Author's note: 'These extracts come from a verse novel, ‘Vanishing Point,’ which experiments with generic hybridity, alternating between poetry and prose in order to test whether a comprehensive structural doubling can more fully express character and story. The doubling extends to the incorporation of two subjects, first love and anorexia, mediated through a passion for horses. Metaphors relating to food, colour and bodies (human and animal) permeate the work as a whole, facilitating character portrayal as well as thematic and narrative coherence. Meaning is embedded in this ‘interstitial’ (Heinz Insu Fenkl 2002) structure, not achieved before in a verse novel, where generic boundaries dissolve and reform.'