‘Poets love love, do they not? They love describing, deconstructing, cornering, hi-jacking, naming, owning.’

‘They have come to find joy, create explosions and reach ecstasy. The circle throbs with the pulse of shared expectations.’

‘My memory isn’t a yard of film I can roll out and re-examine at will; it’s amorphous, immaterial, and in a state of active decay.’

‘She didn’t look like herself, though that couldn’t be helped; the amount of makeup on her face was enough to morph anyone’s features.’

‘People watch from the shore, waving and laughing like nothing is wrong. Like she belongs in the sea.’

‘Over the next few years, a series of massive rocks proposition me for a role as my moon.’

‘You waited 48 hours to go to the police. It took you that long to decide it was a crime, even if it would be called a domestic one, as if it were baked in the oven and smelled like apple crisp.’

‘How, she wonders, did she end up here? Different from her mother, but somehow exactly the same.’

‘She was not allowed to give up. She was programmed for success. She could not process a future without success.’

‘She considered telling Kayleigh about her obsession with Olive Oatman. How the tattoo made her feral, and how much Ellen wanted that for herself too.’

‘I craved the abandoned houses, the stillness of the woods.’

‘My mother always said that mingling too much with boys was dangerous. It could cause an accident and tarnish a girl’s life for good.’

‘In those spaces between their whispering mouths, I led a love life like nobody I’d ever known.’

‘In the water, my body isn't ambivalent, ambiguous, complicated—it's easy to read in its queerness.’

‘For the first time in the two months since he moved there and since Sarla's demise, he found himself awakened by a new sense of purpose.’

‘Martina leaned down into her bag and pulled out a pair of vivid blue surgical gloves. She pulled them over her sinewy hands, knuckles bulging against the latex.’

‘Ever since the dog, Brodie, got hit by that Hermes van, Katy had been like this.’

‘The showers will come in installments, unloading themselves from black clouds on one village at a time. They will embrace me and my mother river too.’

‘Evie’s disturbed by the glint of the blue bottle from where the bathroom door hangs ajar. She folds the newspaper and swallows, feeling its accusation lodge in her throat.’

‘She wades in and floats on her back and waves of forgetting wash her clean. It’s a good dream.’