Review by Lisa Natasha Wetton of "Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet" by Cathi Rae

This is everyday life, simply depicted, suicide taken in a stride, elongated spaces between the words giving breath where there is none. The reader is given space to pause to reflect and then continue, taking in the gravity of this subject matter in as easy a way as possible. 

          "Is this real?"
          "Shit, I think it’s real"
          "He really really did it"
          running in real time
          while time has stopped for you.

Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet is a series of poems based on real-life stories, creating a narrative that shines a light on issues around men's mental health and the tragedy of male suicide. In her preface, the author refers to it as "a 21st century tragedy." She brings home the finality of life-ending decisions made in everyday circumstances, in order to make individual men visible in a culture that, as the collection quietly argues, has made them very easy to overlook.

Every kind of suicide and situation weaves through this collection. Teenage boys, middle-aged men, drunken fathers snatched from life in a moment that cannot be taken back. Some planned, some more spontaneous, all terminal and unchangeable. The sadness and tragedy are stark and unrelenting, with a wish that it could be something other. 

The simplicity of descriptions mirrors the commonality of suicide. Men of all ages are taking their lives under the compounding weight of circumstances that ground them down - feeling unseen, carrying shame they were never equipped to name, or simply exhausted by the effort of continuing. 

In the opening piece, "Slicing Through the Information Superhighway with a Scalpel," Rae writes about the process with which she created the content:

           my computer glitches
           won’t stop scrolling page after page
           name after name after name
           until I have to look away block away the tears
           writing elegies for dead men I didn’t meet.

Poem after poem, man after man, the weight of it builds and builds. These are not isolated failures, not men who simply couldn't cope. They are every age, every background, every circumstance. "Club 18 to 35" feels like the collection's breaking point. This is an almost-angry reckoning with what we are doing to men, and what we are allowing to continue.

Male suicide is becoming an often silent, global epidemic, with men dying by suicide approximately three to four times more often than women. Rae reaches out to shed light on an issue that must be addressed. These poems provide perspectives of people choosing to take their own lives and how, as well as acknowledging those left behind. 

In "Finders," Rae bluntly puts it, 

          your discovery       just a delay
          in the everyday of commuting home
          a flicker of frustration
          and then reset
          Someone has to find you ... 
          someone who will keep that memory
          forever
          even if they wish they couldn’t
          who might prefer that you had stayed
          unfound.

Here, she acutely presents the devastating impact that ripples out from suicide. Lights go out on a life, as the world inevitably, indifferently, keeps on turning. This is a collection that deserves to be read widely - not as a comfortable experience, but as a necessary one. 

About the reviewer

Lisa Natasha Wetton (aka Lisa Life) is a regular contributor to the English pages of L’eco de Sitges, Barcelona. She is a Creative Artist, Coach & Hypnotherapist. She collaborates on Writing Retreats with American Author Will Bashor, with whom she co-authored Soul to Pages - A Weekend Journey to your Novel/Self-help book, a process used to support budding writers that incorporates meditation and visualisation sessions. She is currently refining edits on her first completed book, A Guide to Spirituality from a Working Class Girl. She has a twenty-year history working in Dance & Theatre and has been based in Barcelona for almost seven years. You can find Lisa at https://linktr.ee/NewLisaLife.

You can read more about Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet by Cathi Rae on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Elizabeth Chell of "Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems" and "Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems" by Cathi Rae

 

Cathi Rae’s collection of poems Just This Side of Seaworthy explores the complexities of ageing and mental illness and the forging of new identities in a world where expectations are unforgiving. 

Rae's style is accessible. Her words speak the truth all "women of certain age" must confront. Her poems are not maudlin. They are introspective and deliver a positive acceptance and are celebratory of the aging process. Her poems are layered; on the surface they are what they are, but the underlying emotion and evocative imagery make them extraordinarily good. 

These poems also explore death and other topics. "Single handed," a biography of her father and family dynamics, would not sit out of place on a shelf with Duffy and Heaney.

What I admire most about Cathi Rae’s poetry is her masterful structure and the subtlety with which she conveys emotion. In her poem "When Our Bodies Become as Linen," she eloquently juxtaposes the durability and fragility of linen with the ageing process. This comparison illustrates how, much like linen, we possess an inner strength that endures even as our exterior fades with time. Cathi’s poem "Wednesday night is women’s night – remembering the 1980s," with its thoughtful structure, captures the essence of a girls' night out dancing around handbags with friends, not caring which side of the bed we got out of. Rae's poetry is sometimes raw, sometimes harsh, yet remains consistently honest and exquisitely crafted.

Rae's collection Rock Paper Scissors, as Cathi explains in her introduction, had a starting point: "Tell me about your life." The poetry encapsulates the voices of individuals Cathi encountered during her PhD journey. Her poetry delves into the complexities of mental health and mental illness, addressing the numbing effects of medication. It made me laugh and cry. The beauty of her work is how she encapsulates the ordinariness of mental illness - how it can take anyone prisoner. This challenging yet vital subject, often shrouded in secrecy, is brought to light through Cathi’s work, which fosters open and candid exploration of mental health from a fresh perspective.

This collection of voices, vividly expressed through Cathi’s unique poetic style, will resonate with everyone. During the 2020 lockdown, many of us experienced anxiety, and the most vulnerable often lacked a voice. Cathi’s poetry effortlessly provides a platform for these feelings of inadequacy, addressing an ever-present issue. Mental health is a universal experience, affecting us all either directly or indirectly. We should celebrate it as an intrinsic part of being human. Cathi’s poetry makes it clear that mental health transcends age, gender, and race.

If you appreciate these latest collections of Cathi’s work, I would also highly recommend her earlier poetry collection Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems. 

About the reviewer
Elizabeth Chell is a full-time teacher with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester.

You can read more about Cathi Rae's Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems, and Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems, on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Cathi Rae of "Makeover" by Laurie Bolger

Laurie Bolger is an award-winning poet, performer and founder of The Creative Writing Breakfast Club. It seems that the poet Laurie Bolger and I have things in common – Irish working-class roots, an interest in writing and thinking about fashion ... and we both found and read grown-up sex books at an impressionable age.

Makeover is a collection of the domestic, the small, the lives of ordinary working-class women, the stories of mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters and friends, all described with film-still precision. Her descriptive language is beautiful. She’s able to conjure up that moment, that childhood in ways that evoke a time and place even if you weren’t there and her pen portraits make me feel as if I know these women:

          Aunt Teasy    all horoscopes and nails
                      cursing and coughing
          like she emptying great bags of gravel
          straight onto the coffee table 

Bolger finds beauty in the smallest things, city flowers, the go-faster powers of a frilly swim suit, and the unspoken, when women hold onto lives, make spaces for themselves and challenge society’s expectations of what a good woman is.

This is a confection of a collection – easy to read in one delicious gulp and then return to again and again, always finding a new image, a justifiable blast of anger and defiance. It’s also the only collection I’ve ever read where Sylvanian Families get a name check.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is in the final year of an M4C funded creative / practice-led PhD. A new pamphlet collection, Just this side of sea-worthy, will be available from Two Pigeons Press in March 2024.

You can read more about Makeover by Laurie Bolger on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Cathi Rae of "The Fox’s Wedding," poems by Rebecca Hurst & illustrated by Reena Makwana

As a poet who recently and joyfully placed the word "bosky" into a piece and who has written on The Children of Lir, a collection located in landscape, rurality and the re-imagining of fairy tales is clearly right up my street - or should that be "breaches" (to steal from the poem “Into the Woods” in this collection). If you can imagine Angela Carter, but a reined in, hyper-controlled Carter, where every word is perfect and carries superbly judged weight and musicality – this collection is precisely that.

These are fairy stories that dig back into narratives of blood and skin and teeth, where happy endings are de-railed and deconstructed. The girl raised by wild dogs ("Teeth") returns to the pack and turns her back on “the bones of polite behaviour.” The boy who hides to watch the fox's wedding ("The Animal Bridegroom") is spared his life, but loses language – a word a day until he is “as silent as any beast and lonely.” Even The Frog Prince ( in "The Frog Prince") is "a damp squib of a boy from the wrong side of Tunbridge Wells."

The motif of pins and needles run through many of these poems – the prick of memory in quilt made by a mother – needles to ask needle sharp questions – the path of needles and the path of pins and the task of making impossible fairy tale clothing, "seven nettle shirts seven years dumb in a tree" ("Brothers").

This collection comes from The Emma Press, a Birmingham-based small press, who specialise in producing collections of poetry, short stories, children’s books and art squares where design, layout and illustration are an integral part of the reading pleasure. The illustrations in this collection, by Reena Makwana, are as perfectly executed as the poems themselves.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is an award-winning and widely published poet. Her collection Your Cleaner Hates You & Other Poems was published in 2019. She is currently funded by M4C to work on a large scale collection on voicing the marginalised. 

You can read a review of Your Cleaner Hates You & Other Poems on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Cathi Rae of "Cliff Notes" by Kathryn O'Driscoll

In a spirit of full and frank disclosure, I have on occasions competed against this poet in various slam poetry competitions and she has completely annihilated me. Hardly surprising given that she is the UK Slam Champion 2021/2022 and represented England at the World Cup of Slam 2021.

She is an extremely well-regarded slam and spoken word poet. This collection is her first (and I am quite confident, not her last) page poetry collection. She has made the sometimes-difficult transition from performance-based work to the page with absolute assurance and skill whilst still retaining her own strong, unique, and important voice.

This is not an easy collection. The introduction contains two pages of potential content trigger warnings, and much of the subject matter challenges the reader, but it is a challenge that will make the reader a better person.

Her poems include pieces on serious mental ill-health, suicidal thoughts, bereavement, poverty, and loss, but this is not a diatribe or obvious polemic; her work is nuanced, painfully honest, well observed and quite simply beautiful.

And yes, of course, her work is angry - there is much to be angry about a system where mental health care is a postcode lottery and where people struggling to live with chronic health conditions are condemned to state-sanctioned poverty. But she never writes anything that doesn’t use language adroitly to express these ideas and personal experiences in anything less than stunning poetry.

The collection ends with “Peony-Bruised,” a short poem which seems to suggest that there is hope and beauty after all:

           This city is a bruise I keep pressing upon
           so I dip myself under and ask the petals
           to tell me their first memories.
           Rain
           they say.
           Rain.

           And then, how we grew.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is a poet/spoken word artist/slam poet and community educator. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester and is currently funded by M4C to work on her PhD, creating collaborative poems with marginalised individuals.

Review by Cathi Rae of "Word Bath" by Kassie Duke

Kassie Duke is an American poet and writer but is firmly linked to Leicester and the University of Leicester, having studied an MA in Creative Writing here. This is her first collection – described as “a short sweet walk through the mind of a writer,” including poems that explore “every mood but melancholy.”

Kassie uses language confidently, painting small but beautiful pictures of nature and the everyday and is particularly skilled at the short poem form – something which is far harder to achieve than might seem from first reading. These poems, often quiet on first reading, bear multiple visits and will re-pay careful attention and time. I enjoyed the micro poems and their use of language based on the natural world. 

In our current dark times, this little message of hope seemed particularly apposite: “and I will dream — not of the time I spent in winter — but of the sun coming up with the steam.”

This is a book to pop into your back pocket and dip in and out of over a coffee or when you have a few moments to reflect on the power of words.

About the reviewer

Cathi Rae is a spoken word artist and poet. Her debut collection is Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems (Soulful Publishing, 2019). She is currently working on an M4C-funded Creative Writing PhD at the University of Leicester on telling marginalised lives through poetry.

You can read a review of Cathi's collection on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

You can read more about Kassie Duke's Word Bath on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Cathi Rae of "is, thinks Pearl" by Julia Bird

 

 

It is almost completely apposite that I almost didn’t get to read this collection, because the younger French Bulldog (a voracious consumer of all books) got to the post before me. The first piece “Helium Pearl” describes the chaos of the helium balloon seller trying to manage his fat cartoon dogs – I know his pain.

This is a hard-to-categorise collection – poems, prose poems, tiny gems of memoir. I don’t think it matters – imagine Pearl, the jewel at the centre of each piece as the perfect flaneuse – taking you by the hand and opening up the marvellous, the mysterious and the beautiful within the humdrum.

Julia Bird’s powers of observation are razor-sharp; these pieces read like perfect icons where every detail is imbued with leaf gold. In "Liquid Pearl,"

          when the Mayor reopens the lido 
          Pearl takes to the water
          in a blow-up chair the shape
          of a size fourteen flamingo

There is magic, magic realism, another way of seeing at the core of so much of this work. Describing a night club in “Violette Pearl,” Bird writes:

          ... but how the haze, the synthesis
          of dry ice and Silk Cut smoke,
          looks for all the world like
          bluebells in a birch wood seen
          from the far edge of a distant field.

Take a walk with Pearl – you may never see the world in quite the same way.

 

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is a spoken word artist and poet. Her debut collection is Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems (Soulful Publishing, 2019). She is currently working on an M4C-funded Creative Writing PhD at the University of Leicester on telling marginalised lives through poetry.

You can read a review of Cathi's collection on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Cathi Rae of "A Voice Coming from Then" by Jeremy Dixon

I have been carrying this book with me for weeks now, carefully transferring it from bag to rucksack to bike basket, partly because I wanted to be able to dip into it again and again, but also because, somehow, I wanted to take care of the child / the boy / the young man in this work.

This is not an easy collection – it comes with trigger warnings of suicide and bullying – and includes description of the author’s suicide attempt age fifteen, teenage diary entries, notes from teachers and psychiatrists and heart-breaking contemporary statistics on suicide and mental illness amongst young LGBTQA+ people.

These poems are deceptively simple with razor sharp observation, brutal honesty  and a deftness of touch that gives space for the reader to understand both what is said and what is left unsaid. It would be easy for a less skilled poet to create a collection that shouts its polemical heart – and yes, of course, there’s anger and sadness here. Many of the poems commemorate a gay male world as AIDS / HIV took hold and a time period where being identifiably gay was still enough to fear violence, bullying and prejudice – but they are also a celebration of love and toughness and survival and managing grief.

I am delighted, beyond delighted that the fifteen-year-old Jeremy’s suicide attempt failed – actually I’m delighted when anyone is able to come back from that brink of despair – because now we have this collection and it’s beautiful and important and needs to be read.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is a spoken word artist and poet. Her debut collection is Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems (Soulful Publishing, 2019). She is currently working on an M4C-funded Creative Writing PhD at the University of Leicester on telling marginalised lives through poetry.

You can read a review of Cathi's collection on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Cathi Rae of "Forty Names" by Parwana Fayyaz

The best writing, the very best writing takes you somewhere else, takes you to somewhere you have never been, perhaps somewhere you didn't even know existed.

This collection does just that, taking the reader into the lives of women in Afghanistan and the refugee diaspora, making those experiences real by the telling of family stories, the re-telling of family history. The poems focus on individual experience, so that even if this world is not yours there are commonalities and hooks to help us, the outsiders, connect with these narratives.

The title poem, 'Forty Names,' which won the Forward Poetry Prize for a single poem is the story of forty women who, having hidden in caves to avoid an army of occupation, jump off a cliff to avoid dishonour. As part of the piece, they are named, and women's names - both the names they are given and the names they live by - are central to many of these poems. In a culture where, traditionally, women are often invisible, this naming and the re-telling of their life stories and their struggles brings them into full focus. We can see them as clearly as if they were sitting with us.

There is a strong feel of story telling within the whole collection - from village myths to complex threads of family honour and dishonour and the tiny stories of domestic life. The style is both conversational - you can imagine these poems as conversations over tea - and beautifully crafted and observed, with tiny telling details which convey the refugee experience with the lightest of touch:

           Into exile, next to our little feet and hands,
           My mother carried her box of sewing needle,
           And her Butterfly sewing machine made in the USSR.

This is a collection that will deliver pleasure from multiple readings. Enjoy being taken to another world, another history.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is a spoken word artist and somewhat to her own surprise a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

You can read about Cathi's collection, Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems, on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Cathi Rae of "Russian Doll" by Teika Marija Smits

 

I am reading and re-reading this assured and perfectly crafted debut collection by happy coincidence in a room which contains three sets of Russian Dolls. The best Russian Dolls are made with such skill that it is almost impossible to see the join as you open up each figure to find a smaller perfect copy. The very best Russian Dolls lose nothing in detail even as the dolls become tinier. The pleasures are in the craft, the artistry, and the discovery of the very smallest and still beautiful final doll.

This collection provides the same joy – perfectly made poems, exquisite details, and the satisfaction of finding more and more to read, to consider, to discover.

Written in two sections, the first, 'Daughter Doll / Doll-Daughter,' focuses on childhood and relationships with parents. Some of these poems are 'small' – the sensual joy of mint choc-chip ice cream - while some take on the big stuff – suicide of an old school friend, the death of a father, grieving - but all are crafted so elegantly, so absolutely 'right.' Smits can use even the most structured rhyme scheme, as in 'The Pulmonary Embolism,' with a touch so skilled that in other hands could feel cumbersome - but here there is no loss of real pain and emotion.

The second section, 'Mother Doll / Doll-Mother,' is searingly honest about parenting and being a mother with such careful observation that the poems speak to anyone who has cared for small children. The title poem, 'Russian Doll,' contains this: '... As I thin and am worn smooth by little hands that dismantle me daily…” – one of the most perfect descriptions I have read of motherhood. But there is celebration too and a realistic sense of the day-to-day work. I’m in awe of another poet who can find poetry in the quiet hell of sitting pool-side during the weekly swimming lesson.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is a spoken word artist and somewhat to her own surprise a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

You can read more about Russian Doll, as well as a sample from it, on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

Review by Cathi Rae of "everlove" by Maggie Butt

This is Maggie Butt's sixth full collection in a poetry career of almost twenty years. It has been described as “a mature, devastating and ultimately redemptive work” (Jacqueline Saphra) and it is all of that and much more. My reasons for reviewing it were completely selfish in that I knew that a previous collection had been built on real lives, historical interviews and photographs, an area of writing of particular interest to me post an MA thesis using social media data and imagery to create a collection. 

Her new collection starts with a sequence of poems inspired by the work of the painter Mary Behrens and her photographs of refugees, and these poems are beautiful, focusing on the small, the relatable, to make tangible the refugee experience – in the poem "Shoes," she asks the simple question, if you had to leave your home, which one pair of shoes would you take with you? Sometimes it’s those tiny questions that  help us to have some understanding of what losing everything might feel like and in a way that avoids the polemical or the obvious.

Butt's background in journalism, the ability to use small details to make larger statements and her razor-sharp observation to draw the reader in to empathise and share emotions and experiences are everywhere in this collection. These range from the title poem “everlove” which explores loss – the loss of an earring and the loss of a person and ends “the earring turned up         caught on a sock / and you are here       deep in the core       of me” - to “The Repair Shop,” written during lockdown but which manages to say something new about an experience when for many of us, nothing was new or interesting.

This is a beautiful, deft, and polished collection which will bear reading and re-reading for a very long time.

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is currently working on a PhD looking at marginalised lives and poetry. She has recently been awarded a Midlands 4 Cities scholarship to fund this work.

Review by Cathi Rae of "Arrival at Elsewhere," Curated by Carl Griffin

At the end of March 2020, when the world closed down, artists and writers I knew fell into two camps: there were those, faced with very real concerns about their livelihoods, struggling to home-school and manage their fears for themselves or family members who found themselves unable to make any creative response to our new world order, and then there were the others who found themselves writing or creating obsessively, trying to record the events and their personal responses. As someone who was firmly in the second camp, I was excited to read this pandemic collection, and it’s not quite what you might expect, described by the curator, Carl Griffin as “a book length poem, [where] poets from across the world speak in one voice in response to 2020’s life-changing pandemic.” Poets submitted via a world-wide open submission which requested personal and nuanced responses to the initial few months of lockdown.

Poets included range from the well-known and established to new and unpublished voices, who each submitted complete pieces. Fragments from each were then taken and woven together into one complete book-length poem which touches on many of the experiences lived by us all in 2020.

So, there are many  beautiful, poignant and nuanced descriptions of the silence, the growing attention to nature and gardens, loneliness, fear of the future and managing ourselves in world where many of our compass points are missing. The many different voices have  been skilfully edited to create an extraordinarily effective and moving long poem, an effect that stays with you long after you have read it. It is  one  of the most interesting poetic responses to 2020 that  I have read.

If that’s not enough to pique your interest, sales of this book go to support NHS Charities Together.

 

About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is currently a PhD student  at the University of Leicester. A selection of her own pandemic writing was published in UnDividing Lines, in Autumn 2020. You can read a review of her pamphlet, Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems, here.

 

Review by Cathi Rae of "Threadbare" by Abbie Neale

There is nothing more truly depressing as a working poet than being asked to review a debut collection so wonderful that you immediately decide to pack it in and start whittling or metal detecting.

Neale's work has already been published extensively in a wide range of literary magazines and she was the winner of the 2019 New Poets Prize and it’s easy to understand why.

This slim collection, 36 pages, is divided into two sections – Part 1 with its frontispiece of a dark and decaying cityscape focuses on violence, the violence of men towards women, the violence of bad sex, the violence of sexual predators and the damage that women do to themselves in surviving toxic relationships.

Neale’s language is deceptively simple, but there is a clear sense that not one single word is extraneous. This is writer using huge restraint to describe very difficult things. Her use of descriptive language is extraordinary and leaves images that burn into your memory.

The poem “Can you draw him for us” about a sexual predator contains this striking image:

          so she outlines the lamppost instead

          where she saw the man waiting

          It cranes over him like a surrealist showerhead

The collection's second section, which is illustrated by an image of city brought to life with plants and life, explores the rebirth of relationships and love, with mother, sister and new lovers. Poems about love and acceptance and the possibility of new love avoid being sentimental or mawkish.

Even romantic love is handled with a light and deft touch. In “Being told that you are loved,” “It’s the closeness of coffee bean handfuls, it’s danger and relief, it’s the hairless tail escaping the bird beak.”

This is a beautiful selection of poems, buy it, tell other people and yes, I’m jealous.

About the reviewer

Cathi Rae is currently completing her MA in creative at Leicester University. She is a performance poet and spoken word artist and a multiple slam poetry winner and is allegedly working on her second poetry collection. Books about serial killers, unlikely heroes and blood are amongst her secret reading pleasures.

Review by Cathi Rae of "Killing a Dead Man" by Siobhian R. Hodges

I wish this book had existed five years ago, when I spent my working days in a classroom with no windows and with a collection of teenage boys who were deemed, and in some cases actually were, too chaotic or troubled to manage in mainstream lessons.

On Friday afternoons, we generally abandoned any pretence of formal learning once I discovered that, if I could find the right book, my class would sit quietly and happily listen to me reading aloud to them. Story time for young men who generally towered above me.

Our criteria was uncomplicated, successful books needed to be about the lives of other young men, these lives needed to be recognisable, a lack of romance was definitely a plus and the more violence, gore, mayhem and horror the better.

Killing a Dead Man would have been an absolute hit. The story of Jordan, a very ordinary teenager except of course for the fact that he is still in ghostly contact with his twin brother, Danny, abducted and murdered when they are both ten, is a narrative that many young men will understand.

The core of the novel is the journey that Jordan undertakes when his brother tells him that he now knows who murdered him and that he expects Jordan to take revenge, hunt down and punish his killer.

Accompanied by the slightly enigmatic and menacing Mr Butch, the taxi driver, and with limited money, knowledge or even the ability to convince anyone that he is not mad, but really can communicate with the ghost of Danny, Jordan is not heroic, he is not a teen superhero, but understands that it is up to him to do the right thing.

This novel is pacy, exciting and has enough gore and violence to satisfy the reader. The language is straightforward and focuses on moving the plot forward, but is powerful enough to raise the hairs on your arms as the supernatural elements ramp up and they do.

The level of peril is well judged, spine chilling rather than disturbing and the descriptions of the sad ghosts trapped in the their own past’s is poignant.

A well-put-together addition to the Young Adult fiction genre but with enough oomph to also satisfy an adult reader.


About the reviewer
Cathi Rae is currently completing her MA in creative at Leicester University. She is a performance poet and spoken word artist and a multiple slam poetry winner and is allegedly working on her second poetry collection. Books about serial killers, unlikely heroes and blood are amongst her secret reading pleasures.

Review by Lisa Williams of "Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems" by Cathi Rae

Your Cleaner Hates You is Cathi Rae’s debut poetry collection; she’s a local performance poet and is currently working as a cleaner.  But please don’t expect the comforting smell of polish as you read though: the opening poem with the same title as the collection is quite a punchy diatribe. 

Further in, we cover buying beds, dying dogs, feral boys and summer storms. Intimate secrets sit beside things found at bus stops. There are lists you want to devour quickly to get to the next but find yourself lingering longer over certain lines. 

All through the collection, Rae lifts your heart with humour only to fill it with sorrow in the next stanza or paragraph. She explores memory and things forgotten; relationships with partners, employers, pets, parents, children; the passing of time and procrastination - all done with a beautiful blend of wit and poignancy. 

Read the book. 

Go see her perform. 


About the reviewer
Lisa has just completed the MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester Uni, is working as a shopgirl, and although nearly 50 hasn’t yet decided what she wants to be when she grows up. You can find her online @noodleBubble