Speculate is a collection that is hard to define, but intriguing to read. It's microlit, it's poetry, it's a back and forth that breaks many boundaries of the ordinary literary work. On top of that, it has a layer of speculative fiction that gets you out of your comfort zone and lets your imagination take a completely different direction.
Each piece within this intriguing collection is, by nature, brief, but there’s interesting detail provided in the prose that helps to shape these snippets of these hybrid fiction and poetry texts. This collection does possess a feeling of being slightly disjointed and nebulous; the responses tend to resonate more than the “prompt,” but perhaps that’s a result of getting immersed more with the premise initially presented by the time you read the response to it, which may foster your own reaction to and understanding of it.

Speculate is a collection that is hard to define, but intriguing to read. It's microlit, it's poetry, it's a back and forth that breaks many boundaries of the ordinary literary work. On top of that, it has a layer of speculative fiction that gets you out of your comfort zone and lets your imagination take a completely different direction.

This is the kind of collection that you can easily read on piece each day and let it sink in. You wouldn't want to rush it because it is so full of imagery and a back and forth between the two authors that make you want to think about what's going on in the piece. I like that the authors also switch places halfway through the book to get a different perspective on who creates the image and who reacts to it. I would recommend this collection for anyone who wants something a little different or anyone who likes to read short pieces.

i feel like i had to gather and stimulate every single one of my brain cells in order to read this. i am not very familiar with speculative fiction or flash fiction or prose poetry, so i was extremely uncertain with what to expect and how to take/read it. but i liked this a lot more than i anticipated. at times i was lost beyond belief, unable to grasp at anything. sometimes, it felt like a lot of words thrown at me that i just couldn't comprehend. you know how when you learn a foreign language and you get to that stage where you know a decent amount of vocab and grammar but not enough to really be fluent. and then you read some sentences that are like grade 12 reading level and you recognize most of the words separately, but not put together?? that's how some of this felt. which is not necessarily a bad thing. it was a fun experience, albeit a bit headache-inducing, and you were never able to read a passage once. you had to read everything at least twice, three times. this was only 136 pages but felt much longer.

bacon and hecq have very different voices and i loved the way their passages interacted with each other. it was less of a call-and-response and more of a "here's idea and words. use them how you know best." it was entertaining and enjoyable, and the passages that i WAS able to take meaning from were magnificent. here i go with comparisons again, but this felt like impressionist paintings. how does writing feel like impressionist paintings? i'm not sure, but it did. these prose poems were impressions of ideas themselves, but they also left impressions on me. earlier, i said that some of them felt like many words being thrown at you. yes, there were many words that maybe didn't make sense to me in the context they were in, but these words still held meaning. it was as if bacon and hecq were challenging the meaning of words, not dictionary definitions but their connotations. every single one of us has different connotations to different words. memories, histories, stories are attached to every single word we say and each of us interprets them differently. it seemed to me that bacon and hecq threw words at you said, "what is it you see? what does this word mean to you? does it fit with these words? how about these words?" and honestly what an experience. it's like looking up close at individual strokes in impressionist paintings. you are a bit disoriented and have nothing to grasp at so you are forced to reckon with the individual occurrences that make up the larger picture that aligns with your understanding. this was a time that i didn't not regret having.

i actually had quite a few favorite prose poems from this collection, but i will try to narrow them down to the top ones to avoid an endless list: "Outward declarations of inner decisions", "The traveler", "What the window saw", "A fair treatment", "Dark energy", "Waterlogged", "Blood and tears (if not too contentious)", and "Endgame without ending."