When Hannah Sullivan's Three Poems was published by Faber & Faber in 2018, the jacket blurb began: ‘Hannah Sullivan's debut collection is a revelation – three long poems of fresh ambition, intensity and substance.’ When the book was awarded the TS Eliot Prize in early 2019, Sinéad Morrissey, chair of the judging panel, echoed this sense of discovery:

Although she goes on to praise the Sullivan's ‘formal mastery’ and ‘fresh and observant’ approach to ‘our mortality, our sexuality, our gender and our movement through time and place’, it is obvious that Morrissey's delight also lies in the book's appearance, seemingly from nowhere. Not having seen Sullivan's work in magazines and not having come through the ‘usual’ routes all figures into the feeling of a poet having ‘just arrived’. As much as these details call attention to the standardisation of this trajectory, they also highlight the novelty of such ‘revelations’ – in order words, the rarity of a debut actually being the poetry community's first impression of a poet – to which Faber's promotional rhetoric is similarly attuned. In considering the state of what I call ‘debut culture’ in recent years, the language around a book like Sullivan's is an exception that helps us understand the accepted rules regarding debuts, as well as the first book's broader regulatory function. Such language, together with remarkable prize successes for first collections on both sides of the Atlantic in the past five years, calls for a reassessment of the effects this debut culture has had on writers both before and after publishing their first book- length volume, along with repercussions for established publishers looking to keep their lists ‘fresh’ or newer presses building their lists amid this zeitgeist celebration of ‘new voices’.

My conception of debut culture specific to contemporary poetry stems from a wider sense of its historical specificity and its part in the professionalisation of poetry over the past century.