This was almost impossible to find. The only copies of the book that were online were over $50, which is way over my book budget. I eventually ended up getting the CD and I’m glad I did. I’m not a big fan of poetry but listening to Adjunct: An Undigest read by the author was amazing.

This was one of the most difficult books to find! Now that I’m reading it, it is the strangest thing I’ve ever encountered. It doesn’t fit into the category of fiction or nonfiction. Since the author is a poet, I’m going to look at it like it’s a stream of conscious, modern, epic poem. I’m sure others will be just as baffled by this as me, so I’m including what the author wrote about the book on his website www.petersmanson.com.

“My own book Adjunct: an Undigest (forthcoming from Edinburgh Review) began in 1993 as an attempt to gather together those interesting or funny examples of found language to which my reading habits had begun to sensitise me, and which I felt were in danger of passing me by. I bought a large notebook, and devised a system whereby each new entry would be written on a page selected by a random number generator (I didn’t want the book to imply too linear a narrative, and enjoyed the often startling juxtapositions the method produced). During the seven years the notebook took to fill, I expanded the project to include brief notations of events in my life that seemed worth recording: long periods of unemployment, jobs (and loves) won and lost, the ebb and flow of an unhelpful alcohol problem – always recorded on randomly-chosen pages, taking their place among the found and appropriated language. One day the racing-driver James Hunt died, and I noted the fact in Adjunct. The notation sat so strangely on the page that when anyone else I had heard of died, that went into the mix too. The book that resulted is an unpredictable amalgam of the harrowing and the very silly, and I can’t help but feel that by prioritising neither, Adjunct gave me the chance to view a difficult period of my life with greater good humour, and with a clearer eye than I could otherwise have hoped to attain.”