This ebook is a pure poetry selection, no prose or extracts. The driving themes appear to be trust and despair. There is the desperate seeking of connection at the risk of betrayal and its realisation. Religion is a lifeline, but not the driving force. While dark poetry and alienation themes are often dismissed by readers as whining or teenage, these are adult works and the concrete examples brought up over and over again give these poems a grounding that most dark poems lack. Some of the pictures she paints are very dark indeed. In a world where the fact Black Lives Matter is something that people have to be reminded of by hashtag, her writing is heart-felt, painful, and will speak directly to a generation.

The poems are extremely raw, with some beautiful turns of phrase. While the longer works are good, her real skill is in the short works where a few well-placed words can create a world and concept and tear your heart out with it.

“How” is a simple painful list of ways to die, including simply for being herself in this time and place.

The plaintive words of “Beauty” in its eight lines is the cry of a soul who just wants something, anything good to happen.

“I know” is the desperate wish to unknow something that you’ve been told, to turn back even the last seconds to a world where it hadn’t happened because you didn’t know and there was a chance of a world where it would not happen.

“Walking” the end of a relationship in a mere seven lines, and yet it draws the picture of the whole preceding relationship, their time together, and why it ends.

I can’t single them all out, as there are far too many excellent poems here, but one set deserve a special mention. The tribute and obituary poems, to named victims of random shootings, are heartfelt and moving.

There are formatting errors, it must be said. It has a table of contents listing poems but the entries aren’t hotlinked, and the Kindle Reader could not find it. Fortunately it is at the front so it is easy to locate. Some of the poems are oddly formatted, broken over lines when the words themselves are powerful enough not to need the assistance. Most poems start on a new page, but “Guilty” and a few others do not. There are also a few possible grammar issues, but I am not sure if these are deliberate word choices. For example, the confusion of you’re and your occurs in a work about dehumanisation and not being allowed to be yourself, so could be a reference to objectification.

And the poems are strong enough that I suspect a reader will overlook it, as I am going to.

“My god holds all the cards
But the devil holds the gun” – “How” by Wanda Jefferson

5 stars.