Hey! It's Uncle Jeff, who isn't really your uncle, but you can't talk right now, one of the Jeffs has put his tongue in your mouth. To them he is a mirror, but to you he is a room. Your boyfriend Jeff gets up to answer the phone. All of them have seen you naked and heard you talking in your sleep. One is your father, one is your brother, and the other is your current boyfriend. Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. That means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable. Look at the light through the windowpane. How we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it's more like a song on a policeman's radio, How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses. 'Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake ' Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. I carry his words with me everywhere, both in the shape of his actual book, but also in who I am. I'll never stop reading this book, and that's the great thing with poetry, analyzing, understanding and interpreting and simply feeling it, is a never-ending process. Words I was never able to find myself, but needed more deeply than I'd realised. I read it (or devoured it might be more accurate) and suddenly found a side of myself put into words. It changed me, and I'm not even kidding or exaggerating. This book taught me something monumental about myself. I've read many books, some of them have taught me about the world, about people, about feelings or ideas. My copy is worn out from being opened, read in, then thrown onto the table or put carelessly down as I try to gather myself up from my messy emotional pile on the floor and try to deal with, well. Every poem has meaning, and soul and something deeply terrifying about it. Every line is powerful, it's got secrets.

Siken is beyond talented with words, that much is clear, this entire collection is a work of pure art, something you rarely find these days.

With a start like this, and with expectations as high as mine, you'd think the book would come up short. I have never in my life anticipated the arrival of a book more than I did with this. Dozens of times, until I realised it would never be enough, so I ordered his book. So I read it and re-read it again and again.

That my mind kept circling back to his words. The next day I was painfully aware I couldn't leave it behind. I read Richard Siken's poem 'Wishbone' on the internet. Not from the absence of violence, but despite

Crush richard