‘couplets’

Andrew Shaw was born in and raised in England. He has two previous collections of poetry: Architecture of Shells (Willful Editions) and paper lampshade hotel (Leafe Press). His work has appeared in Envoi, Acumen, The Haiku Quarterly, still, Iota, Poetry Nottingham International, Jigsaw, and Rialto. He has exhibited art in galleries around Europe. He has won numerous literary awards, taught creative writing, contributed Arts and Culture content to BBC radio, worked as a columnist in a number of national outlets, worked as Director of Content for a number of pop culture outlets, and enjoyed a two year tenure as the Poet in Residence at the Swan Theatre.

About the book

In couplets Andrew Shaw explores a new poetic device. Reflective, magically-real, and augmenting process, the collection was initially shared as tiny pieces of street art; paper tags shared in public spaces, via photographs on social media.

Informed by egalitarian Japanese traditions and the work of surrealist writers, couplets aims to inspire beauty as an act of resistance to the political.

Foreword by John Higgs, author of ‘I Have America Surrounded: The life of Timothy Leary’, ‘The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band that Burned a Million Pounds’, ‘Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century’, and ‘Watling Street: Travels through Britain and it’s Ever-Present Past’

From the Introduction of couplets:

consider a thing that takes the mind to an image which cannot be described starting with the word ‘imagine’ describe that thing in a couplet
write only in lower case
once you have composed your verse, erase the word ‘imagine’