The Only Worlds We Know

I first heard of Michael Lee through Button Poetry, specifically the beautiful cinematic rendition of his poem ‘Pass On', which dealt with the grief of his friend Stephen's murder. This poem (along with Neil Hilborn's OCD) became the bedrock of me venturing into spoken word poetry and establishing a community in my city.

I snatched this ARC up as soon as I found it on NetGalley.

It took me a surprisingly long time to get through, partly because a lot of the pieces didn't resonate, and partly because there was a lot of grief and death that I didn't want to process in one sitting. Stephen makes cameos here and there, which is expected and represents a passing milestone that I can recognise. Poetry is how we make sense of a senseless world, no?

Here's a snippet of Lee digging through the mess and finding lines:

I curse archeologists
for their basic tools telling us
basic things.

Sometimes I think scientists are lazy. I too
could dig a heart out of a chest,
but what do any of them know

about pulling the history from a body
without killing it?

This eARC was courtesy of NetGalley.