Shortlisted for the 2014 Robert Kroetsch award for innovative poetry, "The things I heard about you" is an exploration of precision and the unspoken, executing a process whereby vignettes and scenes break apart into fragments, rumours or suggestions of the original story. When stories decompose or self-destruct, the results vary, producing an effect of texture and syntactic transformation. This is a book of tidal memories and elegies, love songs to the coast and all its inhabitants. "The things I heard about you" is Alex Leslie's debut poetry collection.