#TheWhiskeyShot: Poet Spotlight (Wave 2) – Briony Collins

Briony Collins didn’t start out writing poetry so much as rehearsing it. The early years were filled with imitation, not out of a lack of experience, but because poetry, as she’d learned it, belonged to another world. “It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything of my own to write about,” she says. “But poetry still felt entirely inaccessible to someone like me, coming from a low-income household.” All the poets in school were long-dead men, writing about politics, religion, and epic love. “All things that didn’t interest me at the time,” she adds, “as I was very young when I started to explore poetry more seriously—probably around 13 or 14 years old.”

She mimicked what she thought a poet was supposed to be. For longer than she’d like to admit, her work was an echo chamber of other voices. Until one moment snapped her out of it. She was finishing her undergraduate dissertation and sent a poem to her supervisor, a not-so-great piece written from the perspective of an 18th-century ancestor. The response? Brutal and transformative. “Briony. Who are you writing for?” That was the rupture. “I had never written for myself before,” she realises now. “My early work wasn’t poetry; it was posturing.” That same week, she scrapped the poem and wrote Harbour, the opening piece of what would become her debut pamphlet, Blame it on Me. “It was for me, and for my mum.” Now, that’s who she writes for, who she always returns to when her voice is at its most vital.

Collins doesn’t operate on a rigid process. No formulas. No tidy outlines. “It’s more like a feeling,” she says. A word, phrase, or image will lodge itself in her head and demand attention. It’s never born from a big concept. “Just a little fragment of language that sticks in my brain and makes me feel something.” That fragment becomes a magnet, pulling other pieces toward it. Sometimes she has to go hunting, placing poetry books open on her desk, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, Denise Riley, waiting for the language to catch fire. Once the poem begins to take shape, she tweaks and trims, shifting verbs and slicing down lines until it feels right. Then she lets it rest. “Sometimes for an hour. Sometimes for months. Eventually, I return, reread, polish, and it’s 90% done. The last 10% is up to the reader.”

If her mother has been the throughline of her published work so far, that relationship, personal and poetic, has also started to shift. Her mother passed away in 2001, when Briony was five years old. Much of her poetry has lived in that grief, circling it, examining it. But recently, the fatigue set in. “I’ve been having a difficult relationship with that particular muse lately,” she admits. She recalls Forrest Gander, who once said he stopped reading from Be With because he didn’t want to keep performing his grief. “I didn’t understand exactly what he meant at first,” Collins says. “But the actual feeling of performing and comprehending what that can do to a grieving person was lost on me until recently.”

Now, she’s breaking away. No muse, no map, just the instinct to fuck shit up. “I think my poetry is entering its teenage phase,” she says. “I want to try new things, get angry, get weird, swear it isn’t just a phase.” Her upcoming work delves into sexuality and masculinity, turning to bizarre conceits and unexpected angles that challenge both writer and reader.

Collins has written poems everywhere, from receipts behind the till at Marks & Spencer, to bathroom stalls, to frantic scribbles between mouthfuls of life. But ideally, she’s at home, in her study, “a small box room where nobody knows I am.” There’s a teapot of tea, a blanket, a candle, and the quiet hum of the world outside: barking dogs, laughing children, gurgling stomach. “Life is all around me,” she says, “and yet I sit apart from it… My poetry lives with me. I have to make it feel safe if I want to craft something special.”

There’s an ethical sharpness in Collins’ writing that elevates it beyond mere confession. Her poems are personal, but they’re never just about her. “The people in my poems aren’t fictional characters,” she explains. “They are also real… a version of them that existed once, in my head, during a specific moment.” That doesn’t mean they’re always flattered. “Sometimes, I do so in order to deliberately say ‘fuck you’ to the other person,” she says, pointing to her poem Here’s your fucking scene from The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees. “Sometimes, it’s to show them that I see them. That I am hurt, but understand.”

From Blame it on Me (2021) to Ambergris (2025), Collins has built a body of work that balances loss, rage, tenderness, and introspection without ever losing its grip on truth. Her other collections include All That Glisters (2022), The Birds, The Rabbits, The Trees (2023), and cactus land (2023). Each one feels like a different door to the same house, a house built on memory, grief, fury, and the quiet conviction that poetry, when it’s good, says exactly what it means and nothing it doesn’t.

Briony Collins writes not to be heard, but to say what needs to be said, even if no one’s listening yet. And that’s why people are.