The title of Sharon McCartney’s latest collection is indicative of the poet’s ambivalence toward her main subjects – surviving breast cancer, undergoing the protracted illness and death of a sibling, and enduring the even slower death of a marriage.

Of these three subjects, the last dominates. Numerous poems are dedicated, directly or indirectly, to the emotional turmoil born of divorce. “After Little Italy” bounces from drunken spousal yelling match, “like the couples we’ve / always laughed at, trailer park romance,” to “wordless reconciliation”: “first, I want out,” McCartney writes, “then, I want sex.” In “Solitude,” the speaker wonders: “is it perverse / to want it both ways? To want freedom and us?”

Even poems that do not directly address the dissolution of a marriage orbit the subject, or speak of it by analogy. In “A Relationship,” the uneasy truce between a dog and cat substitutes for marital discord. “If the dog moves,” McCartney writes, “[the cat] jumps, imagines he means harm. / But he’s just preparing to leave.” Likewise, in “Impending Death of the Cat,” the animal in question “embodies the state of our marriage.” Elsewhere, the Carol Ann Duffy-esque “Mrs. Oliver Mellors” gives voice to Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley as she chides her once “carnal” husband for his diminished romantic interest. In such instances – when McCartney does not directly refer to the same failed relationship – For and Against is most effective.

By contrast, lines like “I trashed you first, betrayed / you first – you can’t hurt me,” come across less like poetry and more like unfocused, though likely therapeutic, expressions of rage. The obsessive repetition of sentiments related to a troubled marriage drowns out some of the more subtle, artful pieces here. For and Against’s great strength, its potent emotional rawness, is also its major weakness.