Trauma gave these poems their life; craft gave them their shape.

Like surges of grief, these poems are also almost unruly in their variety – from fragmented meditations to prosaic streams of consciousness. And yet, although this collection is so raw, it doesn’t just unpack and unload in a linear fashion, for here is a poet that can see flashes of beauty – and look forward – even from a source of unimaginable pain.

The title poem, ‘A crocodile boiling a kettle’, describes the difficult days following bereavement when the poet was literally floored by grief. People would call by her home, and she would make them tea, but in truth she wanted to lie on the floor ‘like a crocodile’.

The poet was driven to share her grief through poetry, not for people to pity her, but to use the power of words to give insight into the experiences that shook the very core of her life.