The poems in this book-length sequence reflect a preference for asking questions over providing answers. Each poem is a collage of the clues from a book of Guardian Quick Crosswords. To write the poems, each clue was taken in order (the across clues and then the down) and then knitted together using the barest of conjunctions and other linking phrases. The resultant poems make a kind of narrative sense, and also don’t (or perhaps simply not quite the sense that we are accustomed to!) Most strangely of all, a surrealist political commentary begins to emerge from within the gaps in meaning at various junctures… Yet equally importantly, these poems are not to be taken too seriously – the pleasure is in the strange and (as lots of readers have told me) very funny combinations that occur.
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lucy burnett 