Joshua Judson’s disarming debut has an acute sense of place: in canal-side twitchels and river-thrashed hills, in visiting wards and the Co-op, in ‘the town of the body’. On a mission to escape the self, this speaker channels the manifold ghosts we hold within, and the people who hold us together. Judson’s poetry is pop punk in all its fierce and fragile beauty, the honesty of a power chord, the way ‘an old old song can hit you exactly where you are and fill you with light’.

Nottingham-based writer