Peter Cowlam is a freelance editor and the author of literary fiction, plays and poetry. His first novel was published in 1998. Enthusiastically received by Robert McCrum reviewing in The Observer, Electric Letters Z is a gentle satire on London literary life of the mid-1990s. His brief stint as a commissioning editor saw two issues of The Finger, a journal of politics, literature and culture. His most recent expedition into fiction is his novella Marisa, a heady concoction of first love recalled. His latest play, Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize?, although published is looking for its first full performance.
What the marginalia
Are always for
Is a future world of charmless
Exegesis.
Here — from the desert texts
Our burnt out cities have become –
Explorers are fully equipped
To reconstruct
Not the arterial throb
Our dead communications systems
Were…
Rather the plot lines
Between each page, which the world’s
Unwritten populations constructed a life
Or a thumbed white space upon.
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited