Susannah Dickey is best known as a novelist in the autistic, Rooneyish, sad-Mick-chick mode. This is billed as her 'debut poetry collection' but really it's a Chimaera. "I - Podcast", three-fifths of the whole volume and the main event, so to speak, is an extended poem about a True Crime podcast on the corpse known as Isdal Woman, whose mysterious death by burning and drugging in 1970 remains Norway's most celebrated cold case.
I'm not going to cover the remainder, "II - Narrative" and "III - Composite", in any detail. The former is an essay (really a Tumblr dashboard of excerpts from Georges Bataille, Judith Butler and the like) on how we think about death. It reaches the earth-shattering conclusion that True Crime is appealing because it allows its audience to, like, experience death without experiencing death. The latter is an anthology of short, mostly unrelated poems. It's also a slog of such unrelieved shittiness that T. S. Eliot must be roasting in Anglo-Catholic Purgatory for spawning it along with modern free-verse.
"I - Podcast", while an artistic failure, has two things to recommend it by comparison. First, it's about things: the pleasures of speculation, violence against women, the ethics of making "content" out of tragedy, the difficulty of speaking truth to an audience that wants the most salacious version of things. Secondly, it's not formless, unlike the vast majority of modern so-called poetry. We begin:

"Lolloping on three lame legs, grating with unpoetic jargon, meagre content puddling towards the page-edge as it strains to fill the baggy metre." incredible