The protagonist of James Knight’s Chimera is an imaginary organism which, in a series of increasingly complex visual poems, evolves from embryonic cipher to something monstrous, unstable, and expressive. The book explores the transformational, hybridising processes of visual poetry, as well as the violence and chaos inherent in language.

Machine is an exercise in ludic polyphony, juxtaposing surrealised voices of scientific rationalism, advertising, social media and lyric poetry. Employing a range of fonts and symbols, the poem explores human identity and the forces that shape it. However, Machine is a game: none of this is to be taken too seriously.

Self Portrait by Night is a chapbook of surreal poems and nocturnal artwork. It makes an excellent introduction to James Knight’s innovative, imaginative work.

Void Voices is a descent into the Hell that is our contemporary culture. Inevitably, Trump and Brexit feature. Dante’s guide was Virgil; Knight’s is an undead T S Eliot. Along the way, the reader is assailed by a cacophony of heterogeneous material, including song lyrics, doctored news stories, lines from old poems, transcriptions of nonsense texts generated by Google Translate. The Hell is that of our culture; it is also that of the poem itself: poem as voice-filled void.