A child awakens alone in an alien land, not the country of her birth. This is the scene of her original pain, her original trauma. Picking through fragments of memory, she retraces her steps. Addiction, sex, loneliness and hurt. Each poem is a single shard on a journey of self-realisation, from the poet’s life on an East London housing estate, to understanding the power of motherhood.

As a child she is witness to domestic violence; as an adult, she becomes a victim. Addictions become her escape, only to find herself falling ever deeper into a fractured and numbed pain.

Memories of her time in a mental hospital, reuniting with her mother and then losing her again, the pervert in the park, the man who jumped to his death.

But there are also rare and brilliant flashes of gentleness that inspire the impulse to survive.

Both brutal and tender, all told in raw honesty.