Jenni Thorne is a poet from the Black Country. She grew up in a working-class environment where language was practical and poetry was not something you admitted to liking, let alone writing. For a long time, she believed poetry belonged to other people, and that her own voice was something best kept quiet.

Her work explores the space between thought and feeling, survival and recovery, and the everyday rituals people use to get through difficult lives. Drawing on lived experience, her poems often touch on mental health, addiction, shame, resilience, and the fragile negotiations involved in staying alive. She is interested in clarity rather than ornament, and in language that tells the truth without turning pain into spectacle.

Jenni began sharing her work publicly in 2025 and has since found encouragement and community among other writers. She continues to write poems that sit with uncertainty, tenderness, and contradiction, and that make room for voices that are not always heard. She shares her work on Bluesky at @jenthorne.bsky.social.

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Bad Habits

It drinks to hush the static in its skull, 
to drown the sirens with molten silence.
The bottle gleams like amber in the dark.
A jewel clutched in solitude,
when the world forgets its name.

It chokes the numbness with powdered lines,
carved like calligraphy on glass. 
The high, a brief, moth-wing flutter,
worshiping before the flame.

It tokes to calm its trembling bones, 
exhales the incense of the lost. 
The smoke curls silk around its face, 
a mask to help it pass as sane.

It bites its nails to feel the edge of things, 
to taste iron hidden in its hands. 
The blood a bright poppy blooming 
in a garden of shame.

It burns to feel the heat beneath the skin, 
vents its anger on innocent walls.
Embers sear flesh in blooming glory. 
The music of its knuckles, 
a percussion of proof 
that carries no blame.

It wears the bruises like violets,
dancing through broken hands, 
framed with cuffs of scarlet lace,
While they trade its rituals for pills, 
white petals pressed into blister packs. 
Clinical. Clean. Sanctioned salvation that gave no cradle when shadows came. 

It walks the line between collapse and grace, 
a tightrope strung with silk and barbed wire.
Between what they call recovery 
and what it knows as survival.
Living beneath the threat
of being taken once again.

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Shortlisted: Kennedy Warwick, Joanna Munro, Tvisha Mohan, Kerry Gallagher.

Longlisted: Anne Meale, Laura Croyle, Wayne Medford, Ross Jones, Rebecca Fell, Ping Yi Yee, Matthew Harrison, Amber Riley, Sean Tate, Peter Devondald.