Why Are You Here?

The prose poem, as Jeremy Noel-Tod has observed, very often 'makes its home among other forms and genres... such as the anecdote, the aphorism, the sketch, the dialogue, the essay, the fairy tale, the fragment, the joke, the myth or the short story.' And you could also add letters, diary entries, accounts of dreams. The texts in this collection of very short fictions inhabit that edgy, unstable space, and are hard to pin down. They may be dream-like or humorous. Some of these fictions deliberately mirror each other, while others are linked by imagery or thematic content. Some form series, identifiable by their titles, and others could be extracts from the constantly evolving, virtual novel described in the very last piece, 'Medusa'.They are all jewel-like and certain to delight readers who enjoy the unpredictable pleasures of prose poems and very-very short stories. Simon Collings lives in Oxford UK and is a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review, where he writes film commentary and where some of these fictions have previously appeared.