Warning: this book may encourage a series of ungrammatical thoughts!

Welcome to the poetic landscape of Mark Truscott, where less is more than you bargained for. Said Like Reeds or Things is a book of micropoetic and linguistic koans. With a quirky, off-centre sense of humour, these poems uncover a language that has malfunctioned only to find itself in the form of a gesture.

Minimalist in form, these small gatherings of words, a.k.a. 'poems', seek strangeness in familiar language; their effect is harmonic dissonance within the mind – like an overturned toy box in your path to the television set, these poems are a fresh and amusing diversion from the everyday from which they are derived. Mysteriously entertaining and precise, these succinct, visual lyrics say as much about the world as they do about their own status as objects for reading, and they persist in the hilarity and contemplation of their own enigmatic possibilities.

'Mark Truscott's Said Like Reeds or Things is the work of a mischievous conservationist with a shadow of Basho in the mix. It's sometimes snappy, sometimes calm, and always an exhilarating tease. This is the place where little pieces of perfection ride along a sublime horizon line.'

– Lisa Jarnot

Mark Truscott's first book, Said Like Reeds or Things (Coach House, 2004), was shortlisted for a ReLit award and received an Alcuin citation for Darren Wershler-Henry's design. Poems appear in Pissing Ice: An Anthology of 'New`'Canadian Poets (BookThug, 2004) and in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury, 2005). Mark was born in Bloomington, Indiana, but has spent most of his life in Canada. He lives in Toronto, where he co-edits the small magazine BafterC and curates the Test Reading Series.

Mark Truscott's profile page