about everything

is an elegy for power brokers and mass-production, constructed from a years-worth of newspapers, reordered and reshaped. The titles of ancient dictators – high-ranking officials from Rome, Russia, the medieval church – replace our contemporary Presidents and celebrities. As the poem progresses, words self-erase to become zeroes, holes. 

The poem was published as a book in 2009, then featured as an intervention at Liverpool Biennial. Lines from the poem were used to label hundreds of pieces of rubbish and street furniture, letting the poem spill into the world.

about everything is a coffee-table book from a ‘now’ populated by medieval-minded politicians and religious leaders, machines that emulate life, breeding ever more products, news images that clone themselves and in the midst, people with their faces turned away.

‘Reduced price’ stickers incorporating lines from about everything have been billposted in Liverpool and Manchester on discarded objects, street furniture, shop displays, so that the poem spills out of its book into the world.