Can A Question Be A Poem?

That’s the question I’m asking with my new book, I Am Incomplete Without You. 

I’m often sent poetry in response to the things that I write, incredibly charged stuff that people have clearly put a lot of time and heart into and if I’m honest, I’m never, ever sure what to do with it. Do I start a conversation entirely in poetry? That doesn’t work. Maybe in movies but not hear in the far more cynical and grey world where your poem might reach me as I am picking up the dog poop in the backyard or wondering why I can’t sleep (and if I’ve actually written enough today to justify my existence).

So I Am Incomplete Without You is half of a conversation. It’s also a kind of springboard into writing some prose, even if you’ve never really thought about writing prose yourself. Every poem I write (I speak only for myself) starts with a sentence, or a picture, or a thought, or a pattern. And so I’ve created a book with incomplete sentences, descriptions of pictures, thoughts, and patterns that can be continued. Like a literary drum circle between two people (making it technically a drum line).

I wrote it mostly in coffee shops in and around Cape Town, I repeated myself a lot because the same questions kept popping up (then I edited brutally), I created instructions because instructions seem like a way of asking questions (will you actually do what I ask you to do?) and I thought about leaves, the sea, living and dying and the questions that form connections between all those different points.

It’s a spiderweb.

There’s space at the front for your name next to mine and you can preorder it right now on Amazon by clicking here, which will mean you’ll get it in February, hopefully in time for Valentine’s Day.

I’ll write more about it closer to the time but right now I need to go clean up the backyard.