"Wherever you are and whatever it is, the terrible is trying to grip you and sometimes you're walking down the street and it tries to knock you clean off your feet and send you right underground."⁠

I didn't know what I was getting into with this book. After reading and enjoying Bones, I was excited to get into The Terrible. As you'll know from my Bones review, I have struggled to get into poetry and it is a genre I am actively pursuing the older I get. Bone is one of the few poetry anthologies I have read and wanted more from. The same lyricism and ease with image creation is evident in The Terrible. It is a memoir but Daley-Ward has taken the memoir genre and moulded it to suit her needs. It has the lyricism and creative openness of her poetry. Chronology is played with and the boundaries between what is real and not, what is a drug-induced haze and what is actually happening, is explored and manipulated, drawing out surprising levels of sympathy and emotion.⁠
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In writing about the specific, Daley-Ward manages to touch on universal experiences, allowing me to relate to her story in ways I didn't expect to. Part of this is in the throwaway manner in which she recounts instances of casual racism in her predominantly white neighbourhood growing up or the childish shame in not understanding a mother struggling to do her best. The language is powerful without being fussy. Each thought is clear and each story told with simplicity and precision.⁠
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It's not quite at the run-around and force everyone I know to read it level, but it's high on my recommendations for some creative and novel (in the true sense of the word) reading.⁠

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