The Way the Crocodile Taught Me

<p>Katrina Naomi’s <i>The Way the Crocodile Taught Me</i> is the eagerly-awaited second collection by this lively and popular poet. With warmth, flair and a certain ferocious wit, Naomi tears into her subject matter: a childhood fraught with dislocation and violence but also redeemed by more tender memories of a sister and a kindly, although at times comically obtuse, grandmother. In the first half we meet the family which also includes: an often glamorous mother, a truly scary stepfather and the sort of relatives where one can expect fistfights to erupt at family weddings. The second half of the book is informed by the tragi-comic events of the first and includes: a bleak hotel, an attempted rape and a description of the sadistic relish with which the Kray twins dispatched their victims. <i>The Way the Crocodile Taught Me</i> will delight people who know Naomi’s work and undoubtedly win new fans for her courageous and unabashedly entertaining poems. </p>