Primers Volume Eight

Carl Alexandersson, Rachel Jeffcoat and Olivia Tuck

Edited by Laurie Bolger

ISBN: 9781916760448

eISBN: 9781916760455

Price: £11.99

Publication date: 6th August 2026

Format: Paperback / eBook

Territories: World

Extent: 72pp

DCF: Poetry Collections

In 2025, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Laurie Bolger as selecting editor. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Carl Alexandersson, Rachel Jeffcoat, and Olivia Tuck.

Primers Volume Eight now showcases their exceptional and groundbreaking new work in poetry. Each poet moves between territories of the self and the worlds we inhabit – from reflections of queer joy in landscape and nature, to the voices of ancestors, of women with ‘long memories and short tempers’, to a neurodivergent perspective of the precious planet we call our home in a time of environmental crisis. Steadily focused, haunting and distinctive, this is an essential collection of new work from three of poetry’s most talented emerging voices.

Praise for Primers: Volume Eight

“I’ve absolutely loved reading these new poets. On the go, in the bath, anywhere I could steal a moment. Their poems are so bold, so brilliant and every time I come back to them I find more to love; new approaches and fresh ways in, voices I hadn’t experienced before now, and inventive ways of experimenting with poems. The originality of each lingered long after I’d read them. I absolutely cannot wait for readers to be able to also experience the poems I’ve been so lucky to meet on the page.” – Laurie Bolger

“These are poems that are joyously defiant, full of humanity and wonder, deftly in touch with both the inner and outer worlds of ourselves, and conscious of where we have been and where we are headed to. The work of Carl Alexandersson, Rachel Jeffcoat, and Olivia Tuck, as showcased in Primers Volume Eight, shows that contemporary poetry is not only thriving, it is vibrant, alert, and alive with human connection and gravity” – Jane Commane

Carl Alexandersson is a queer poet based between Glasgow and London, hailing from Småland, Sweden. He was Highly Commended for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2022, a runner-up for the Grierson Verse Prize 2022, and selected for the BBC Words First programme in 2021. His work has appeared in Atrium, streetcake magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, and more. His debut poetry pamphlet Förgätmigej // Forget-me-not was published by Stewed Rhubarb Press in 2023.

Read a poem by Carl at our blog.

Rachel Jeffcoat is a Yorkshire-born, Hampshire-based poet and educator whose work has been widely published, including in Poetry Ireland Review, Under the Radar, Banshee, Tears in the Fence and First Aid (Pan Macmillan 2025). She was one of the winners of the 2024 Candlestick Press competition, Poems of Light, has been nominated for Pushcart and Forward Prizes, and was most recently Commended in the 2025 Winchester Poetry Prize.

Olivia Tuck’s work has been published by the Poetry Society and Broken Sleep, and in Propel, Under the Radar, Poetry Wales (forthcoming) and Magma (forthcoming). She won the 2025 Winchester Poetry Prize, was placed second in the 2023 Jane Martin Poetry Prize awarded by Girton College, Cambridge, and was longlisted for the Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize. She is an associate editor at Lighthouse.

Nine Arches Press

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