This book isn’t about abuse. It’s about untethering. It’s about the disconnect.
 
When leaving isn’t enough, when staying in your own body feels unsafe. This book is the grab-what-you-can-carry-and-run. It’s all that we can’t hold, and all that we can’t carry. This book is about all that gets left behind.
 
Most of all, this book is about healing. This book is written from the body. It’s about writing your way back together again.
 
Taking imagery from the living and anything that has been touched by its fire… from human anatomy to the architectural, from the zoological and botanical to the geological. The urgent metaphors held within this book echo one another, strengthening the rallying cry of survival.
 
In this book I hold the rhythm and pulse and unflinching courage of spoken word in one hand, while using deftness and delicacy to coax a shyness of creatures in slantways. In this book the craft cradles the song of the heart.
 
I believe poetry should include breath, both on the page and off. It should beg to be spoken aloud, both by the writer and the reader. It should stay in our ears, slip under our tongue and settle under our skin. It should take root in us, it should change us.
I believe that our bodies carry our stories, and through writing and sharing we can soothe embodied trauma. This book is about survival. It’s about the aftermath. Above all, it’s about connection.
 
“Holly Winter-Hughes’ visceral writing turns the human form inside-out, mapping the contours of trauma, abuse and hard-won resilience. It urges the reader to follow and ‘Breathe deep to the creak of your heartwood’. Darkly imaginative and pearled with fresh phrase-making, these are poems that compel attention and linger.”  John McCullough
 
“Holly’s poetry leaves red shapes on my skin, and teeth marks. Unapologetically incandescent images twist tightly and then open into wide, revelatory spaces. The thin blade of a plastic-handled knife flashes in the dark of cold-roomed poems, but beside my shoulder as I read there is always an older, kinder spirit. It says, ‘Look – this, yes, and this.’ And yet, somehow, the spirit is still singing. I love this collection.”  Tom Hirons
 
“Holly writes with the whiplash of thunder.”  Antony Owen
 
“An electrifying poet with Plath-like power and potency.”  Anna Saunders