You Break It You Buy It

(Essential Poets)

9781771838108

100 pages | September 1, 2023

Tait is a perceptive observer, asking penetrating questions about our collective mistakes, our addictions, and our family legacies. We quickly trust her disarming voice to cut through the crap and tell us the truth. A terrific debut!

John Wall Barger, author of Smog Mother

In Lynn Tait’s debut volume, dark humour and a no-nonsense approach to life’s challenges – large and small – command the reader’s attention ... Across this collection, we smell the “stink” and feel the “heart pain” that is everywhere. And yet, Tait is undefeated. She helps us see that “life’s a controlled burn.”

Ruth Panofsky, author of Bring Them Forth

Lynn Tait’s You Break It You Buy It is a surefooted book by a mature writer in the best of the peoples’ poetry tradition. These passionate assessable poems come from a poet knows all of life, from love to loss, its bumps and beauty and everything in between.

Bruce Hunter, author of Galestro

Tate’s finely-honed poetic razor slices through the detritus of rupture and disconnection—the relational tangle that makes us so beautifully human. An exquisite soul-punch to sting, heal, and tenderize.

David Stones, poet, performer, Infinite Sequels, sfumato

Working past a legacy of disturbed and disturbing family relationships, Lynn Tait crafts with rich language and powerful images the treacherous core of heartbreak and the shocking loss of her son. She breaks the “silence that closed around us like a coffin,” and presents a deft and powerful treatment of grief, how it scrambles our minds and slows our bodies. Tait’s gaze widens past personal trauma to environmental catastrophes in tough – but welcome – poems that name events like “a toxic deal sealed in triplicate.” Hers is a poetry that is “ready to hear our voices, touch our differences.”

Maureen Haynes, author of Sotto Voce

An expansive and wide-ranging collection of poems that are always open-hearted even as they confront the ills of the world, whether environmental and political conflicts, the harms done within families or betrayals by friends and lovers. Lynn Tait’s debut book is rich in imagery and forthrightness in equal measure, “a yard sale of porcelain hearts, all cracked”. These are indeed “dangerous poems”, in the very best sense.

Frances Boyle, author of Openwork and Limestone

From the potential toxicity of family relationships, to environmental catastrophes and the vagaries of friendship, to global conflicts, the pandemic and personal loss, Tait tells it like it is, but sure as hell makes it mighty engrossing along the way.

David Stones, Verse Afire Magazine