On Friday I shall be releasing an anthology of writings called time lines. The book is a collection of works by six authors (including me), all of whom have published and collaborated on twitter.

The other five authors are @littledeaths68, @gadgetgreen, @sandcave, @welloverthought and Mina Polen, whose work can be found on this blog and whose twitter handle is @minafiction.

The six of us are quite diverse, in terms of our subject matter and styles. But we share a preoccupation with inner worlds, an interest that has found expression through the solitary communion of social networking. Many of the poems and prose poems in the collection started life as tweets.

Here’s an excerpt from my preface, which was written as a tweet series:

6. Poetry has been given a lifeline by online social networking. The private and personal has become the public and universal.
7. All of the poets in this volume publish and collaborate on Twitter. Our words thrash and leap through the rapids of the timelines.
8. People don’t usually have time for poetry. But poems popping up in timelines give instant sensation, gratification.
9. The tweet is the sonnet for the 21st Century. If a sonnet embodies elegant compression, a tweet is a mind-expanding miniature.

The book will be published through lulu.com and will cost just over £5 – not bad for 230 pages! All of the poets agreed we want to sell this as cheaply as possible and forego any profits.

Watch this space! On Friday I’ll publish a link for purchasing the book…