'Helen Hagemann’s lines crackle with the energy of an arch observer. Although she often looks back, her nostalgia is an honest squaring with the world that never lets metaphor too easily ‘glaze’ a thing. And what a dense material world it is. These poems burst with a dazzling record of things that both tenderly and wryly evoke other decades and, in doing so, other ways of living. Her uncompromising yet generous eye balances an openness to fragility with the ‘red combustion of our lives’. - LUCY DOUGAN' (Publication summary)
