Hi folks!

Here is the Braag’s 2025-6 line up in all its glory! I’m very, very excited for the books the next year will bring, and I hope you are too. Without further ado, here’s a bit more detail on each of them:

2025-6 Titles

Let’s make one thing clear: polblar tmolkop by Andrew Blair is not an endorsement of the 2009 film Paul Blart: Mall Cop. If anything, it is an explanation. One that defies explanation itself. In a series of experimental, ludic poems Blair takes us through a series of conversations between the actor and writer Kevin James, and an ambiguous disembodied entity called Polblar. 

Empirical by Gita Ralleigh explores immigrant life, domesticity and motherhood through a series of lyric poems and narrative fragments, including several ghazals. From Black Star, a voicing of the earliest South Asians in Britain, to abecedarian for maternity ward, postcolonial estrangement, immigrant contingency and tentative instances of love, joy and belonging are illuminated. These poems trace how inherited myths, contested histories and political tides pattern our lives, leaving indelible marks which corral the course of future imaginaries for ourselves and our descendents.

Only Fragments Survive by Carmen Marcus is a collection of speculative hybrid fiction and poetry that imagines the life of paranormal historian, Graine O’Malley. Graine is a researcher who divines the history of objects. Her catalogue contains a splinter of driftwood from Captain James Cook’s Endeavour; a hair from a polar bear that washed up in Orkney; a tale of witches from a dressmaker’s bent pin, an Indie mixtape from 1998 and other tales, taken from the history of broken things.

Micros

Little Book O'Moss by Corinna Board
Toucan by Jessica Boatright
The Annual Convention of Most Gentle and Virtuous Saints by Heather Chapman
Possession by Stevie Ronnie
Lavender Hill by Lauren Thomas

Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in an Oxford secondary school. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. Her work has appeared in And Other Poems, Anthropocene, berlin lit, Propel Magazine, Spelt Magazine, Atrium, Ink Sweat & Tears, Magma and elsewhere. She published her debut pamphlet, Arboreal, in January 2024.

Jessica Boatright writes from a colourful house in Lincolnshire. Her words have recently been spotted in Magma, The Alchemy Spoon, Anthropocene and Poetry Bus, among others. In 2025 she placed third in the Disabled Poets Best Unpublished Pamphlet Prize and was highly commended in the Kathryn Bevis Memorial Poetry Prize. Jessica is founder of “Raising The Fifth,” a creative digital space for writers without children.

Heather Chapman is a Durham University student. She was a 2023 Foyle Young Poet, was shortlisted for the 2024-5 Poetry Wales Award, and won the 2025 Hive Young Writers Competition. Her work is published in The Garlic Press, Bloodletter and Carmen et Error. Heather likes vampires, sestinas, and Edward II. She is on Instagram @heatherchapman4523.

Stevie Ronnie is a writer and artist based in Northumberland. His most recent publication is And For You (love), an artist’s book of love poems rendered in Braille. His poetry films have screened internationally and attracted several awards. Stevie is the recipient of a Northern Writers Award for his poetry and two MacDowell fellowships for his interdisciplinary work.

Lauren Thomas has been published in various places including Poetry Wales, 14 Magazine, The London Magazine, Lighthouse Magazine, The New Welsh Review, Abridged and Magma. She is co-founder and editor of Black Iris magazine https://www.blackirispoetry.com/ she was long listed in The National Poetry competition 2024, commended in the Magma poetry competition 2025 and her work was recently selected to be featured in the Poetry London Presents series. She holds an MA in poetry writing from Newcastle university and the Poetry School.