Patrick Davidson Roberts was born in 1987 and grew up in Sunderland and Durham. His debut collection is The Mains (Vanguard Editions, 2018), and a chapbook The Trick (Broken Sleep Books, 2023) has been published. His second collection will be Divided Tongues (Broken Sleep Books, 2025). He has been published in many periodicals and anthologies.
Our featured publication for January and February is Notes on Burials by Jayant Kashyap, published by The Poetry Business. Notes on Burials won the New Poets Prize in 2024.
‘Jayant Kashyap’s Notes on Burials asks the reader to consider different types of burials and retrievals, including personal and etymological burials, in cool, reflective poems.‘ Holly Hopkins
‘In these tender poems, definitions, etymologies and repetitions perform a kind of excavation, digging to the root-places but also layering back up, hand over hand, word over word, to build a language of grief that feels fractured and true.’ Miriam Nash
‘Notes on Burials sits comfortably alongside the work of Seamus Heaney and Anne Carson.‘ The Madrid Review
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Prayer for My Mother as a Child
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Carrying
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The pastor said the graveyard has now sprouted flowers like a welcome
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Jayant Kashyap’s third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, won the Poetry Business New Poets Prize in 2024, for which he was shortlisted in 2021 and 2022. In 2021, Kashyap also won the Young Poets Competition at the Wells Festival of Literature, presented a poem at COP26, the United Nations Climate Conference, and published a zine, Water, with Skear Zines. He has published globally, including in such magazines as Poetry, Wasafiri, Poetry Northwest, The Ex-Puritan, Rabbit, Poetry London, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Poetry Wales, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Over the years, he has also published some art and nonfiction, and read poetry for Quarterly West and The Adroit Journal. Kashyap was awarded a Toto Award for Creative Writing in 2025, and was recently named an Acumen Young Poet.
Moira McPartlin has five published novels. Her latest, Before Now: Memoirs of a Toerag, is written in Fife dialect. Her short work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. Moira’s current project is about Scotland’s Victorian mass concrete viaducts. http://www.moiramcpartlin.com Instagram @moiramcpartlin Instagram @a_thing_so_delicate
Meg Pokrass is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections. Her work has appeared in RATTLE, The Pedestal, American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Ink Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. She is an American author living and teaching in the Scottish Highlands.
Simon Ravenscroft is a Fellow of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. He has published poems recently in Osmosis Press, The Penn Review, Full House Literary, Eratio, Apocalypse Confidential, The Alchemy Spoon, Swifts & Slows, Meniscus, Trampoline, and elsewhere.
John White has been commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Eco poetry (2020) and the Magma Poetry Prize (2024). ‘Attachments’ (Templar), won the 2023 iOTA Shot pamphlets competition, and was published in June 2024. He takes wing occasionally at @johncraigwhite.bsky.social
Jessica Boatright’s words have been spotted in magazines including Magma, The Alchemy Spoon and Anthropocene. In 2025 she placed third in the Disabled Poets Best Unpublished Pamphlet Prize and was highly commended in the Kathryn Bevis Memorial Poetry Prize.
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.
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