Grim, funny and unremitting, Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot is a book attuned to dark times

Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo dancing in a scene from Shakespeare's The Tempest – Johann Heinrich Ramberg. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“Girly, there’s something rotten in your keep cup,” Evelyn Araluen writes in Girl Work!, a poem in her new collection, The Rot.

We are trailing after a young female Hamlet figure, a contemporary up-and-coming princess or “girlboss” off to work in some creative-industries office job, who is studiously ignoring the spectres summoning her to political action.