Fat chance. A million to one. Buckley’s. We’ve all come across bizarre tales of survival that defy belief. Take the case of sixty-year-old Hiromitsu Shinkawa, found floating ten miles out to sea, clinging to the roof of his house, days after a tsunami wiped out his home town in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan in 2011. What were the odds?

Shinkawa doesn’t feature in Kent MacCarter’s Fat Chance, but plenty of other such stories do, recounted in the form of ‘journalism poems’. But, just as MacCarter’s poems are festooned with chance survivals, so too are they drawn to chance endings. Case in point: Akbar Salubiro, the twenty-five-year-old Indonesian farmer who, in 2017, was swallowed whole by a reticulated python, the first such recorded incident of its kind. Pure bad luck? MacCarter’s supplemental note that ‘the tropical biota of Indonesia has lost 0.84 hectares of primary forest and predator habitat per year since 2000, significantly outpacing deforestation in Brazil’ gives reason for pause. Added to which, Akbar’s wife learnt of his death watching television ‘while eating snake bean salad’, a sting in the tail if ever there was one.