This collection of poetry did not speak to me. Perhaps I am too much of a poetry cynic. I found the poems hard to connect with, perhaps due to my lack of relation to the author's lived experience or because of the overwrought and overworked language.

The sections "Still Lifes" and "That Broke into Shining Crystals" have each poem named for a real still life or gemstone, respectively, with the theme carried throughout. Great idea, but the poems' contents fell somewhat short for me, and felt like the poet was trying to stretch a narrative over a particular painting or gemstone. By the end, it felt tired.

The middle section, 'Coy,' is the star of this collection, though unlike the other poems, this is a vocabularyclept. Perhaps this is why I liked it most of all: it had Scott's arrangement style, but not his vocabulary choice.

Thank you to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for the ARC.

Thanks to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for the ARC!

Richard Scott’s "That Broke into Shining Crystals" is a gorgeous collection of poems that confidently occupy the tension between trauma and beauty.

Richly intertextual, the book converses with dozens of still life paintings to look for beautiful shapes in the shadow of childhood abuse. It sounds like an impossible premise, but that impossibility ultimately feels generative. Still life paintings always have a certain kind of staginess—the light is carefully controlled, and each object feels placed to perfection.

Scott constructs poems with this same kind of precision, but rather than trying to turn abuse into something “poetic,” he allows it to fracture and fissure through his work. He presents stately, elevated language, and just when it might start to feel a little too stilted, the blunt reality of trauma rips through it and adds a jagged edge. The poems become hollowed-out cathedrals; the heightened language begins to feel meaningful because of its failure. It simply cannot undo the horrific realities experienced by the speaker.

Even so, Scott highlights a persistent optimism that feels artful in and of itself—like hope is a trained skill in the speaker’s world. When we read lines like, “True plenty is untranslatable,” it feels less like resignation and more like celebration. Language can only do so much, but recognizing its limitations opens us to its possibilities. It cannot explain away pain, but it can be beautiful if we realize that beauty isn’t a solution—it isn’t meant to be “useful.”

Despite everything, there is still life.

"That Broke into Shining Crystals" is a difficult read, and not one that I would recommend lightly, but it is a book that will reward readers who choose to excavate its many layers.

The trauma that curls in the gut of "That Broke into Shining Crystals" is both solidified and splattered across relics of life—past and present. Still life paintings soak up its dye, devouring its “dense sweet-meat bloom,” while stones and crystals stretch its skin over their once-molten cores.

It’s a vicious wrestle, like the brutal tangle of animal bodies glimpsed in mute shock in nature’s quiet corners. But the sharpest wounds are inflicted on language itself. It’s both mutilated and rebuffed, lashing between lexical and syntactical ruin (”Thus I go slow. I song last. Least. The lower.”) and a plainness that rejects poetic provocation (”I will not wrap this up in pretty words”).

All the while, a droning moan hums in the background, part strained sentiment (”His love was this kind of grinding”), part entrapment of its resolution within a body that is a sentence, a word, “a symptom.”

It’s only natural, then, that Scott’s poetry evolves into a kind of “exorcism.” Its repetitive nature, though draining at times, serves as an invocation. Still life becomes the vessel that holds “all the little red / apples of [himself],” emerging as “a kind of ghost” that manipulates “repetitive and distressing images. / All the glistening and painful / reds beginning to move, to run.”

The mind’s response to pain, so deeply embedded in life’s forms, is both disturbed and disturbing. Here, language floats between softness and incision—tender but sharp to the cut. At times, it conjures no images except for the image of the word itself, clinging to its own fragmentation.

And so, "That Broke into Shining Crystals" captures a fully embodied state of rage that exists in conversation with exhibition notes, lectures on desire, paintings, poems—one even shaped as a mind-raking vocabularyclept—and other pieces whose limits evoke a sense of illicit being.

In binding his poems together, Scott points a gentle finger at the constraints of expression, and how true experience—uncontainable within the tidy languages of structured being—is ultimately failed by it.

Yet neither the unravelling of the self nor of its voice is rendered powerless. Restraints, once sensed, are licked and prodded into inevitable submission. Because while change is irreversible, it's also persistent.

In the end, "That Broke into Shining Crystals" doesn’t attempt to mend or resolve the fractures it exposes; instead, it thrives in the tension of brokenness, where language refuses to hold. Scott’s poetry forces the reader into a space where experience shifts and slips, never quite caught.

It’s not a work that seeks answers but one that embraces the unanswered, the jagged, irrepressible fragments of existence. Each word, each image, is a wound that will not close, an echo that cannot be muffled. In this perpetual state of rupture, language becomes both subject and casualty—forever unsettled, forever freed.

4.5 stars. This collection of poems sent shivers down my spine on multiple occasions. It caught me off guard, and swept me away. Scott's prose is mighty and somehow also so delicate. The softness of each poem paired with the tense, biting, and gripping stories left me more than impressed. I love when I find a new poet to keep following! Thanks so much for the arc, Netgalley. Pick up this beautiful work from Richard Scott when you're looking to feel something, even if the feelings are a twisted and broken. Don't forget to check your TW's.

I’m not a big poetry reader, but this collection pulled me in with its raw emotion and striking language. It explores trauma, survival, and self-determination with an intensity that lingers. The way it plays with form and language, especially in the title sequence, makes for a challenging but rewarding read.