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Review: The Illegal Age, by Ellen Hinsey

Karen McCarthy Woolf, The Poetry Review, 2018.

Reading Ellen Hinsey's book-length poem The Illegal Age is a bit like stumbling on a secret intelligence dossier mislaid by an absentminded mandarin on the Bakerloo Line... its critique of the accelerating erosion of our global democracies is tense and breathtaking. There is something deeply intimate yet expansively wide-ranging in theme and scope, achieved through an adroit blend of lyric and factual expression.