‘We need our guides. We need those who have negotiated and broached their own sundered and shifting worlds before us. How do we survive our contemporary moment? And how do we articulate that survival? Project Patchen says language is a strategy. The writing that emerges is supple, muscular, and innervating. These are nervy, driven lines, but they also channel something of Patchen’s directness and clarity.
     ‘There’s no cathartic release, no striving for an empathetic sigh. There’s only an accounting and a holding to account. No one is saved and no one’s off the hook. That’s the beauty and the bravery of it. The horror of it too. These are poems from the class war. These are poems from the war on women. These are poems from and for a world that will not look poor women in the eye; for a lyric sensibility that drains their rage into pallid depoliticised reservoirs of poetic sentiment. None of that here. But a humour and an honesty that persist despite it all. No little dramas of abjection, but real life. We cannot look away.’
     –  Fran Lock