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The poems, writings, texts - I'm not too concerned with definitions - in this short collection of recent work is purposely heteroglossic. Or maybe that's polyphonous, or dialogic, in its multifarious registers of language. It encompasses instances of office jargon, marketing strategy terminology, symbols lifted from popular culture, references to continental philosophy, Marxist theory, art theory and critical studies, old documentary footage, movie-star biographies, science texts, Elizabethan drama, nature writing, local observation, memoir, dreams, overheard conversations, below-the-line comment from websites, phrases altered sequentially through an online thesaurus, the occasional neologism, slang... and more. Quite usually, the variousness of the parts collide in quick succession during the course of a single small work. I don't think we experience the world in straight lines. I mean, there may be a beginning, types of mid-points, and then a disappearance that we may wish to see as some kind of an end, but how we get from one to another is never even. (Outside, as I write, it just started to rain. Now it has stopped again, and this sentence is already too late. And now...)

The Orphaned Spaces is an illustrated exploration of overlooked areas of natural beauty - edgelands, ex-industrial, derelict and brownfield sites, and the sometimes rare flora and fauna that is found there. More than a nature book, it is a rumination on life, loss and time, through the prism of liminal spaces captured in moments between dilapidation and regeneration. The book is the culmination of a multi-discipline collaboration by poet MW Bewick and artist Ella Johnston.