How to Make Love
Annie Brechin
Book of the Month: October 2025
Reviewed by Annie Muir
The title of Annie Brechin’s second collection, How to Make Love, can be read in two ways: literally, how to have (good) sex; or, more abstractly, how to find/create/sustain love.
The collection is divided into five sections: London, Prague, Paris, Dubai and Edinburgh. Rather than holidays, these feel like places the poet has lived, giving us an impression that the poems take place over a long timeframe. Reading them gives us the feeling of the poet inviting us on a fly-on-the-wall magic carpet ride through their sexual/romantic life.
The very first poem, ‘The Best Lovers’, sets the scene. [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.
Here, we are hit with a familiar cliché: the best sex is casual sex, without strings attached. The poem also broaches the theme of violence in sex, which continues throughout the collection, sometimes as something desired by the speaker, and sometimes not – but always portrayed as floral or natural; here as a ‘faint/ blossom on your skin’. The poem then jumps to ‘years later’, suggesting that the encounter described happened a long time ago. The last line, an image of the speaker's back ‘arched like a question mark’, reinforces the idea of youthful naivety. By ending with this image, the poem cleverly subverts the bold opening statements and introduces sex as something that often asks more questions than it answers.
A few poems later, ‘You Don’t Rise’ describes the pain of faded desire in a romantic relationship, which seems miles away from the aforementioned ‘room full of mirrors’: ‘You don’t see me anymore. / It is not that you are looking at someone else, you have simply turned away’
And the rollercoaster (or ghost train?) continues. We have a poem in which the speaker is in a relationship but fantasizing about a steamy past encounter; a stream of consciousness list of intoxicating memories from a short-lived relationship, followed by a swift myth-busting shift to the other person’s perspective; as well as poems about being single and dating, like ‘Real World Valentine’ and ‘#fuckyourdatingapps’.
In the Edinburgh section the tone changes. ‘Tainted Love’ begins: ‘when the smell of our shite mingles, that’s amore.’ Here, we are thrown into a brave new world of comfort and security. This is the last section, where the story ends (for now) with ‘One Knee’ and ‘a ring on it’. (Spoiler alert: it ends with marriage, like a Shakespeare play or romantic comedy from the 90s.)
However, because the rest of the poems have in the most part been written in present tense, it is also as if they are still happening in the here and now too, replaying all at once in the poet’s (and therefore the reader’s) mind – as if they never really ended and can still be felt vividly if poked at like a bruise. This collection is a pandora’s jewellery box of those vivid memories: some are ecstatic, some are painful, but they are all very much alive.
How to Make Love is published by Blue Diode Press
Annie Muir is a poet and workshop facilitator based in Glasgow. Her debut poetry pamphlet, New Year’s Eve, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021 and her second will be published in 2026. She has a Creative Scotland funded podcast, Time for One Poem, aimed at complete beginners to poetry, and runs a monthly open mic night with a focus on getting first-timers on stage and attracting people who don’t usually go to poetry events. @time41poem