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What do we reach for when our heart is broken, and reading an entire novel feels completely beyond us?

In this episode, I welcome back poetry anthologist Ana Sampson to talk about her wonderful new collection, You Can Do It With a Broken Heart, a book of poems for anyone weathering the end of a relationship.

Ana and I talk about why poetry can be particularly powerful when we’re distressed: short enough for a depleted attention span, but capable of delivering an emotional gut-punch in just a few lines. We explore the strange universality of heartbreak, from the devastation of a first teenage breakup to the grief, rage and disorientation of losing a relationship later in life.

We also discuss the five stages Ana uses to shape the collection, moving from It’s Going Wrong through I Miss You and the gloriously necessary I Hate You, before reaching Picking Up the Pieces and A New Dawn. Not because recovery is ever neat or linear, but because sometimes we need a poem that meets us exactly where we are.

Along the way we talk about reclaiming places haunted by memories, the comfort of discovering that someone else has felt what we are feeling, and why the arts may sometimes have more to offer a broken heart than conventional medicine. There’s also Wendy Cope, Edna St Vincent Millay, Derek Walcott, Sophie Hannah, the therapeutic possibilities of bedazzling, and the excellent concept of a "bedazzle and bitch” party.

A warm, funny and very honest conversation about heartbreak, poetry, friendship and the gradual discovery that, eventually, there might just be a glimmer of light again.