It’s a few months since I made one of these. So: a new book spine poem.
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‘Microworlds’
Microworlds, a patchwork planet
Solar bones brighter than
A thousand suns.
Gut symmetries collapse,
All fall down,
Vertigo: wide open –
Full catastrophe living.
*
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Thanks to the authors: Stanisław Lem, Anne Tyler, Mike McCormack, Robert Jungk, Jeanette Winterson, Jared Diamond, Ita Daly, Joanna Walsh, Nicola Barker, and Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Solar Bones and Vertigo featured in this post; I tweeted lines I liked from them too, and from Gut Symmetries and Microworlds, including Lem’s elegant description of sci-fi as involving ‘the art of putting hypothetical premises into the very complicated stream of sociopsychological occurrences’. Some of the books I’ve yet to read.
Another of Nicola Barker’s, Five Miles from Outer Hope, appeared in my first set of book spine poems back in 2010. This is the 40th one I’ve put on Sentence first – the full archive is here, where you’ll also find links to other people’s. New players are always welcome.
Sentence first 
Hi Stan. I LOVE this and played with it myself. Do you have to get permission from author’s to use their titles this way?
Hello, Heidi, and thank you. I don’t think permission is needed; I’ve never sought it.
Best ever!
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Ah, thank you. Too kind.
This is great!
Glad you like it!
Kudos. This is marvelous, as usual. I’d like to play, but I have become a minimalist in book ownership and most of my books are digital. I see no way to successfully do one.
Thanks very much, Lori. Without physical books you can still make them abstractly, though it’s less fun. Less trouble, too! I plan to do the same with DVDs, but if you’ve gone minimalist that may not be an option for you either.
Brilliant idea! May I steal it for my classroom activity?
Iffat
I think it would make a great classroom game. The first place I saw it done was in Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project.
Hoorah for more of this!
One day I’ll have all my books in one place and my bookmashing options will snowball. :-)
[…] featured: Diski in ‘Antarctica’; Barker in ‘Microworlds’ and ‘Inside Outer’ (and a post on reading coincidences); Smith in posts on compulsive […]