The Proper Care of Knives (Argotiers Press) is Anu Lakhan’s full-length poetry debut, in which an animist compulsion for the natural world illuminates human preoccupations with wild forms. Characterised by their brevity and the force of their impact, the poems in The Proper Care of Knives do not shy away from the complexity of interpersonal relationships, either, revealing the often fraught truths at the heart of domesticities that may seem benign. Even when the circumstances depicted in these verses feel otherworldly, the roots of the poems are as reassuring, and sometimes as disturbing, as reality itself.