The Mad Art of Doing Time

These poems, written during a stint in prison after a psychotic episode, show that anything is possible if we accept help, accept our addictions, and ask for forgiveness not both from those we have harmed but from ourselves. These astonishing poems are some of the most vital, unexpected, and raw poems I have ever read. They are bold, they are brilliant, and they are meticulously crafted. They are her career-defining work. A touchstone of recovery literature.

- Max Wallis

Blimey. It's hard to know where to start with The Mad Art of Doing Time, Bolton's collection, which loosely narrativises time spent by the author in prison for a crime committed in a manic episode.

With such a dramatic byline, one may worry that the story could overshadow the writing itself. But Bolton manages to reconcile confessional and modernist traditions with sparkling ease. The bare-bones of craft are obvious, and give us an automatic trust in Bolton's more ambitious linguistic pyrotechnics.

Her voice echoes through the collection, but do the voices of SCRAM (My Secure Remote Alcohol Monitor), the stories of women imprisoned alongside the writer, Oasis, Robert Browning, and more.

The Mad Art of Doing Time is a staggering collection. Bolton is adept at wordplay, but it goes beyond being merely playful (though there are moments of humour weaved seamlessly through the book): language is used to question, reflect, tease, move, and scandalise. Dark images jut from poems like stalagmites: such as 'choices contorting like decomposing ballerinas'.

Bolton has pulled off something remarkable here. This is a staggering collection, with lines that reverberated in my mind long after I put it down.

- Sarah Fletcher