(Received an ARC via Netgalley to review)

This is one of those poetry collections that absolutely begs to be bought in paperback, so that you can do the pretentious thing of dog-earing every page and scribbling all over it and memorising all the best lines so that you can say them over and over again, just for the joy of hearing them out loud. 'Joy' is perhaps an odd word to apply to this particular collection, given that it's essentially 80 or so pages of unrelenting grief, but there really is an odd sort of joy to be found in reading a work which takes someone's particular experience and manages to make it both entirely singular and of the poet, but also something that the reader can experience.

I know there are reasons that this book speaks to me. Like the poet, I've held the hand of someone I love as they die. I've been there for the undignified end, seen the way a body changes when there's no life in it, wondered how everyone and everything else can just keep going on like the world hasn't ended, when I just saw it happen. And that's the exact feeling that this collection manages to make manifest. The bizarreness of sitting at a party, as the poet describes, while everyone else around you is having fun, and all you can think about is how different someone's face looks when they've been dead for half an hour. The unrelenting urge to speak out about it, the way you want to be asked about it but also don't ever want anyone else to know what you saw, the way everyone else's problems are nothing in the face of your grief. These feelings are at once universal to anyone who's ever been bereaved and also entirely personal on the part of the poet; no-one's grief is ever the same, even when they've lost the same person, and I think Schminkey really excels in conveying the complexities of grieving someone.

Honestly, there's so much that could be said about this one that I don't even know where to start. The language is often beautiful, often surprisingly funny - some reviewers have commented negatively on Schminkey's use of humour, as though it diminishes their grief, when actually anyone who's ever been in a similar position will tell you that it's literally the only way you can cope with the enormity of watching someone die, and in my mind it also added some much-needed levity to the book, albeit a rather dark flavour thereof - and every single poem, even the ones which feel the least polished, stands entirely on its own merit, whilst also pulling the narrative of the collection through. Grief isn't the only subject of the poems; queerness, addiction, fatherhood, found/chosen family and the gendered nature of 'care' are all themes that Schminkey weaves in alongside it, and which make it feel less like a monotonous treatise on death. It's nuanced and clever and brilliant and I really do just want to haul a copy of this book around with me forever.

This isn't a collection to read if you aren't in the right frame of mind, but for anyone who's ever experienced anything like the poet has, reading it feels like being witnessed and recognised in a way that speaks to the cleverness of Schminkey's work, and I'm absolutely going to be looking out for whatever they write next.