Atherton's treatment of the prose poem in Leftovers creates a synaesthesia-like experience. Her inventive regard of ordinary things - watermelons, doughnuts, tequila, passionfruit, gingerbread - triggers a breadth of sensations and memories, blurring in and out of her real world and her other 'real' world of literary fiction. Through the domestic and the edible, the collection maps the body's encounters with love, loss, longing, and desire. Allusions to Proust's madeleines and Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan sit alongside Blue Heaven Slurpees and Bunnykins eggcups, as Atherton dissolves the boundary between the quotidian and the literary with wit, sensuality, and emotional precision.
