What’s the cure for a broken heart? What about for grief, anxiety or loneliness? For those visiting the Poetry Pharmacy – customers or patients, depending how you see them – it’s these questions that are on their minds. The company’s new London bookshop, on Oxford Street, offers tonics to those sorts of emotional ailments. Calm, comfort, inspiration: whatever you’re searching for, there’s a book of poetry, philosophy or psychology to help you find it.
, The Poetry Pharmacy specialises in poetry on prescription – to aid with a variety of emotional ailments. Customers can browse poetic remedies in the form of beautiful books curated by emotion, a range of Poemcetamol pills and other bookish delights. For a case of the pick-me-ups, customers can be prescribed coffee and cake in the Dispensary Coffee Shop.
Whether you are suffering from the stresses of the modern world or simply need a tonic for the spirits, The Poetry Pharmacy has a poetic remedy in store. Customers can uncover Alma’s potions in a 62sq ft space on the first floor of Lush Oxford Street.
This concept was founded by poet Deborah Alma, who is passionate about poetry but came to the field later in life, she took other directions before she began studying for an MA in creative writing while in her late 40s and adopted the medium as a matter of “necessity”. As a mother to young children, poetry was something she could start and finish in the flashes of time she had to herself. She’d always turn to reading it in moments of turmoil though. “There’s something that poetry does that no other art can quite do,” she theorises. “It goes very quickly to the heart of something … as though speaking intimately from one person to another, very, very directly.”
Graduated and freshly out of a difficult relationship, Alma bought a 1950s ambulance on Facebook Marketplace and began driving across the country offering ‘poetry on prescription’ as the Emergency Poet in 2011. Her approach was simple and structured. She’d ask her patients about their reading habits, their favourite places and ways they liked to relax. When asking if there was anything they were particularly looking for in poetry, it was as a gentle question, rather than a therapeutic probing.
She would visit festivals, hospitals, libraries and school, dispensing poems-in-pills to those who may not have given poetry much of a chance before. The goal was—and still is—to promote the fact that poetry can go a long way to support mental health, with underrated therapeutic effects.
They later opened the world’s first walk-in poetry pharmacy in the heart of the Shropshire Hills. Like their new Oxford Street store, the stock is all chosen with a particular emotional ailment in mind; from the books on the shelves, to the stationery and gifts on offer.
The Poetry Pharmacy was shortlisted for an Independent Business Award in 2021. Lush was on the judging panel and Co-founder and CEO Mark Constantine got in touch with Deborah after the concept caught his eye. Things started with a very successful pop-up at Lush Studios in 2023, and now The Poetry Pharmacy is operating out of Lush’s three-storey branch on Oxford Street. Mark and Deborah are even writing a book together, titled ‘The Poetry Business School’, which lays out the inspiring journey to The Poetry Pharmacy opening its very first London location.
Deborah Alma commented: “My long term mission has been to bypass the gatekeepers and bring poetry to more people in playful and engaging ways; and I couldn’t have wished for a better place to do it. With the generous support of Lush, now poetry will be on the most famous shopping street in the world!”
