Even for those of us given a second chance
life isn’t all cup cakes and drinking iced Earl Grey
laced with gin from bone china tea cups.

 

“Life keeps breaking into Lorna Thorpe’s poems, complete with shoplifting, therapy, gravestones, sex, and the ‘cool silver of heavenly ideals’ – all of it washed down with ‘a bottle of cheap red’… This is, quite simply, a roller-coaster of a book.” Alison Brackenbury

“These are chameleon poems, restless poems, poems to read in the dark ‘wild and self-contained all at the same time’.  With a tang of Frank O’Hara – ambivalent, allusive, ecstatic – Lorna Thorpe’s new collection toyes with death and disappointment but ultimately is on the side of life, love and the perfect Martini.  The title, from a poem considering the ‘itch of ancient wounds’, encapsulates this pull in different directions, a coming to terms with the conundrum of embodiment.”  Linda France