'‘The Idiotlect Dicktionary is a book filled with delights. It’s a great idea, the language is playful, energetic and erotic, the illustrations are fabulous, and you never know what’s coming next. For readers who go to poetry for surprise, happiness and excitement, you’re in just the right place. As Michał himself says—ha! Here come the fireworks!’

—Tim Atkins


‘Within these pages each word becomes a poem in its own right. It is a celebration of the magic of language. As you read this book you will see things as they truly are. Infinite!’

—Stephen Emmerson


‘This text presents itself as a dictionary but as a combination of images and short texts it flits between playfulness and anarchy. The energy declines meaning in any worthy way and yet it demands to be let loose in lines such as,

Someone snatched

my cupboards and all

the knives are now

following me around

the house

The question then is what are we to do with it. Maybe trust it. In a time when language suffers a bad reputation ‘the halloumi cheese is melting... and is spelled with two Ls’ resets some parameters. The line, ‘While we were eating our huge / pancakes with strawberries and / mango purée, the people that died were still dead’, asks everything and nothing of us.’

—Aodán McCardle

‘Michał Kamil Piotrowski’s full-body formalist submersion is often the cause of my most exciting reading experiences. It has been joyous to see him turn the doomed pursuit of reading the dictionary (another favourite of mine) into a queer, absurd, comico-serious interrogation of how we make words, break them and put them to work. With the help of John Dunbar Kilburn’s illustrations, which pierce the text’s ironic armour with children’s-book-ish guilelessness, Piotrowski’s experiments in form are not merely an excuse for a grand game, but a mesh through which to seep his anxious observations about modern life: social media, climate catastrophe, economic misrule, love and death. The Idiotlect Dicktionary is therefore winking and waggish but not wanky, pricklish and puckish but not prickish, and impossible to read all at once. This, for a book with very little text in it, is a big deal.’

—Josephine Carter

This is part of a new series of Veer Books to be produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.