Alan Halsey and Karen Mac Cormack invest the mundane newspaper column with striking poetic resonance in Fit to Print, a collection of poems whose exuberant invention recalls tabloid coverage of the moment. Arranged in one or two justified columns topped by a bold headline, the poems subvert one’s expectations of newspaper-style simplicity and order. These “stories” admit no cursory glance: they are all lead, all transition. Halsey, a poet living in Sheffield, England, sets the ground rules early in “An Alphabet for Karen,” where he notes that the language should be read with an eye for flow over fact: “Beauty when a culture’s a passport’s a quality of syntax.”

The poems often change perspective, voice, and subject in the space of a few words, giving them a spirited, improvised feel – the written equivalent of a teeming sidewalk in Brooklyn. Toronto’s Mac Cormack replies in “Headlines on the Sphinx, or Post-earthquake Egypt in the News” that “what’s written isn’t newly confronted or planned to be so serious,” showing that the poems are also about accident and play.

Several poems take flight from typographical errors from The Globe and Mail, while others exploit wide letter spacing – words stretched open in a kind of typographer’s cubism. Halsey, on the whole, tends to offer more gems of profundity within the crush of text, musing on skewed translation and distorted history. Mac Cormack, who has published seven books to Halsey’s five, notes in “The Vacuum” the quantum energy generated between pairs of charged metal plates, like the megawatts of linguistic energy resonating within these blocks of type.

If anything, the poems too often strike the same fevered pitch. And other than their skyscraper-like forms, they don’t always offer a superstructure of concepts for the reader to grasp. The result is occasional vertigo and rush-hour fatigue.