Okay – this is extraordinary. Not pretty. A scab-ridden, festering collection of poems; truth exposed and displayed on a slab. If that’s your sort of thing (it’s certainly mine) then you’ll obsess over these fragmentary images from one side of a tumultuous, drug-suffused relationship. HLR is a very skilful poet. The language here is exquisite in its precision. Yet it’s describing what is essentially chaos. The reader has to cope with this inherent contradiction and that gives the poems so much of their power. There are wonderful set pieces. “This Is Love Like” is a teetering pile of glorious comparisons to the love in this relationship, “Like drinking a bottle of Coke & immediately eating a Mento”. “The Third Psychosis You Witnessed” is scarily hilarious. The narrator reads the instructions on a microwave lasagne, “Remove sleeve. Pierce several times.” Then she applies it rigorously to herself with the help of a paring knife, “How many times is ‘several’ anyway?” The wish to laugh at entirely inappropriate times occurred often when reading these poems. In “A Son First, Then A Daughter”, the two lovers have grown up and are house hunting. The narrator explores the top floor of a possible buy and ponders on which room would have fixtures sturdy enough to hang from when she chooses to end her life, “…the crimson flood of / my blood will complement the nursery, / which we are going to paint lemon yellow”. I laugh out loud, not because this is funny, but because I need to react and laughter is the only thing that seems available. I found an oddness here. Usually with poetry, there is a sense of the poet reaching out to the reader to achieve some meeting of minds. Not here. The narrator is too obsessed with the (terrible, destructive) relationship to give any mind to other things. It’s not that I felt disrespected as a reader. It was more that I didn’t feel acknowledged at all. The poet had work to do and I had no part to play. I felt a bit sniffy about that at first but I got over it. So what if the narrator doesn’t come across as particularly likeable – she doesn’t ask to be liked. And there is something wholly authentic about these poems. They have an intensity all of their own. The relationship at the heart of the poems is a disturbing one. Abusive? Exploitative? It seems driven entirely by self-centred need. And yet… The final poem looks back at the relationship which has long since disintegrated. So beautiful. No laughter this time. Instead, the poem brought welling tears to my eyes. A delirious paean to the meaning that being loved gives to our lives. “And what a thing it was / to have been loved / by you.”