Once again, I, Dr Fulminare, have set a generation of plundering wild-head poets loose on the whole four-decade span of electronic gaming, compelling them to seek out mystery and meaning in a panoply of virtual realities. This time the scale is grander, the rewards richer, the effects dazzling in their variety.

Mixing existing poems by well-known performers like Ross Sutherland and Nathan Penlington with newly commissioned work from a plethora of young writers, Coin Opera 2 uncovers the surprising similarities between the two mediums: the hidden rules and restrictions, the role of rhythm and structural repetition, the need to access that vital space between 'too hard' and 'too easy' which snares the human imagination, and, fundamentally, the importance of play.

These are poems that don't just respond to the games that inspired them, but mould and reshape them, mimic and tinker with form and convention, fuse and confuse our world with theirs.

Expect poems made entirely out of Playstation controller inputs, Lemmings as a metaphysical tale of transcendence, Caligula cynically gunning for a role in Final Fantasy IV, two-player head-to-head and collaborative poems, and mega-size boss poems.

Everything, in fact, that I need to make my dreams of vengeance and world domination a reality.

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About the Author
Jon Stone is a Derbyshire-born writer, editor and researcher. He won a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and his collection School of Forgery (Salt, 2012) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. As well as writing several shorter poetry books and co-editing a number of collaborative anthologies with Sidekick Books, he has published a monograph, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames (DeGruyter, 2022). He teaches writing and publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Kirsten Irving is a Lincolnshire-born, London-based poet and voiceover, and one half of the team behind collaborative press Sidekick Books. Her work has been published by Salt and Happenstance, widely anthologised and thrown out of a helicopter. She has won the Live Canon International Poetry Prize, judged competitions, and taught courses on folklore in poetry. Kirsten's latest collection, Hot Cockalorum, was published in 2022 by Guillemot Press.


Book Information
ISBN 9780956416476
Author Jon Stone
Format Paperback
Page Count 168
Imprint Sidekick Books
Publisher Sidekick Books
Weight(grams) 361g