About the book
One of the privileges of being a writer – and even more so of being a poet – is that of multiple identities. The poet can be somebody else in every poem – can create trial versions of oneself, and send them into the world, into the hands of the readers – to watch them cope better or worse. Maarten Inghels enjoys that conglomerate nature of his identity so much that he has even established The International Society for the Official Doppelgängers of Maarten Inghels. He tells the reader of the proceedings of this entity, reporting from beyond the grave. Weird? Perhaps. But the poet presents – in a set of distorted mirrors – a world in which everyone can be whatever and whoever they want to be. He offers a Baudrillardian procession of simulacra, a hell of banality, a nightmare of arbitrariness and ambiguity.