Poppy Cockburn’s new poetry collection, Everytime I meet you feels like doom (SARKA, October 2026), is a sexy, romantic meditation on life in 2026 — one that feels both unmistakably contemporary and strangely timeless. In our conversation, we discuss what it means to live and write online, the influences behind her poetry, and the physicality and embodiment at the heart of her work. Everytime I meet you feels like doom is the first poetry collection published by SARKA.

When did you start working on this collection?

The earliest poems date back roughly five years, with the most recent written at the end of 2025. I was working on two collections simultaneously, and this one was more of a slow burn, though I see it as following on from my 2023 chapbook, Liquid Crystal Lovesick Demon in terms of its central concerns and methods.

Which writers were influential for you? Who were you reading while you wrote these?

I’ve read so much mind-altering poetry these past years; a lot of it by women. Some names that stand out are: Tove Ditlevsen (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell), Mary Ruefle, Penny Goring (from whose work I took the book’s epigraph), Nadia de Vries, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, Louise Glück, Sappho (translated by Anne Carson), Mau Baiocco. Deborah Levy’s book, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, which I chance-encountered at the National Poetry Library in London, was a wonderful revelation. I tend to read a lot of memoir and fiction too, but there are honestly too many to name. Mary Gaitskill’s writings have been important to me.

What is your writing routine like? Where do you typically write?

I don’t have a routine. It’s more a compulsion. Since I started writing poetry in 2019, I can’t not write, but my approach is sporadic. I think my best writing often happens in the bath when I can free associate. I keep a notebook and towel on a side table so I can quickly dry my hands and scribble down any vital lines before I forget them. Other than that, I write in the notes app, in transit, in my notebook, voice-transcribing while walking. I have a long-term ambition to write a book of prose, and I sometimes think, if I had a routine, I’d be more likely to succeed. So, a routine is something I aspire to.

You write really presciently about the internet — how it feels to be online. What is your relationship to the internet like?

Tempestuous. As with many things in life, I have conflicted feelings. I address that in the book’s opening poem, Save, don’t save—which riffs on the dream of digital-crash salvation, and emotional renaissance. I think social media is particularly dangerous, in the way it can trigger and incubate obsession. It’s terrible for someone like me, with a tendency to overthink and speculate where there are gaps to fill.

That said, I find modern technology a rich source for my writing. I’m fascinated by the internet’s lexicon, and the ways language can influence human psychology and behaviour, for better or worse. How something as simple as ‘To feel something’ or ‘Current mood’ or ‘Felt cute’ can enter the language and shape our collective consciousness and conscience. The poem, This comment section is my life now is a cento of sorts and meant as an ode to digital forums—to the pleasure and mutuality found in online spaces.

Specifically, you write quite a bit about the act of posting. What does that feel like for you?

Posting feels sacrificial. Like giving something away. It’s an act of vulnerability, isn’t it? Sending something personal out into the unknown, with the possibility someone might see it, relate, make contact. At the same time, there’s a cowardice in sending something out to everyone—casting the net wide.

When I first started posting poems on Instagram, I would get so stressed each time, my skin would get very hot. If I experienced the humiliation as too acute to tolerate after an hour of it being up on stories, I’d delete. This became a kind of measure. Obviously most of the time no one cares or even sees stuff. The person who cares most is always oneself.

Now, I think I’ve de-sensitised and find it easier to dissociate, but I am trying to get better at restraining myself, letting things stew in private rather than throwing out drafts so much, even though I’m an advocate of showing process and failure.

Marguerite Duras wrote that you should never let a lover see what you write, and perhaps I’d fare better if I followed that advice.

Your poems have a very romantic quality to them without ever getting saccharine. Do you consider yourself a romantic?

I do. Deeply. I relate romantically to the world around me. I experience it as psychedelic, poly-dimensional.

I think you can easily inject a bit of romance into everyday life simply by, for example, lighting a few candles, reading a museum text aloud to a friend, sending a note, an audio postcard, taking a picture of a funny sign, slicing an apple, sharing the slices, spending a day with your phone turned off. For me, romance is connected to imagination—in noticing the beauty, sensuality and humour in things, how they’re connected up, and sometimes imagining more than is there.

I consider the process of writing a poem a romantic act—a kind of psycho-cosmic kiss.

I live by the sea with the sunset pouring directly in through my windows. It’s a pretty universal romantic cliché, but then someone will come along and stand directly in front of the view and start loudly preaching about God or a seagull will try to steal a chip out of your hand, so perhaps by acknowledging these kinds of intrusions is how the saccharine might be avoided.

Visual art — and paintings in particular — seem to be an influence on your poetry. Who are the artists you turn to? Do you glean inspiration from other art forms?

I’ve worked in the visual arts for fifteen years, so naturally it’s seeped into my writing. There’s a poem in the collection that started as automatic writing in response to paintings by the Swedish mystic artist Hilma af Klint.

For the last four years, I’ve lived in the coastal town of Margate in the UK which has an artistic history. I work in the public art gallery and through the office window, I can see the sculpture by Antony Gormley that inspired the poem in the book titled Empathy Dummy. JMW Turner was a frequent visitor in his day and Tracey Emin grew up and returned to live here. The naked vulnerability and expressiveness of her work has certainly influenced me in terms of what a woman gets to say about her life in public.

The art I enjoy most often tends to be by women. I love art that balances beauty and brutality. That’s what the experience of being a woman feels like to me. Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Ana Mendieta are some of my favourites. I was recently very moved by the Mendieta exhibition currently showing at Tate Modern in London, and I’m excited about the Sophie Calle exhibition that’s coming to Margate this autumn.

Beside visual art, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks was definitely an influence, as well as the Canadian musician, Cindy Lee, to whom one of the poems is dedicated.

You have a poem called Lana Del Reymix, which I loved. How has she been influential for you?

I love reading that one out in public! Apart from being a long-time fan of her music (Get Free is talismanic to me), I’m fascinated by the public interest in her persona. I’m interested in how persona can become a necessary protective armour, as well as the slippages and interplay between authenticity and performance. I think that makes some people uncomfortable. My remix is saying something about projection and pushing back against the absurd pressures put on women to be ‘everything’. The thing I admire most about Lana is her unapologetic her-ness, and while I feel like I’m often apologising, I tried not to in that poem.

How did you choose the titular poem for the collection?

I liked its melodrama. Once the poem was written, it felt obvious, because it encapsulates what almost all the poems are circling. The ‘you’ in this poem for me became something more archetypal that spoke to the whole collection—this recurring relational dynamic the speaker doesn’t seem able to navigate away from and instead watches unfold, as if separate from herself. It’s this separation that creates the sense of doom.

In the poem Audience Participation, you mention Ozempic three times. Do you have thoughts on the rising popularity of GLP-1s?

Yes. It’s troubling. We live in a time where women’s faces and bodies feel more exposed than ever, and subject to hyper-scrutiny, commodification and comparison. It’s this entanglement of appearance with a person’s sense of self-worth that’s so poisonous. Even as I myself fall prey to it, and hate that.

The writer Amy Key recently wrote an incredible essay about the dilemma of having a body in public, which is well worth the paywall in my opinion.

I love the cover art for your collection. Can you talk a little bit about that process?

Yes! I love it too. The cover painting is by a Russian artist called Elizaveta Zalieva, who’s based in Margate and just graduated from Tracey Emin’s international residency programme. I saw the work through the window of a bar during an art festival called Off Season and was very struck by it. I took a photo on my phone. It was only when searching for cover inspiration that I re-encountered the photo. It felt eerily suitable. The blank page, the sense of something impending. It took a little bit of detective work to find out who it was by, and then I reached out, and she agreed it could be used. Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing more of her work. I love how she primarily works with a palette of blues, and I think her style is very romantic.

Your work, to me, feels very embodied. Do you have any practices that you feel translate into your written work? Exercise, yoga, walking?

I’m glad that comes through, because I feel like I spend too much time in my head. I’m still learning to listen to my body.

I like dancing alone at home to the Pina Bausch film soundtrack, and hula-hooping to darkwave. I sometimes jog backwards up the beach. In summer, I swim in the sea up to three times a day, and I like going to the public swimming pool. They play a lot of old-school music you can swim along to, which I enjoy. Nothing beats breaststroke to Bohemian Rhapsody.

What do you see yourself working on next?

I’ve recently completed a new manuscript of very concise, compressed poems titled Sedimental Value, which is stylistically closer to my debut Naked Oyster, and I’m trying to decide what to do with it—whether to send it out as it is, or wait and see if something comes along to complicate it. I’ve been writing new poetry and short personal essays, and I’m currently in the early stages of a book of memoir fragments reflecting on desire and romantic failure. Lol.