Bring Down the Haus: JLM Morton

We are pleased to welcome back JLM Morton for the launch of her second poetry collection, Borrowed Ground.

Borrowed Ground is JLM Morton's second full collection, a reckoning with land, climate grief, and the entanglement of human and more-than-human life. Rooted in the woodland and river country of the west of England, the poems move between close observation and myth: a central creation sequence follows a black pine through litany and shaped, fragmenting text, while a closing sequence stages the drowning and mythic rebirth of Sabrina, goddess of the Severn. Morton works through erasure, found material, and liturgical forms without losing lyric precision, holding ecological dread against humour, domestic comfort, and ancient, feminist modes of knowing.

JLM will be joined by poets Andrew Hykel Mears, Caleb Parkin and Sophie Dumont.

Come along and hear JLM and our other excellent poets on Thursday the 8th of October. Tickets cost £7 and include a glass of wine or a soft drink. Presented by bookhaus.

JLM Morton is a writer, celebrant and creative producer based in the west of England. Her poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and is widely published, including in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, and The London Magazine. Winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer, Laurie Lee and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes, her debut poetry collection was Red Handed (Broken Sleep Books, 2024), highly commended by the Forward Prizes and a Poetry Society book of the year. Her first nonfiction book is forthcoming in Spring 2027.

Andrew Hykel Mears**** is a writer and PhD researcher proposing ‘Ambient Eco- Poetics’ as a way to write with the more-than-human. Open Ribs are a Church Full of Sky was released in 2024 by Bread & Roses Press. Rivering was released Summer 2026 by Scarlett Tiger Press, and Treatment Autumn 2026 by Dialect Press. He’s founder and EiC of the interdisciplinary small press Ambient Receiver.

Caleb Parkin was Bristol City Poet 2020 – 22. His work explores the connections between environment, gender and identity; the ways we share space with each other and with other species; and the unruly, uncontrollable qualities of what we call Nature. He’s published three pamphlets: Wasted Rainbow (tall-lighthouse, 2021); The Coin (Broken Sleep, 2022); and collected City Poet commissions, All the Cancelled Parties (2022). His second collection, Mingle (Nine Arches, October 2024) featured in Resurgence and Ecologist magazine. His debut, This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches, 2021) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize and is translated into Danish.

Sophie Dumont is a prize-winning poet and editor based in Bristol. Her debut poetry collection, Sculling, has been shortlisted for the Foward Prize for First Best Collection 2026 and featured in The Guardian, Financial Times and The Sunday Times. Sophie's poetry has won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize and the John Brooks Award and she's held writing residencies along Bristol Harbourside and at Exeter Custom House.