There’s a woman somehow veiled in marble who is only forme so I take her out of the Art Institute through a back wayand no one notices: she lives with me now, happier than inthe gallery with the cold white lights, in my home she is seenfor who she is, though the veil cannot be removed, itshardness impenetrable, but now she can be touched.

Acutely Life playfully or sorrowfully interrogates works of art, asking fictional characters their views on grief and generosity. Sue Sorensen’s poems try out poses learned from other poems or wander off with dead artists who insist on entering places they don’t belong.

These quicksilver poems are life studies, or conversations held with all sorts of unsuitable and suitable companions, written in a style full of echoes and dark humour.