In Balloons, Alex Innocent writes into the body's most private rooms and the world's most public violences. These poems move through harm and aftermath, through desire and dread, through the absurd theatre of modern life, with a voice that is at once forensic and ferociously alive. A North Sea undertow runs beneath hospital language, domestic spaces, religion, schoolrooms, news bulletins, and the algorithmic present, where power keeps shifting its mask and the self must keep learning how to survive it. Urgent, darkly inventive, and startlingly tender in its refusal to look away, Balloons is a collection of pressure and release, of what swells, what ruptures, and what refuses to go back to its original shape.
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