David Stavanger’s third collection of poetry, The Drop Off, disintegrates binaries and social expectations with post-structuralist fervour, occupying and exploring the liminal space of broken families, neo-liberal cultures, mental health and, of course, language. Stavanger’s poetry is both pithy and undercutting, anathematic and loving, political and personal – and often, as is the case with such duplicitous poetry, these themes express themselves simultaneously, almost co-dependently.

It is appropriate, then, that the first poem in The Drop Off references both dichotomy and play. ‘The Chess Game’, a pseudo-ekphrastic poem in conversation with Marcel Duchamp’s painting of the same name, begins ‘My son and I play chess / every morning during his custody visits.’ Chess functions as a symbol of polarity: white versus black, father versus son. Yet Stavanger is more interested in the cultural and social ambiguities that infiltrate such dichotomies, immediately undercutting the starkness of the first line with the enjambed revelation of domestic tension in the second. ‘Sometimes’ he lets his son win, other times his son wins fair and square. They ‘hunch over, contemplating next moves’, their bodies contorting and pliable, not straight and uncompromising. In a bracketed aside, Stavanger underlines the impermanence that perfuses The Drop Off: ‘he’s never glued my pieces to the board.’ ‘The Chase Game’ contextualises many of the poems in The Drop Off, situating the collection within the perimetric conditions of family life.