'This collection presents a strong, distinctive, and, in some places, a startling and disturbing voice. Hawkes uses the everyday of supermarkets and butchers' shops, farms and suburban streets. But there is often an unsettling sense of nightmare and gothic, and that unsettlement comes from an interrogation of the practices that we unthinkingly accept as normal, but are here imbued with a sense of menace.' --Jane Stafford

'Clearly, rubber gloves are one of the images Hawkes owns by right of obsession, but they will do nothing to protect you from the clinging smell of these poems, an irreverent blend of cow shit and red meat and mangroves and pomegranate and raw talent.' --Joan Fleming on Rebecca Hawkes in AUP New Poets 5