‘Reading ‘Riding Sharks’ is like taking the longest draw, on the highest tar fag available at the plain package tobacco counter at [insert supermarket of your choice] & you don’t care if it kills you. Because finally, someone sees you. Someone has seen you & the madness & all of the ‘beautiful failures & spectacular despairs’ & they have called it, even though before reading the poems you didn’t even fucking know what ‘it’ was. & somehow after reading the poems you still don’t, but it doesn’t matter, because now you find yourself drowning in a poem for the love of Sinéad O’Connor, ‘with a basket full of sins as the moon falls apart’ before going on to, ‘..die of grief in an uber on the way/home/from where you never went.’ This collection simultaneously loves & is terrified & chimes loudly with the ‘poetry of thunder’ & as I read, I find myself saying yes, yes, yes, over & over & over & I have no idea why.’
 

Ali Whitelock