An easy yolking would be with the work of Plath or Olds, but Lorna Thorpe's poems are particularly English, set in the betting shops and back rooms of urban working-class life. The poems are often very explicit about sex, and the pain of claustrophobic, domestic relationships. And that explicitness is given on the cover of this book with a striking and shocking picture of a blonde-haired woman, cigarette and champagne glass in her right hand, her left hand resting on a debris strewn table, and tears and mascara streaking her face.