Passionate, forthright, tender, baffled, dangerous, hopeful, funny, these poems quest for answers but refuse to accept trite hand-me-downs. Their interweavings challenge notions of artifice and tired versions of the mundane. In a variety of forms and voices, they embrace the sublime and the rotten, the detritus of life and moments of exhilaration, witty humour and harsh loss. With agility, varied rhythms, swooping descents, rising uplifts, they conjure the speaking voice, the word reaching to be set free, protesting against captivity, while honouring the ordinary, the profane, the messy, the incomplete, and the absurd. Death is approached forensically here, elegiacally there. The question of how to write and live fully in the face of loss, oppression, prejudice and mistrust is explored with humour and poignance: 'You were not the first to feel lost and awkward and special all at once'. Fiona Hamilton, 2015