Open Plan
Poems

"I've admired Graham Fulton's work since I first heard it: his mix of tenderness, adrenalin, razor clarity and dynamism, as rare as it is potent, just sings. This is poetry got right to the heart and the head at the same time. It's just poetry got right. Brilliant." Janice Galloway

"I've always been a fan." Liz Lochhead

"This is a grimly funny book with Fulton successfully departing from the urban exteriors for which his work up until now has been nervously celebrated. Here Fulton has moved indoors, queasily observing group behaviour among the office furniture. Open Plan is told in Fulton's characteristic edgy rhythms with that near-nasty dark wit of his. It's a book that offers the office as a prism of a wider social disembodiment, though it is also a portrait with surprising affection." Richard Price

"By the sweat of your brow will you eat until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." These days most of us earn our daily bread sweating over spread-sheets, agendas and unanswered e-mails. There are 10m office-workers in the UK, sharing over 200m square metres of office space. White-collar workers are the new proletariat. And yet office work has rarely been the subject of poetry.

Open Plan is a demented elegy to all the minutes, days and years that slip through a hole beneath our tidy, open plan, white collar desks. Graham Fulton writes with wit and compassion of the world of e-mails, post-its, tea-breaks and sickies, of the little rituals, the red tape and the humdrum flexi hours punctuated by moments of mayhem, of those who are here to stay and those who are just passing through, of the things we need to do to stay sane, just to make it through to the next day. Alice in Wonderland meets David Brent. Office workers of the world unite - you have nothing to lose but your paper-clip chains.

Graham Fulton has been writing poetry since the 1980s when he co-founded the influential Itinerant Poets performance and publishing group. In the 1990s he was on the editorial board of West Coast Magazine and was joint winner of the prestigious Scotia Bar First of May Poetry Prize. He now runs Controlled Explosion Press. Previous collections include Humouring the Iron Bar Man, This, Knights of the Lower Floors, Ritual Soup and Other Liquids, Inner Circle and Pocket Fugues. He lives in Paisley.