---Tom Raworth

'You will never find Fatty Cakes without these notes. And why would you want to? Well that option is totally denied. FC is going to be rubbed into your carefully composed faces, into your delicately frozen critical measurements (especially the French or Cambridgian). The punctuation, which has been so diligently learnt in defence of the contemporary, is spilt and walked over with chant and serious weirdness.

 The nervous poet, feeling their words sanctified, is not reading here. Instead the shrill swazzle of Mr Punch is wired sideways through the PA or intimately whispered over and over again. In elegant print it is bubbled through the bleached page, where it looks like what we know or should know. The calming of this apparent structure is another misdirection, because nausea is being chiselled between the reversed words, giddy brackets and absent pages. That jest gifts sugar and sea salt against any sniff of the serious mountains of black overcooked respect.

Fatty Cakes is not trying to befriend us. All those inside these notes are rejected or confused by it, and have no choice to hide or remain ungreased by its continual insistency. We all end up reading and re-reading it until its becomes a profound mantra or we become unsane and calling for escape out of its drowning pool of recycling words: “Dinghy, Dinghy”'

 ---Brian Catling

 'A delightful, teasing adventure awaits the reader who sets off for the frontier with Fatty Cakes. Ranging from ocean to dry-land pub, prairie to outer space, this book's good-humoured restlessness provokes us to think about relations between self and other. While the poems' musical obliquity can please like Edgar Allan Poe or Walter de la Mare, here the very process of articulating thought is in question: not just interior embedding, transforming, unmaking, but what happens in dialogue, direct address and exclamation. Andrew Spragg is a poet who can love; this book is in love with language without losing a grip on the world.'

--- Vahni Capildeo