Skittles Animals by Karola Karlson

🌈 Hyperactive, artificially coloured, full of additives, the prose poems in Karola Karlson’s anticipated debut mix synthetic tastes and semantic fields in unpredictable flavour pairings that sometimes bond, sometimes split – anti-aging and data scraping, ice-cream and news cycles, junk food and surveillance, extinction and emojis, commercial floristry and chess. The question of origins is raised and avoided – food production, mineral costs – and hovers like a toxic rainbow over familiar modes of distraction and numb aesthetics: we might all be unicorns soon, but at least the meteor shower looked cool. 24pp, edition of 160