One of the outstanding features of this anthology from Peepal Tree Press’ Leeds-based Inscribe Readers & Writers Group is the diversity of themes and styles, a testament to the remarkable growth of the group over the past two years. Contributors are pushing against the boundaries of the various forms they are engaged with. Their work is no less nuanced and introspective than the previous anthology; if anything, it is more daring and exploratory. A feast of themes, styles, subject matter and insights awaits the reader: from frank and powerfully erotic fantasy to meditative interrogations of the writer’s relationship with the physical spaces they occupy. The poems and stories seek to unravel the delicate threads of loneliness and longing, of the personal quest for a certain kind of reprieve from the relentlessness of life. A daughter dreams of another life while she cares for her elderly, declining mother; another records her restless poetic musings as a “Covid refugee”. Yet another invokes that magical moment of stillness when a poem arrives. The family features strongly here: a character seeks to uncover the secretiveness surrounding her birth in a family which looks so obviously different from her; a struggling housemaid finds her predicament mirrored in that of the mistress who has employed her. There’s light and humour too: a woman finds an unusual way of dealing with her cheating partner’s betrayal while two sisters bring a twist to the Caribbean tradition of keeping a parent’s body in the “best room” before sending them off to their final place of rest. It’s all in here: bitter-sweet interrogations of fatherhood; fractured childhoods; the politics of love, redemption and abuse. The shocked awareness of a world turning on itself. This is an anthology that you, the reader, will savour and enjoy.