How To Decode Your Orange-Peel Fortunes

How to decode your orange-peel fortunes is a pamphlet about tiny encounters. It's about the moment the blossom comes into full bloom: perfectly pink, terrifyingly wonderful. It's about going for a walk and seeing an astoundingly white butterfly; it's about noticing roadkill and feeling, just for a moment, life teeter. It's about those moments when the right song comes on at the right time, when nothing else makes sense but your favourite poem, how that can be enough. It's about how entirely good it is when you eat fruit that's so perfectly ripe that everything else in your life glows full of clarity. It's about the time after you've been so sad when you begin to piece a life back together: small beauty by small beauty.

The pamphlet also includes a longer piece called 'Conversations with the moon: An essay on poetry', where the speaker talks to the moon, drawing on Amelia Lanyer and Sylvia Plath, luxuriating in the clichness of it all. The moon doesn't care about our sadness, but we tell it anyway. How human, how brilliant, is that?

It is the second pamphlet by Alice Wickenden.