Rock Paper Scissors

Adam’s latest pamphlet, Rock Paper Scissors, written in collaboration with Ella Duffy, is the Summer 2026 Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice.

Commissioned by Dialect, who specialise in collaborative works, Rock Paper Scissors began life on a Zoom call in which the poets were asked what they wanted to do, and how they wanted to collaborate. Ella said she’d had a dream the previous night about playing Rock Paper Scissors, and they were off.

The pamphlet begins and ends with two sequences of six poems which play out rock, paper, scissors in order, but the heart of the pamphlet is a sequence of 12 ‘competitive’ poems, written after Adam & Ella met up on a regular Zoom call and decided what would be written by playing the game, which gave them scope to challenge one another by heading off in all sorts of allusive directions as each poem had then to ‘win’ or ‘lose’.

To take out as much of the sting of competition as possible (poetry should be more about play than competition, after all), Adam & Ella invited the publisher, JLM Morton, to assemble a crowning cento to close the pamphlet, built from lines from all the poems in the book.

It’s available to buy direct from the publisher, Dialect, for £10. Follow this link to purchase it.