(Review of an ARC received via Netgalley)

I'm not sure how to feel about this one! In many ways I loved it, and in many other ways it left me a little cold. Gorman's use of language is beautiful and every poem is obviously very carefully crafted, not a single word wasted, which is a nice contrast to a lot of the more raw and unedited poetry that we tend to see these days (which is its own separate art form and in no way inferior!) I really loved some of the poems in here, particularly the first one, Brittle Naiad, but then others just didn't really resonate with me at all, perhaps because I didn't have a reference point for them, living halfway across the world and being entirely unfamiliar with the organisms she was writing about. I actually read the Author's Note first and I feel like this helped to give necessary context to the writing, but I wish that hadn't been necessary; without that context, a lot of the poems really didn't mean a lot to me.

I did really like the sci-fi / dystopian element that Gorman wove into the natural world, and thought this was particularly effective when she didn't make it explicit that the poems were set in the future. I liked the duality of the poems that could either be set in our time and our world, or on another planet entirely; for me, those best encapsulated the inherent oddity of nature, and really brought home the alien characteristics of many of the things we consider normal.

This is a strong collection of poems by a writer I'll definitely be looking into in the future, and I really do think that its main drawback is also its biggest strength; it's just so niche that there are going to be some people who absolutely adore it, but for those of us who are coming to it without the weight of pre-existing knowledge, it's not the most accessible.