New Pamphlet: Blood Tundra (Broken Sleep Books)

My new pamphlet, Blood Tundra, is published by Broken Sleep Books October 31st 2026.

Buy here

Blood Tundra by Sophia Argyris is a spare, vigilant collection in which the body is chronically estranged from itself. Argyris works across numbered incantation, unpunctuated blocks split by white space, and close-set lyric stanzas, with a four-part shadow sequence recurring at intervals, each instalment taking up where the last one broke off. Argyris sets childhood threat, inherited dread, and ecological grief within an idiom of stone, weather, and watchful animals. What emerges is a book preoccupied with methods of disappearance that it keeps rehearsing before deciding, eventually, to stay. 

"Blood Tundra is a fierce and luminous pamphlet where memory, loss, and survival collide. Sophia Argyris navigates grief, survival, and desire with an unflinching gaze, pulling the reader through landscapes of frost and fire, body and shadow. These poems are a study of endurance—of the self, the body, and the planet. Argyris writes with sharp lyricism, weaving tenderness and violence, intimacy and estrangement. Here, voices rise against absence, against erasure, against the weight of histories both personal and collective. These are poems of reclamation—haunting, visceral, and alive with possibility. Blood Tundra is arresting, unsettling, and unforgettable."— Vasiliki Albedo 

"A book of incantations, imaginary missives, prophecies, warnings, notes of joy - Blood Tundra is a collection you won't want to look away from. These poems work their subtle magic on the reader, drawing you in."— Helen Mort

'Heronless' review and interview at Eche Poetry

“Right from the start you can feel her skill with pace. She propels the reader forward with bursts of vivid imagery. We journey through flowers, time, the body and even temperature in some lines and in the next we land in intimate domesticity, perhaps a more literal place. This flitting use of imagery takes the reader from the breadth of the world and what’s in it to very close and personal places in just a few lines, and it’s a skill Sophia uses in a number of poems…It is a book about absence, and about the presence that absence can carry”

Read the full review and interview here

Heronless, poems by Sophia Argyris, published by Palewell Press

Sophia’s latest poetry pamphlet Heronless, is published by London-based Palewell Press in March 2025.

You can order a copy direct from Sophia, or through the publisher here: https://palewellpress.co.uk/bookstore/environment/hrnl/ (this is also available on amazon etc, but please order from the publisher or myself if you can).

 

Words about Heronless:

How to grieve for a dying world whilst still finding joy in its beauty? How to come to terms with the loss of a parent? These are some of the questions raised by Sophia Argyris’s pamphlet. The poems in Heronless evoke family, love, loss and a desire for connection between the realms of the human and the more-than-human. A dead mother becomes a moon jellyfish, a fox names the world, and a cave teaches us how to love.

Corinna Board, author of Arboreal (Black Cat Poetry Press)


This pamphlet is a stunning, beautiful expression of love, loss, the haunting of grief and memory, told to us by Argyris in a strongly themed, skilfully written, well-structured gathering of most interesting shapes, fractures and fragments. These poems are emotive, heartbreaking and at times devastating. Each poem is filled with pain and claims a piece of your heart.

Each of the poet’s experiences is bound to the natural world. Nature is integral, is the lens through which the poet attempts to name or process the overwhelming, inescapable massiveness of grief. These poems are neat, often gorgeously distilled acts of devotion. Argyris’ ghosts are forever bound with the birds, the trees, stars, stones and water. How do we bear these sadnesses that enter our hearts and never leave? Perhaps there is no answer to this question. At least there is poetry like this – these poems will remain, gentle as breath around you for a long time. Jane Burn, author of The Apothocary of Flight (Nine Arches Press)

 
Sophia Argyris' poems are spacious, loving and melancholy. These are writings of near-loss and actual loss, of nature and need; poised in the balance between air and earth.  Jo Bell, author of Kith (Nine Arches Press) & Boater: Life On England’s Waterways (HarperCollins)