The way the expression ‘half your luck’ feels luckier than all your luck; the way halfway around the world sounds further than all the way around. Half: the bisector, but what was the whole? To think like the Indian poet, Sujata Bhatt, how far east is still east? The way I don’t credential this collection is because it beckons another kind of account (though in these brackets I attest the work walks a sharply decolonial edge). It is as if the book were a lung that fills, empties, clears. We have been bouncing at what appeared to be normal speed when, in the final section, the title poem drops. Suddenly, the page is vertically bisected, lifting us out of a half-time groove into what feels like 160bpm. Jungle!’ Lucy Van
