CROSS WORDS

A new zine composed of poems written in the form of crosswords

The cover of CROSS WORDS. Photo by William Sidnam.

I just published a zine entitled CROSS WORDS. What is it, you ask? It’s a series of twenty haikus written in the form of crosswords. I wrote them in and around Paris during the second half of 2020, when the pandémie had fallen head-first into pandémonium.

To read them, you first have to solve the crosswords. And they’re not easy. Because when the times are uneasy, well, shouldn’t the words be too?

In those muffled times, I, like millions of others worldwide, often found myself feeling anxious, disorientated, and more than a little cross. So, to put it another way, ‘Cross Words’ aren’t just puzzles; they contain the thoughts and emotions I harboured during that period. They’re ‘cross words’, in other words, in every sense of the words.

There are twenty haikus in total — as many haikus as there are districts in Paris. And in each one, I’ve taken a snapshot of a place both in the French capital and in my mind’s eye.

Inside the zine: twenty crossword poems. Photo by William Sidnam.

Strange? You bet. And like all strange ideas, it was born in the strangest of circumstances. Last summer, as I was browsing the French…