“I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back”.

So writes Jay Bernard in the introduction to their sucker-punch debut collection of poetry which primarily examines the ramifications of the New Cross Fire that claimed the lives of 13 black people in the eighties - often regarded as a racist massacre - whilst glancing at its urgent and uncomfortable parallels with Grenfell’s more recent injustices and how these intermingle/inter-haunt with the poet’s own identity: racial, gender and sexual. Although formally some of the poems didn’t work for me as I found some of the rhyme and imagery didn’t always compute, this is probably subjective so I’m going to listen to Bernard’s delivery in the hopes of following their flow a bit better. In any case, this is an extremely important work which deserves re-visiting and remembering; after all, at its molten core is the problem of memorialisation, for the unsolved, unsung, unacknowledged and unwritten about, and the pursuit of protecting the victims from the secondary tragedy of archival violence.