The Secret Garden is my all-time favourite book, so when I heard about this blackout collection of found poetry, I knew I had to read it. I'm not sure what, exactly, I expected, but I didn't think that it would be this. I had a vague idea that this was a horror poetry collection, and it is, but I also thought - and this was probably wishful thinking on my part - that it would be a lot closer to the source material. Sort of a horror take on that enclosed garden, and on Mary herself.

It isn't really like that. There are a handful of poems where it's easy to see the novel's influence - the most obvious, and therefore the one I liked best, was "Evergreen" - but ultimately Strange Nests is its own creation. It's not a retelling, and once I got past that I liked it better. The poems themselves are little polished fragments of grief and trauma, but in many ways the more interesting parts of this, for me, were the scribbled over pages of the original. There are doodles and strikethroughs and complex constructed paths through the text, and each (old) page is new and visually interesting.

It's a fascinating idea for a project. I'm glad I read it.