Published on 30 September 2025
ISBN: 978-1-915108-34-0
76 pages
“You said our love language is doing things for each other.
But mine’s dirtier, down in the soil…”
Annie Brechin’s How to Make Love is no instruction manual. It’s a double meaning, a rumbustious, poetic odyssey through five cities – London, Prague, Paris, Dubai and Edinburgh – and the amorous encounters found there: the hopes, disappointments, frustrations, and heartbreaks, which ultimately lay the foundations of an unlikely path towards real love. These poems reject a sanitised version of romance. They are bold, messy, compassionate, visceral and revelatory. They present ordinary human minds and bodies, fragile and splintered, which they then “chisel into wonder/ over and over.”
*
The Best Lovers
don’t want to marry, they don’t want children
or to settle down. They lay you
on a mattress in a room full of mirrors
and turn the switch to pitch black.
They drive you to an orange grove
in October. They leave faint
blossom on your skin.
Years later you will see their photographs
in exhibitions and remember
how midday fell through their skylight
how they brewed you fresh coffee
how your fingers tore
their sheets apart and your back
arched like a question mark.
*
‘Today, when ‘the body’ is so over-theorised, intellectually-dissected and contested, almost to extinction, everybody [sic] seems to forget that the living / breathing / loving lived-in body aches [sweetly and sourly] and so does that hard-working muscle, the heart. Thanks-be then, for Annie Brechin’s new collection, which shimmers with the sweat of things as they are, but elevates the real into taut, illicit language. And this is just the bedrock of the collection. By the time the reader comes across a surgeon [spoiler-alert!] the collection soars further into amazing, risk-taking territory. And behind it all there’s a subtle, unstated arc of the body and heart slowly reconciling after much [wild and tough] buffeting. “Love is the worst kind of fall./ It knocks your teeth out./ Like the Homeric dead, you can’t speak/ ‘Til you’ve swallowed the blood”. Stow your online intimacy gurus and manuals! You’ll learn much more reading this.’ —Matthew Caley
"Annie Brechin's poems marry the sensuousness of love with an intimate violence only known to the body, beyond language. It's in the arch of the back, be it in anguish or ecstasy, a touch here remembered and lost over there. Brechin's poems stand to remind us that in each encounter is a self locating again, and in each loss a self never recovered. Yet the assurance persists: we can always be new and in that newness is our wholeness. She makes language a site for intimacy and takes it beyond the guttural and material, says to us: look, here. This is what love does, this is the power of our secrets, spoken only once and never again." —Medha Singh
How to Make Love by Annie Brechin
#fuckyourdatingapps
A man who’ll feed me wine straight from his mouth
that’s what I want. Fuck your dating appsyour Tinders, Bumbles and Happns
fuck these endless robotic profiles“I like travelling sports and good food” who doesn’t
fuck them and not in the good wayI do not want someone who’s “just a regular guy
looking for his partner in crime” when he’s neverapproached anything criminal especially not
carpark sex on a Sunday nightA man with tarmac burns scarring his knees
that’s what I want, a man who knows where to biteso it stays ripe for days who’ll lick
my armpit slurping in my scentA man who isn’t afraid to use two dildos at once
that’s what I want, who checks at every stepare you ok? while taking me apart
A man who asks me what I wantand if I answer, to drown in pleasure
shipwrecks me every time.*
The Sculpture
for Jim FreemanSome people carve happiness out of this world
like a sculptor carving a beautiful image
from wood, or stone. They leave behind
their father’s landscaping business
and ride round Europe on a motorcycle
with their new wife. Thirty years later, still in Prague
and the walls pulsing with a new colour.
How do you make it all new, again and again?
Jim, you gifted me the best email of my life,
in which you told me I had and was the gift.
Please keep being you, one of the best men I know.
In winter nights I light a candle to remind myself
of all my friends’ generosity. And you are there,
whittling away, getting to the heart of the shape
inside the shape which is your own true centre
pit and kernel that you chisel into wonder
over and over.
Annie Brechin received a Jerwood/Arvon Young Poets Apprenticeship in 2003 at the age of 19. After stints living, writing and performing in Prague, Paris and Dubai, she settled down in Edinburgh. Her debut full-length collection, The Mouth of Eulalie, was published by Blue Diode Press in 2022. How to Make Love is her second collection.