Cirrus@Austlit

'What is most striking in Hazel Smith’s fifth collection of poetry is the far-ranging scope of topics explored and the wide number of poetic approaches employed, the poet still succeeding in retaining a powerful, unifying voice throughout. Smith’s poems challenge both intellectually and emotionally. Familial poems written in free verse are sandwiched between computer-generated works and list poems. Politically and socially aware poems about Trump, Brexit, the Berlin Wall and Covid-19 share space with poems such as the one that we first encounter, ‘The Collection’ [8-9] in which the poem’s third person narrator confesses to their process of writing and curating the book, a heads up to the reader that the poems in it'  (Introduction)