Gutted

Gutted, Evie Christie's powerful and harrowing debut, pulses with the rhythms of life, loss, and love. Energized with the language of now and the wide scope of popular culture, while dwelling in Yeats' ''foul rag and bone shop of the heart'' - a world where needs are unfulfilled and passions unrequited (or worse) - it also manages to revel in the beauty of fragility and discover awe in the smallest things. Depictions of alcoholism and sex contrast with scenes of contented domesticity; questions of faith stand in counterpoint to the harsher realities of pornography and violence. Lovers, friends, family, and strangers play an equal part in shaping these sharply barbed observations, fleshing out the typically unseen and unspoken dramas of both small town and urban existence. From out of ''an anarchy of conventional process'' comes Evie Christie's stunning, original observations - because despite the searing and sometimes controversial themes, this is essentially love poetry - the kind that will leave your ''heart plundered, hands lifted, gutted.''