Award-winning poet Tallulah Howarth celebrated the publication of her latest book An Alternative Xanadu this month with two launch events. The first was in her home city of Leeds last week and the London launch took place on Wednesday 8 April.

An Alternative Xanadu began as a university assignment last year, when Tallulah was studying for an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University. I was a fellow student on the course and a module required us to write an essay and a series of poems about a place, real or imagined. Tallulah chose to write about the Xanadu Housing Co-operative which started in Leeds in 2004, and where she’s lived for the past five years.

I read Tallulah’s finished assignment last spring and it delights me, a bibliomane and book collector, to own an inscribed, limited edition copy of An Alternative Xanadu. The pamphlet, described as "a poetic sequence documenting the chaotic, shifting organism that is a shared house and its inhabitants", is the result of a creative alliance between the poet and Ossa Prints of London, who designed the book and used glorious letterpress to enhance every page.

The book’s preface starts with a reference to Coleridge and notes that in Italian, the word stanza means room. The preface also describes the formalist conceit at the centre of this body of work. The square foot measurement of each room within the house dictated the number of words used in the corresponding poem.

I recall during our studies that Tallulah planned to round up the room measurements but our seminar discussions about accuracy meant the decimal points were retained. As Tallulah explains in the preface: “Mathematics was an unexpected element of the project. How best to represent the decimal places of words? In order to know how much of an intended word was missing, there had to be a visual marker of the absence of letters.”

For example, ‘Utility Room’ was bound by the measurement of 35.2 square feet and as a result there are letters missing from a word beginning with “h” and it is up to the reader to fill in the blanks: “In larger boxes, h____ of junk”.

An Alternative Xanadu is a unique reading experience. A house and its inhabitants are brought to life but it’s also an artistic collaboration between poet and printer. The book needs to be held in your hands to read and enjoy Tallulah’s handwritten marginalia and the contents page, which is a floor plan of the house.

Tallulah is a DJ and musician and I was keen to see and hear An Alternative Xanadu performed live. Last week’s launch was held in an ideal venue, Holding Patterns, billed on its website as the city's "first listening bar ... with one of the best hi-fi listening systems in Leeds.” Tallulah is a regular DJ here and the launch saw the venue filled with friends, fellow creatives and housemates from Xanadu.

The evening was in two halves. In the first, three poets read for roughly 10 minutes each on the theme of place. After a short break, Tallulah read the book from start to finish with friend and former housemate Fergus Quill on double bass. The performance was assured, playful and perfect, just like the book.

To buy a copy of An Alternative Xanadu, contact the press via email hello@ossaprints.com. For more information about Tallulah’s writing, art and DJing visit https://www.tallulahhowarth.co.uk or follow her on Instagram @tallulahhowarthcreative