Carole Satyamurti's third book of poems is concerned with the forces that connect people to each other, those that divide us, and those - language in particular - that do both. in poems of celebration, love and loss, she looks with a new imaginative concentration at the lives, real and imagined, that we construct for ourselves, and those we attribute to others. The second part of the book places individual lives in the wider political and social context, asking for instance, what it might mean to be caught up in civil war, a ferry disaster, the alienating complexities of bureaucratic procedure. The poems engage with the question of what can be our relation to such experiences, as much as with the experiences themselves and how people attempt to survive them. Serious, sharp and witty, Carole Satyamurti achieves (as fellow poet, Catherine Byron, says) `an extraordinary balance between an unflinching facing of grim facts and a particular sort of lightness of heart'. From reviews of Changing the Subject : `Carole Satyamurti's second collection is like a seemingly innocuous drink, laced with the hard stuff' Carol Ann Duffy, The Guardian `the wit does not provide a cosmetic for the emotion, it co-exists with it...the underlying terror is almost unnoticeably stalked and pinned.' Carol Rumens, Poetry Review This book is intended for poetry readers.