What is this book made of? Think of it as a verse-novel in parts, complete with characters who are solving mysteries and seeking love. Slug wakes up with an h-shaped rash and becomes obsessed with tracking down the source. Spitz & Spatz-a pair of three-and-a-half inch high lawyers-work to get Slug a better divorce settlement than the one he agreed to years prior. They end up losing Slug's accent to the ex-wife, who had thought it the only tolerable thing about him. Butterfingers is a tightrope walker and Slug's neighbor, identifiable by her tangible, siren-like voice. The lives of these characters are inter-cut with the texts of two etiquette manual writers, and concrete diagram poems of human organs. All told, this is an anatomy of poetry and slapstick, a lyrical pastiche of how we conduct ourselves in the urgent situations of love and duress, with a constant stress upon the visceral quality of the word.

A doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo, Angela Szczepaniak is neck-deep in a dissertation on innovative poetry, detective fiction, and comic books. Her first book is a novel-in-poems, called Unisex Love Poems. In addition to publishing poetry and critical essays, she recently participated in a hygiene themed poetry-art project with LOCCAL, and as a result her visual poetry can be found on placards in some of the finest public restrooms in Seattle. At the moment, she lives in Toronto, where she thinks about being ravaged by time’s withered claw.

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