I pedalled mad out sssss across the beach
like Skoblikova sliced on speed: I hit
the highest tide in umpteen years disguised
like fog and bogged amidst the milky hush...

from 'Brancaster Sands in the Fog'

Resistance is Futile opens in Mongolia with a poem called 'Yoghurt'. It is spring in Ulan Bator and Hoo Gerjan is seeking legal advice over a stolen car. This is the first of twelve weird narratives separated by brief, lyric moments: stories of Samuel Beckett's telephone, a bet on God's fondness, Fyodor the Crow, murder and revenge in the New Zealand goldfields, a little Italian anarchist assassin, a Christmas message from the Vatican received through an iron, and so on.

Gallas keeps finding new ways of telling stories in poetry. His characters endure and survive the wild short-circuitings of language and plot. The most anarchic fact of all is that these things really happen.