Keighley Perkins is a poet and academic based in Wales whose work explores love, longing and the quiet aftermath of intimacy. Her writing is image-led and emotionally attentive, often dwelling in the small, intimate moments that shape connection: what is said, unsaid and remembered long after.
From a young age, she has been drawn to words: how they work, what they mean and how they taste. This fascination continues to underpin both her creative and academic work where language is not only a tool but a subject in itself.
Her influences include Selima Hill, Richard Brautigan, e.e. Cummings, Anis Mojgani, Rupi Kaur, Dylan Thomas and Jeffrey McDaniel.
Her poetry has appeared Fire, Acumen, Obsessed with Pipework, and Erbacce. Alongside her poetry, she researches political discourse and online harms. More about her academic work can be found here: https://allmylinks.com/keighleyperkins.
What does it feel like when you write a poem? Walk me through that process.
Writing a poem feels like stepping into a heightened state: something between focus and disappearance. There’s a kind of excitement to it, a pull that’s difficult to resist – as if the poem has already begun and I’m just trying to catch up to it.
The world around me seems to shift in two directions at once. Everything else fades: the noise, the movement, the sense of time. At the same time, certain details come into sharp focus. A word, an image, a feeling will suddenly feel illuminated as though it has been waiting to be noticed.
It becomes a kind of slow state but one that feels almost physical. My attention narrows to the page, the pen, the movement of thought. Everything else falls away. There’s something addictive in that: something about being so completely absorbed that nothing else can interrupt it.
At its most intense, it feels like being electrically alive, like something is moving through me faster than I can articulate and my only task is to stay with it for as long as it lasts.
Do you have a word or an emotion you return to in your poetry? What do you think that says about you as a poet or as a person?
I find myself returning to longing, particularly unrequited love. There’s something about that space that feels both delicate and expansive: a quiet tension between joy and ache, presence and absence. It holds a kind of exquisite sadness but also a strange beauty I keep wanting to understand.
More broadly, I’m drawn to intimacy in all its forms. I’m interested in the emotional and psychological undercurrents of relationships: how people connect, misconnect and carry one another long after. That doesn’t always mean romantic love; friendships, too, offer their own depth, their own quiet complexities.
I also notice a pull towards the Gothic in the work. Certain images recur: the moon, ghosts, things that linger just out of reach. I think this connects back to that same fascination with longing. These figures are, in many ways, untouchable: present but not fully graspable. They allow me to explore what it means to want something that cannot quite be held.
Perhaps that says that, as both poet and person, I’m interested in what resists resolution: the spaces where feeling stretches, unsettles and remains.
Do you have a favorite time of day to write?
As much as I am a morning person, I tend to write at night. It’s the point in the day when everything else can be set down, when I can return to the thoughts that have been quietly building, almost unnoticed, beneath the surface.
There’s a sense, at night, of stepping outside of my other roles. I’m not an academic, not a partner – I’m simply myself. It’s a space where the roughness and rawness of my thoughts can emerge more freely without needing to be shaped too quickly.
I think there’s something inherently reflective about the night. It offers a kind of shelter, a stillness that allows for deeper exploration. The world softens, distractions fall away and what remains feels more honest, more immediate. It becomes a time where I can sit with what is hidden and begin to understand it.
Are your poems autobiographical or do they simply show facets of who you are on the page?
My poems often begin in something real: an emotion, a moment, a memory I’ve lived through. Drawing on personal experience allows me to explore those feelings with a kind of emotional honesty that feels difficult to access otherwise.
That said, what happens on the page isn’t a direct transcription of life. I tend to expand, reshape and, sometimes, exaggerate what I’ve felt, allowing the emotion to become more visible, more concentrated. The truth of the experience remains but it is heightened, given a sharper outline so it can be seen more clearly.
So, while my work isn’t strictly autobiographical, it is always rooted in something real. There is usually a trace of lived experience beneath it: a small, persistent thread of truth running through whatever the poem becomes.
Have you ever had to abandon a poem because it got to be “too much” to write? Without getting too personal, can you describe what happened?
When my first dog, Molly, passed away. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life. Writing became the only way I could begin to process that grief but it wasn’t something I could approach in a sustained or structured way. Instead, it came in fragments: isolated lines, half-thoughts, small pieces that felt all I was capable of carrying at the time.
There was something both relieving and unbearable about it. On the one hand, writing allowed me to give shape to what I was feeling, to place it somewhere outside of myself. On the other, each attempt felt like returning to the same wound, like pressing on something that had no intention of healing quickly.
I think that experience taught me that writing doesn’t always offer resolution. Sometimes, it simply creates a space to sit with what is difficult, even when that difficulty resists being fully expressed.
Are you the same person on the page as in real life – poet vs. human? If not, where are the similarities? What are the major differences?
I tend to think of the poet-me and the human-me as the same person, just held in different light. They’re not separate identities so much as different facets, ways of focusing attention, of deciding what to bring into view.
The poet-me is, perhaps, ore deliberate. More composed. There’s a level of shaping and refining that happens on the page, a kind of performance, in the sense that experience is distilled into something more precise, more contained.
In contrast, the human-me is much messier. She lives through things without always understanding them, without the benefit of distance or clarity. It often feels as though the human version gathers the experiences while the poet returns to them later, trying to make sense of what was felt but not fully understood at the time.
Writing, then, becomes a way of creating a stylised version of the self – not inauthentic, but considered. A space where emotion can be arranged, examined and held a little more steadily than it can be in life.
Underground
You have never known
how it is to want like this,
to have ghosts,
riding the underground of your thoughts,
herding your longing home.
-Keighley Perkins
Isabelle Palerma
Isabelle Palerma 