Consequences

Sections T - V of Hand Over (above/ground press, 2026)

Available online in the UK at Housmans Bookshop

This text was not written in the usual sense. None of its sentences were composed for this chapbook. What you are reading is sections ‘T’, ‘U’, and ‘V’ of Hand Over, a manuscript which emerged during a six-week Leighton Artist Studios Residency at Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2024. The 1000 sentences in the manuscript were gathered—over years, across notebooks, drafts, conversations, and published pages—and brought together without attribution, without hierarchy, without the usual markers of ownership, and in alphabetical order. I have arranged the sentences so that they stand apart, right aligned, with space between them.

This spacing is deliberate: it slows the eye, isolates each phrase, and resists the flow of narrative. As you read, you will not know which words are mine and which are not, though you can find out easily by consulting this index. That uncertainty is not a flaw but a principle. It reflects the way language circulates—how voices overlap, echo, and refract through time. Authorship, here, is porous. Every sentence is a crossing: between self and other, past and present, intention and accident. This chapbook is less a composition than a constellation. It asks what happens when we let go of the boundaries of “I” and “you,” when we allow words to speak without names attached. It is an experiment in listening, in gathering, in acknowledging that no text – no writer – is ever solitary.