These poems are about "stuff" - the 2 of life that isn't covered by the Mental Health System. These poets are wrestlers, grappling with prose-ak and worse, pomping up and calming down, and doing that most difficult of things: trying to be straightforward about that "stuff" (long-windedness is "left at home"). All ring-mastered disarmingly by Rob Gee.

Before introducing the poets Gee takes us to a landscape - where the house is filled with magician's rabbits and doves, where the street is a 1950s heaven without imagination, where the residents all keep some kind of weapon - a comic geography hinting at backstories that no one is going to force on us. Indeed, this set is mostly about the future- manifestos, postal achievements, "I'm the doctor now" breathes Will Quinton over his sectioned teddy bear.

Netty Jonas takes a list of old lady hatreds and it becomes a glistening geography of people, foods, words, sounds, games. Nick King is weathering out another winter in the talking hospital and has to admit he found love in the place he's bitching about, even paranoia's "a nice thing" in the rain, when "everyone else" misses out on the emptiness.

Dave King reads a poem by the absent Julie Blakey and here we have the straightfowardness question again. Because it's not easy and it doesn't always work. Speaking from the heart, plain language, it often obfuscates, it writhes and feints, it's not always clever and its not always clear. But wrestled into tension - like The Welshman prowling WWF-style and yelling "I'm a castle...vulnerability..." - plain words are marshalled like "scrabbling troops":

"my dad was the best... And then he had me."

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