This companion forms the best introduction to the work of one of Britain's leading experimental writers. Maggie O'Sullivan has an international reputation as a poet both on the page and as a mesmerising performer. Her work breaks through traditional boundaries of performance and writerly practice.

Chris Emery is a director of Salt. He has published three collections of poetry, a writer’s guide, an anthology of art and poems, and edited editions of Emily Brontë, Keats and Rossetti. His work has been widely published in magazines and anthologised, most recently in Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe). He is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing, edited by David Morley and Philip Neilsen. He lives in Cromer, North Norfolk, with his wife and children. Charles Bernstein was born in Manhattan in 1950. He has published 27 collections of poetry including With Strings, Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1984 and Controlling Interests. His essays are included in My Way: Speeches and Poems and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Bernstein is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Peter Middleton was born in 1950 and grew up in both England and the United States. After a first degree at Oxford University, he took a PhD at Sheffield University, and studied for a year at SUNY Buffalo with Robert Creeley and Jack Clarke. He is the author of a book on masculinity, The Inward Gaze (1992), co-author with Tim Woods of Literatures of Memory (2000), and author of a book of essays on poetics, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (2005). His poetry and essays have appeared in magazines in the UK and US, and with Piers Hugill he is editor of Torque Press. He is a Professor of English at the University of Southampton. Maggie O’Sullivan is a British-based poet, performer and visual artist. For over thirty years, her work has appeared extensively in journals and anthologies (including Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2) and she has performed her work, often in collaboration, internationally. She is the editor of out of everywhere: an anthology of contemporary linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK (1996). More recently is Body of Work (2006), ALTO (2009), WATERFALLS (2011) and murmur (2011). The Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan is also available. Her website is www.maggieosullivan.co.uk. William Rowe teaches contemporary British and Latin American poetry at Birkbeck College, where he is Director of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. He has written on Maggie O’Sullivan, Lee Harwood, Eric Mottram, Allen Fisher, and William Carlos Williams and is the author of Three Lyric Poets: Lee Harwood, Barry MacSweeney and Chris Torrance, forthcoming from Northcote House in the Writers and Their Work series. His translations of contemporary Latin American poets have been widely published, and he has three books on Latin American poetry, including Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life (OUP, 2000). Robert Sheppard is mainly a poet, whose selected poems, History or Sleep, appears from Shearsman Books, and who has poetry anthologised in Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry (OUP) and Reality Street Book of Sonnets, among others. His short fiction is published as The Only Life (Knives Forks and Spoons Press), and is found amidst his 2015 autobiographical work, Words Out of Time, and in several places in his 2016 publication Unfinish (Veer Publications). He is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, where in 2016 they celebrate ten years of the Edge Hill Prize. Scott Thurston began writing in the poetry scene situated around Gilbert Adair’s Sub-Voicive Poetry reading series and Bob Cobbing’s New River Project workshops in London in the late eighties. In 1995 he moved to Poland where he taught English as a foreign language. He returned to the UK in 1997 and completed a Ph.D. on Linguistically Innovative Poetry. He currently lectures in English and Creative Writing at The University of Salford and lives in Liverpool. He edits The Radiator, a journal of contemporary poetics. His books include Turns (with Robert Sheppard) (Ship of Fools/Radiator: Liverpool, 2003), Sleight of Foot (Reality Street Editions: London, 1996) (Selection), State(s)walk(s) (Writers Forum: London, 1994) and Poems Nov 89 - Jun 91 (Writers Forum: London, 1991). Hold: Poems 1994-2004 is due out from Shearsman books in 2006.