NB. This piece is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin, and was originally published on October 17th. With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent now well-and-truly arrived, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. This is the last of three parts, released […]

NB. This piece is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin, and was originally published on September 8th. With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. I’m going to do it in three parts released over […]

Tonight I’m trying something new: a fighting game and poetry night for students. They can take turns at 4-player arena battles on Power Stone 2 or team up for 2-player ‘Dramatic Battle’ mode in Street Fighter Alpha 3 (both from the recently released Capcom Fighting Collection 2 ). I’m bringing some thematically linked poems for […]

NB. This piece is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin. With the new university semester and two new Sidekick Books titles imminent, it’s time for a significant update to Stray Bulletin, recounting key happenings from the year so far. I’m going to do it in three parts released over a week. Let’s begin with: Part […]

A couple of years ago, I hurriedly wrote three ‘micro roleplaying poems’ to hand out as part of a pamphlet at an conference. Each one was based on a 2022 game I loved: Stray, Sable and Citizen Sleeper. I decided recently to part-digitise them, rewriting some elements, and upload them for people to read/play. You […]

Jon’s Adventures in Space was the title of my earliest attempt at a novel, or rather a full-length book — I’m not sure I was aware of the concept of novels as distinct from storybooks at the time. I would have been in primary school, Year 3, so around 7 or 8. Every page was […]

A short interactive poem of mine, ‘The Whisky Shop’, is published in the latest issue of Taper, a journal of computational literature (poems and experimental lit crossed with coding, essentially). The constraint for all submissions to the journal is extreme: 2KB file size. A Microsoft Word document of a one-page poem I’m working on at […]

Note: this post is a duplication from my substack, Stray Bulletin. In between running numerous live events over the last couple of months (which I’ll post about soon) I’ve been designing/typesetting/putting the finishing touches to the fifth in Sidekick’s 10 Poets series, Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon. As well as featuring ten brand new, […]

I went to see Rashomon at the cinema for my birthday last month, and it reminded me that I published a Toshiro Mifune poem in The Rialto 80 going on a decade ago. So I dug it out and rejigged it, trying to get an anagram of ‘oni’ onto the end of two thirds of the lines: A text-only […]

This is from Standard Midland (Bloodaxe, 2010), picked up in Scarthin Books. Echoes of the 1940 apocalypse poets here — but interesting that the ashen landscape is behind him, seen in a reflection, as if the end of everything has already been and gone.