"Alexa, what is there to know about love?" by Brian Bilston (Picador, 2021)

I think it's hard to please everyone if you're writing comic prose - light can become slight, and one joke doesn't justify a long poem even if it rhymes. I like the variety of inspiration for the poems in this book. I'm less sure that all of the resulting poems merit publication. A particular problem is that many pieces have weak sections that can't be removed because not enough would remain to be called a poem. And some of the pieces are clearly prose with line-breaks.

• I like "The Caveman's Lament".
• p.27 has "There's a supermarket where once the library had been./ I've been reading the Dahl in 'Indian cuisine'./ No golden tickets, giants, or witches of course;/ just chickpeas and lentils in a creamy spiced sauce" is 25% of the poem. I don't think it earns its keep.
• "As Easy as Alpha Bravo Charlie" suffers from the same problem that many alphabet-based pieces do - all the letters have to be included, even if some involve weak writing.
• There's less excuse for the length of "Better Never Than Late" - 2 pages of revised proverbs: "It was shortly after I moved into the glasshouse/ that I began to throw stones ... I collected up several large stones, remembering to roll them down the slope first to ensure they were completely covered in moss ... being fully consumed by sin, cast the first stone".
• "The Bad Salad of William Archibald Spooner" is better, feeling less like a dutifully completed exercise - it's only 12 lines and has fewer weaknesses.
• I like "An update to my privacy" - a good idea well excuted
• "Mrs Fatima Sabah Abdallah" is over 4 page of prose with line-breaks.
• "Please read these instructions carefully" works for me. I've seen the idea before, and I'd call it prose. It's fun though.
• "ee cummings attempts online banking" is prose, and good.
• Here's "Composition" without the 3 stanza breaks and 6 line-breaks - "The human body is sixty per cent water, he read and he sat there, silent, frowning, wondering whether that was why he always felt as if he was slowly drowning". And I've seen the idea used before
• "Lonely Hearts" had lots of source material to exploit. My favourite section is "Haiku debutante,/ with a fondness for rambling,/ would like to meet a"
• "An exchange of similes" (3 pages) is a flop.
• "Remembrance of Things Pasta" is a fun title, but that's where the fun ends.
• "The Unrequited Love of an Olympic Pole Vaulter" works for me - only 30 words, shaped. Why not "A Pole Vaulter's Unrequited Love"?
• "The News where I am" is weak.