The Shakespeare of reversible prose

Barry Duncan is locked in an epic struggle with the alphabet, said Gregory Kornbluh in the Believer. Ever since he picked up a book on wordplay in 1981, Duncan, 53, has been obsessed with writing palindromes—words or sentences that read the same forward and backward, like the famous: A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. “I write hundreds a day,” says the recently unemployed bookstore clerk. His complex compositions often run up to 1,000 characters long, and tackle big issues like climate change. “You shouldn’t confuse me with any of those garden-variety ‘Madam I’m Adam’ hacks.”

Duncan follows a strict set of guidelines when writing. One cardinal rule: Don’t double up letters. “‘Straw warts,’ that’s a palindrome, but the w is doubled, so it only calls attention to the palindrome.” His proudest achievement is a 406-word creation that he wrote on commission for an eco-friendly boutique in Cambridge, Mass. One of the piece’s lines, “Go ecotopia!” is reversed to read, in part, “A IPO to CEO?”

Despite such playfulness, the life of a master palindromist is a lonely one. None of his friends share his passion, and several stopped talking to him after he sent them his first book of reversible prose. “People think it’s freakish. Palindrome writing is not the way to win friends and influence people.”

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