Typewriters, plagiarism and the poetic line are just three of the subjects under the spotlight in this book of essays by much-loved literary blogger Katy Evans-Bush. Studies of Ted Hughes, Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas sit alongside a new look at Keats, a search for forgotten war poet Eloise Robinson, and practical guides on poetic technique.Katy Evans-Bush combines the intellectual rigour of the literary critic with the dynamism of a seasoned traveller in the blogosphere. These essays place poetry at the heart of contemporary culture, meeting at the borders it shares with music, politics and sculpture. She writes about art and life in a way that is generous, witty and incisive.

In a world where everything has more possible explanations than ever before, where no experience seems real unless it is refracted, this book examines love, loss, and time itself under a variety of lenses: these poems are made from other poems, from paintings, from songs, from spam emails, snapshots, jokes, dreams. We are the experts on our own existence, but what does it all mean? Katy Evans-Bush has been praised for situating poetry in the heart of daily life, and her second collection is written in deep engagement with the sounds and colours of real and imaginative worlds. The French writer Nerval's pet lobster takes us on a vibrant summer's outing in nineteenth century Paris. Two playwrights in two centuries ponder happily on their unseen downfalls. A child dithers on a hot day, and a lover resorts to pure tactile expression at the moment it means the most. A sharply-lit American childhood is seen as if through a telescope, from amid the mists of London and its layered lives. Ordinary objects act of their own accord; art speaks to us more than the person standing beside us; and the core of love remains the same while everything around it shapeshifts. One thing is certain, though: an egg is never just an egg.