Selima Hill has twice re-entered the underworld of mental breakdown through her poetry. Her earlier Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness presented the strange diaries of a young girl before, during and after her treatment at a psychiatric hospital. In her recent collection, Bunny, she opened another door on madness, revisiting the haunted house of an adolescence cut short by breakdown.

Now, in Lou-Lou, she goes back in time to meet her earlier self, sharing her pain, bewilderment and outrage as she retraces her steps through the institutional labyrinth. But the Lou-Lou poems are much more direct: shorn of her crazy metaphors yet still recognisably speaking with Selima Hill’s voice. Returning to the world – outlandish London in the Swinging Sixties – Lou-Lou ends with her discharge, when ‘we give not a word of thanks,/not a single smile,/ as they lead us away to be normal,/hair-dos swaying’.

Lou-Lou takes a different tangent to Selima Hill’s other treatments of mental breakdown: another way in, another way out. It is also a celebration of first love, a belated token of awe and gratitude for the gloriously caring sweet-smelling Sister in her skin-tight dress.

‘Selima Hill’s world is strange, dream-like, secretive…delicate, moving and vaguely sinister’ – Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian

‘Selima Hill evokes, for me, the inner childhood world we’re supposed to give up as we become adult yet which artists need to draw upon’ – MICHÈLE ROBERTS, Time Out