Through its myriad settings, from the bemonstered waters of Loch Morar to the London commuter belt to the Amazon, Cleland's second collection is concerned with the relationship between our internal and external landscapes and explores how our attempts to control the world around us betray our desires and prejudices. 
 
Blank verse, free verse, prose poetry and concrete sit happily alongside each other in this surprising and varied collection. The poems in their different forms are united by Cleland's sinister sense of magic, which breathes life into the people and creatures that inhabit them: they are haunted by the ghosts of faeries and deerhounds, the spectre of an unreachable internet and the patchwork past of Machu Picchu. The result is work that deftly treads the line between the serious and the comic, characterised by compelling imagery, fresh conceits and strong narrative voices.
 
"In Angela Cleland you feel you’ve made a remarkable personal discovery: at last!, you think, here’s a poet whose precision of language and breadth of vision transforms the everyday into extraordinary art. Emotions and intimacies are subjected to the same clear-eyed, and eye-opening treatment as nature, myth, and exotic locations. Cleland is a poet to treasure." (Robert Vas Dias)
 
"The strength of Cleland’s supple, deft writing lies in more understated poems, moments when she acknowledges the ambiguity of her enterprise: how – to follow the boxing metaphors that run through the collection – with every hit 'your blow could absorb like melt water/ into the padding of your opponent’s gloves.' " (Helen Mort, Magma)