In the middle of his life, Robert Lowell wrote Memories of West Street and Lepke , a poem that reflected on Lowell’s recurrent manias and included the lines ‘My manic statement’. This is Neilson’s manic statement, arching backwards through his personal histories (rural, difficult) and then into the current scale of illness: how it prophesizes and destroys. But this is not a book solely given over to a state; Neilson gives most of the book over to love, how it moves him, the disaster of chasing it, and how it settles all the accounts in his life.