WAYS OF DESCRIBING CUTS — S. KELLY & S. J. FOWLER
The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2012 £5.00
Note: Sphinx only reviews single author pamphlets, each of which is considered by three reviewers. However, we have made a special exception in this case (as a one-off) because it seemed fun to have a dual-authorship dual-reviewed (the two reviewer-poets are well-versed in collaborative authorship).
Ways Of Describing Cuts: jointly reviewed by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving
J: Each page in this collaborative pamphlet is an exchange between top and bottom, and although I don’t mean that in the S&M sense, there's a strong sense of the voices playfully resisting each other, like ferromagnetic materials of the same polarity—words as charged filings. Part of that, of course, is a result of the similarity in style: lines of variegated length (tending towards the very short) moving through disparate visual ideas at the speed of a film reel.
K: Lord knows we love collaboration, and you get a real sense of the back and forth, of the process, rather than a static product. The deliberate omission of titles, smooth transition between the two writers and sporadic punctuation all contribute to this effect. I also like the idea of not knowing whether this is actually a collection at all. It could be one long poem.
J: Each page in this collaborative pamphlet is an exchange between top and bottom, and although I don’t mean that in the S&M sense, there's a strong sense of the voices playfully resisting each other, like ferromagnetic materials of the same polarity—words as charged filings. Part of that, of course, is a result of the similarity in style: lines of variegated length (tending towards the very short) moving through disparate visual ideas at the speed of a film reel.
K: Lord knows we love collaboration, and you get a real sense of the back and forth, of the process, rather than a static product. The deliberate omission of titles, smooth transition between the two writers and sporadic punctuation all contribute to this effect. I also like the idea of not knowing whether this is actually a collection at all. It could be one long poem.