Lynley Edmeades is a poet, essayist and scholar. Her first book of poetry, As the Verb Tenses (Otago University Press, 2016), was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, and a finalist in the UNESCO Bridges of Struga Best First Book of Poetry. She has a PhD in avant-garde poetics, and lives in Dunedin with her partner.

Edmeades’ poems are terrifically accomplished – they show confidence and a sure, skilful handling of language, even when expressing tentative, slippery ideas and emotions. Her work is full of verbal play, celebration, pleasure and despair. This is a book where you know the poet is intensely alive to language and its possibilities – she’s always looking for another angle, another way. Edmeades’ voice is an essential one in the ‘now’ of NZ poetry. – Jenny Bornholdt

This book confirms Edmeades as both a wily and witty writer with a sure grasp of the potential for shifts of linguistic register to create telling shifts of perspective. Extracting poetry from noise with cool measured techniques, Edmeades emerges in this collection as a precise observer of the human comedy as well as a careful listener. Edmeades’ poems are alert to the phenomena of the real world, delivered with a fidelity and assurance that indicate a significant writer. Every poem in this collection is rewarding. – David Eggleton