(Review of an ARC received via Netgalley)

One day, Button Poetry will release a collection that doesn't become one of my new favourites, but today is not that day. Afterwards is a really beautiful and often difficult window into complex grief. Myers' writing is full of lines that practically beg to be underlined and highlighted and read aloud.

As someone who, like Myers, has experienced multiple bereavements in a short space of time, I liked the messy nature of this book; it's not always clear whether she's writing about a break-up or, when it's clearly a bereavement, who she's mourning. That's just how grief works. It gets tangled up in itself. I'm glad that this book wasn't separated into sections which isolated each subject. It's necessarily muddled.

There were a few poems which didn't stand out particularly strongly to me, mostly the ones about womanhood and body image, which I think is purely because those are very common subjects in this style of poetry. The poems in here about grief and mental illness were by far the strongest.

My favourite poems in here were probably the erasure poems, where Myers takes existing texts (such as wedding vows and song lyrics) and reworks them into something completely different. I found those to be such great metaphors for grief; what is grief if not making the best of things?

I'm continually grateful to Button for publishing these short books of slam poetry from an enormous range of voices. I do think that, purely by the nature of the genre, some of the voices tend to bleed into one a little, but as a corpus of work, they continue to be excellent.