Scratches, P Inman, if P then Q, 2019, ISBN 978-1999954741, £8.00

Belladonna, Suna Afshan, Broken Sleep Books (as Legitimate Snack 5), Out of print

A Quarter Life, Tyler Pufpaff, self published, 2020, ISBN: 978-1714800285, $8.00

Convenient Amnesia, Donald Vincent, Broadstone Books, 2020, ISBN:  978-1-937968-65-6, $22.50 retail, or $16.50 when you order directly from the publisher.

Scratches is P Inman’s first collection of new work since his almost collected poems Written 1976-2013 was published by the same press in 2014. There’s a reassuring familiarity in this new work, with Inman returning to his early habit of using invented and/or extremely obscure lexical items in poems that hover around such concerns as abstract expressionist painters, the atonal music of Monk and Webern, the politics of marginality, and. of course, the nature and purpose of language.

This last is, as ever with Inman, a question of pushing the medium…