Not Esperanto ! Desperanto is the universal language of despair !

It is spoken by the hopeless, learned by the luckless and sung by the broken armies of losers, lovers and lefties everywhere. It is the literary language of the More or Less Deceived.

With a bit of help from William Blake, Jake Thackray, Philip Larkin and Georges Perec, Mike Wilson offers a beginner's guide to the emotional grammar of Desperanto, where defeat is a regular verb, hope declines and the future is always conditional.

Combining traditional form and formal experiment, playground wit and serious jokes, politics, people and poetry, Desperanto is a primer of crossed lines, crossed swords, cross words, crosswords and the c-word. It is a rough guide to the dialects of despair.

"Devastating and beautiful." — Adrian Mitchell (the shadow poet laureate)