You Break It, You Buy It features poems about disconnection, misconnections: the loss of friendships and identity, our voice, our purpose. At its core, it is a collection of elegies railing against and dealing with toxic relationships, from fair-weather friends, controlling mothers to narcissists. These poems invite the reader into personal experiences, public observations and the price we pay, positive and negative for our interactions with the media, our global and local conflicts, environmental challenges, the pandemic, the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. She writes about the dark underside of our lives with a sense of danger, humour and of hope for reconnection in the future with our community and our world.

Lynn Tait is a Toronto-born poet and photographer residing in Sarnia, Ontario. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines and journals including Literary Review of Canada, FreeFall, Vallum, CV2, Windsor Review and in over 100 North American anthologies. She is a member of the Ontario Poetry Society and The League of Canadian Poets. You Break It You Buy It is her debut collection.

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Tate’s finely-honed poetic razor slices through the detritus of rupture and disconnection—the relational tangle that makes us so beautifully human. An exquisite soul-punch to sting, heal, and tenderize.

David Stones, poet, performer, Infinite Sequels, sfumato

In Lynn Tait’s debut volume, dark humour and a no-nonsense approach to life’s challenges – large and small – command the reader’s attention ... Across this collection, we smell the “stink” and feel the “heart pain” that is everywhere. And yet, Tait is undefeated. She helps us see that “life’s a controlled burn.”

Ruth Panofsky, author of Bring Them Forth

Working past a legacy of disturbed and disturbing family relationships, Lynn Tait crafts with rich language and powerful images the treacherous core of heartbreak and the shocking loss of her son. She breaks the “silence that closed around us like a coffin,” and presents a deft and powerful treatment of grief, how it scrambles our minds and slows our bodies. Tait’s gaze widens past personal trauma to environmental catastrophes in tough – but welcome – poems that name events like “a toxic deal sealed in triplicate.” Hers is a poetry that is “ready to hear our voices, touch our differences.”

Maureen Haynes, author of Sotto Voce

Tait is a perceptive observer, asking penetrating questions about our collective mistakes, our addictions, and our family legacies. We quickly trust her disarming voice to cut through the crap and tell us the truth. A terrific debut!

John Wall Barger, author of Smog Mother

An expansive and wide-ranging collection of poems that are always open-hearted even as they confront the ills of the world, whether environmental and political conflicts, the harms done within families or betrayals by friends and lovers. Lynn Tait’s debut book is rich in imagery and forthrightness in equal measure, “a yard sale of porcelain hearts, all cracked”. These are indeed “dangerous poems”, in the very best sense.

Frances Boyle, author of Openwork and Limestone

From the potential toxicity of family relationships, to environmental catastrophes and the vagaries of friendship, to global conflicts, the pandemic and personal loss, Tait tells it like it is, but sure as hell makes it mighty engrossing along the way.

David Stones, Verse Afire Magazine

Lynn Tait’s You Break It You Buy It is a surefooted book by a mature writer in the best of the peoples’ poetry tradition. These passionate assessable poems come from a poet knows all of life, from love to loss, its bumps and beauty and everything in between.

Bruce Hunter, author of Galestro