Some poetry collections are delicate, offering quiet introspection. Debone & Fold is not one of them. Si Griffiths’ work is a visceral, unflinching exploration of labour, endurance, and survival, set against the relentless backdrop of the professional kitchen. At The Broken Spine, we publish voices that challenge, provoke, and demand attention. Griffiths’ work does all three. His poetry does not romanticise work. Rather, it reveals its bruises, its exhaustion, and its stolen joys. This is a book that speaks to those who understand the toll of long shifts, of pushing through pain, of finding meaning in the grind of daily survival.
Griffiths’ work captures the collision between physical labour and psychological resilience, making Debone & Fold a rare poetry collection that describes hardship by immersing the reader in its textures. The tension in these poems doesn’t arise from abstract suffering but from the concrete reality of work: burned hands, aching feet, bodies pushed to their limits. There’s an awareness here of poetry’s tendency to aestheticise struggle, but Griffiths resists that impulse; his language is precise, stripped of unnecessary ornamentation. Instead of leaning into lyrical sentimentality, he focuses on rhythm and repetition, mirroring the daily grind of kitchen life. The poems are structured like shifts; they are demanding, relentless, and punctuated by fleeting moments of relief. Griffiths’ poetic voice is one that understands survival isn’t just about enduring pain, but about carrying it forward, making it part of the body’s muscle memory.
From the opening poem, Zero Hours +/−, Griffiths immerses the reader in the kitchen’s heat, urgency, and quiet violence:
'Now, bleeding on my board, I work hard to stay calm,
saw Fred solve the same, and with spoon, cool in hand,
head to the hob, put steel to flame, wait for a hot lava glow.'
These are poems built on tension. The constant push and pull of the body against exhaustion, of duty against desire. Even the collection’s title, Debone & Fold, itself suggests both craftsmanship and the quiet dismantling of the self.
The opening poem immediately establishes one of the collection’s core themes: the body as both a machine and a site of struggle. There’s a methodical quality to the way Griffiths describes injury—not as a moment of crisis, but as an expected part of the work. The decision to highlight kitchen injuries as routine rather than dramatic reinforces the poem’s central tension: endurance is not heroic, it’s simply necessary. The language here is sharp, utilitarian, reflecting the precision required in both cooking and poetry itself. The phrase ‘wait for a hot lava glow’ suggests an almost ritualistic patience, a learned resilience that extends beyond physical pain. Through these details, Griffiths crafts a world where injury is secondary to efficiency, where bodies are expected to function no matter the cost.
Food in Debone & Fold is never just sustenance. It is history, labour, and control. Griffiths brings the physicality of cooking into sharp relief, as seen in All in the Game:
'Tear it, part skin from flesh, purple-pink,
take the knife and gut him.'
Through striking imagery and precision, these poems reveal the unspoken hierarchy of the kitchen: who prepares the food, who consumes it, and the unacknowledged cost of both.
Food here is a site of transformation, but also destruction, a duality Griffiths refuses to soften. The act of cooking, often romanticised as a form of care, is instead depicted as an exercise in control—over flesh, over time, over hunger. There’s an awareness in these poems that eating is not a neutral act; it is the endpoint of labour, of someone else’s effort, of someone else’s sacrifice. The violence embedded in food preparation parallels the larger violence of work itself, where bodies, animal or human, are shaped, broken, and repurposed. The decision to use such direct, unembellished language in describing this process forces the reader to confront the realities they often consume without thought. Griffiths does not allow distance between the reader and the act of preparation; instead, he makes us complicit, holding the knife alongside him.
Beyond the workplace, Debone & Fold explores love through the same lens of endurance and effort. In Hors D’Oeuvres, a first date unfolds with the same careful precision as a plated dish:
'Our talk a fusilli of twists and turns,
vegan ice cream to theories of change.
Your words alert against mine,
a rehearsal of a sort, an embrace of a kind.'
Meanwhile, Long Term Love treats relationships as a recipe—something that requires patience, risk, and the right balance of ingredients:
'Remember to include an element of surprise.
Like a sugar snap popped in your lover’s mouth,
never underestimate the power of bringing something new to the table.'
Here, love is not effortless; it is something to be worked at, shaped, and sometimes endured.
By framing love through the language of labour, Griffiths reinforces a central argument of the collection: that survival is never passive. The relationships depicted here are not romanticised as sources of ease or comfort, but as spaces where the same tensions of the workplace manifest in different forms. The idea of love as a ‘rehearsal’ suggests performance, expectation, the constant negotiation of roles within intimacy. Just as in the kitchen, there is a weight of responsibility, one must maintain the balance of ingredients, manage time carefully, ensure nothing burns. Even the tenderness in these poems is measured, aware of its fragility. Griffiths presents love not as a refuge from labour, but as another kind of work, another demand placed on the body and mind.
The truth is that Si Griffiths has crafted a collection that is both beautiful and brutal. Debone & Fold pulls the reader into a world where:
Griffiths’ poetry is urgent, deeply felt, and impossible to ignore. For readers who appreciate poetry that challenges and resonates long after the last line, Debone & Fold is essential reading.
What makes Debone & Fold so compelling is its refusal to provide easy conclusions. These poems do not celebrate suffering, nor do they resolve it into something redemptive. Instead, they insist on the reader’s full engagement, forcing us to inhabit the speaker’s exhaustion, his moments of hesitation, and his hard-won resilience. The structure of the collection mirrors the experience of labour itself, with repetition acting as both poetic device and emotional weight. Every return to the kitchen, to the body, to the demands of survival, reinforces the reality that endurance is not a choice. No, it is a necessity. This is a collection that will linger, not just in its imagery but in its unrelenting honesty, leaving the reader with a deeper understanding of what it truly means to work, to love, and to persist.
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
