Poetry: Tom Branfoot launches Volatile with Nat Raha & Anthony Vahni Capildeo

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.

Featuring the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem shortlisted “A Parliament of Jets”, 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.

Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Writers' Award in 2024, the New Poets Prize 2022 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2025. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of two pamphlets, This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023. Volatile (The 87 Press) is his debut collection.

Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024, finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards 2025). She teaches in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. [Image Credit: Phyllis Christopher.]

Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction Anthony Vahni Capildeo FRSL believes that a genocide-free, fossil fuel-free books industry is possible. Professor at the University of York and an Honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford, Capildeo's interests include traditional masquerade, silence, plurilingualism, and place. Their poetry has been recognized with awards including the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, and the Saltire Award. Capildeo has guest-edited the Royal Society of Literature magazine and an ecopoetics issue of Stand magazine, as well as serving as a contributing editor at PN Review and the Caribbean Review of Books, and a contributing advisor at Blackbox Manifold. Masqueraders: Selected Essays is their most recent book.