Billowing palm trees, a rustle in the celery, a tiger disappears, an atomic bomb detonates in the distance, and a consciousness starts moving backwards. The latter belongs to a TV presenter who has been banished to a deserted island due to numerous instances of grave misconduct, equipped with (as per her own choice) a knife, a grindstone and Meyers Konversations-Lexikon.

But she is not alone. There are already twenty-five sailors inhabiting the island. Since they suffered shipwreck years ago, they have created a small but impressive parallel society called Hegelland. Originally Quakers, they are now followers of a religion worshipping screws (their own invention) and maintain three printing presses of continuously increasing print quality (a cultural endeavour involving painstaking work). What will happen, now that a woman has arrived on the island, and what if more of them are to come?!
In 399 neo-Spenserian stanzas, Ann Cotten describes the turbulences that occur in the aftermath of a wave of female refugees arriving in Hegelland from the internet. The wearers of prosthetic limbs, encumbered with debts, become the unwitting catalyst of a counterrevolution that has been simmering for a long time. With the aid of rhymes, allusions, synaesthetic coercion, and immense vividness, this lucid nightmare will also be engraved into your consciousness.

Sonnets from the Dictionary of Borrowed Words