The title of gillian harding–russell’s collection proffers the urgent suggestion that something must be told. It is with such insistence that the poems reach out from the page with this narrative energy, but once engaged, cleverly maintain their ironic weight of understatement and emotional complexity. Like the fingers of a hand, this collection is divided into five sections, each one offering its own related theme while combining for greater purpose. Matters of intimacy, enhanced by acts of God, are dramatized against a backdrop of the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of molecules. Phobic catalogues of the fears of our age are balanced against our greatest scientific and architectural achievements that underlie civilization with its propensity for the straight line. And as these poems, at times lyrical and intimate, at other times ironic and satiric, unfold, they mark harding–russell’s evolution as a poet and demonstrate the meticulous care for how subtleties of language emerge.