Grounded in the urgency of the moment – motherhood, housing precarity, politics – Past Lives also surges along on the nervous and joyful electricity of Leah Dodd' s voice, taking us from buses to poetry readings, rental bathrooms to Runescape, sometimes through the power of astral projection. These poems encounter domestic and feral creatures, mermaids, and men with terrible mullets. In form these poems are restless and spacious, constantly locating themselves, as the author herself does in her new life with a young child who shapeshifts daily. Most of all, these poems are about becoming – how, as we move toward the future, we turn our thoughts backwards towards the lives we have come from.
