This Is Not an Epiphany

These are formal, intelligent poems demonstrating an immense control of language and lineation. At their core is a restlessness, a searching presented as a series of inwards questions which never quite find their resolve. They keep going until the question itself becomes the endgame.  – Anthony Anaxagorou

“Tom Branfoot writes ‘in longing / as if anything that came out of language / could make language tremble.’ In this pamphlet, categories shift, ideas and their moorings tremble, come loose. The speaker is undone, and re-done, by attention to a shifting world, full of softness and of brimming violence. These are poems with images that slice through the mind, leaving a bright, indelible light.” Seán Hewitt

Winner of the 2022 New Poets Prize.

Tom Branfoot’s This is Not an Epiphany examines inner and outer landscapes that have become inhospitable; where people are ‘burnt / by business as usual’. This collection is attentive to shifting landscapes where warehouses spring up on empty land, and the incremental austerities that constitute our living; its lyric absorbs the shocks and crises of survival within them.

Published June 2023.