‘Leaflostness’) as ecopoetic attunement; the sonic clustering of survival, ‘the peace of small beasts who still need’. The book is cinematic, performative, sensuous; it flexes lyric in fresh places, presents a bounty of poetic modes and deploys a voice no less visionary than discursive.

— Maria Sledmere

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Keston Sutherland, Jokes (The Last Books)

The language in this is manic, punning, tender; lines keep detonating several pages later. I loved the way Sutherland stretches the idea of a joke until it becomes stand-up riff, legal quibble, nervous tic, bad-faith apology, then sudden, unbearable sincerity. It’s one of the few books I’ve read that feels honest about living inside global catastrophe while still insisting on pleasure, care, and good humour.

— Aaron Kent

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Shrikant Verma (trans. Rahul Soni), Magadh (And Other Stories (UK, 2025); Eka (India, 2023))

Magadh is a serial poem, a reinscription of folk-epic motifs set in modernist idiom. Magadh as place refers to a long-lost empire providing both allegory and real history, exploring the themes of circularity, recurrence and futility: ‘time beyond time’. Shrikant Verma, as exemplar of the Nayi Kavita (‘New Poetry’) movement in Hindi-language poetry, examines corpses, cities, rulers, ethics, dharma and such in straight-forward language bringing traces of real and imagined geographies into contemporary political modernity, ably translated by Rahul Soni. It shows a way of inhabiting a mythopoetic totality that remains clear and piercing, while retaining the layered sediments of mythologies, religious texts and historical tellings. We are left with the option of a ‘Third Way’ between political choices and those of individual identity; as Mantra Mukim puts it in an accompanying essay, ‘[Magadh] makes room here for a precarious, impossible space that remains outside any cartographic dictation and sensory knowledge.’ It asks us, how do we think about myth and history as real and allegorical, as imagined and vernacular, as continually reinscribed in the collective memory and existing as an autonomous schema of aesthetics?

— Kashif Sharma-Patel

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Vida Vojic, The Holy Birth of a Drummer (Tabloid)

Including some poems by Cru Encarnação along with Vida Vojic, this pamphlet is a wild ride through the nexus of music and identity, exploring gender politics, performativity, and the healing power of sound with from an experimental and richly satirical standpoint.

— William Kherbek

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Jonathan Wonham, with illustrations by Nick Wonham, Dystopia Persecutia (Drizzle-Dazzle)

Jonathan Wonham has been tireless in his commitment to the Palestinian cause but he has also been innovative within the braid of intelligence and community. This is one of the most powerful books to come out of UK solidarity with those suffering mass murder at the hands of the colonial project: in a split level approach the top part of each page has echoes of the direct, sophisticated English of late MacDiarmid (among others), while the base shares more with Reznikoff and his documentary urgencies, taking us through day by day, issue by issue. A truly remarkable book (no wonder it has not been reviewed) with all profits going to Palestinian refugee charities.

— Richard Price

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Boaz Yosef Friedman, Born in a burning house (Pastel ritröð)

Timing is everything. To write from this side of grief. Born in a burning house is that nightmare of your childhood in flames that comes true one day, in a phone call. Friedman inhabits the space of negation with a lyric tenacity unafraid of scale. For every metaphysical solar conceit there is blessing, the forehead kiss of morning light. In the furious nowhere of losing your mother, in the litany, on paper. Part artist book, part elegy, part dream lyric, depression journal and song, I was given this slim volume at a time of great need and would slip into it whenever sleep eluded me. The language of advertising and spiritual affirmation acquiring the eerie aura of being looked at by the recently bereaved. Interspersing the prosimetric commonplace feel of the book are drawings of the sun, personified starfaces and stitches, space matter, darkness and light crosshatching mood as wicked surface. Somehow this is a book that sings and screams itself. It really has that ‘becoming so big’. And it is kind and despairing and cosmic. ‘The nurses dreamt that the sun was sick, and was confused why anyone would care’.

— Maria Sledmere

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Steven Zultanski, Help (Tenement Press (UK/EU, 2025); Golias Books (US, 2024))

Help brilliantly extends Steven Zultanski’s current phase of writing—looser, more documentary, more situational. In setting up explicit objects of inquiry and conversation–love, death, childhood–the book shows that to know these things is to also know our friends and ourselves. Sustained by an orchestration of  relation and memory (and thus reality), affect here is modular, the product of what happens when we transform things by talking about them. A careful and astute experiment in writing and living.

— Jennifer Soong

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Graphic by Kirsty Dunlop

Published: 22/12/2025