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the poet
Vanessa Napolitano is a British-American writer with three pamphlets to her name and a fourth due from Stanchion Press in May 2026. She was among six writers selected for Word Up North's 2025 New Northern Poets, and has seen her work appear in Humana Obscura, The Interpreter’s House, And Other Poems, Porridge and Clarion. Vanessa writes about grief, place, nature and the domestic. Her first collection, I’ll know I’m home, will be published by Black Cat Press in 2027.
the poems
Tell me again about your
theory of change
Tell me what it will do for us here,
at the level of moss and woodlice.
Tell me again how it’s like the stages of grief,
strata of sand and eggshell, fossil and soil,
tell me how it’s better for everyone to absorb
losses and gut punches,
clearing away deadwood to break new light
onto the forest floor - because the stems of our minds
are like the roots of trees,
flourishing, eventually, after the storm-drench.
Tell me how you saw your activities and outputs
landing like blackbirds on perches from up the hill-
in your shelter- where all the landscape unrolls
miniature as monopoly.
Tell me again about impacts, collateral damage,
like slate in the quarry crumbling paths,
like blackberries staining your fingers,
like the duckweed choking the banks,
tell me again how nothing lasts.
Tie-dying outside
The tie-dye was frozen in its tub no ice forecast, a sudden plunge like leaving significantly like leaving for somewhere new or moving no warning and here
is a hard bucket of brilliant purple ice i expected some whorl of it in the cloth
some scar that told the story there’s none no wax batik like scorch we rinse the ice till it remembers it was water in a previous life we go about our business we leave chance drying on the radiator the heat, the heart, the hearth.
Faint
Did she make the shape of a cloud
on the ground? Concerned words
like taffeta or trifle cream. Luxury.
Blood disperses back each side
of the scale, each chamber of the heart,
a tepid hand checks her pulse at the wrist.
Does she make the shape of a cloud?
Dispersed on the ground. Drawing a crowd.
Her skirt long, thank goodness, pooled like blood
around her. Her heart weighs heavy on the scale,
this long, dangerous day. Taffeta-blue sky.
A sudden hand helps her up. Luxury.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb