“Poetic Trenches” is a collection of short poems and prose from the Brine Rights publisher, focusing on moral and ethical issues. As with all their collections, part of the sale price is donated to good causes.

Covering subjects from porn to existentialism, the content varies widely in tone and topic. The prose ranges from the touching to the somewhat purple and overblown, but it should be no surprise to anyone that I prefer the poetry. There’s a poem about a ballet dancer that stands out, focusing on the nature of performance and beauty, which particularly stood out to me, but sadly little else did.

“Poetic Trenches” is well presented, nicely assembled and the odd spelling error comes as a shock because it is otherwise so well done, but somehow it left me unmoved. The problem is that there is very little new in the themes tackled here: the Holocaust, false accusations, police corruption, the regular parade of media horrors, but no solutions. Nothing particularly touching, and the message is not that this needs to change, but that we simply need to accept this.

Competently presented, handling difficult topics, and generally well-written, the only flaw in this is that there is nothing new here.