Zelda Cahill-Patten’s poems hinge on human connection: a glancing moment shared between patient and nurse, neighbours coaxing a community garden from rubble, or the deeper, more complex, love between child and parent. In poems which navigate the loss of her father, Cahill-Patten writes with a warmth and a capacity to smile at oneself, which reaches generously out to the reader. – Holly Hopkins

Zelda Cahill-Patten is a poet and short-fiction writer from London. Her recent work has appeared in Acumen, The Interpreter’s House and on The Poetry Society website, with poems forthcoming in Under the Radar and 14 magazine. She won the Philip Burton Poetry Commission in 2025, and was shortlisted for the Jane Martin Poetry Prize 2026.

HOWK is a pamphlet that burrows down and back: into the rock under its feet, into family histories, into maps and documents, before shooting off into the Pennines in a ‘redleather beemer’ or a bike that crashes; or jumping off ‘Black Bridge even though the safe spot was only two meters wide’. These are poems of love and frustration: eager to break out of the kitchenette to Chapel Fell and Langley Beck.  – Holly Hopkins

Joe Wright is a poet from the North Pennines. He was a Foyle Young Poet, was shortlisted for the Young Northern Writers’ Awards, and won the Wells Festival of Literature Young Poets Competition 2022. His work has been featured in Magma, The Little Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Mays, and other publications. He co-edited the DIRT Plantable Poetry Pamphlet Competition, and was a T.S. Eliot Prize Young Critic. He studies at the University of Cambridge. 

George Adams’s poems are filled with close observations of fault lines where animal and human meet: a badger hit by a car leaves a lipstick smear of blood, crabs are stacked in a bucket, mackerels are ‘reeled in flapping’. In these poems, under ‘the moon’s documentary light’, we are invited into a series of intimate and often troubled interactions with the natural world. – Holly Hopkins

George Adams is a poet and critic who lives in Cambridge, where he is currently undertaking an AHRC-funded PhD on nineteenth-century British nature poetry. His critical writing is forthcoming in The Little Review. 

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Reading Jacob Burgess Rollo’s Minor Sporting Achievements is to enter a world of strange athletic pursuits: The Headless Saints Olympics, butterfly racing, sprinting Jazz-Cows. Jacob Burgess Rollo catches the reader up in inventive poems filled with movement, where a loved man raises his arms to show “life / was this big, once, yay deep.’ – Holly Hopkins

Jacob Burgess Rollo is a poet from Dorset. His work features in The London Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Magma, Berlin Lit, fourteen poems, The Little Review, Basket and elsewhere. He was commended in The Poet’s Workshop Poetry Prize 2025. 

Holly Hopkins‘ first collection The English Summer (Penned in the Margins) ‘takes on the stories England tells about itself’. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Prize and won a Laurel Prize. It was awarded the Poetry Book Society’s Special Commendation and was named one of The Guardian‘s ‘Best Poetry Books of 2022’. Work-in-progress, which will form Holly’s second collection, was awarded the Northern Writers Award for Poetry in 2023.