(In)Habit wields form as a heated scalpel, revealing the complex aftermath of a ‘good bad’ relationship.

These poems interrogate what it’s like to live in intertwined and inhabited orbits with a love that is sometimes quicksand, sometimes warped house, always slow consumption.

Unafraid of charting moral greys, (In)Habit reveals that love is not always clean redemption or saving grace. Images are ‘glittering red’, trip-stones we see coming, but are propelled towards through incisive line-breaks. 

Cliss deploys a brutally honest lyric, caustic, irreverent, yet compassionate for the pits we might choose to love, the (re)tellings we sing ‘in infinite rows’ to stop ourselves leaving. 

Resisting easy narratives of subjection, what these poems insist on is a tenacious willfulness. ‘Turn up the tunes’. We’re not looking back.

Prerana Kumar

Like a close-up of a wound, Hetty Cliss’s debut pamphlet shines with painful detail. We’re invited to inhabit a relationship – but there’s violence in the Budweiser and that bad feeling won’t disappear, no matter how many family Sunday dinners the speaker sits through.

The everyday hurt of (In)Habit could easily become habit.

But by making language new, by crafting these poems, Cliss’s speaker makes themself notice every irony – and perhaps that is what ultimately saves them. Can it save us too?

Helen Bowell

These are gorgeous poems of love, longing, and lying around, of lines, of lies, and of lego. 

Hetty Cliss masters the sonnet form and owns the couplet, embracing the imperative. These are sharp, witty, confessional poems that capture the zeitgeist of modern romance and explore coping strategies, hurt, and memory. Often note-like and staccato, the voice is immediate, honest, and erudite, the short messages clear. 

Don’t miss out on these heart-howling poems you won’t forget.

Paul Stephenson

About (In)Habit

A collection of raw and moving poems, the book charts the decline of a relationship that is often abusive, with the speaker working their way through not only the loss of love, but also the shock and awe of a partner becoming coercive and controlling.

The poems balance the struggle to maintain one's self in such an environment, while also attempting to present a unified and happy front to the outside world, through a combination of invigorating imagery and use of form.

There's a humour here too and a very English sense of both the interior and exterior; the keeping up of appearances is threaded through pints and Sunday lunches, with emotions suppressed for the good of a "quiet life". But the book's trajectory offers hope to the reader, with the speaker rediscovering their strength and finding the courage to break free and take on the world again by its end.

These poems become life affirming and celebratory; while the couple's relationship may be breaking down, the speaker's story is just beginning.

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