Funny, poignant, or black, and often all of these at once, the stories work cumulatively as a compelling contemporary text about embodied experience. Deborah Robertson knows that through masquerade new identities are grafted: in ritual re-crossings of the past or double-crossings of the present, putting on the imagery of the dead poet as convincingly as the blood and feathers of the bereft turkey plucker, in a 'lava of unstickings and meltings', her readers, like her characters, will recognise Proudflesh, bloodied or Schiaparelli pink, as radically new connective tissue.