Linda Black's first collection consists entirely of prose poems. The author says of the collection: "I like how the form allows for an ending that isn't an ending - I don't believe in the idea of closure; as in etching I'd want an image, fine detail, but also degrees of dark or shade with less definition, something implied, unseen, reverberating in the shadows."

This is a collection in search of origins, a kind of 'delving', 'trying to get to the bottom of it'. In a series of unsettling prose poems Black offers pieces of a fractured past. The effect is memorable and often menacing, each poem glinting like a sliver from a broken mirror; language enacting the struggle to retrieve and reassemble an unauthorised past. The difficulties of truth finding and telling are explored through shifts in identity and a syntax of qualifications and hesitations where everyday phrases take on a new and frightening resonance. Domestic objects and rituals loom large in...