“Very ready we are to say of a book, ‘How good it is – that’s exactly what I think!’ But the right feeling is, ‘What the hell did I just read?’”
— John Ruskin

Why a book of misquotations? Because what’s captured in such a book is the jittery, jumbled essence of truth: that wisdom and edict alike are constantly customised, iterated, adjusted. Nothing stays the same.

Say It Again gathers the sage words of philosophers, statesmen, artists and authors alongside proverbs, sayings and scripture – all distorted with varying degrees of deliberation. Some are stitched into poems (or something like poems) while others speak to the present in bizarre new ways.
Whether or not they retain their former authority, or the power to lower the reader into the deep well of human experience, these refigured fragments are evidence that everything we know may be shaken, like the grains in a kaleidoscope.

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. 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.