A book about family – the genetic strands that run through generations; the ties of love and belonging that bind parents and children, siblings and counsins. But it’s also about damage and grief, and how to negotiate your way through dark passes – lockdown, cancer, a family history pieced together from fragment, myth and discovery. Uneasy poems for uneasy times, but woven through with love, beauty and hope. Poems as an embroidery of memories, so that they are made beautiful, so that they become art. But also poems as sutures – binding wounds, repairing harm. So that the work of healing can begin. So that the patient – all of us – might survive.