In Milk Snake, Toby Buckley invites us to look at the world from a slightly different angle, where small things become unsettling if you look closely enough. The poet explores queerness, displacement and trauma through clear-voiced, deceptively gentle poems about fishermen, maggots and bees.

bleary
from sleep and warm
water and no glasses
i spot an uncertain comma
sliding

he drags his tail up my
shower wall cumbersome
and not unmaggotesque and i
can see

his guts
or maybe it’s
his dinner
- from 'companion'