Corey Frost, a veteran of Montreal’s spoken word scene, spent a decade writing, performing, and collecting the bits and pieces that make up The Worthwhile Flux, his second book. The book encompasses prose, photos, and poetry, but most of its 15 pieces lie halfway between story and poem, and all resist definition.

These are stories for the altered attention spans of the modern world: experimental meditations on everything from the way North Americans vacillate between happiness and unhappiness in “A Few Advanced Yo-Yo Tricks” to underused letters of the alphabet in “A Farewell to Q.” The book is also highly visually oriented, with graphics on almost every page.

Dreamy and erudite, silly and profound, The Worthwhile Flux is an exercise in contradictions that lingers in the memory. Frost cites Louis Althusser and Karl Marx as influences alongside Xena, Warrior Princess. Occasionally, the postmodern juxtapositions can leave the reader wondering whether Frost is merely serving up a selection of literary gimmicks, but he consistently pulls the most delicate nuances of meaning out of the familiar or mundane. Such show-stopping lines as “Every quotation must be taken out of context, or it’s not a quotation” make every moment of ambiguity worth savouring.

In “Summer Plum (Winter Version),” an exploration of the implications of eating a plum months past the growing season, he asks, “Am I living in some fantastical 21st-century golden age, when I can just buy a plum that is nearly as big as my fist and as purple as heck?” The answer that naturally follows is, “Yes, I am.” Though some readers may lose patience with The Worthwhile Flux’s non-linear ways, the more adventurous are sure to dig it.