In Well Done, You Didn’t Die, Max Wallis returns with a searingly intimate and formally inventive pamphlet that refuses erasure. From the aftermath of breakdown to the first electric flickers of healing, these poems map the brutal, brilliant terrain of survival; mental illness, addiction, queerness, love, sex, shame, and the fragile dignity of staying when staying is a whole new thing entirely.
 
Wallis writes with wit, lyric fire, and radical candour. Whether speaking from the aftermath of the hospital bed or a hookup, future conversations with lovers-to-be, or the slow relentless work of sobriety, he never flinches. The voice is fierce and unguarded—at turns devastating, defiant, tender, and laugh-out-loud funny. A poem might stammer like a belt buckle or stream out in prose, incantation, or techno-prayer. Whatever the form, the message is unmistakable: “Well done, you didn’t die.”
 
Here is a poet documenting not only what nearly broke him, but how he rebuilt from ruin, choosing life, again and again. From “Cage” to “Prayer for Glitch”, “I Am 1 Year, 2 Months, 2 Days Sober” to “Instructions for What Happens Next”, this collection is both elegy and anthem. It is a document of return: to the body, to breath, to poetry.
 
“Survival is more than endurance. It is a quiet declaration: I live, I live.”
 
 
"Max Wallis writes with the urgency of a life that has been to the edge, looked over, and felt the winds rising up from the abyss. With vigor and conviction, he turns those winds of oblivion into a song. His own, inimitable song." - Joseph Fasano
 
"Riotous and razor sharp, this phenomenal pamphlet is proof that survival and recovery is not only possible - it can be sexy, too." - Rhian Elizabeth
 
 
Max Wallis is a poet and editor from Lancashire, living in recovery from addiction, ADHD and complex PTSD. His work has appeared in The Rialto, Poetry London, and 14 Poems, and he is the founding editor of The Aftershock Review, a poetry magazine that centres trauma-informed practice and creative resurgence.