A event on Thursday 23rd October. The event starts at 19:00.
Tottering State #8: poetry for unsteady times, with Jazmine Linklater, Zoë Skoulding, and Nia Davies.
Join us at East Bristol Books for the 8th instalment of our poetry series Tottering State. It's another wobbly one, with Jazmine Linklater launching *Snagged on red thread* (Monitor Books), a long poem of power, protest, complicity about which Mira Mattar asks ‘What is it to only know the word sweetheart in the language of people being killed in your name?' There will also be readings by two poets writing at the peripheries of Welshness, Welsh landscape and language: Zoë Skoulding (A Marginal Sea; A Revolutionary Calendar) and Nia Davies, author of *Votive Mess* (Bloodaxe).
On Jazmine Linklater's *Snagged on red thread*:
Snagged on red thread is a long poem of protest, power and complicity. Jazmine Linklater articulates how the apparatus of Empire is encoded in the structures we live in: militarised sights set on schoolyards, bargaining arms deals with teenagers, surveilling civic squares, co-opting institutions. And yet Snagged on red thread is compelled to march, to embroider, to bear witness.
‘What is it to only know the word sweetheart in the language of people being killed in your name? How do we comprehend the paltriness of our gestures against genocide? The speaker of Jazmine Linklater’s Snagged on red thread moves within the intimacies of complicity, not excluding themselves from the we whose taxes fund genocide, or succumbing to individualising games of guilt or absolution. The poem rather weaves then with now – how the “war on terror” normalised the murder of Arabs in the “Western” imaginary for generations. It snags constantly on irresolution, not attempting to tie anything up, but always manages to locate the right enemy.’ – Mira Mattar
On Zoe Skoulding's *A Marginal Sea*:
A Marginal Sea is written from the vantage point of Ynys Môn/Anglesey, which is both on the edge of Wales and in a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean – the island is imagined here as a site of archipelagic connection with other places and histories, where the spaces of dream and digital technology are interwoven with the everyday. Skoulding’s poems take their readers into new worlds: we come to terms with the oystercatcher’s ‘muscle of belonging’; we chart the cross-cultural coordinates of ‘Newborough Warren with Map of Havana’ (‘and it’s this way to the Malecón /to look out over the Menai Strait’); elegy and song overlap in moving poems which think through how we remember and misremember: ‘it’s my voice // deepening with others that won’t let themselves / be buried.’ (‘Anecdote for the Birds’).
On Nia Davies' *Votive Mess*:
"In Votive Mess Nia Davies asks how time and desire move us errantly. Her second collection follows her startling debut All fours, emerging from an immersion in performance and ritual. The poems trace a path through the peaks and troughs of performance, bouncing between enchantment and disenchantment. These works are studies in the altered states of travel, masks, comedy, learning and love. Nia Davies begins to learn a lost mother tongue, iaith Cymraeg, and presents unfinished experiments in liminality.
Votive Mess is a book of small rebellions against systems of exhaustion and alienation, embracing lingual brambles and shabby theatre to assemble fragments gleaned from the rubble of Babel. There are love letters drowsy and excessive as well as uncanny happenings on stage and in the woods. Votive Mess is composed out of a tangle of sex, leaf, stumbles on stage, damage, blackberries and dyslexia. There is a discharge of Awen, otherwise known as poesis. The navel of the dream is inside out." - Pamela Scott
Jazmine Linklater is a poet and writer based in Manchester where she is a regional editor for the online art writing platform Corridor8. She has published four poetry chapbooks, most recently *Figure a Motion* (Guillemot Press, 2020). From October 2025 she is undertaking practice-based research in art writing and ekphrastic encounters at Sheffield University.
Zoë Skoulding is a poet and literary critic interested in translation, sound and ecology. She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University. Her latest collection of poems is *A Marginal Sea* (Carcanet Press, 2022). Previous collections (published by Seren Books) include * Remains of a Future City* (2008), shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year, *The Museum of Disappearing Sounds* (2013), shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry; and *Footnotes to Water* (2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020. That year she also published *A Revolutionary Calendar* (Shearsman). She received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 for her body of work in poetry.
Nia Davies is a poet experimenting with performance, embodied practice, intermedia and hybrid writing. She is also a writer, researcher, performer and literary curator. Her second collection of poems, *Votive Mess*, was published by Bloodaxe in 2024. Nia was recently awarded a doctorate for research into poetry and ritual at the University of Salford. Her first book-length collection of poems *All fours* (Bloodaxe, 2017) was shortlisted for the Roland Matthias Prize for Poetry (2018) and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for First collection (2019). This followed the pamphlets *England* (Crater, 2017), *Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words* (Hafan/Boiled String, 2016) and *Then Spree* (Salt, 2012). She was editor of the international quarterly magazine Poetry Wales from 2014 to 2019.
Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio)
Join us at East Bristol Books for the 8th instalment of our poetry series Tottering State. It's another wobbly one, with Jazmine Linklater launching *Snagged on red thread* (Monitor Books), a long poem of power, protest, complicity about which Mira Mattar asks ‘What is it to only know the word sweetheart in the language of people being killed in your name?' There will also be readings by two poets writing at the peripheries of Welshness, Welsh landscape and language: Zoë Skoulding (A Marginal Sea; A Revolutionary Calendar) and Nia Davies, author of *Votive Mess* (Bloodaxe).
On Jazmine Linklater's *Snagged on red thread*:
Snagged on red thread is a long poem of protest, power and complicity. Jazmine Linklater articulates how the apparatus of Empire is encoded in the structures we live in: militarised sights set on schoolyards, bargaining arms deals with teenagers, surveilling civic squares, co-opting institutions. And yet Snagged on red thread is compelled to march, to embroider, to bear witness.
‘What is it to only know the word sweetheart in the language of people being killed in your name? How do we comprehend the paltriness of our gestures against genocide? The speaker of Jazmine Linklater’s Snagged on red thread moves within the intimacies of complicity, not excluding themselves from the we whose taxes fund genocide, or succumbing to individualising games of guilt or absolution. The poem rather weaves then with now – how the “war on terror” normalised the murder of Arabs in the “Western” imaginary for generations. It snags constantly on irresolution, not attempting to tie anything up, but always manages to locate the right enemy.’ – Mira Mattar
On Zoe Skoulding's *A Marginal Sea*:
A Marginal Sea is written from the vantage point of Ynys Môn/Anglesey, which is both on the edge of Wales and in a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean – the island is imagined here as a site of archipelagic connection with other places and histories, where the spaces of dream and digital technology are interwoven with the everyday. Skoulding’s poems take their readers into new worlds: we come to terms with the oystercatcher’s ‘muscle of belonging’; we chart the cross-cultural coordinates of ‘Newborough Warren with Map of Havana’ (‘and it’s this way to the Malecón /to look out over the Menai Strait’); elegy and song overlap in moving poems which think through how we remember and misremember: ‘it’s my voice // deepening with others that won’t let themselves / be buried.’ (‘Anecdote for the Birds’).
On Nia Davies' *Votive Mess*:
"In Votive Mess Nia Davies asks how time and desire move us errantly. Her second collection follows her startling debut All fours, emerging from an immersion in performance and ritual. The poems trace a path through the peaks and troughs of performance, bouncing between enchantment and disenchantment. These works are studies in the altered states of travel, masks, comedy, learning and love. Nia Davies begins to learn a lost mother tongue, iaith Cymraeg, and presents unfinished experiments in liminality.
Votive Mess is a book of small rebellions against systems of exhaustion and alienation, embracing lingual brambles and shabby theatre to assemble fragments gleaned from the rubble of Babel. There are love letters drowsy and excessive as well as uncanny happenings on stage and in the woods. Votive Mess is composed out of a tangle of sex, leaf, stumbles on stage, damage, blackberries and dyslexia. There is a discharge of Awen, otherwise known as poesis. The navel of the dream is inside out." - Pamela Scott
Jazmine Linklater is a poet and writer based in Manchester where she is a regional editor for the online art writing platform Corridor8. She has published four poetry chapbooks, most recently *Figure a Motion* (Guillemot Press, 2020). From October 2025 she is undertaking practice-based research in art writing and ekphrastic encounters at Sheffield University.
Zoë Skoulding is a poet and literary critic interested in translation, sound and ecology. She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University. Her latest collection of poems is *A Marginal Sea* (Carcanet Press, 2022). Previous collections (published by Seren Books) include * Remains of a Future City* (2008), shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year, *The Museum of Disappearing Sounds* (2013), shortlisted for Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry; and *Footnotes to Water* (2019), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020. That year she also published *A Revolutionary Calendar* (Shearsman). She received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 for her body of work in poetry.
Nia Davies is a poet experimenting with performance, embodied practice, intermedia and hybrid writing. She is also a writer, researcher, performer and literary curator. Her second collection of poems, *Votive Mess*, was published by Bloodaxe in 2024. Nia was recently awarded a doctorate for research into poetry and ritual at the University of Salford. Her first book-length collection of poems *All fours* (Bloodaxe, 2017) was shortlisted for the Roland Matthias Prize for Poetry (2018) and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for First collection (2019). This followed the pamphlets *England* (Crater, 2017), *Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words* (Hafan/Boiled String, 2016) and *Then Spree* (Salt, 2012). She was editor of the international quarterly magazine Poetry Wales from 2014 to 2019.
Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio)
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