"Aaron Kent’s pages made me experience, for the first time ever in my reading, the spaces between words as rips in fabric that let skin show through in its bruised and tender luminosity. Yielding the sense of a shared life, yet refraining from the anecdote porn of domestic exposure, these poems are attractive for both modesty and intensity: ‘These are the seas that hold squid / angels, and wrecks the size of / never explore.’ Ordinary objects – a hoover, a cigarette – appear as graspable yet floating, as does language itself, where infinity twins infirmity, angels angles, and lamb’s wool is two phrases away from a battering ram. The scientifically precise apprehension of ecological interconnectedness as personal and emotional impacts is emerging in some of the best contemporary poetry, which this is. Reading Melatonin Spring Collection is like learning to ice skate under an open sky; you are a thin blade away from falling, but always close to holding hands, wheeling a little off kilter with gravity, being pulled up, seeing stars and seeing stars."
- Vahni Capildeo
Melatonin Spring Collection
