Joanna Lowry won the 2025 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker for her debut pamphlet The Man Whose Brain Turned to Glass (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2026). She received an MA Distinction in Writing Poetry from the Poetry School/Newcastle University in 2022, with a prize for exceptional performance. She has been shortlisted in several competitions, including the Arvon International Poetry Competition and the Bridport Prize. In 2018 she was commended in the Manchester Poets and Players Competition and won third prize in the Teignmouth Poetry Competition. She was highly commended by Louise Glück for the Moth Poetry Prize and received second place in the Edward Cawston Thomas Prize in 2023.Now living in East Sussex, she was born in Wales and spent her early childhood in Nigeria. Apart from writing poetry she has lectured and written about photography and video art, and sometimes those different worlds still converge and overlap. And when she isn’t writing she is painting. And those worlds converge too.

Joanna Lowry’s poetry voyages through time and space with the pale demeanour of a ghost, now perplexed, now disabused, never able to look away. It haunts the galleries of history getting the details right, revisiting moments and figures still living out their fates, but always emerging into the forlorn light of now, as the living poet bearing the scars of it all, the aftermaths of love or horror, the deeds and delusions of men forever sounding in the dark. Lowry’s is a poetry of the still point and the turning world: this is a rich and memorable collection.

• 7 A Few Short Miles from Herculaneum8 The Man Whose Brain Turned to Glass9 Machado’s Last Words 10Lee 11 I have been trying to paint a picture of Simone12The Black City13Jirga14Du Fu15 Exercises in Navigation17 Portobello 2023. Turkish Earthquake Magnitude 7.818 St Petersburg19 The History of Dictators20 Prometheus21 Photovoltaic22 Unforeseeable23 The Storm24 Elisabeth Pauli tracing a relevé, El Ghicha, Algeria, 193525 Bison26 S.O.S.28 Nara29 Camera Obscura30 Conversation with a Miniaturist31 Ancient Days32 Notes