Entirely written by hand along the four edges of the square format, Karl Holmqvist’s, The Mind Can Rave, uses language in ways that are at once strange and familiar; writing is turned into a type of free-associating labyrinth where the eye and the mind can wander, or rave as the title suggests.

The square format in fact is taken from the preferred canvas shape used by American painter Agnes Martin, neither landscape nor portrait it allows for a kind of discovery and a figuring out along the way. Printed on different coloured papers and with some of the writing forming mid-centered circles the book also mimicks the shape of a record sleeve. While the reader spins the book like a record they can also recognise some of the phrases that might be spinning at the back of their minds.

Words are people, says Holmqvist, their agency and their history at least as vital as that of the writer himself.As words trade meanings with other words, we encounter a queered language at once potent and slippery.