The other side of happiness is where the hard work’s done.

In November 2016, unable to focus on much else outside of her own disbelief and anger with the US presidential election, American-Australian Heather Taylor-Johnson began writing poems in response to outrageous and offensive quotes by the incoming POTUS, and found it a healthy way to settle back into the world around her. With sexism, racism and climate-change denial playing heavily into the far-right zeitgeist of our times, this book - six years on - is still fighting back. But it’s true things are better now / It’s true that things are the same. Ironic, playful, lamenting, Alternative Hollywood Ending melds the political with the domesticated, and the public with the poet’s invisibly disabled body-as-temple: chaos the beauty of our wild lives.