UNNATURAL BLONDE Olivia Petrini

She bleached her brunette hair and cut it into the bob she had worn as a small child, hoping to meet that girl again. The mirror gave her a stranger. The title poem records the shock in lines as ragged as the cut, with Talking Heads, the yellow road to Oz and Hardy's much-missed woman all washing down the plughole.

What follows is the year the dye ushered in: new love on a rooftop at sunset, heartbreak, a serious illness and a stay in hospital, and at the end of it all, a daughter. Madwoman, the book's one long poem, turns the ward into a witch trial. A sestina plucks the last feathers from an angel's stumps, heirloom rings pass down three generations, and Tea & Toast finds her with a newborn, learning to figure out the rest.

Olivia Petrini designed the cover herself, a peroxide bob above a coat marbled in bronze and violet, and the poems are interleaved with collage plates of birds, wings and starbursts. The afterword opens the atelier, tracing a line from Eliot and Pound to Leonard Cohen and Sharon Olds.