If We Knew How to We Would

By Emma Barnes

If We Knew How to We Would answers a question nobody asked: How many thoughts can you work into a single poem? Through breakups and a pandemic, health issues and deaths, Emma Barnes's second collection is a riveting, overflowing and grief-stricken reckoning with the ordinary: a skinful of spit; insides scooped out with a melon baller; cracked like an egg and nothing inside. ' It is too much to say nothing about. It is nothing to say too much about.'

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1776711882
• ISBN13: 9781776711888
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 9.4"