by Hannah Read.

A pocket-sized diary of post-internet love annotations, Hannah Read's fragments are blessed with the sincerity and dead-pan surrealism of iPhone notes and ancient Roman epigrams alike. As it twice travels through the hypotheticals of desire, poems by my imaginary boyfriend about his imaginary girlfriend takes on echoes of alt-lit "honesty", internet self-gaze, and haiku incompleteness - while also not trying to do any of this. This is poetry that very much operates by its own rules, familiar and distinctive at the same time. It could be a cross between Boris Vian and Georges Perec, young, in love, and on Twitter. But it's not. It's not that at all.

24pp.
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Praise for Hannah Read’s poems by my imaginary boyfriend about his imaginary girlfriend:

‘this book changed the way i think about laptop chargers’
‘the imaginary girlfriend we all wish we had’
‘never have i been happier to see cargo pants in a poem’
‘lovers of blood and urinal cakes look no further: this [book] is the bible.’
‘made me want to get drunk and watch thunderbirds’
‘made me wish i had an imaginary boyfriend ‘
‘somehow a coldplay song started playing while i was reading and i haven’t stopped laughing since’
- Literally all by Crispin Best, author of Hello (Partus Press)

‘Tender and coarse, fuzzy and dark, funny and warm, playful and heartfelt, sincere and surreal – this is a tribute both understated and expansive, a portrait bristling with restless adoration.’ 
- Dan Power, author of Predictive Text Poems (SPAM Press).