About The Cutting Room

I’m Adam — poet, occasional essayist, working in the Welsh Marches between the Malverns and the Wye. I write a personal essay Substack at Beyond Solitude; this is the other one.

The Cutting Room is for the autopsy.

Each week, a poem of mine that didn’t make it. The cut draft printed in full, then the failures named — line by line, by their proper names. The poems are mine; the diagnostic is general.

Three notes on what this is and isn’t.

It’s British, and specifically of the Marches. The language for landscape and labour here is its own — neither pastoral nor metropolitan — and the craft thinking grows out of that ground.

It’s diagnostic, where most craft writing is aspirational. There are good teachers showing how poems succeed. This one runs the other way: how poems specifically fail, named and dissected.

It’s transparent about my own failures. The drafts on the slab are mine. I have nothing useful to say about other people’s cuts; I have a great deal to say about my own.

Free for the first three months, while the taxonomy fills out. After that, a paid tier: quarterly workshops on a specific failure mode, occasional manuscript mini-feedback (six lines, ruthlessly specific), full archive. Founding subscribers get three single-poem deep edits at any point in the year.

If you write poems, this is for you. If you read them carefully, it may be too.

— Adam

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