Darran Anderson's contribution Marah visits border locations through history. “There is no patron saint of borders,” he tells us, while taking on the role of guardian spirit of the Idea of borders, rescuing scenes from oblivion and storing them up. Some scenes are described without meagre specification – I was running to google a lot – but that's part of the fascination of the piece. Try this one:

Sykes runs his finger across the map they are studying and proposes a line from the 'e' in Acre to the last 'k' in Kirkuk

Agave Americana is Jonathan Creasy's personal essay about his time in Marfa, meeting other poets, and a discombobulating encounter with Border Patrol. It's a great free-ranging read.

Lots of great stuff in Gorse/Fruze/Whins, including an excellent Orfhlaith Foyle story. Very much an in-the-moment observational writer, where the reader is wondering where the emotional energy is coming from and who is going to do something to upset everyone. She has unusual perspectives – perhaps because she was brought up in Africa, by missionary parents. So I think there is this element in her stories of closely observing people's behaviour, being sympathetic to them, yet without being part of their culture or belief system.

Colm O'Shea has a tense story with an obsessively tightening energy to it. Is the narrator a real spy or is this an extended metaphor for his – close to paranoid – outlook on the world? It's like nothing else I've read recently and reminds me of reading Beckett for the first time and intuiting that this is a writer who can do things to your head.

Lots of stuff in this book from the brain-tweaking to the enjoyable. Being a Stalker fan (the Soviet sci-fi film), I suspected what Another Roadside Picnic might be about – though I have only seen the film and not read the novel.

With I Bloom, the poem/prose/graphic illustration by Katie Holten we are back with no-apologies no-compromises experimental writing, including a phylogenetic(?) tree of bacteria. Likewise with the Scheffler & Fowler poems. I love it, this is what I want, poems that are not chicken soup but are scalpels of a mad surgeon.

And I'm still only half way through.