January

Visual poems from my huge mixed-media project Moreau’s Doctored Bodies were published in Buzdokuz and Cutbow Quarterly (which has since gone on indefinite hiatus, so you can see the piece below).

February

Poet David Spittle edited a special edition of Shuddhashar, dedicated to the ongoing poetic legacy of Surrealism. It was an honour to be involved, not least because I consider some of the other contributors to be among the best poets writing today. My contribution included five visual poems from Moreau’s Doctored Bodies, as well as some reflections on my relationship with Surrealism.

March

Amanda Earl published her extraordinary new ebook, The Seasons, and I took part in the online launch, along with Maria Sledmere, Karenjit Sandhu and, of course, Amanda herself. You can watch the whole event here:

Meanwhile, more visual poems from Moreau’s Doctored Bodies appeared in Cream City Review, and Timglaset published Richard Capener’s The Enochian Alphabet, a fascinating visual poetry project, for which I provided a blurb (which, bizarrely, is not included on the website). Through Steel Incisors, I published the utterly awesome The Second Dream by Madelaine Culver; let this blurb tempt you to buy a copy: “Inspired by Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi/horror movie Under the Skin, The Second Dream comprises cut-up poems made from reviews of the film, juxtaposed with striking asemic pieces created in response to the film’s sound design and musical score.”

April

Some visual poems from Cosmologorrhea were published in the Mercurius anthology, Local Nature Devas.

May

Faux Hex (makers of dark electronica, evocative of glitchy industrial mindscapes) released their first album, featuring a cover image I’d made for them while under the influence of their music. This LP is strongly recommended!

June

Well into the throes of a new project (this time a perhaps foolish attempt at a new version of the Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, realised as a series of mixed-media visual poetry diptychs), I was thrilled that some of this new material was published by Ice Floe Press. My Beowulf began as an offshoot of Moreau’s Doctored Bodies; like that project, it mixes physical and digital materials and processes, in an exploration of the notion of the monstrous, in relation to that of the human.

July

July kicked off with a performance at the National Poetry Library in London, in an evening of Anglo-Norwegian collaborations, forming part of the annual European Poetry Festival. Festival organiser SJ Fowler paired me up with Endre Ruset, and we tapped into the common heritage of our languages and cultures through the performance of imaginary extra scenes from Beowulf. You can watch our performance here:

New visual poems on the themes of death, language and boxing appeared in Buzdokuz, Streetcake and The Spit Bucket. Meanwhile, after a long editing job, I published Moreau’s Doctored Bodies through Steel Incisors. The published version comprises 165 visual poems (nearly 200 fewer than I made), arranged to form a narrative of sorts, and is the culmination of every experiment I’ve made in words and pictures.

July was also the month in which I decided to give my publishing venture, Steel Incisors, a fresh start, by opening up for submissions of book-length manuscripts of visual poetry.

August

At the kind invitation of Vilde Bjerke Torset, Endre Ruset and I published a visual-poetry reconstruction of our European Poetry Festival collaboration at SCRYPTH.

September

Some new publications: a second visual poem about boxing in The Spit Bucket, two unsexy visual poems about sex (“Breathing Hard” and “Voluptuously Sleazy”) in Mercurius, and an iconoclastic contribution to the compilation of a canon of edgy writing at Minor Lit(s).

October

October saw the publication of the wonderfully prolific JP Seabright’s timely meditation on AI, what are you afraid of? (the LAMDA sonnets), with a blurb from me, in which I praised the book’s “deftly dialogic lyric poems.” Do check it out! Meanwhile, I contributed to two online workshops on visual poetry, one run by Amanda Earl for the League of Canadian Poets, and one for the Cambridge Writing Centre with the deliciously portentous title (for which I offer no apologies), “Monstrous Hybridity: Mixed Media Visual Poetry.”

November

A month of quiet rumination, in which I reviewed and responded to Steel Incisors submissions.

December

Machine, my Trickhouse Press book, went out of print, though EIC Dan Power kindly allowed me to give away the PDF for free on this very website. It was a pure joy working with Dan; one of the best small press experiences I’ve had.

This month I announced the 2025 Steel Incisors lineup. Each book is guaranteed to surprise, delight, ruffle, challenge…

Into 2025

Two main projects look set to dominate 2025: my publishing schedule with Steel Incisors, and Beowulf, which I probably won’t finish until late 2026 at the earliest.

I should also mention that House of Mirrors, a collaboration with Mexican artist Viviana Hinojosa, is under development as a VR game that will be available via Steam. Please visit the developer’s website for sneak peeks and more info! Meanwhile, let this image whet your appetite….