Who Was by Alex Quel questions the very basis of poetic creativity. Here language speaks in the voices of heteronyms who write of mortality and love in the tense concentrated form that goes as far as poetry has any right to reach. This is a book about death and failure; about the impossibility of mourning and writing about mourning. Mortality and annihilation lies at the heart of these dense and concise traces between empty margins. They are the writings of absence and loss that allow language to speak. ‘The poem less as one’s story than something other than oneself, possessing an independent beauty or trace of life’s varied troubles.