Volatile

Debut poetry collection about crisis and environment from award-winning Northern working-class poet.

Volatile is a daring debut poetry collection about crisis, habitat destruction, archives, and alcoholism. It asks, how do we love within a system of damage?

"This is a book of fierce clarity and aching beauty: a record of a life weathered, a landscape unsettled, and a future pending." —Peter Gizzi

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. Produced as a part of a residency at Manchester Cathedral, the long poem "Muminent" is threaded throughout the book engaging with the earliest recorded history of Manchester to consider the body as an archive at risk of disappearance.

Volatile reaches out in solidarity to the dispossessed everywhere who still sing in the wreckage of the now.