Primers Volume Eight

In 2025, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for an eighth time, 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.

Laurie Bolger is a London based writer & the founder of The Creative Writing Breakfast Club. Laurie’s work has been widely anthologised and has featured at Glastonbury, TATE, Sky Arts and BBC Global News. Laurie’s first publication Box Rooms celebrated community and her W10 roots. Laurie was the winner of The Moth Poetry Prize in 2023 and was shortlisted for The Sylvia Plath, Bridport and Forward Poetry Prizes. Her latest pamphlets include Makeover by The Emma Press and Spin by The Poetry Business celebrating the resilience of working class women, autonomy and love. Jane Commane is a poet, editor and publisher. Her first full-length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, for a decade she also worked in museums and archives and in 2016 she was chosen to join Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 writer development programme Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press, co-editor of Under the Radar magazine, and is co-author, with Jo Bell, of How to Be a Poet, a creative writing handbook (Nine Arches Press).In 2017, she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. In 2019, Jane was commissioned by Historic England and the Poetry Society as part of the Where Light Falls project to write a poem alongside community groups which was projected onto the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and viewed by over 15,000 people over three nights as part of a music, poetry and light installation. 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. 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.