Min-a-rets is published by Compound Press and Issue 9 is edited by Craig Foltz

The editor’s motive was ‘to create a forum for an absurdist, collaborative experiment, roughly based on the surrealist Exquisite Corpse experiments from the 1920s’. In the collective approach to writing the second writer only sees the last line of the first writer.

In this instance:

28 writers got a line of text, a specific form and 7 days to produce a piece. The last line was handed onto the next writer. There were four groups each starting with the same first line: Among clouds of dust, only mountains – a garden

The writers come from New Zealand, USA, Taiwan, Australia and Sweden and include Joan Fleming, Nina Powels, Ya-Wen Ho, Steph Burt, Airini Beautrais, Lisa Samuels, Anna Jackson, Amy Brown, Sarah Jane Barnettt, Essa Ranapiri, Rebecca Hawkes.

Names were put in a hat to assign group and order.

Four poems, without attribution to individual writers, achieve a sweet and surprising fluency. It is like picking up a stitch from the previous writer and taking  it wherever you fancy. Sometimes it is a shift in pattern, sometimes repetition.

Four distinctive poems like a game of whispers in the ear or the game where you draw a head, fold the paper over and let the next person continue with a modicum of clues. I was hungry to keep reading, motivated by the bridge between stanzas.

What a delight to read the hooked stitches: the surprising links and the wayward disconnections. I utterly adore this issue, both startling and sumptuous.

Compound Press page