Poppy Cockburn | Every time I meet you feels like doom | Paperback | $16.00 US
ISBN: 979-8-9879849-3-2 | Release date: Oct. 5, 2026 | SARKA
Every time I meet you feels like doom—psychosexual poetry for the post-internet era
SARKA’s first poetry release, Every time I meet you feels like doom by Poppy Cockburn, is a contemporary lyric collection exploring intimacy, obsession, and self-performance in a culture of constant visibility.
Across encounters mediated by art, sex, humor, and spectatorship, the speaker remains witness to her own complicity, staging longing as an ethical and aesthetic problem, rather than a story with a resolution.
These poems, hot with psychosexual tension and rendered with painterly detail, offer a darkly funny and surprisingly tender excavation of the contradictions, disappointments, and realities of modern life.
Preorders will ship in early October. Free U.S. and international shipping.
“Yearning, though erotic, is a form of suffering. It’s an experience that combines two themes—love and pain—that are notoriously difficult to write about. Poppy Cockburn writes about yearning (seemingly) effortlessly. Her poems are like pop songs that encapsulate that one feeling you’ve been ruminating on for months in a single verse. Sometimes even a single line is enough. ‘I think about how/we never gave what we had/a name,’ Cockburn writes, and I nod, because I too know this particular brand of grief. Who doesn’t? If you’ve ever texted someone a picture of your shadow, or taken out your contact lenses to cry, you have to read these poems. Nobody writes about desire like Poppy Cockburn does.
—Nadia de Vries, author of All My Dead Jesters and Know Thy Audience
“Poppy Cockburn's Naked Oyster was one of the best UK poetry collections of 2025. In this latest book, she again delivers her cool drollness (and droll coolness), undaunted sexuality, meticulous but madcap imagery, and whimsical meditations that are, on closer inspection, deadly serious. A memorable new voice, Cockburn is a mistress of interiority: she externalizes the internal with rare self-awareness and wisdom.”
—Kathryn Maris, author of The House with Only an Attic and a Basement
“Every time I meet you feels like doom is Poppy Cockburn’s brutal, gorgeous Rose Period. This collection feeds something winged in the stomach. At her best in romantic ekphrasis, Cockburn hues gendered marginalia and Opheliac observation with the pink violence of vulnerability. At the end of the garden path you will find a cemetery of the speaker’s making, a Love that makes sense. This is a book that will follow you through the day like light.”
—L Scully, author of Self-Romancing
“Poppy Cockburn’s second full-length activates various kinds of arousal systems. Memorable love moments are packaged with gift wrap irony in ‘pastel happiness’ as our speaker plays ‘WhatsApp hide-n-seek’ on a date at the Tate. The ‘endless scroll’ promises in its rainbow infinity a ‘crock of gold’ after all: despite the deadpan tragedienne at its centre, this is a tenacious book in search of abundance. With a wit to rival Dorothy Parker and Chelsey Minnis, Cockburn pits grown up gurlesque against the agonies and ecstasies of modern dating and modern being-in-a-feminised-body. These are poems of effortless pithiness like a shrug of fine chiffon, collecting a cache of ‘romantic instants’ to alchemise with orange wine, synthy beats and textspeak.”
—Maria Sledmere, author of Cinders and The Indigo Hours
“Every time I meet you feels like doom is speculative poetry, an intimacy report on the limits of technology, erotic play, field notes on dates at the Tate, ontological dinners, synth poetics, and poems for both the crush-addicted—those who need ‘a new crush every two weeks’—as well as those who would prefer ‘having a coke with no one.’ This is a book obsessed with meaning and submission.”
—Ulyses Razo, author of Personal Life
Poppy Cockburn is a writer living on the coast in Margate, UK. The author of five poetry chapbooks—such as Liquid Crystal Lovesick Demon and most recently Confetti (ex-cerpts)—her debut book-length collection, Naked Oyster, was published by If a Leaf Falls Press in 2025.
Cover painting courtesy of the artist, Elizaveta Zalieva, part of Tracey Emin’s international art residency program at TKE Studios, Margate, England. The piece is titled:
“I opened the new book
and the very first line was
‘somehow, searching for something else’”
Cover design by Raegan Bird
Portrait of the author by Joe Lang
Poppy Cockburn | Every time I meet you feels like doom | Paperback | $16.00 US
ISBN: 979-8-9879849-3-2 | Release date: Oct. 5, 2026 | SARKA
Every time I meet you feels like doom—psychosexual poetry for the post-internet era
SARKA’s first poetry release, Every time I meet you feels like doom by Poppy Cockburn, is a contemporary lyric collection exploring intimacy, obsession, and self-performance in a culture of constant visibility.
Across encounters mediated by art, sex, humor, and spectatorship, the speaker remains witness to her own complicity, staging longing as an ethical and aesthetic problem, rather than a story with a resolution.
These poems, hot with psychosexual tension and rendered with painterly detail, offer a darkly funny and surprisingly tender excavation of the contradictions, disappointments, and realities of modern life.
Preorders will ship in early October. Free U.S. and international shipping.
“Yearning, though erotic, is a form of suffering. It’s an experience that combines two themes—love and pain—that are notoriously difficult to write about. Poppy Cockburn writes about yearning (seemingly) effortlessly. Her poems are like pop songs that encapsulate that one feeling you’ve been ruminating on for months in a single verse. Sometimes even a single line is enough. ‘I think about how/we never gave what we had/a name,’ Cockburn writes, and I nod, because I too know this particular brand of grief. Who doesn’t? If you’ve ever texted someone a picture of your shadow, or taken out your contact lenses to cry, you have to read these poems. Nobody writes about desire like Poppy Cockburn does.
—Nadia de Vries, author of All My Dead Jesters and Know Thy Audience
“Poppy Cockburn's Naked Oyster was one of the best UK poetry collections of 2025. In this latest book, she again delivers her cool drollness (and droll coolness), undaunted sexuality, meticulous but madcap imagery, and whimsical meditations that are, on closer inspection, deadly serious. A memorable new voice, Cockburn is a mistress of interiority: she externalizes the internal with rare self-awareness and wisdom.”
—Kathryn Maris, author of The House with Only an Attic and a Basement
“Every time I meet you feels like doom is Poppy Cockburn’s brutal, gorgeous Rose Period. This collection feeds something winged in the stomach. At her best in romantic ekphrasis, Cockburn hues gendered marginalia and Opheliac observation with the pink violence of vulnerability. At the end of the garden path you will find a cemetery of the speaker’s making, a Love that makes sense. This is a book that will follow you through the day like light.”
—L Scully, author of Self-Romancing
“Poppy Cockburn’s second full-length activates various kinds of arousal systems. Memorable love moments are packaged with gift wrap irony in ‘pastel happiness’ as our speaker plays ‘WhatsApp hide-n-seek’ on a date at the Tate. The ‘endless scroll’ promises in its rainbow infinity a ‘crock of gold’ after all: despite the deadpan tragedienne at its centre, this is a tenacious book in search of abundance. With a wit to rival Dorothy Parker and Chelsey Minnis, Cockburn pits grown up gurlesque against the agonies and ecstasies of modern dating and modern being-in-a-feminised-body. These are poems of effortless pithiness like a shrug of fine chiffon, collecting a cache of ‘romantic instants’ to alchemise with orange wine, synthy beats and textspeak.”
—Maria Sledmere, author of Cinders and The Indigo Hours
“Every time I meet you feels like doom is speculative poetry, an intimacy report on the limits of technology, erotic play, field notes on dates at the Tate, ontological dinners, synth poetics, and poems for both the crush-addicted—those who need ‘a new crush every two weeks’—as well as those who would prefer ‘having a coke with no one.’ This is a book obsessed with meaning and submission.”
—Ulyses Razo, author of Personal Life
Poppy Cockburn is a writer living on the coast in Margate, UK. The author of five poetry chapbooks—such as Liquid Crystal Lovesick Demon and most recently Confetti (ex-cerpts)—her debut book-length collection, Naked Oyster, was published by If a Leaf Falls Press in 2025.
Cover painting courtesy of the artist, Elizaveta Zalieva, part of Tracey Emin’s international art residency program at TKE Studios, Margate, England. The piece is titled:
“I opened the new book
and the very first line was
‘somehow, searching for something else’”
Cover design by Raegan Bird
Portrait of the author by Joe Lang
