Shireley Bell lives on a Lincolnshire cactus farm with her physicist husband and their children. Her poems have been widely published in magazines such as Poetry Review, Ambit, Critical Quarterly, London Magazine and The Wide Skirt, and broadcast on Radio 3's Poetry Now. A pamphlet, Hanging Windows on the Dark, was published by Wide Skirt Press in 1987. Her work has also appeared in Faber and Faber's Poetry Introduction 6, and Rivelin Grapheme's Six: The Versewagton Poetry Manual. The poems in this collection have previously appeared in all of these publications.