Morton's visceral and intimate third collection is a self-professed 'gnarly' read; gloriously jewelled sentences brim with rich and dark language - this is the work of someone who feels the sounds and visuals of words as much as their meanings. An eroding headland "gentle as a soft-shell crab, loses its meat to the tide"; a father pulls honeysuckle from "the soft brains of hydrangea". This is post-pastoral NZ gothic; trees and flowers giving way to rotting ox carcasses and deep dread.
Morton borrows like a magpie from various scientific fields to form a reality where beings and objects refuse to stay inside their boundaries. Anatomy, botany, animal and vegetable, pharmaceuticals, sickness and medicine, and heavy news headlines collide to lend new precision to our vision of a soul grappling with the unruliness and violence of their mind and body, with the edges and limits of things, and with the constant search for hope. A rich and rewarding book of poems for those who like to chew words down to the bone.
