If We Knew How to We Would

I am an unmade bed. I am a single thing made up of many other things. I am a reason, a raising, a roof to be raised. I am a song you sing in your sleep. I am a collection of dots. I am a need you buried in the back garden. I am a literal spray of light across a wooden floor in a house where the sun has only just returned. I am a musical phrase. I am a lead light. I am a host. I am seven different names. I am all the fat in my body. I am the sky when it is early spring and I can’t believe I exist in this colour range. I am so blue.

If We Knew How to We Would answers a question nobody asked: How many thoughts can you work into a single poem?

Through breakups and a pandemic, health issues and deaths, Emma Barnes’s second collection is a riveting, overflowing and grief-stricken reckoning with the ordinary: a skinful of spit; insides scooped out with a melon baller; cracked like an egg and nothing inside. ‘It is too much to say nothing about. It is nothing to say too much about.’