Inspired by the flotsam of contemporary culture, journalism, and spam emails, this collection of poetry transforms Shakespeare s sonnet sequence into a celebration of the possibilities of language unleashed. Shakespeare s themes of fading beauty, posterity, immortality, and death find their modern-day responses in celebrity gossip, consumer products, vampirism, and the credit crunch. Dynamic and anarchic, this exploration sheds light on Shakespeare and the contemporary world in a disturbing yet entertaining manner."

Between 1970 and 1982, George Perec sent his friends small pamphlets with his best wishes for the New Year. These were collections of short texts based on homophonic variations. The three pieces are neither translations of this material, nor entirely original pieces of work, rather a sort of homage to Perec.

Following his irreverent, inspired Oulipean reworking of Shakespeare's sonnets, in his new book Philip Terry takes on Dante's "Inferno," shifting the action from the 12th to the 20th and 21st centuries, and relocating it to the modern "walled city" of the University of Essex. Dante's Phlegethon becomes the river Colne; his popes are replaced by vice-chancellors and ministers for education; the warring Guelfs and Ghibellines are reimagined as the sectarians of Belfast, Terry's home city. Meanwhile, the guiding figure of Virgil takes on new form as Ted Berrigan, one-time Essex...

The poetic form used in these pages is one invented by Raymond Queneau in his 1975 book Morale elementaire; it has come to be called the quennet, after its inventor, as it has one more line than a sonnet. The three sequences which make up this collection experiment with psychogeographical quennets inspired by walking around the Essex estuary and the Berlin Wall Trail, with the final sequence retracing the steps of W.G. Sebald through Suffolk."