A launch of their new poetry collections in Glasgow. Both collections rewire nature and language for our ruinous conjuncture and fizz with radically inventive energy.

Part ecopoetic inventory, part dream vision, The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is an experimental book-length poem about trees. Jay Gao’s second full-length collection presents a visionary poetics of dreaming, dispersal, grafting, cruising, fantasy, the invasive entanglements between nature and data.   

Tom Branfoot’s debut poetry collection explores nature during a time of political crisis, drawing its title from the Middle English use of ‘volatile’ to name birds and other winged creatures. Pulling apart what it means to dwell, habitat loss appears synonymous with eviction, and birds become fellow travellers in our precarious present. Featuring the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem shortlisted “A Parliament of Jets”, these complex, formally daring poems are concerned with the entanglements between personhood, global catastrophes, and ecosystems. 

Jay Gao is a poet and writer from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His second poetry collection The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber (2026) is published by Nightboat Books and Carcanet Press. His debut collection Imperium (2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award, and a Somerset Maugham Award.

Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford. He won a Northern Writers' Award in 2024, the New Poets Prize 2022 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2025. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Volatile (The 87 Press) is his debut collection.