POETRY NIGHT Tom Branfoot, Claire Carrroll, Andrew Hykel Mears, Ginny Darke

Join us at EBB for a double launch celebrating the publication of Tom Branfoot's debut poetry collection *Volatile*, published by the87press, and Andrew Hykel Mears & Claire Carroll's new poetry pamphlet *Treatment*, published by Dialect. Readings by the authors and by special guest Ginny Darke.

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. These complex, formally daring poems are concerned with the entanglements between personhood, global catastrophes, and ecosystems. These poems swoop between the unpredictable relationship between a son and their alcoholic parent, fighter jets soaring over the Lake District, and the mercurial rustle between memory and truth when childhood is stored in waterlogged pastures. *Volatile* reaches out in solidarity to the dispossessed everywhere who still sing in the wreckage of the now.

As the name implies, Tom Branfoot’s *Volatile* is an exhilarating and vertiginous swoop of a book, in which lyric language swerves or soars between the material sign and the ephemeral trace. At play is a mercurial intelligence that alchemises all that it touches. And perhaps it touches most our vexed experience of everything we have learnt to separate from ourselves as “nature”. This is eco-poetics as ecstatic enquiry, a mystic – in the best, and most acute sense – way of seeing and being in the world. *Volatile* is a collection that asks us to look again; a vision unpredictable and unflinchingly alert. — Fran Lock

Blurring ethnography, memoir, environmental testimony, and dreamwork, Tom Branfoot’s powerful book asks how we live amid collapse—how we love, witness, and speak when the world is both archive and wound. This is a book of fierce clarity and aching beauty: a record of a life weathered, a landscape unsettled, and a future pending. The poet’s eye is forensic yet tender, attuned equally to microscopic volatiles and to the geopolitical sky where fighter jets and swifts share a single ayre. — Peter Gizzi

Claire Carroll and Andrew Hykel Mears’ *Treatment* is a wry take on late capitalism full of wit, humour and pathos. Beginning with an introduction to a meeting, the opening verses introduce a proposal for an advertisement film; a Treatment. From here, the narrative digresses into vignettes - a couple attending a house-viewing, a swimmer in a marine lake, a comedian on stage, artists making a performance piece - returning periodically to the ‘room’. The text is disrupted by imagery, footnotes and other distractions, but returns again and again to the assertion that there is ‘no sense of an end’.

A kind of fallout miracle. I fell in love immediately with this voice, the low key despair, and the hope lying just out of sight. An incredible collaboration. — Ben Pester,

Andrew Mears is a singular creative voice and it's bracing & fresh to hear that voice in tandem with the equally extraordinary Claire Carroll. Together they form an electric synergy, full of fresh cadences & angles. A beautiful piece. — Yannis Philippakis

BIOS

Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford. He won a Northern Writers' Award in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of *This Is Not an Epiphany* (Smith|Doorstop) and *boar* (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023. His poem ‘A Parliament of Jets’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2025. *Volatile* is his debut collection.

Claire Carroll is a writer and PhD researcher whose work explores how experimental writing can reimagine how we relate to nature and the non-human world. Her debut short story collection, *The Unreliable Nature Writer*** was released in 2024 by Scratch Books.

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 in 2026 by Scarlett Tiger Press. He’s founder and EiC of the interdisciplinary small press Ambient Receiver.

Ginny Darke is a Welsh poet based in Bristol, England. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming with The Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Tenement Press, WORMS and Magma, amongst others. She was shortlisted for the Poetry Wales Award 2024-25 and was a Foyle Young Poet. Her debut pamphlet, *Poison Centre* (Winter, 2026), is forthcoming with if a leaf falls press.