In Silk Work, Imogen Cassels’ debut collection, desire and grief are a double-edged subject, elucidated through a kind of lyric diffidence. Forms, translations, folksongs, geographies of longing, and the work of memory are interplayed, though always with the haunting implication that the words we use to document our lives are never quite enough.As they weave multiple sources from literature, philosophy, visual art and history into ways of reading and documenting, the poems in Silk Work are an exercise in language’s inbuilt, radiant futility, which is both its suffering and its joy.