I am Alison Hramiak: poet, writer and tutor. Welcome to my web site: a place where you can discover more about me and my writing. A place to share my love of poetry.
I spend my time writing poetry, reviewing and editing poetry, and delivering 1:1 tuition in a variety of subjects at all levels. I have been published in journals and anthologies and on various websites including Forward Poetry collections, New Contexts, Dirigible Balloon, Impspired, and The Causley Trust as well as a number of anthologies dedicated to charities.
I edit and review poetry for Consilience, which explores the space where scientists and the arts meet. I review books for ‘together in the uk’, a place where migrants and refugees share their stories and receive advice, as well as for ‘grist – a journal of the literary arts’. My reviews have also been published in ‘The Other Side of hope’, a UK-based literary magazine edited by migrants. When I’m not writing or reviewing poetry, I write and read about history, and review history books for ‘The Historical Association’.
I write poetry because I believe that there is a beauty in language that poetry unwraps, one which reaches out like a sound that resonates, and which, in doing so, helps others to feel less alone. I write poetry to express my feelings and to convey a message about the things I feel strongly about. I write poetry because I love it.
If you’d like me to write something for you, or to review and edit for you, please contact me on LinkedIn or on Facebook.
Broken Lies
Too well I slaked my thirst
On truth untold.
(Alas) Too well.
We were never meant to last
(You) look at me
fuck at me
then left your hook in me.
Dive down to me
thrive in me
be alive in me.
Jelly on a salty plate
It. Gentle creature. Jelly soft amongst the foamy fury. Silver Chinese lantern. Metallic and inorganic in an organic world. Translucent. Bioluminescent. Framed in crimson beading, edged in polished brassy blood. Caught in the mercy of surf and froth. Maelstrom and morass competing to push it further and further in. Nearer and nearer to its inevitable, inexorable sandy demise. An outlier on these shores. Brought south on the currents of climate change. Stranger in a strange sea. So very far from home. See now how it moves helplessly on and onward. Breaking up in breakers, wallowing in whitecapped waves, swept surgically to the shore. I hesitate. Stand still for a moment ignoring the wind and the rain. Momentarily, in one small second, I entertain the notion that somehow, I can save this one creature. Can launch it out to sea beyond the shoreline. Yonder where rollers turn and laugh as they curl and fling all before them. And as I reach down to scoop and hurl, as the icy water floods my ungloved hands with coils of numbness closing in, I suddenly comprehend that this beautiful creature is not alone. It’s part of a family. A whole shoal of silvern shiny lanterns and I feel so very privileged to be part of its journey. Part of their journey. I can’t turn back the sea. I can’t Canute it. I can only refute it and the human activity – that chain of events – that brought them here. We warm the oceans. They pay the price. Powerless to swim against the tide, they tumble into the shore. Some are lucky. Some few are tumbled back again. Chance collects and carries them rearward. Most are dashed in. Rinsed onto the beach to die in what we flushed. Detritus. Dying. The tide that brought them in receding, retreating. No turning back. Journey’s end ends them.
I wrote this ‘off the cuff’ as it were at a Huddersfield Author’s meeting in November 2023 and edited it to improve it before submitting it to the ‘Mugwort Magazine’ where it was published in their March 2026 edition. We had been asked to write about 500 words in about 10 mins so I tried what was a new format for me, of writing poetry that looks like prose. It’s not my favourite format and if I’m honest, it does tend to put me off reading poetry that looks like a paragraph of text. But I do like the end result, and I did feel so very privileged to be in the sea with such beautiful creatures on the beach in Tynemouth.