Editorial Note by Max Wallis

What I love most about Dale Booton’s poems is the unpalatability of them — and I mean that as praise!

There is a quiet defiance in the way these poems refuse to make themselves agreeable. “Beauty” announces itself as an abstract noun and then immediately dismantles the idea that beauty can be stable, desirable, or even coherent. The slashes aren’t decorative; they feel like thinking under pressure, like a body trying to speak before it has fully decided what it is allowed to say. The poem moves in clumps, in tugs. It drags itself forward. It refuses the clean line, the polished turn. Even the word palatable appears like something caught in the throat — a recognition of how often bodies are asked to soften themselves for the comfort of others.

The poem understands what it is to be looked at, to be translated by someone else’s appetite. It doesn’t ask to be admired. It insists on being felt in its resistance.

Wide Awake:

“Wide Awake” carries that resistance into the mouth. Lemon, split gums, bitterness seeping; the imagery is intimate and slightly uncomfortable. Love and pain sit beside one another without explanation, without hierarchy. The poem doesn’t attempt to separate them or resolve them into clarity. Instead, it lingers in the slow unfurling of a labyrinth, in the irritation that won’t quite subside. The city becomes a cracked nail, something picked at until it bleeds. It’s such a small, bodily metaphor, and yet it opens into something larger: the way restlessness becomes its own landscape.

Outside:

By the time we reach “Outside”, the interior has spilled into the world. Ambulance wails thread through sleep. Breath becomes visible in the cold air. The coming of morning doesn’t promise redemption; it bleaches. It exposes. The city lights are biscuit crumbs across brick tables — tender, almost domestic — but there’s still that sense of imbalance, of see-saw streets and rainfall pushing itself against whatever it can hold.

What holds these poems together is not a single theme but a shared refusal to resolve. They do not rush toward epiphany. They do not perform neat catharsis. They stay with the abrasion… of being watched, of wanting, of not being able to untangle love from harm, of lying awake while the world insists on continuing.

There is a line in “Beauty” that lingers long after reading: there is so much / of me / that wants / out. It doesn’t arrive as a declaration of freedom. It arrives as a fact. And that feels honest.

In a moment where so much writing feels pressured to be easily consumed, easily shared, easily praised, these poems hold onto their roughness. They leave an aftertaste. They resist being smoothed down.

That resistance is where their beauty lies.

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