“And what exactly does a scarf have to do with an overcoat? you ask. Well, I suppose I was thinking at the time that a scarf would be a good thing to hide up one of my sleeves, covered in the scrawl of this script of coats.”

In this collection of poems, experimental prose and plays, artist Tiziana La Melia charts the subconscious movements of a wandering attention. An overcoat grumbles about the dubiousness of tailors, two flatworms converse about the length of an hour, and the misheard saint Joan d’arc becomes the ambivalent “Joan Dark” — all while the traces of emails and speculative writing prompts can be seen vibrating along the margins of pages, mixed in with spaghetti and stolen powder foundation. At once bookish and naive, these are whimsical, improvisational texts that tell stories in tangents rather than straight lines: writing constructed, and playfully undone.

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This updated edition of Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect collects together selections from a decade of La Melia’s early writing (2005-2015) with the addition of several new texts and an afterword by the artist.