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

Winner of the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2025

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.

‘Joanna Lowry’s poetry voyages through time and space with the pale demeanour of a ghost, now perplexed, now disabused, never able to look away. It haunts the galleries of history getting the details right, revisiting moments and figures still living out their fates, but always emerging into the forlorn light of now, as the living poet bearing the scars of it all, the aftermaths of love or horror, the deeds and delusions of men forever sounding in the dark. Lowry’s is a poetry of the still point and the turning world: this is a rich and memorable collection.’ – Glyn Maxwell

‘The inspiration for these poems is a series of objects, stolen trinkets, remains, scraps of film, creatures, all left behind by events that cover a sweep of time and terrain. Each one is held up for examination, or perhaps more precisely, for meditation, to reveal a story of seismic shifts in human history and the natural world… In poem after poem, Lowry works her images and references with great confidence and clarity, sometimes quietly mysterious, sometimes sparkling, varied but deeply connected. She works with the dedication and formal skill of a miniaturist. It is an engagement of the body as well as the mind that links the object, the poet and the wider environment in a finely articulated series of relationships.’ – Imtiaz Dharker

‘In this exceptional debut, Joanna Lowry writes of the pain-staking art of the miniaturist, an apt analogy for what she is able to accomplish in her poems. She traces the steps of artists such as Lee Miller and Antonio Machado, chronicles the final hours of Herculaneum, arrives in the museum or at the edge of a cliff. Her painterly eye takes in places as vast and varied as St Petersburg and the Gobi Desert; in these landscapes are stains of human intervention, shadows obscuring the light, but Lowry is always impeccably accur-ate in showing us what it is to be present and observant – a witness to life.’ – Tamar Yoseloff

'A fine project of transformative imagining, a compendium of lyric explorations of moments in global and individual history brought together into an extraordinary and moving poetic whole.' – Jane Draycott

Joanna Lowry won the 2025 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker for her debut pamphlet The Man Whose Brain Turned to Glass (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2026). She received an MA Distinction in Writing Poetry from the Poetry School/Newcastle University in 2022, receiving a prize for exceptional performance. She has been shortlisted in several competitions, including the Arvon Prize and the Bridport Prize. In 2018 she was commended in the Manchester Poets and Players Competition and won third prize in the Teignmouth Poetry Competition. She was highly commended by Louise Glück for the Moth Poetry Prize and received second place in the Edward Cawston Thomas Prize in 2023.

Now living in East Sussex, she was born in Wales and spent her childhood in Nigeria. Apart from writing poetry she has lectured and written about photography and video art, and sometimes those different worlds still converge and overlap. And when she isn’t writing she is painting. And those worlds converge too.