PBS Recommendation. The school of forgery is a singular institution, whose principal teachings concern the volatile relationship between fakery and invention. Both you and I are its alumni, and so is the bandit boiled alive in a cauldron of oil. So are the perpetrators of hoaxes, the writers of pornographic dōjinshi, counterfeiters in love with their teachers and teens who dress up as birds to fight tyranny. Its professors proliferate. Its graduates excel in every field. Its campus is the world.

This book, part prospectus and part fanzine, is made from stolen or borrowed parts – centos and collages, half-rhymes and homophonics, translations and travesties. Equally inspired by manga luminaries like Naoki Urasawa, animation and adventure stories as it is by earlier poets, the natural world and human history, School of Forgery postulates the poem as knock-off, as reclaimed scrap, and most of all as through-and-through fabrication.

The structure of School of Forgery is ingenious and impressively intricate. Its slotting architectures are slit, mortised and battened. (...) I stress-tested their timbre by reading poems aloud and yielded a cadence of genuine feeling within the multifaceted, mega-fabricated, louche architecture.

These are poems with an edge, or rather, multiple sharp edges, poems as elaborate 'fabrications' challenging conventions of form and voice. This is an inspired, integrated debut, endlessly inventive, with a lively intertextuality and a wide frame of reference. The language is both playful and hard-wrought, words at high voltage, words as collector's items.

A poet of fantastic inversions.

Jon Stone was born in Derby and lives in London. His work has been performed on radio and published in national newspapers, as well as in poetry anthologies themed around imitation, formal innovation, science fiction, mythology and the erotic. He won a Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Poetry London Prize in 2014 and 2016. He edits compendiums of visual, ecological and experimental poetry through Sidekick Books, which he co-runs with Kirsten Irving.