The Man Whose Brain Turned to Glass: winner of the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition

The long parade of recurring wars and natural disasters forms a shadowy backdrop to Joanna Lowry’s debut pamphlet. Her poems trace the subtle ways in which we attempt to weave our way between these forces of catastrophe through retrieving tiny moments of beauty and contemplation: a few words written on a scrap of paper in a dead poet’s pocket, a clay model of a buddha on a desert floor, a miniature portrait, a cave painting, a shiny fragment of black twisted glass. Each of these objects represents an encounter with a lived moment that is precious, and that is at the centre of a story which is deeply felt and very human, the kind of story that sits outside the larger tide of history, one that helps us to believe we might be saved by art. Winner of the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2025.