Are you afraid you might be difficult?
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Julia Webb is a neurodivergent writer/editor based in Norwich. She has four collections with Nine Arches Press: Bird Sisters (2016) Threat (2019) The Telling (2022) and Grey Time (2025). She is steering editor of Lighthouse.
The Eighth Floor, Virgen de las Nieves Hospital
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Becky May is a Manchester-based poet who used to live in Spain. Her work has been published in PN Review, Propel Magazine & 14 Magazine, amongst others. She can be found on social media @beckymaywriter
Edward II, Deposed 1327, Visits the Big City
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Heather is a Durham University student. She was a 2023 Foyle Young Poet, and was shortlisted for the 2024-5 Poetry Wales Award. Her work is published in The Garlic Press, Bloodletter, and Carmen et Error. On Instagram, she is @heatherchapman4523.
The Captain
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Hannah Linden’s debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. Her 2nd pamphlet, The Gods of Misrule, is due Sept 2025 from Stoat Books. BlueSky: @hannahl1n.bsky.social
Patch of Blue
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John Coburn is an Anglo-Irish poet living in London. He has been published in A New Ulster, the Black Nore Review, the Sunday Independent and the Poet’s Yearbook Autumn Anthology. He has also read on Irish radio.
Mezzotint
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Julie Hogg is a Poet from the North Yorkshire Coast with poems recently appearing in Ghost Furniture Catalogue, Magma and Poetry Scotland. Featured in anthologies by Culture Matters and Seren, ‘A Raven on a Writing Desk’ is available from Dunlin Press.
R.I.P. The Bay Horse
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Carole Bromley is a York-based poet who writes for both adults and children. Winner of a number of prizes, including the Bridport, Hamish Canham and the Caterpillar prize, she is published by Smith/Doorstop and Valley Press. Her website is www.carolebromleypoetry.co.uk
The Law of Conservation of Mass, according to Marie Antoinette
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Victoria Spires is published in Berlin Lit & The London Magazine. She has been commended/shortlisted in: Ledbury, TPW Prize, Aesthetica Arts, Artemesia Arts, Plough Prize. She came Third in the Rialto Nature competition. Her pamphlet Soi-même is available from Salo.
Our featured publication for Autumn is The Mayday Diaries by Robin Houghton, published by Pindrop Press.
‘Robin Houghton is a poet who really notices things – silly and deadly serious, quotidian and extraordinary, often all at once – and knows precisely how to sift them so that only tight, resonant poems fall out. She makes ‘the debris of our private lives’ newly familiar and honestly strange, and never solely for sport, though she is playful too. The Mayday Diaries is a stylistically and thematically dextrous triumph in four unyieldingly inventive movements, and I don’t write that lightly.’ Rory Waterman
‘There’s so much delight and surprise in these poems. A clarity of diction to-gether with a playful reach and sense of experimentation, a formal agility and for all their dramatic storytelling and beguiling sense of humour, a persistent subtlety, an emotional tension in even the most light-hearted or casual lines. What do we feel when we hear the word Mayday? Alarm, fear, intrigue. And what do we hope to find in a diary? Intimate confessions, the inner workings of a psyche trying to make sense of the world. The unusual conflation of these two words in the title of the collection evokes perfectly the intense and every-day wonder at its heart.‘ Greta Stoddart
‘While Houghton’s foray into American corporate capitalism equips her witha satire-ready vocabulary, she is equally fluent in the idioms of another in- ferno – that of Dante – and the poems that show his influence are transcendent. Houghton writes with poignancy, humour, formal versatility and, most of all, a refreshing self-awareness that circumvents both self-aggrandizement and self-pity.‘ Kathryn Maris
The long-haired girls
Previously published in The Rialto
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Before the splicing
Previously published in Prole
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Break
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Robin Houghton is the author of four poetry pamphlets including Why? And Other Questions (Live Canon, 2020) which was a winner of the Live Canon Pamphlet Competition 2019. Her work has been published in many magazines including Mslexia, The Rialto and Poetry News, and is widely anthologised. She was awarded the Hamish Canham Prize from the Poetry Society in 2013. With Peter Kenny she founded the poets’ publishing collective Telltale Press in 2014, and their current project is the podcast Planet Poetry, begun during the 2020 pandemic. Born in London, Robin has lived and worked in Italy, Germany and the USA. After a marketing career with Nike and then Adidas, she obtained a masters degree in Digital Media in 2000 and ran her own online marketing business for over twenty years. She is now settled on the South coast of England. The Mayday Diaries is her first full poetry collection.
Copies of The Mayday Diaries are available to purchase from the Pindrop Press website, here.
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atriumpoetry.com 