The first poem I ever wrote was for my grandfather. I was a little kid and he was unwell and though I was too young to really understand the gravity of the situation, I knew that I loved him very much and wanted to do something to make him feel better. I don't really remember much about actually writing the poem (I was seven at the time, so my artistic process probably revolved around trying to keep my finger out of my nose long enough to actually hold a pen). What I do remember very clearly though, is how it felt to finish it. How it felt to hand it to my mother and to watch her read it. How it felt to see her face soften and her eyes fill with tears. How it felt when she returned from visiting her father and told me how much he'd loved what I'd written.

I lost my grandfather a few weeks later and that loss affected me hugely, the aftershocks of an incomprehensible grief rippling out into my future, distorting me in ways I'd spend the next twenty years struggling to redress. I found myself exposed suddenly to a torrent of unfamiliar emotions that I could barely contain, and a darker, more fragile world that seemed hellbent on falling apart. In order to cope I developed a slanted logic, thoughts that contorted into pacts and pledges contingent on little rituals. Years later a doctor would diagnose me with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, an insidious condition that evolved and twisted and grew inside me, weaving its way inextricably into my thoughts like bramble through a hedgerow.

The poems in this anthology are relics of this period of my life. I made so many mistakes and miscalculations and pissed off a lot of people. I drank too much, fought too much and tried repeatedly to lose myself in chemicals and dead-end relationships that only ever made things worse. Growing up is hard enough already without mental illness tossed into the mix. One of the only things that kept me going, alongside friendship and my extraordinary family, was writing. The urge to write poetry was violent and entirely irresistible, forcing its way out of me like that fucked up baby xenomorph bursting through John Hurt's chest.

These poems reflect who I was back then. They cover a range of subjects; love, lust, drink, drugs, life, death, friendship, family, money, religion and porn. They are about traveling. About grieving, whether that be for people or places or the parts of ourselves that we lose along the way. They are about how happy certain things can make us. They are also about how those very same things can leave us miserable and desperate and confused and furious and drunk to the point of stupor. They are about really, truly, honestly wanting to be better but never quite managing to work out how. They are about grandparents, an island and a house by the sea.

And everything that house represented...