In SLOWLY, AS IF , Karen Press looks clear-eyed at what it means to live in a complex society, a fragile world. She celebrates the connectedness that sustains us - in dance, in love, with the natural world, in cities where ‘strangers seem happy / to let you be’ - and sees it betrayed by our unreflecting complicity in poverty and violence. The death of a child who ‘barely scratched the air of the country’ resonates in her tender, devastating account: ‘When a child dies, who is responsible[unk]’ SLOWLY, AS IF asks hard questions with grace and wit, balancing the particular and the universal. ‘Being told / you’re made of stardust / is not helpful / as you sit holding a parking ticket’, but it is, none the less, a truth.