In Spills, poet, critic and translator, Angela Leighton looks back on her past; from memories of her childhood between northern England and Italy, to her Jewish heritage and relationship with her father, the famous prize-winning composer, Kenneth Leighton. She also contemplates the weighty subjects of death and mortality through candid and honest poems which draw from various classical sources including the Bible and Greek mythology. This collection also contains Leighton's English translations of the work of Sicilian poet and politician Leonardo Sciascia.

Angela Leighton taught for many years at the University of Hull. She is now Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She has published books and essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, including On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word, as well as three volumes of poetry: A Cold Spell (2000), Sea Level (2007) and The Messages (2012). Her poems have appeared in many magazines in Britain and America, and some have been set to music.