ISBN 978-1-909404-61-8 pamphlet collection 32 pages
Poetry Space Pamphlet Prize 2025 winner in the debut category.
Uncompromising and striking pieces about cosmonauts, poems that taught me things I didn’t know, poems about flight and change and the cost of aspiration. Daring playing with form – prose poem, well-wrought sonnet, mirror poem, letters – unified around the theme of exploring space. Very impressive, moving, deeply felt, memorable and awakening.
Rosie Jackson, judge
Isabelle Thompson’s pamphlet is one of the most impressive debuts I’ve read in years. Witty, highly intelligent, and deeply moving, these poems begin with the early Soviet space program and by degrees admit the narrator’s presence, at once vulnerable and reverent. Refreshingly original and carefully sculpted, Thompson’s poems are at once probing and joyous, yearning and revelatory.
Carrie Etter
Sample poem
The Interpretation of Dreams
— Isabelle Thompson 2026
