to anyone who thinks they don't "get" poetry and to anyone who was forced to analyse poems for gcse english and hates poetry as a reflex - please, read this book, and let yourself discover how wonderful it can be. this is such a beautiful anthology which has introduced me to some heart-wrenching poems, and ella's commentary is stunning and lovely and sparse.

This is the book that basically got me through the year. Set Me On Fire edited by Ella Risbridger is a poetry collection like no other I've come across before. I struggled with poetry in school and both enjoyed and hated the "solve the poem like it's a riddle" exercise that every poem became, and so it was only when I became a bookseller that I really started trying out poetry again.⁠ This collection is perfect for people exactly in that stage, wanting to find out what they like that isn't necessarily written by a dead white man years and years ago. It includes several of my favourite poems, including Monica by Hera Lindsay Bird which is a poem about Monica Geller from Friends, which contains the line "she makes me want to stand in an abandoned Ukranian parking lot and scream her name at dead crows". There's funny poems and sad poems and poems about being a shabby daughter infatuated with the man who has come to visit. Throughout, Ella adds commentary or little notes about how the poems interlink or extra facts, which I enjoyed immensely. Her love of poetry really beams through the page and every aside feels like a secret passed to you.⁠ I dipped into it every night during the first batch of lockdown and it helped guide me through. I now have a list as long as my arm of poets to discover more of, which is a wonderful thing.