Support, support is a house in which lovers are made up with the bed in the morning, where imaginary keys are mooned over, plates left out, where only the radio delivers a longed-for voice. This house is both a desire for and a fear of domesticity, where another’s presence is both an ‘ordeal’ and an ‘ideal’, and the promise of shelter is subverted by gaps and damage, by cruelty and claustrophobia. Here, the taxi cab is safer than the house, than the ironically named Care Home, than the party you leave in tears, than the bed you lie awake in, than the womb, than the closeness you both did and ‘did not invite’. In order to build, you must dismantle, these poems say, borrowing from songs, novels, poems and historical documents; ‘you make a home for yourself in narrative.’
This is a debut of great power from a bold and radical new voice.