“Alanna Offield’s debut pamphlet vibrates with authenticity while never for a moment sacrificing originality. Her intoxicating use of language never strays too far from the plainly sayable, and yet trips to Olive Garden with her mother, and to Wholefoods while carrying her soon-to-be-born daughter feel like crossings into another world, one so deliciously and ever so slightly askew. Channelling herself on occasion through celebrities such as Kim Kardashian, Bill Murray and Whitney Houston, Offield discovers something about herself, and in doing so offers up an honesty that is as courageous as it is introspective, achieving via her chosen avatars a new way to explore the ‘confessional’. A Native American, Offield’s New Mexico experience contrasts wonderfully with her experience in the North of Ireland, particularly Belfast, which becomes a kind of atavistic concrete Roswell where familial and romantic interactions can be coded and covert while remaining entirely recognisably human. Friends and family are remembered in elegiac, often humorous, tones reminiscent of Raymond Carver at his best, though the voice of these poems is utterly Alanna Offield’s. This is a new voice in every sense of the word. Reading this pamphlet made me wish I had what she has.” – Matthew Rice, author of The Last Weather Observer

“These poems fall somewhere between the urge to be the apple of the world’s eye and the urge to cook the same lover dinner every evening until death. Alanna Offield reflects on her heritage while suspecting the future may not be able to contain her. She writes confidently with a simple yet exciting aesthetic which never betrays the complexity of the ‘basic’ and never denies the subject its integrity or its dreams, whether those dreams come to pass or not. This is a book to make you fall in love with poetry again and Offield is our Poet Laureate of Trash, a position which I hope she keeps way longer than she ought to.” – Jake Hawkey, author of Breeze Block

“This pamphlet begins in New Mexico, where ‘back home, the mountains/ are actually purple and aspens/ quake golden across them/ like they are covered in sequins.’ Here we find jingle dresses, the reservation and Rural Dental Services alongside Olive Garden and the Wheel of Fortune. The poems detour through the lives (real and imagined) of female actresses, musicians and models: Whitney Houston, Anna Nicole Smith, Lindsay, Britney, Paris, and more. These women become ‘that friend group…mysterious from some angles, dangerous from others,’ asking us to consider who we are and how we came to be. Finally, the speaker resurfaces – after a pregnancy and the deaths of loved ones – in Killowen and Belfast, contemplating the ‘ways that things could be left to dissolve.’ These bold and vulnerable poems are like mussels; each one offers the reader ‘the slimy guts and…a pearl.’” – Milena Williamson, author of Into the Night that Flies So Fast