"A Ghost in my House", Lorna Thorpe's first full-length collection, can be seen as an exploration of identity - of how individuals adopt various personas to mask feeling and to step aside from emotional involvement. The 'ghost' of the title is a 'bad girl' and this book charts her life, birth and death through dance halls, betting shops, bed-sits, broken love affairs and the streets of Brighton. Other ghosts inhabit these poems too - the ghosts of lost loves, of childhood, of music, snatches of which summon the past, and the ghost of the loss of love itself. Assertive, sexy, confrontational, these are poems which pack a punch and which will resonate with the reader for a long time.