In roughly January 2025, I received some good news: Aaron from Broken Sleep wanted to publish my third book of poems.

At the time, I was just hitting the first wave of burn out from political campaigning. I had stopped actively using my website, stopped writing for myself, except in short, desperate bursts of journalling during commutes. A mountain formed between politicking and poeting.

It took me two more months to start drafting a blog announcement, one in which I tried to carry the sham of excitement I no longer felt about anything:

I have been sitting on some good news for a couple of months: Parchment Scalpel Rock, my third full length collection, will be published in May 2026 by Broken Sleep.

It’s a greatest hits of a project I’ve been working on for 15-20 years. The first ‘arrangement’ was published around 2008 in Shearsman Magazine (still one of my favourite accolades, such a wonderful place to be included). Then I included an untitled heap of them as ‘Parchment Scalpel Rock’ in my first book, Static Exile. Since then I’ve published several arrangements, of anything from a page to 12 pages of sequenced units. There was a one-off untitled piece (or pair?) in Perverse Magazine (another favourite place to be included!), which was too short to warrant a name, but might have been the start of something called ‘Complex’. And I used the form for a collaborative commission with Dr Charlotte Allender, ‘What’s Up Doc?’, as part of Coventry Creates, which ended up at around 20 pages including images.

I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time, but had a pile of obscure fragments

Bearing in mind the reading window for Broken Sleep’s submissions closed in summer 2024, I’d forgotten even submitting the manuscript. And with politics piling on pressures to organise, promote, communicate and canvass, my capacity for doing anything creative was next to nil.

Things fell apart, the centre didn’t hold. I started a blog announcement on 9 June 2025, but failed to write anything more into it than, My third book, Parchment Scalpel Rock, is due for publication in May 2026. It’s a long enough way off that I’ve been thinking about other things in the meantime, but .

But. But what, George? I also found an image, which I no longer know the origin for:

A nice, misleading thought.

Fast forward to the publication date, May 2026, came and went. I barely mentioned the monthly Broken Sleep reading on my bluesky account (yes, in the interim, I’d managed to sever my connection to the old poetry networks on Twitland and all that toxic garbage it had become). I did the live launch for Broken Sleep, but realised when I saw friends waving their copies at the screen that I didn’t have a copy of my own to wave back because I’d failed to respond to an April email asking me to order author copies.

These stacking problems are just a game of jenga, of course. None of it really matters. Poetry never earned me a living and I found myself so busy at times, I was unable to even prepare sandwiches to snack on between activities. Not that I minded too much – poetry is, after all, as far from capitalism as you can get, and which is in itself part of poetry’s value to me.

But it has taken its toll. Asking myself what I have to show for it – it being a quarter century of writing and performing – reveals the rubble at my feet. Yet beneath this pile of collapsed bricks I’ve been stacking for 4 years, I have a very beautiful looking book. One I believe in. And I have to be grateful to Aaron, Emma, Stuart and everyone else at Broken Sleep, for believing in it too.

Parchment Scalpel Rock is a procedural series made from the fragments of existence – my own and those of people I know, or knew. Collaged from dreams and books, films and songs, stories and documents, much of this text is built on thefts and echoes from other books. In fact, instead of a references list at the back, there’s a Thefts and Echoes section, without any cross-referencing, to demonstrate the breadth of experience that goes a life – this life, at least.

Beyond that, there are collaborations and voices, some named, like the brilliant Dr Charlotte Allender, and others anonymous, such as the people maintaining the Coventry Mind / Warwickshire Wildlife Trust allotment in Spon End. Some close friends maybe don’t even know they contributed to parts of this book, with weird, brief, psychological stories and comments. And there are undoubtedly fragments emerging from what I thought was my own selfhood, but are instead mis-attributed to the nebulous thing at the centre of all the relationship ‘I’ have experienced.

At the end of the day, I have to admit I have wanted to stop existing as an individual for quite some time. The idea of erasing selfhood, perhaps in a Buddhist sense, or perhaps in the sense of JA Baker, wanting to be non-human enough to be able to give his self over to the peregrine. I’d like to give myself over to community, disperse into the air like pollen and fully enter the relationality passing through me, between self and land, self and other.

What the old Romantics called oblivion wasn’t an ending of existence, but a transformation, an obliteration of the primacy of the individual ego and a displacement of responsibility into scape, into the values brought to co-existence.

Doing it, obviously, is another matter, but the fact that people can think like that, can write poetry from that thinking, should move us. That’s the premise underlying this book, written as shonkily as it deserves.

I will follow up with some samples from the book, but in the meantime, you can browse some sample pages and buy it here from Broken Sleep.