'The first time I looked into Alan Gillis's poetry, I was completely taken by it. Even though there was so much to take in at first glance, I was immediately hooked by its linguistic exuberance, its intelligence, its black humour, its sometimes zany flights of imagination that are grounded in an emotional reality.

'Belfast features in many of these poems, but it is not a conventional 'Troubles' landscape. Here, the city is a state of altered consciousness, reeking of desperate late-night parties, the drink-and-drug-clouded boundaries that join and separate its protagonists.