Tracey Slaughter’s poetry collection The Girls in the Red House are Singing has a vibrant cover that hints at the psychedelic. Inside doesn’t disappoint, the sections vividly titled: ‘opioid sonatas’, ‘psychopathology of the small hotel’, ‘the girls in the red house are singing’, and ‘nudes, animals & ruins’.

This is Slaughter’s second poetry collection and seventh book. ‘Opioid sonatas’ recently won the prestigious Manchester Poetry Prize and was described by the judges as ‘haunting and harrowing, yet executed with such forceful luminous brilliance,’ which could describe this entire work. Desperation, anger, and the feeling of being inside a fever-dream permeate, but no veil shields the reader from the visceral, or from pain:

‘in this killer place
the doctors are putting your blood on loop pedal
don’t listen’ (‘this is not a tribute’)

‘psychopathology of the small hotel’ deals with adultery, betrayal, and the tawdriness of hotel rooms:

‘Book now to tour your next abasement in the three-and-a-half-
star light of hotels.
It's a catalogue of burnt nerve endings.’ (‘the light in hotels looks forward to welcoming you again soon’)

The third section continues the heartbreaking, dark trend, facing up to rape and the culture that allows it to happen. ‘nudes, animals & ruins’, last, is the shortest section: lockdown and loneliness.

Slaughter is a brilliant observer of human nature and of details that grab you by the throat and make one feel. The poems here get under one’s skin, abrading and scraping, leaving a residue that feels like heartbreak.

fawn

That daddy-hole was deep:
that first big yearn that never closed, that urge
to beg that built me, leashed in church
& soldered to the nerve-ends, that worship

of company cars the way I was boned.
I’m jointed of sugar & crawl—
a pullcord to singsong of zeros in bad laps.

I’m bent at the minor neckbones not to tell.

I’m fitted with milky teeth to glint
the mathematical problem
of keeping traps shut

I’m rigged with a smile that swallows
trained to bat carbonated lashes
all my pretty pits so permanent sorry
my repertoire of dirty curtseys

don’t make a scene/ turn off the waterworks
& if you have something about being raped to say

don’t say anything at all.