Holiday
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Jayant Kashyap is the author of three pamphlets, most recently Notes on Burials, which won the Poetry Business New Poets Prize in 2024.
Holiday – Jayant Kashyap
Category: Uncategorized
Sequel – Oz Hardwick
Sequel
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Oz Hardwick is a European poet and academic, focusing mainly on prose poetry, who has published “a dozen or so” collections, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). He is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University. www.ozhardwick.co.uk
Slow-boiling – Smitha Sehgal
Slow-boiling
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Smitha Sehgal is a legal professional and a bilingual poet who writes in English and Malayalam. A Best of the Net nominee, her poems have been featured by Ink Sweat & Tears, Osiris Poetry, Temz Review, The Indianapolis Review and elsewhere. She’s the author of ‘How Women Become Poems in Malabar’ ( Red River, 2023)
Wild Dogs & – Sophia Argyris
Wild Dogs &
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Sophia Argyris is of British-Greek origin. Her work has appeared in Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, and Under the Radar, and been placed in the Verve and Welshpool competitions. Her pamphlet ‘Heronless’ was published by Palewell Press in March 2025.
Ida smiles – John Adlam
Ida smiles
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John is a group psychotherapist and an independent psycho-socialist researcher. He lives in Brixton and works in what’s left of NHS mental health services in South London. He is affiliated to the Survivors’ Poetry collective, and blogs as Barrelman https://barrelblog.org/
Before her first night in a Bradford Refuge, – Laura Strickland
Before her first night in a Bradford Refuge,
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Laura Strickland is a carer from Yorkshire. Her work has appeared in The North, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Dreamcatcher, Northern Gravy, Strix, The Frogmore Papers and Butcher’s Dog. She was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2023.
Featured Publication – The Price of Happiness by Nikki Robson
Our featured publication for Spring is The Price of Happiness by Nikki Robson, published by V. Press.
‘The Price of Ηappiness neither holds back nor wastes a word in its tale of a marriage from unsettling omens (‘Goodness, I’m weeping said Mum’) to full-blown violent coerciveness (‘the sore in the wall/where the dinner was thrown’) and out through the numbness and the decree absolute to the glimmers of a new life (‘it crackled like fireworks,/illegal for so long’). You barely take a breath before you’re holding it in shock at the damage we do each other in the altogether too close up of a dysfunctional relationship. It is a tribute to Nikki Robson’s skill that this is accomplished without sentiment, catching our attention and our compassion entirely through telling detail and command of phrasing – these poems are constantly quotable in their exactitude – ‘my label of a husband’; ‘my mummy-smile’; ‘this Vitruvian boy’ – and are nowhere more moving than in their grasp of the impact on the children: ‘[I] tried to describe the end of her world/as the beginning of another’.‘ W. N. Herbert
‘‘The divorced cannot/bury their dead.’ Nikki Robson scours that truth, asks where it leads. We are used to graphic detonations of trauma, but here, the poet, well able to apply her ‘mummy-smile’, layers words, finds metaphor, draws deeply on sources and places. Unfolding her narrative, she never neglects a poet’s first responsibility: to language. These poems haunt as mere shock cannot.‘ Beth McDonough
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Signature dish
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Omens?
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Bone-weary
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First Laugh
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Nikki Robson was born and raised in Northern Ireland between Tyrone and Fermanagh, where she still regularly spends time with family and friends. Following 25 years in Scotland, she now lives in Suffolk. After a career in business, she obtained an MLitt in Writing Study and Practice from Dundee University. Her writing often explores relationships, place, associations and the idea of home, with poems published in many journals and anthologies. The Price of Happiness is her first pamphlet.
Copies of The Price of Happiness are available to purchase from the V. Press website, here.
Breaking Stuff – Graham Clifford
Breaking Stuff
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Graham Clifford is author of five collections of poetry. His work has been chiselled into paving slabs, translated into Romanian and German, is found on the Poetry Archive, and is anthologised by publishers including Faber and Broken Sleep Books. www.grahamcliffordpoetry.com
Let them eat tennis balls – Paul Stephenson
Let them eat tennis balls
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Paul Stephenson’s debut collection ‘Hard Drive’ was published by Carcanet in summer 2023 and was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize.
A Couple of Sundays – Kymm Coveney
A Couple of Sundays
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Kymm Coveney was born in Boston (Massachusetts) and has lived in Spain since the 1982 World Cup. A freelance writer and translator, her poems have been published in The Interpreter’s House, Prole, Under the Radar, and Ink Sweat & Tears. BetterLies @KymmInBarcelona Insta
atriumpoetry.com 