Sad Giraffe Cafe is a collection of prose poems which together form a shifting progressive narrative. There are three recurring themes: an imaginary and sinister kingdom, a young wanderer named Alice, and a shape-shifting, time-travelling, first person narrator. The poems seem to be devoid of past or future, existing in an unstable, and at time apocalyptic present. They are peopled by strangers and lodged in an ‘elsewhere’ which is also somehow familiar. They have the feel of dreams masquerading as real events, or else of real events masquerading as dreams. Richard Gwyn’s collection treads an unerringly unsteady line along the borders between dream and vivid observation, between sensual and laconic, between prose and poetry. animas and alter-egos, ghosts of novels and travelogues, of the archaic / archetypal and of the contemporary populate the ‘restless geography’ where these wry and curiously wise short fictions are at home.A Philip Gross