Some people think I’m a hyperactive writer. A reviewer in Exeter once suggested that either I was one of those names used by a group of individuals or that I had been cloned. Goodness knows what they would make of the extensive two page list of publications by Eileen R. Tabios at the start of this book!Because I love you…is subtitled ‘Poems and Uncollected Poetics Prose’ and contains an unruly mix of the experimental, the imagistic, the political, the conceptual and the explanatory; the author is very, very present throughout.

I don’t mean this is confessional poetry. Tabios knows all about Kenneth Goldsmith’s and others’ theories of re-presentation, collage, processual writing, flarf, variations, responses to and ‘translations’ of work; she’s invented forms (the Hay(na)ku), has an acute sense of poetics, but is adamant about how, even when using ‘the potential randomness of line combinations to create new poems’…