A fine and eclectic group of poems from, for the first time in our Pick of the Month competition, an all woman shortlist. What poem draws you in?
Will you choose:
- Sharon Black, ‘Free Range’: a poem on the edge of human/creature experience
- Anna Bowles, ‘Akademichna Street’: a powerful list poem showing human life persisting in a bombing’s aftermath.
- Emma Dandy, ‘I found it particularly hard as a dad’ : a sharp, skilful prose poem deftly roping larger social commentary about adoption with its titling.
- Betty Doyle, At Sea: The language both lets the reader into the experience of releasing ashes, while providing elevated thoughts of the experience, the idea of ‘loosening’ a loved one into the water.
- Claire Lynn ‘Out of Place’ makes strange the everyday experience of a trip to the hairdressers through the eyes of a narrator who finds the whole thing overwhelming.
- Rhian Thomas, ‘Undertow’: a vision of climate change that balances the stark image of the future with the concrete of the present.
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate and Sabine. or received the most attention on social media. They can be found below. (Please scroll down.)
Please VOTE HERE. Voting will close at 6pm on Saturday 24 October.
Our ‘prize’ is £25 towards the charity of your choice or an emailed National Book Token giftcard*.
*Book tokens can only be used within the UK. Sadly, we are unable to find suitable cost-effective alternatives outside the UK.
THE SEPTEMBER 2026 PICK OF THE MONTH SHORTLIST
Free Range
My thoughts are skittish,
peck at whatever they find.
I flick each whitewash flake
into the bin. Shadows on the walls
are darkened rooms
in which I lose myself, daily:
if I say that I look for this
at the edge of every brightness
would you hand me a prescription?
The house is rustling, I can’t get out.
I have a tongue for truth
and a tongue for lies. My mouth
is dry, all this barking. People say
I have something of the fox.
Sharon Black is from Glasgow and lives in the Cévennes mountains in France. Her fifth full collection of poetry, Things That Fruit in Darkness, was published in May 2026 by Vagabond Voices. She is editor of Pindrop Press. www.sharonblack.co.uk
*
Akademichna Street
is bombed-out flats, is
the hot-pink Sweet Bakery Café, is
straggly new-planted trees, is
infantry quaffing cappuccino, is
the community hub spilling ragged donations, is
fuchsia velvet armchairs, is
the balcony with the twitching flag, is
another glide bomb on course for the city, is
partly still standing so fuck you russia, is
the medic checking her eyeliner over cheesecake, is
the café owner smoking on the steps, her
eyes averted from her bombed-out flat
Anna Bowles is a freelance editor and activist who divides her time between London and East Ukraine. Her work is deeply rooted in personal experience. Her first pamphlet, Landscape With Mines, was published by Mica Press in 2025.She is currently near the front working with groups of local volunteer evacuators and IDP support hubs, trying to draw as much attention as possible to their cause. More here: https://annabowles.substack.com/. @annabowles.bsky.social, Facebook: anna.bowles.90, Instagram: annabowleswriter. More details on how to support Anna’s work can be found with the original post.
*
‘I found it particularly hard as a dad.’
Keir Starmer, Prime Minister’s statement in the House on historic forced adoption
I’ve been staring at the blank page of this notebook for an hour. I close my eyes and breathe in for four, hold for four and out for eight, then repeat three times. I open my eyes, take the lid off my pen and set a timer for fifteen minutes. I need the pressure of a deadline. I start to list the things I wish you would ask me. It’s been three years since I found you, and you haven’t asked a single question about me or my life. It’s been a year since I suggested we meet but you haven’t replied to that email. The timer vibrates. I put my pen down even though I’m in the middle of a sentence. I go to the kitchen to make a coffee, and I think about my father. Every time I ask him what he’s worried about, he laughs and says a problem shared is a problem doubled. After five minutes, I go back to my desk and assess what I’ve written. Twenty questions in neat cursive that morphs into an erratic scrawl; I had so much I needed to get down before my time ran out. I bought this notebook because it’s full of holes; there’s a line of perforations running down the margin of each page, so I can remove my mistakes and pretend they never existed. There’s an arc punctured at the outside corner on the bottom of every page. I like to tear the corners off to remind me how far I’ve made it through. I pull one away. I press it against the roof of my mouth and hold it there with my tongue, so my saliva softens the paper. I rip out more corners, pile them on my tongue and swallow. I tear out the page of questions then place a ruler on the loose page and shred it into strips. I rip each strip into squares that I roll up and layer over my tongue. I close my mouth and swallow. I write diagonally across a fresh page: WILL YOU DIE BEFORE I HAVE A CHANCE TO MEET YOU? I remove the page, scrunch it up whole, cram it into my mouth with my fingers and gag as I push it down my throat.
Emma Dandy‘s poetry explores the fragmentation of identity after trauma. She has been widely published in journals and anthologies including The Ekphrastic Review, Atrium and The Honest Ulsterman. Emma won the Fish Publishing Haiku Prize 2026. Instagram: @emmadandypoetry
*
At Sea
Both cast out to sea, I wonder –
did your ashes ever meet?
It was under the same sun setting,
although years and miles apart.
My grandmother, loosened slowly
into Cardigan Bay under a Hay Moon.
My best friend, spread across a bed
of Pacific seamount, five years before.
Down there, the rocks are hot.
They fracture. Plates upend and falter.
It is a far-off land, alien to our Irish Sea,
with no way for their salt to meet, but still
I imagine their greetings –
a grain from my grandmother’s jaw
grazing dust that used to be my best friend’s knee,
their cinders caught by current,
tumbling together. The loam debris
of a femur, loess of skull dome cupping
one another. What do they talk about?
I hope it’s me. In darkened rooms,
in the land of the living, I click through
learning the names of bones
that have been calcified, atomized, sown.
My inherited orbital bone, the lunate
I used to hold; the incus that only hears
the rush of opposite tides, mandibles open
to taste the salt, the spray, the tears.
Betty Doyle has two pamphlets: Girls Parts, published by Verve in 2022; and Fruits of Labour, published by Seren in 2024. She has a PhD in Creative Writing.
*
Out of Place
I lie back, arch my throat,
pretend to relax. Contemplate
ceiling tiles, and women
who do this weekly
for pleasure. A basin
strangles me. The palm
of a hand realigns my head: this
is how the ironing board feels
when you dance with it.
I agree to a full fringe
because I can’t identify
the part of the question
I don’t understand. Christmas
seems to come round faster
each year. My small talk
shrinks. I spray
DON’T SPEAK TO ME
across my reflection.
I’d like to foreclose, cut
the blow dry, but am helpless
as a mermaid; surrender
to hot brush and serum.
Release lifts my hair
like the tail of a kite. I run
all the way home.
Claire Lynn was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2025. She won the Tyne and Wear Metro Poetry Prize in 2023, and has been published in magazines such as Butcher’s Dog, Pennine Platform and Alchemy Spoon.
*
Undertow
On my phone a newsreel shows a car boot lifting
just above the flood. Tail lights like eyes
caught in a comic gasp, while its body, like the carriageway,
lies under sixty million litres of last night’s rain.
Walking through town we find the storm has coughed
up through the tarmac on Brick Row again, drivers
glaring blame as they edge what’s left. They’re calling it
unsettled weather, but watching the floodstream push
through clods of muck like it always did
it’s the bricks that look presumptuous. At night
I dream roads winding under water. Concrete like flaking skin
or weed rising in glass-green depths. Scan through the earth’s crust
you’ll find tectonic graveyards, plates you might have mapped
in earlier oceans, landmasses in ribbons – now continents
of subducted fragments stirred in magma. We turn,
maps metamorphose with exhumed rock
like floodwaters that wash away the borders and the checkpoints.
The current of the road rushing out to meet all debris,
all small boats buoyed by nothing
but hope magnetised in a planet’s undertow.
Rhian Thomas has been shortlisted for the New Welsh Review’s Borzello Prize and the Laurie Lee Prize. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry Wales, The New Welsh Review, Planet, IS&T, The Alchemy Spoon and The Gentian Journal.