Volatile

Praise:

‘Blurring ethnography, memoir, environmental testimony, and dreamwork, Tom Branfoot’s powerful book, Volatile, asks how we live amid collapse—how we love, witness, and speak when the world is both archive and wound. This is a book of fierce clarity and aching beauty: a record of a life weathered, a landscape unsettled, and a future pending. The poet’s eye is forensic yet tender, attuned equally to microscopic volatiles and to the geopolitical sky where fighter jets and swifts share a single ayre.’ —Peter Gizzi

‘In Volatile, Tom Branfoot pulls open the idea of what it means to dwell and lays out the pieces for us to examine. From the housing crisis to disappearing wetlands and homes lost to grief and solitude, Volatile explores precarity, loss, and life on the edge of forced flight. These are poems deeply invested in earth and its vulnerability, as well as in love, endurance and care. They ask how we are meant to live in the spaces between motorways, in decaying properties, rented rooms, and wrecked habitats. Precise, ambitious, and achingly beautiful, Volatile is a remarkable achievement. I love it.’ —Hannah Copley, author of Lapwing

‘"A Parliament of Superlatives" convenes here in Tom Branfoot’s debut, for real. Volatile. Vital. Necessary. Urgent. Virtuosic. Formally innovative. Utterly felt. Laden with history and totally lit, this collection flies in the face of supposed singularities of English poetry, Northern voice, pastoral projections — or, rather, projectiles. These poems bird eye fascists and fauna and forgone conclusions through a congenital translucent lens.’ —Kimberly Campanello, author of An Interesting Detail

‘As the name implies, Tom Branfoot’s Volatile is an exhilarating and vertiginous swoop of a book, in which lyric language swerves or soars between the material sign and the ephemeral trace. At play is a mercurial intelligence that alchemises all that it touches. And perhaps it touches most our vexed experience of everything we have learnt to separate from ourselves as “nature”. This is eco-poetics as ecstatic enquiry, a mystic – in the best, and most acute sense – way of seeing and being in the world. Volatile is a collection that asks us to look again; a vision unpredictable and unflinchingly alert.’ —Fran Lock, author of Hyena! Jackal! Dog!