Zarah Butcher-mcgunnigle’s Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.

Giramondo, 68pp, $19.95

instead of almond or the wrong number of Christmas puddings. Ringworm. A therapist who suggests channelling pain into art. That’s what he did as a former comedian and clown – and what about Kurt Cobain, who “made millions”?

In the first of these vignettes, some of which have been published elsewhere and reframed for this work, the narrator is eating “disgusting chocolates that have melted and reformed five times while sitting in my friend’s hot car”. The abject stays in focus throughout.

Under the flat surface of each boxy slab of prose are trip-wires, quick flips in tone. There’s something of the mood of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation with its depressed narrator who is all looks and no vision until she imagines the “luxurious free fall into velvet blackness” of a year-long pharmaceutically enabled sleep. Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, too, is often comedic and sharp, although where its satire is directed •Felicity is not always an answerable question. Plunkett