New Poets Prize – serie

Gaps speaks about the gaps between two different languages and cultures, and questions how successfully love can bridge these. It’s also about uncomfortable spaces: the distance between your desired self and your true self, between anxiety and reality, between your body and another person’s body.

Osteology is a candid examination that reveals the workings and hairline fractures of every day life. From haemoglobins to the Yorkshire hills, this collection celebrates the magic of reality, revealing how intricately we are linked to the places we inhabit: the lines that separate our bodies from landscape, memory, and each other are nothing more than a shadow on the sand left by the changing tide. Bringing us back again and again to places and moments that demand to be remembered, and that we might call home, Osteology speaks to an ancient pastoral tradition with without nostalgia, pretension or illusion.

"These are incredibly well-constructed, tight poems which are infused with a tender sense of longing; "this is the brittle language that we speak in" declares one poem, there is a fragility here, but a real strength as well." — Andrew McMillan

Typhoid August simmers with sustained tension, articulating a world where power relationships are in constant flux and even-footing is never guaranteed. This collection interrogates the diseased body politic, going further than Fletcher's debut 'Kissing Angles', to push themes of control and dominance to their philosophical and linguistic heights. Ambitious in its scope and unrelenting in its gaze, Typhoid August finds abjection in unlikely places and forces the reader to place themselves in relation to their violent vision.

"These are arresting, often uncomfortable poems which explore the intersections of sex, violence and disgust. These poems never allow the reader to rest easy, they ask us to interrogate our most shameful thoughts, and through witty surrealism ask us to look afresh at everyday encounters." — Andrew McMillan

Gin & Tonic is about the bittersweet experience of trying to grow up fast. The poems, written whilst living alone for the first time, are about drinking and pop music, trauma and love, glitter and girls.

With an informed awareness of its own intertextuality – from American gunslingers and the Blues to the landscape of the Midwest – Wax wanders through the concrete and the abstract, language and idea, the patterned and the primordial. At once urgent and ecstatic, and always politically engaged, Burnette’s intricate collection is, above all, a celebration of the infinite ways that humans reform their world.

"These are poems infused with the spirit of the blues, with the American Midwest, with a friction that bristles between expansive journeys and the ending of things. Immensely readable and enjoyable poems that transported me somewhere else entirely." — Andrew McMillan