About the Author

Marcus Slease is a (mostly) absurdist, surrealist and minimalist writer from Portadown, N. Ireland and Utah. His writing has been translated into Danish and Polish, and has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including Tin House, Poetry, Fence, Bath Magg, The Lincoln Review, Black Box Manifold, and Best British Poetry 2015. He is the author of numerous books from indie presses, including: Never Mind the Beasts (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), The Green Monk (Boiler House Press), Play Yr Kardz Right (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and Rides (Blart Books). He comes from a working class background and currently teaches high school in Barcelona. Find out more at: Never Mind the Beasts (www.nevermindthebeasts.com) and follow him on Twitter @postpran

Words of Praise

"This gentle series of prose poems follows the adventures of a young dog and his boy as they negotiate life in a small Spanish town during the pandemic lockdown. In Marcus Slease's world, Puppy is everywhere, like the proverbial jewel of interdependence in the Buddhist image of Indra's Net that opens the book. This net reminds us that "no one knows where the soul sits." Is it everywhere or is it nowhere, here or not here? On the way to find out, Puppy and boy romp through a range of everyday objects (urine, sand, wood) and not so everyday references (the New Testament, Greek Mythology, the music of Bach and Max Richter). Can they reconcile the domestic and the wild? Like so much of Slease's writing, this book is at once ludic, lucid and profoundly welcoming." - Peter Jaeger, author of Postamble : For an Invisible Sangha

"Feel the heat, the distance. The need for puppy. The awe at puppy. Slease walks his puppy along a threadbare path between knowing and not knowing - flashes of wisdom jump up at you from the puppy dog panting of 'just trying to hold on'. Slease leads you into his worlds easily and it feels all right, anecdotal, familiar. The rhythm hooks, the pace builds. You're dizzy. Something has happened to you but you're not sure what. The person who enters the book is not the same as the person who leaves." - Lydia Unsworth, poet (Mortar, Some Murmur, Certain Manoeuvres), based between Manchester and Amsterdam