Ian Monk's 14 × 14, here translated from the original French by Philip Terry and the author, is a collection of fourteen poems, interspersed with interludes, all of them fit between a prelude and coda-a sort of mille-feuille made with alternating layers of the lost and regained purity of love and the world's brutally intimate indifference.

¿¿Here for example why not while waiting

for elsewhere and having been somewhere else too

just recently in this ascent straight

towards wherever and anyhow leading to

needful things to fill in the time

your brains too or what's left of them dunno

as for me what's on the box tonight spare a dime

and what about going to a museum or the opera lol?