Gold, anOther Mythology (2023)

Maxwell I. Gold, anOther Mythology. Interstellar Flight Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1-9537-3624-6. $14.99.

Reviewed by Lisa Timpf

anOther Mythology is a collection of horror prose-poetry re-imagining myths from a queer perspective, penned by Maxwell I. Gold, a five-time Rhysling Award nominee, and twice Pushcart nominated Jewish American author of prose poetry and short stories in cosmic horror and weird fiction. Gold’s books include Oblivion in Flux: A Collection of Cyber Prose from Crystal Lake Publishing and Bleeding Rainbows and Other Broken Spectrums from Hex Publishers. With this background, it’s not surprising that he is able to craft a compelling collection that is often humorous, sometimes darkly so. Publisher Interstellar Flight Press is an indie speculative publishing house that aspires to spotlight “innovative works from the best up and coming writers” in science fiction and fantasy, so this different approach to mythology is right up their alley.

Cahill, Unicorn Death Moon Day Planner (2023)

Zachary Cahill, Unicorn Death Moon Day Planner. Red Ogre Review & Liquid Raven Media, 2023. Pp. 74. ISBN 979-8-8600-3593-5. $14.99.

Reviewed by Julie Reeser

Over the last few years, I’ve established a personal habit of spending time each morning planning my day with a view toward my yearly goals and reading poetry. When I saw the Unicorn Death Moon Day Planner by Zachary Cahill, I anticipated an experience born of this complimentary companionship—a planner interspersed with art and poetry to inspire—it seemed the perfect match. Zachary Cahill has quite a few projects and titles under his writerly belt, including a graphic novel, a debut novel, a directorship, and being editor-in-chief of Portable Gray. Both his art and poetry have been shown in several prestigious settings.

Jones, Of Weeds and Witches (2022)

Shelly Jones, Of Weeds and Witches. Alien Buddha Press, 2022. Pp. 36. ISBN 979-8-357779-18-2. $10.99.

Reviewed by Julie Reeser

Shelly Jones is an educator, author, and researcher nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Dwarf Star Award, and she has been a finalist for the Best Microfiction 2023. Their chapbook, Of Weeds and Witches, contains twenty-four poems that thrum with mythical magic. Nature lurks and drips from the lines, midwifed by women seeking power, revenge, or escape. The titular poem was published in Issue 58 of The Future Fire, and it’s lovely to see it put in service as an anchor for this collection. While eighteen of the poems have been previously published, six will be new to fans of their work.

Margariti, The Saint of Witches (2022)

Avra Margariti, The Saint of Witches: A Horror Poetry Collection. Weasel Press, 2022. Pp. 92. ISBN 978-1-9487-1234-7. $12.00.

Reviewed by Jason Kahler

The witches depicted in Avra Margariti’s collection The Saint of Witches are cursed with the burden of knowing, the pressures of womanhood, and the threat that comes with being the other. Dangerous love waits on a blanket under a moonlit tree, and the penalty for being extraordinary is death. Taken as a whole collection, The Saint of Witches doesn’t have one specific narrative line to follow, at least I don’t think, but instead paints a general impression of the lives (and deaths) of witches and those around them. The poems’ speakers are consistent, but I don’t think we’re supposed to understand that voice as belonging to one specific person. If I’m wrong, I don’t think that changes my reading of the pieces, and if I’m right, it doesn’t do anything to diminish the impact with which each individual piece lands.

Schein, Lady Anarchist Café (2022)

Lorraine Schein, The Lady Anarchist Café: Poems and Stories. Autonomedia, 2022. Pp. 110. ISBN 978-1-57027-391-9. $15.95.

Reviewed by Cait Coker

Speculative poetry is an often overlooked genre in the fields of the fantastic, despite a wealth of practitioners in and out of the mainstream. Lorraine Schein’s collection, The Lady Anarchist Café: Poems and Stories, plays with the conventions of both form and language, cannily utilizing wordplay to heighten response and reaction. Consisting of 41 poems and 9 short stories, the volume is a delightful romp across words and worlds.

brown, Fables and Spells (2022)

adrienne marie brown, Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry. AK Press, 2022. Pp. 329. ISBN 978-1-84935-450-9. $17.00.

Reviewed by Julie Reeser

When I first encountered the work of adrienne marie brown, it was through her book, Emergent Strategy. That book showed me a gap in my existence and began the process of filling it in. brown introduced to me the concept of moving through systems in nonlinear and creative ways with whole minds, bodies, and communities. She embraces this perspective again in her new release, Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry. The book is long and complex, ever-shifting like an octopus exploring the environment. It challenges the reader to find a place of relaxed alertness while acknowledging the pain of both change and stagnancy. brown is one of the few writers who makes the reader inescapably aware of the body—not just the reader’s body, but all bodies in space and time and politics. Her work and activism are tender and confident like a practiced lover, alive and breathing.

Timpf, In Days to Come (2022)

Lisa Timpf, In Days to Come. Hiraeth Books, 2022. Pp. 80. ISBN 978-1-0879-2712-1. $10.00.

Reviewed by Jason Kahler

A reader’s response to In Days to Come, Lisa Timpf’s slim collection of poetry, will depend on his or her attitude toward a few things:

• Poetry in general.
• Haibun specifically (more on those in a bit).
• The role of poetry in the SFFH space.

I love poetry, and I love science fiction, so I’m all for bringing the two together. Overall, readers will find plenty to enjoy in Timpf’s book. There are enough poetic moments, what noted poetry critic Clive James called “little low heavens,” to make readers feel like the time they share with the book was time well-spent. Casual or new poetry readers will enjoy finding poetry doing things they didn’t know poetry could do. More critical poetry fans will appreciate Timpf’s book, too, though they may be able to identify some places where the book’s weakest elements don’t live up to the promise of its strongest.

Twisted Moon #5 (2020)

Twisted Moon, ed. Hester J. Rook, P. Edda, Liz Duck-Chong & Selene Maris. Issue 5 (2020). Online at twistedmoonmag.com.

Reviewed by Djibril al-Ayad

Twisted Moon is a yearly magazine of speculative erotic poetry based in Australia that has been published online since 2016. Editors Rook, Edda, Duck-Chong and Maris are all also writers (some of whose work we’ve seen and loved elsewhere), and they bring a lover’s touch to the selection and presentation of poems in each issue. The contents are eclectic, as is perhaps inevitable with collections of poetry, and range from delicious, lyrical verses to the most discordant, experimental or opaque of forms, always tantalizing and excruciating and challenging.

Kuppers, Pearl Stitch (2016)

Petra Kuppers, Pearl Stitch. Spuyten Duyvil, 2016. Pp. 102. ISBN 978-1-944682-06-4. $15.00.

Reviewed by Kathryn Allan

I first read Petra Kuppers’ poetry collection, Pearl Stitch, on a plane while en route to a conference on the fantastic arts. I don’t normally reach for poetry as my go-to travel reading but given my previous encounters with Kuppers’ writing—buying her short story “Playa Song” for Accessing the Future and thoroughly enjoying her short story collection, Ice Bar—I felt that reading something a bit out of the ordinary, as her story-telling always is, would fit the bill. I was not disappointed.

Durasow, Endless Running Games (2015)

Gareth Durasow, Endless Running Games. Dog Horn Publishing, 2015. Pp. 72. ISBN 978-1-907133-90-9. £8.99.

Reviewed by Małgorzata Mika

Clandestine clusters of texts, casting shadows of the avaricious past between the verses—the future can be transfixing and dark as countless SF/dystopian hybrids have pictured it. As the history of the fantastic reveals, a simple ‘SF’ acronym can stretch its meaning far beyond the burgeoning landscapes of prose-oriented fiction. To a large extent ‘SF’ proves to be more ‘speculative’ in choosing a vehicle for containing its variegated content. Thus, extrapolating into poetry, the vibe of secure sentences is replaced by a much more challenging (for writers and readers alike) and alienated world of figures of speech. Despite changing tides of opinions regarding its quality, the so-called ‘speculative poetry’ has established its own, slightly estranged, niche that acts as a portal to a new Wonderland. Its creation has been aided by such famous writers as Craig Raine, Bruce Boston, Steve Sneyd and Mike Ashley; among them emerges Gareth Durasow with Endless Running Games, his newest collection of poems which invites a reader into a world which Alice would find more daunting than the Queen’s Croquet Ground.

Thompson, Rhymer (2014)

Douglas Thompson, The Rhymer: an Heredyssey. Elsewhen Press, 2014. Pp. 192. ISBN 978-1-9081-6841-2. £9.99 pb/ £2.99 e.

Reviewed by Djibril al-Ayad

The Rhymer is the eighth novel by Scottish weird and speculative author and editor Douglas Thompson, published by British small press Elsewhen. This novel is one of the more surreal and absurdist tales Thompson has written, parts of which were previously published in serial or standalone form in other fantastic magazines. It is entirely written in a style somewhere between free-association, free-verse, and comic semi-rhyme, which sounds like it would be hard to read, but actually isn’t, although the story does veer wildly and apparently out of control between satire, grotesque, bizarre, mystical and pseudo-scientific allegory. While I felt this novel sometimes sacrifices plot continuity and character consistency in name of moving the story forwards, it is a bit hard to tell to what degree this is the result of lazy writing, and how much a symptom of the rapidly changing realities in the story itself. I confess to not particularly liking any of the characters, or indeed the narrative voice, but I did find it pleasant to read, challenging in the way that literature should be, and sometimes startlingly original.

Riggs, Bilateral Asymmetry (2014)

Don Riggs, Bilateral Asymmetry, Poems. Texture Press, 2014. Pp 114. ISBN 978-0-692-21272-1. $17.00.

Reviewed by Cait Coker

When we discuss genre writing, poetry often gets left out, ignominiously, despite some of the great practitioners of the form: Tolkien, of course, wrote elegiac verse for and in his legendarium; the poems of Ursula K. Le Guin and Jane Yolen echo the concerns and themes of their prose works. Speculative poetry, like speculative fiction, explores possibility through form as well as content. The poems, calligrams, and illustrations in Don Riggs’s new collection Bilateral Asymmetry play with the mythic and the esoteric, inviting closer readings to deceptively short texts.

Grimwood (ed.), Monster Book for Girls (2011)

Terry Grimwood (ed.), The Monster Book for Girls. Exaggerated Press, 2011. Pp. 289. ISBN 978-1-4710-0975-4. £8.99.

Reviewed by Georgina Bruce

Exaggerated Press is published by horror and fantasy writer Terry Grimwood, who is the editor of this anthology of stories and poems. In his foreword to the book, he states that anthologies “grow a soul of their own, a thread within a theme...” Unfortunately, this is precisely what I found lacking in The Monster Book for Girls.

The collection is a real mixed bag of stories and poems with no discernable theme, or “soul”. Nothing connects or unites the pieces in the anthology, and there is no sense that an viewpoint is being developed, or an argument explored, or a series of images uncovered. The pieces have little in common besides the fact that they all feature females in some way. Stories and poems are thrown together with apparently little thought as to how they play off one another. Literary fiction sits next to schlock horror; thoughtful poems rest alongside comic japes. There is a case to be made for a ‘something for everyone’ approach, but I wished for a more coherent read, with less changes in tone from piece to piece.

Napier, Mouth for Picket Fences (2010)

Barry Napier, A Mouth for Picket Fences. Needfire Poetry, 2010. Pp. 88. ISBN 9781926912066. $9.99 print / $2.99 e-book.

Reviewed by Christopher Michaels

How do you review poetry? It’s such a subjective art, both in the writing and the reading. This wasn’t always true. Poetry was the primary form of stylised speaking and writing, as a performance art in the past; now, apart from its role in song, it’s a minority art mostly accused of being elitist. As a writer and appreciator of poetry I focus on emotion and passion and on these ways of experiencing and thinking about life, relationships and self. I like poetry with a strong emotional core. To me the power of poetry is its ability to point to the deep complexity of life beyond the limitations of words, its medium. For me another important quality of good poetry is the sense that it expands our language by playing with its metaphoric uses and the edge-meanings of it.

Barry Napier’s book is full of beautiful poetry in a modern free-verse form which fulfils these criteria admirably. Some of the poetry in the book continues the pattern of elitism of modern poetry in the complexity of its colliding imagery in ways that obscure meaning and feeling at first but then you learn his language. There is a sense of melancholy to his style which is not quite the enraged darkness we see in a lot of modern poetry, that slows you down to think and feel. He disrupts the blackest moods he suggests with gentle humour.

This is demonstrated in the very first poem ‘Hiding in October’. It starts with images of a one-track world and bored birds suggesting we have no control over the world and therefore life, but then he says:

“This was the same day you realized that a clock
has hands that can’t applaud
or hide themselves in coat pockets
or hold a baby, slick and new to the world.”

A humorous way of expressing the limitations of time yet filled with compassion. The poem is lovely and profound about the way symbol and organisation can overtake life by talking about how thin the calendar page is between September and November. The sad thought that a month is reduced to no more than a page in that calendar.

Another beautiful very sad poem from the first segment is the ‘Sentinel’. This one has no humorous relief. It is a short emotionally precise expression of self-destructive solitude, though it also seems to be about the loneliness old age and dementia. In contrast, towards the end of this segment, there is a rather sensuous contemplation on haunting, heaven and death, ‘We Will All Be Voyeurs in Heaven’, which nonetheless ends with:

“you will waste away in the shadow of life
regardless.”

The book is divided in three segments or chapters: ‘Normalcy’, ‘The Darkness Weighs Us’ and ‘(in)humanity’. To be honest I found it hard to know the relevance of the titles of the segments to the poetry within them. Normalcy has pieces, like the above three, which don’t necessarily seem to have much to say about normal life, unless he is saying normal life is melancholic.

The first poem of the second segment gives the book its name, ‘A Mouth for Picket Fences’, a description of mysterious evil, or is it God? This poem suggests a Stephen King-like story and character with an Old Testament complexity for the higher power. The strength of this poem is that he could be talking about marketing and capitalism just as easily as gods, demons and/or spirits. This poem has quite a different feel to the poetry of the first segment, there is a passion and clarity of opinion to it. The next poem ‘Morning Choir Practice’, a reflection on the sounds of a suburban morning chorus, returns to the melancholic feel of the first segment, but has a more judgemental sense to it. In away it seems to be more of a statement about normal life than most of the poems in the segment called ‘Normalcy’.

Most of the poems are about one page, short intensely emotional. ‘What We Know of Blackbirds’, at six pages, is the longest poem and picks up the theme from the sentinel of loneliness and aging. It uses the language and images of horror and mystery, reminding one of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Raven’, but is a contemplative exploration of hallucinogenic solitude brought on by profound grief. The choice of blackbirds as the birds of focus gives it symbolic depth. It could easily have been cliché, bringing on Stephen King, Hitchcock’s Birds and the Beatles, but the subtle understanding of the subjective, of feelings and the edge of sleep terror takes it into the realm of beauty.

The last poem in the book is appropriately ‘Rituals of Farewell and Departure’. It picks up the feel and narrative style of the earlier ‘Mouth for Picket Fences’, though not quite as strong as it, in the sense that it tells the story of a mystery spirit, maybe death, moving though suburban and small town life; a

“single shadow sulks across town,
under layered shadows and a collective naiveté”

Barry Napier’s collection of around forty poems is a substantial work worthy of wider notice. It courageously explores areas of life that are left untouched by many other art forms. Its style and emotional qualities take it into much deeper territory than the horror or dark lit that the promotional back pages suggest. To review a book like this is a little unfair since some of these poems are worthy of long consideration, of whole reviews by themselves. If there is a criticism it is that the collection is unlikely to pull non-poetry readers from the general public, people who don’t already love and appreciate poetry, but that’s not its aim.

Another minor problem is that of consistent emotional tone, maybe this is about his voice and the publisher’s idea that it should all fit together thematically and stylistically but for me it makes it a bit flat. A poem in the last segment like ‘The Misogyny of Writing’ heads towards sensuality and love with humour but then ends with grave-robbing obsession. A beautiful rendition of an afternoon of lemonade and a daughter’s relationship with her mother ends with a wasp landing on a “glazed-over eye where it marched onward, unseen”. It is as if everyday life is not enough, not profound enough or worthy enough for poetry unless it points to death and grief. However, the fact is few ordinary people in everyday conversation chat comfortably talk about death and its emotional consequences, its relationship with love and loss. These are important parts of our human experiences and Barry Napier is unflinching yet compassionate and sensitive in his expression of the intimacy of these moments.

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