Three Poets at Lighthouse: Launching Jennifer Lee Tsai's Melete and Jay Gao's The Dead One... with Agata Maslowska

There's nothing we love more than a poetry night here at Lighthouse, and we're delighted to be bringing you not one, not two, but THREE incredible poets as we welcome Jennifer Lee Tsai and Jay Gao's new collections in the company of Agata Maslowska.

These poems cover themes of family history, migration, racial and queer desires, womanhood and war. They explore identity, belonging and place through each poet's own voices - get ready for an evening of beautiful language and fantastic readings!

The collections

Jennifer Lee Tsai's Melete is a compelling narrative exploring family history, intergenerational trauma, love, loss, migration and belonging from the perspective of a second-generation British Chinese identity. It interweaves dual cultures and heritages, moving from China and Hong Kong to Liverpool. The mythic structure of the book relates to the three original Boeotian Muses – Melete, Mneme and Aoede. Named after the Muse of meditation and contemplation, Melete navigates the boundaries between life and art, personhood and subjectivity, states and places of spiritual transcendence. This expansive book establishes a powerfully distinctive lyric voice in British poetry.

Jay Gao's The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is an experimental book-length serial poem on the arboreal. Rewiring nature and language, Gao’s second collection is an inventory for dreaming treely, dispersed across a commons-place of grafting and cruising, racial and queer desires, diasporic entanglements and renewal. These serial poems arrive at the hewn nation of the unthought like an invasive species addled by contemporary contaminants.

Agata Maslowska’s Woman: Plant: Language is powered by the drive to understand life at its deepest level, pre-human and beyond borders. To explode language, grasping what we can know in our bones and roots, and to live according to that knowing. Lyrically sublime, playfully provocative, the poems in this collection disrupt form to challenge rampant authority, layering the lived experiences of womanhood, migration and war between the ripple of bryophytes, the songs of the soil, the fading call of endangered species.

The poets:

Jennifer Lee Tsai is an award-winning poet, writer and teacher. She was born in Bebington and grew up in Liverpool. She is a fellow of The Complete Works, a Ledbury Poetry Critic and a former Contributing Editor to Ambit.

Jay Gao is a poet and writer from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His second poetry collection The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is forthcoming in Fall 2026 from Nightboat Books and Carcanet Press. His debut collection Imperium (2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English at Columbia University.​​

Agata Maslowska is a writer, poet, and translator. She was born in Poland and lives in Scotland. Her debut poetry collection “Woman : Plant : Language” was published by Bad Betty Press in September 2025 and was named the Book of the Month for January 2026 in Poetry Extra, BBC Radio 4. She is the recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award, the Hawthornden Writing Fellowship, and the Gillian Purvis Award for New Writing.