Join us as Nicky Melville and Tessa Berring read from, thereby launching, their new collections Get Tae, and Burnt Snow, from Edinburgh’s Blue Diode Press. They will be joined by brilliant Glasgow based poets Sophia Archontis and Endija Lukstina, for a night of playful, political, hybrid, decadent, concrete, and excitingly experimental poetry.

N[n]ick[-e]y M[m]elville, in the parlance of our times, is a ‘creative’: a poet, writer, an artist, an educator, musician, creator – the lot! Decade of Cu ts, his selected poems was published by Blue Diode Press in 2021 – a new collection with Blue Diode, GET TAE, has just been published (precipating this launch!).Other more and less substantial works include the concrete poetry sequence Power Cuts (zimZalla, 2024) and his 400-page found poem The Imperative Commands (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2022). He makes music as Fuck This, a project which could be described as Ivor Cutler on [nick-]e. He
lives in Edinburgh with his partner and Beckett (who is a whippet).

Endija Lukstina is a Latvian poet based in Glasgow. Their poems have been published by sincere corkscrew press, Ambient Receiver, Discount Guillotine and others. They co-edit Brackish, a DIY translation zine, and are a poet mentee in the 18th edition of Clydebuilt (run by the Edwin Morgan Trust & St Mungos Mirrorball). Currently they are
working on a hybrid piece about swans, womanhood and decadence in the USSR, and a suite of poems about learning to swim as an adult.

Tessa Berring is the author of poetry collections Bitten Hair, Folded Purse, and Burnt
Snow, from Blue Diode Press (three distinct books, but very much in relationship with one another). Another recent publication was Joke Book (The Silent Academy, 2025), a sequence of fifty short poems that play with the traditional joke form as
miniature conversation and thought flipped over. Her work frequently cuts into an lifts things out from domestic and intimate environments – sites of chatter, humour, touch, and raw emotion. Many of her poems are built through a simple love of language – the way it can both carry an image, veer to the side, and shatter a sentence.

Sophia Archontis is a multi-media artist originally from Cyprus. Her work spans poetry, noise/sound art, photography, and music. She hosts Translations Radio on Radio Buena Vida, and is the host of the monthly night Electronic Experimentations at The Flying Duck. Her work has been featured in exhibitions off-page and Urban Coincidence, as well as Performance Events Research Programming.