Animated by many different types of kinship, the poems in Dear Friend(s) explore webs of experience that wind between parents, extended families and friends. They will take readers back to powerful, often early influences, which result from relations of likeness and empathy as well as blood.

The long title poem is an elegy – to a specific Dear Friend, dead from AIDS in its earliest years. It’s also an elegy for the loss of innocence and freedom of sexual expression that flowed generously in the 1970s and 80s, in the UK and in the US.