The Body As Haunted by Pixie Bruner

(Authortunities Press, 2024). 58 pp. Paperback $10; ebook $2.99. https://amazon.com/Body-As-Haunted-Pixie-Bruner-ebook/dp/B0CTHPQPPH

Write poetry every day for 30 years, keep it to yourself the whole time, and there's no telling what you'll come up with. Then, then, snatch the cloth off the table. Pixie Bruner has done it, and we all benefit from the result. The Body As Haunted is a disturbing and often erotic exploration of bodies, those that haunt and those that are haunted. And remember that not all haunting is the work of ghosts. Bruner shows us, in a variety of poetic forms and viewpoints, some of the many pitfalls (and a few opportunities) that come with having a body, in particular a woman's body. In fact, this book reminds me of the well-known quip, “Hell is other people.” In some cases Hell might be the self. The Body As Haunted is feminist horror poetry, and may not be for everyone. Some of the poems are hard to read, because they are uncompromisingly frank. Others, while quite macabre, are actually funny. Most of the poems appear in the book for the first time, which means they'll be eligible for annual awards.

“'You'd Be ____If You____'” is a quite reasonable answer to a kind of nonsense all too commonly foisted upon women:

… I wore a shorter skirt and had it wrapped upon your neck as I wrung and
pulled, feet braced against the side of your head, until I heard a satisfying
“pop” from your spinal column.

This stanza is but one of a long list of stereotypical put downs turned on their heads in the poem. Or separated from them.

“Trigger Warnings” takes a dim view of us, of people, and the things we do to ourselves and each other. “Semaglutide Poetry” worries about body image, “The Dogma of Good Fucks,” is about that. And there is more, so much more.

There are a few things about The Body As Haunted that I don't like. Chief among them is this: some poems contain pop-culture references (at least that's what they are within genre circles), many of which are also plays on words. On the one hand, these can lighten the tone of what otherwise would be rather dark pieces. On the other hand, much of this wordplay seems out of place to me, diverting the flow from what appear to be the objectives of the poems. From “Murder Paradoxia”:

Masks of the Illuminati fall off—
to reveal Schrödinger’s cat
eating a naked lunch.
Guilty secrets from the chocolate war, flow my tears,
“The body was found in lot 49” the policeman says.
Travels, unnaturally cold in July—
now wait for last year.

The Body As Haunted is an impressive first collection, and should please anyone looking for a gritty feminist exploration of the body and of the self. Also, I love the cover by Gemma Files!

—David C. Kopaska-Merkel

The Heartbeat of the Universe: Poems from Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact 2012–2022 ed. Emily Hockaday

(Interstellar Flight Press, 2024). Paperback $17.99, ebook $9.99. https://interstellarflightpress.com/heartbeatuniverse.html

The Heartbeat of the Universe: Poems from Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact 2012-2022 offers 60 poems which, as the subtitle indicates, previously appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction or Analog Science Fiction during a specific period of time. The collection is divided into five sections, “The Sum of Broken Parts,” “Impressions in Time,” “Entangled Particles,” “Dispatches,” and “Off the Map.” Speculative poetry fans will find many familiar names between the pages, including Bruce Boston, Brittany Hause, Herb Kauderer, Mary Soon Lee, and others.

Editor Emily Hockaday notes in the Introduction that it took some time to sort the selected poems into an organizational structure that made sense. The five-section grouping that she decided on gives the collection a sense of flow.

Hockaday comments on the multi-layered nature of many of the poems, noting, “A poem about an asteroid visiting the Solar System is also a poem about an absent father; a poem about Marie Curie’s achievements is also a poem about a failed relationship.” The poems evoke the wonder of the cosmos and the joys of everyday life. They take us to the stars, and bring us back to earth, and we are invited along the way to visit other times and other lives.

Many of the poems contain striking imagery. In “Mostly Hydrogen,” Jack Martin writes:

Each meadowlark song is a series
of green sparks. Oh, vastness,
I’ve forgotten how to be where I am.

In “Almost Certainly a Time Traveler,” Jarod K. Anderson muses:

I think my bones remember, even if I don’t.
My teeth feel like time traveler’s teeth.
Temporality skitters along my femur
Like centipedes on a fallen branch.

Some of the poems connect the past to the present. “Apocatastasis” by Jennifer Crow speculates:

Given time enough, that egg will unbreak itself.
Everything, Plato says, wants to go back
to the perfect state in which it began, so perhaps
Atlantis even now prepares to rise …

Many of the poems offer sly, sarcastic, or playful humor. “Fay Ajzenberg-Selove (1926–2010)” by Jessy Randall contains the lines:

No women’s bathroom in the science building.
“I’ll use the men’s,” I said.
I didn’t escape the Nazis

to let a urinal scare me. …

“Quantum Entanglement” by Ken Poyner notes: “We look out of the portal / Looking at ourselves looking / At us through a portal.”

In “The Three Laws of Poetics,” Stewart C. Baker advises:

… no poet should
set out to harm, or
through inaction,
cause a poem to be harmed …

And there is much more. There are wry observations about the road not taken. A woman named Nancy turns into a giantess. Poets explore our desires for connection with loved ones who have passed, and our yearning to know just enough of the future to make our lives easier. Offering a variety of moods and topics, The Heartbeat of the Universe is a wide-ranging collection which, at the same time, hangs together thematically. Entertaining, multi-layered, and, quite simply, an enjoyable read.

—Lisa Timpf

The Second Stop Is Jupiter by upfromsumdirt

(Wayne State University Press, 2017). 129 pp. Paperback $19.95. https://amazon.com/Second-Stop-Jupiter-Upfromsumdirt-Davis/dp/0814350534

The Second Stop Is Jupiter is a major work of literature that also happens to be SpecPo. The publisher describes it as a “collection of mythological, Afrofuturist, and surrealist poems” but it goes beyond including slipstream, references across timestreams, and across cultures which combine to make it feel like world-building. Perhaps the author is building a bridge for us to enter his alternate universe that coexists with ours.

The book is organized in three sections that easily could have been two full collections and a chapbook. The first section is titled “I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This But.” The section is a wild ride across space, time, and the author’s subjective universe. The other sections are more focused. The book as a whole is as immersive as thinking in a foreign language. Part one is intermittently structured around exploration of the solar system, and at other times the connection of ancient mythographies. Part two explores stories of Fayre Gabbro. Part three is a denouement. From Part one, “The Hero With An African Face”:

take this once-in-a-lifetime adulation and nurture it
on gridirons & hardwoods sponsored by Wilson &
Adidas but     in real life       the Black Soul
is just a construct of White Guilt for I was born
    not a soul       but a living body

From “Rocket No. 9 To Venus”:

at the next shooting star make a legal u-turn;
there is hydrazine at the next ejecta / a full moon
   in diaspora;
refuel then resume travel;
carry forth for 30,000 light-years;
then carry on for a lifetime:

The major triumph of the book is treating all cultures similarly. Instead of being a book by a person living in one silo, it is a book about an American black living in the world, a world with Asians, Africans, Middle Easterns, Europeans, Indigenous Americans, Caribbeans, even white Americans, and embracing them all as part of the modern world that spawned upfromsumdirt. He demonstrates significant knowledge of the mythology of all these groups.

The book includes linguistic and typographical explosions on a par with Alfred Bester, but expressing the black experience with a richness that might take me years to mine in-depth. Font sizes are variable, punctuation is elastic, boldface and italics travel below the stanzas like gophers. The most extreme of the typographical experiments would be difficult to reproduce in this format. Here is the smallest taste from “The Astral Black Baedeker”:

but every known apocalypse (as of yet)        has a sequel
                                                                         / ghost stories

Upfromsumdirt is not creating speculative worlds for the reader. He is taking the reader on a tour of his own world, using speculative references to connect his black world to other worlds. The pantheons, and the cultures foreign to me, are not made up as they might be in some speculative works. They are right here on earth and I am ignorant of them, less so for having read this book.

The book is full of high vocabulary, a wide range of allusions, and a strong voice set on expressing black Afro-futurism. Here is a partial list of allusions, gods, or words I had to look up: Elegba, Oshun, egungun, Thutmose, Olodumare, Alkebulan, Fantomah, rugaba, kraal, Sundiata, Auset, Aché, chimurenga, jugendstil, Chukwu, oscine, mzimu, nyctophilia, baldachin, tenebrescence, goetic, odalisque, Mammatus, keloid, tephra, gélé, hypergolic, Juok, calyx, farraginous, Ogbunabali, Anikulapo, soucriant, virago, Nyame, Uhlanga. It would make me happy if readers know a lot more of these words and references than me. This is not to say he doesn’t use made up marvelous words such as mythematist, africadabra. There is also a healthy splash of profanity.

In addition to the mythological references, there are science references, gaming references, SF references, and more. For example, one poem explores the common experience of Star Trek Commander Sisko and folk hero John Henry. Here are other examples; from “Spaceship For Sale”:

it felt good when Starfleet degreed
you, but what’s a PhD in astromystics
to the amoebas in your motherboards
baptized in nanobots?
        --the future is hypnagogic!

From “This Kiln Isn’t For Everyone”:

the doggerel black womb is red dwarf / a star
collapsing into kiln / my mouth / a centaur seeking
your center of skin / an imbecile’s orbit / the sweltering
genesis swirling just under breast / our love, My Love,
isn’t for everyone. we are Nephilim / bareboned & Nubian

The second book of the collection is “The Girl with the Frantz Fanon Tattoo.” The girl is Fayre Gabbro, a creation of upfromsumdirt in his career as a graphic artist. Fayre is an ancient spelling of fair and fare. Gabbro is a type of dark basaltic rock that often lines ocean basins. The first of the poems connects Gabbro to the sea with references to mermaids, a sea-slug, basalt, and seafoam. The titles of thirty-seven of the thirty-eight poems in the section include Gabbro’s name and almost every poem goes a different direction bound at the center by her. From “The Fever Dreams Of Fayre Gabbro”:

dandelions dream themselves
on fire for her / the look of love

there is ligature and there is literature and
when we are bound we are both

cherubs in the ashes / satyre conjoined
in the science they share /

From “Fayre Gabbro Meets Her Maker”:

elevate me in status the tongue-in-between;
the black & blue roan your nouns ride upon
with the forlorn fable of Schrödinger’s fate
for inside your calyx of verse—

i am shorn & unshorn

While Gabbro is most often a mythological figure/goddess, she fits many roles and contexts such as these successive poems of SF and high fantasy. From “Fayre Gabbro In The Fenestra”:

I’m as nude as a quasar
on the floor of my gundam
spread-eagle in the peonies
my thoughts a spiraling galaxy
of poppies & chrysanthemums
even my railgun is marble & pearl

From “Fayre Gabbro & The Trickster God Dossier”:

the goblin king, injured and hiding
within the bush with hellhounds hot in abundance
turns to his small companion, the child Gabbro,
for whom is his charge and helps cover his escapes,
taught her he did in all the ways of The Whimsical World

The last and shortest section of the book is titled “The Underground Rubaiyat” and it begins with a lengthy prose poem titled “Tangerine Tubman”:

Truth be told: Harriet Tubman
is my Lord & Savior. for who
abandons Joy when it topples
them? Isn’t this how Genocide
is overcome / how Apocalypse
is overturned? this braiding of
ascension into world-ending
dystopia.

After that poem the credits (acknowledgments) run, and three more poems follow like a post-credit scene, including one more about Fayre Gabbro. They give the reader a chance to catch their breath, a chance much needed. In the end, this is not a book for everyone, but I believe it will be studied for years to come. It is endlessly inventive, like spending two hours in a creative maelstrom. If that sounds appealing, you might be the audience.

—Herb Kauderer

When Chaugnar Wakes: The Collected Poetry and Other Works of Frank Belknap Long, ed. Perry M. Grayson

(Tsathoggua Press, Australia, ). 231 pp. Hardcover $35 plus shipping; ebook $4. https://tsathogguapress.com

When Chaugnar Wakes collects poetry from perhaps the longest-lived of the Lovecraft circle: Frank Belknap Long, 1901–1994, who lived long enough to attend modern tributes to the work of the Weird Tales crew, and was given both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards for Lifetime Achievement. This collection takes work from his book In Mayan Splendor, and from other collections of his poetry, including poetry appearing in such poetry anthologies as Fire and Sleet and Candlelight. In addition, it gives us snippets of Long’s work in the amateur press and in the pulps in which he worked as both a writer and an editor until they gave way to the modern SF/F/H magazines and publishing houses. The title refers to one of the poems, which references Chaugnar Faugn, one of Long’s contributions to the pantheon of the Great Old Ones. I will quote from “The Inland Sea” to give a taste of the atmosphere his work achieves:

In icy shallows polar lilies grow
Which sunder to reveal Jurassic clay;
A bullet-head with motions weird and slow
Precedes a bulk which drives the wolves away:
A dark and monstrous lizard shape that glides
Upon the waters with the inland tides.

For fans of the Weird Tales crew of poets, as well as fans of fantasy and mythologically based poetry, this collection is a real treat. Long mostly wrote formalist poetry, much of it in sonnet form, but also wrote prose poetry and fiction, essays, and related works. I have not read any of his novels, but am definitely familiar with a good deal of his poetry, and my hardcover copy of In Mayan Splendor is on my shelf of treasured Arkham House books. I intend to add the hardcover of When Chaugnar Waits to it. Here are the last two stanzas from the title poem:

When Chaugnar wakes, its mindless hate
Will send it voyaging far;
It may set Sirius adrift,
Or seek a humbler star.

A humbler star with satellites,
Small planets in its train:
And that is why I kneel and kneel
Before Great Chaugnar’s fane.

Most modern readers of cosmic horror have not read his earlier books of poetry, but may have seen some of these poems in slightly more modern publications such as Omniumgathium and Crypt of Cthulhu. Other readers will be surprised to learn that he was still alive and writing up through the 1980’s.

The advantage of buying this book is to have all of Long’s poetry in one place, as well as poetry written about him by his Weird Tales pals. It is a real link for the contemporary reader to the bygone era of the pulps and amateur presses and one of their best poets and most valued members. Some of the poems and excerpts from other works of Long’s give the reader a good idea of his relationship with other Weird Tales writers, and for historically minded readers, it's helpful to have this information in context. Fans of formalist verse can easily see the inspiration for modern formalists in the genres of the fantastic in Long’s work. I can highly recommend this compilation for not only completists but also for fans of lush language and skillfully wrought fantasy and horror formalist poetry.

—Denise Dumars

Mars Maundering by Denise Dumars

(Space Cowboy Books, 2024) $5 12pgs https://spacecowboybooks.bandcamp.com/merch

Dumars’ “Maundering” — defined on the inside cover as “to wander aimlessly, either physically or with words, done crankily” — is a concise 11 poems, each 11 lines. I’m not sure what the significance of 11 is, but it works, both for the length of this collection and the length of each poem.

Each poem is an untitled musing on Mars, full of imagery and references to color: rust, beating heart, butterscotch, caliginous (I had to look that one up — “dark, dim, or misty”)…it’s an extensive list that evokes new images of the red planet.

Writing about Phobos and Deimos, Mars’ moons, Dumars writes

“Oh lumpy, lumpy moons!
no match for our Death-Star perfect
Luna. More like uncoordinated children
always banging the screen door
begging for strawberry Jell-O…”

Followed by a poem that begins “Ares is an asshole,” varying the playful tone with references to history. Some of the poems, like the section quoted above, focus on actual geography and climate, others touch on mythology. One of my favorite lines ties the author to Mars

“When I was little, my father told me
that our name meant that we were from Mars”

Dumars weaves the imagery with a deft hand, each poem rife with references, several of which tested my own knowledge of mythology and vocabulary. Throughout all the poems, there is a playfulness, a whimsical seriousness that captures the character of the “little green men from mars” narrative — no, it’s not true, couldn’t be true…but what about…? that keeps us all turning our gaze up to Mars.

My favorite poem in the collection ends with a punchline: the Martians invite us to come back, “to come home”

“ all is forgiven — just don’t leave
your old junkers on the front lawn.”

Chapbooks are excellent avenues to explore specific topics, and, almost like buying a single in the days when you couldn’t cherry pick your songs digitally, chapbooks offer an opportunity for a quick highlight from someone’s more extensive work. Dumars’ work here is a perfect fit for the chapbook form — succinct and firing on all cylinders. It’s an amusing, enlightening, and thoroughly engaging read.

—John Reinhart

Unwilling: Poems of Horror and Darkness by Gerri Leen

(self-published, 2024) $4.99 102pgs, https://www.amazon.com/Unwilling-Horror-Darkness-Gerri-Leen-ebook/dp/B0CZQ64THS

Gerri Leen’s latest collection contains 88 pages of poetry playing on fantastical and dark themes. There is a lot of death and things hidden in the proverbial shadows, all presented in relatively short lyrical form.

Leen twists many familiar myths or images, as in “Medusa Ups Her Game”:

“I’ve abandoned stone for fire
And this time you can watch
As I burn it all down
You’ll long for snakes when this is done”

or “What If It Hurts?”

“I always thought magic would feel good
Bubbly and warm, moving through
My system like a sweet wine
But it stings, sharp little jabs…”

The shifting of the reader’s assumptions is where these poems find their sweet spot. Most of the poems are free verse with first person narratives that strike a conversational tone, as if the narrator is sharing this all over a cup of tea or while standing at the office water cooler. That lightness in tone contrasts to the blood and ravens everywhere else.

Because of the consistency of her poetic form, I found that poems deviating from that stood out — there’s a villanelle and a few where the stanzas are punctuated with single lines that move the poem, a few written in couplets. These variations helped change the pace of the collection.

Readers looking for clever and novel approaches that shift their relationship to old stories, opening dark avenues down familiar lanes, will appreciate this collection. And the stylistic consistency provides a kind of comfort; the reader knows what to expect. I found myself wanting to see the poetic voice stretch and surprise me as much as the concepts in the poems.

—John Reinhart

Unwelcome Guests by David C. Kopaska-Merkel

(Weird House Press, Central Point, Oregon, 2024). Paperback $16.95. https://www.weirdhousepress.com/

“Unwelcome Guests” abounds with aliens, vampires, werewolves, sea monsters, and other nameless creatures. Many poems, like “Medusa Buys a Car,” imagine how these creatures would tackle the challenges of the modern world. Poems that focus on the same creature tend to be grouped together, allowing each poem to transition seamlessly into the next.

One of the shortest poems, “shrill cries,” is just three lines long:

shrill cries
of joy, we thought
not our fault

The first two lines could be interpreted as: “Shrill cries — of joy, we thought.” They could also be interpreted as: “Shrill cries; we thought of joy.” That is, upon hearing shrill cries, the speakers thought of joyful things, suggesting that they derive pleasure from the pain of others. This imbues the last line with new meaning: it is not the speakers’ fault that they are sadistic by nature.

Nearly as brief as “shrill cries,” “Premature Visitation” is just as effective:

your disembodied self—
an omen of what, I wonder:
you aren’t even dead yet;
the hole’s dug, but
I’m still waiting on the axe;
supply chain, Amazon says

The power of this poem derives not only from its compactness, but from its imagery, which adds credibility to the narrative. Instead of telling us that the speaker plans to kill the addressee, the poem shows us the axe, the dug hole, and the email from Amazon, providing evidence for the speaker’s murderous intentions, thereby compelling us to believe in them. While lines 2-6 contain standalone sentences, the first line contains only a sentence fragment, “your disembodied self.” Since this fragment is disconnected from the other parts of a sentence, it is disembodied, just like the addressee’s ghost itself.

Other poems, like “Antiquarian Research,” deal with death in a more light-hearted way:

It wasn’t so much the cadaverous curator,
nor the restless stirring under his grimy coat,
not his penetrating, silent stare
punctuated by obscure ominosities,
they were nothing new, but you,
under glass, final scream still on your lips,
and the tome from which you’d read,
blood-warm, squirming in my hands,
its many mouths snarling and spitting,
and the sound it made when I flung
it in the fire, gave me quite a turn.

The irony of the final phrase, “gave me quite a turn,” amplifies that of the speaker dismissing the curator’s repulsive appearance as “nothing new.” This creates humor, complementing the alliteration in phrases like “cadaverous curator” and “obscure ominosities,” which reinforce a sense of playfulness. Indeed, the poem teases us with one image at a time, keeping the subject of the first “it” a secret until the very last line.

Unwelcome as they are, the guests in this collection draw us in, urging us to spend time with them. The more we do, the greater our appreciation of their unique complexities.

—Ryan Tan

Distilled from Water: Speculative Poetry About Water by Herb Kauderer

(Written Image, 2024).16 pp, ebook $10. https://www.herbkauderer.com/poetry-chapbooks--other-books.html

I’ve often thought that issues of Eye to the Telescope would make wonderful chapbooks: they’re thematic, they’re varied, and they hint at greater potential depth with the subject without subjecting you to it.

Kauderer’s latest selection of 78 poems spans a mere 16 pages, two of which are the cover and acknowledgements, all centered on the theme of water. The poems here are not all short. Though they tend to brevity (even one to two lines), a small handful run two columns, covering an entire page.

Those few longer poems (What Neighbors Do, Life’s Goal, Life’s Meaning, The Place Between) are narrative poems and their stories are both clear and engaging with a gentle touch of humor. These poems lean on the story rather than poetic twist.

The next day he sailed out and
found the spaceship,
no bigger than a schoolbus
and immune to sonar and other
sciency things…

They swarmed him boat
lifting heads and appendages to communicate…

(What Neighbors Do)

I enjoyed imagining how these would look appear as graphic poems, much like John Philip Johnson’s collections, where the artwork doesn’t simply elaborate on the text but adds layers to the stories.

The shorter poems pack more punch, as shorter poems should.

viewpoint

phosphorescent fish
form math equations perceived
only from orbit

I find that good short poems necessitate both a clarity of thought on the poet’s part and simultaneously pleasant chasms where the reader’s imagination can traverse swaying rope bridges. Kauderer captures his watery themes with particular grace in his shorter works here. He describes exactly that process at the start of “sky gift”:

the lazy void
an emptiness decorated with clouds
affords a sense of expectation…

At the end of the collection, Kauderer explains that these poems were written as a celebration of the North American Science Fiction Convention held in Buffalo, New York, “at the tip of Lake Erie, where the Niagara River begins its journey to the Mighty Falls of Niagara.” Like a river with its numerous tributaries, water takes many different forms throughout these poems and, as a reader, I enjoyed locating the streams and feeling their connection to the larger flow. Fans of Kauderer’s work, short speculative poetry, and chapbook connoisseurs will be particularly rewarded with Distilled from Water.

— John Reinhart

Giant Robot Poems (Middle West Press, 2024)

$19.99 http://www.middlewestpress.com/2024/05/in-new-anthology-sci-fi-war-poets.html

When I picked up Giant Robot Poems I admit that I did not read much into the subtitle: On Mecha-Human Science, Culture & War. I anticipated a collection of SF/F poems centered around robots. I love robots, and there’s lot of jabber about so-called AI these days, not to mention companions like the robotic dogs from Boston Dynamics, and spinoffs that not only run and jump, but spew flames too.

But the 165 pages of 92 poems and seven pages of discussion and writing prompts demonstrated a much wider range than I anticipated. Perhaps colored by editor Randy Brown’s military experience, the 66 poets included in this anthology range from folks regularly published in Star*Line and other SF/F publications to military veterans and many poets unfamiliar to me.

The first poem surprised me, a poem seemingly counter to mechanistic themes:

I offer you these flowers…
…against the machinery
of my flesh, they writhe, they are alive…

(“Flower Power,” by Callie S. Blackstone)

One familiar theme, robots becoming sentient or rebelling, gets a twist in “Lucked Out” by Dana Jensen. “It builds itself. / Heals itself.” In succinct, full-stopped lines, Jensen conjures the story of military robots who take control of themselves — yet don’t turn on their makers: “Loyal. / But now by choice.”

One of the pleasant potentials with any anthology is the range of style and voice available to the reader. This collection has range, from J.D. Harlock’s alliterative “The Blasted Brigade’s Ballistic Bio-Armour,” to Vaughn A. Jackson’s tribute to Percy Shelley’s poem “OZYM4ND14$,” references to Frankenstein and golems, from haiku to longwinded poems on so-called AI chatbots. Any one of these themes might be worn thin if it were the focus of an entire collection itself. Here, the variations on a theme are varied enough that the theme is heightened.

Throughout the collection, the relationship between human and machine, maker and creation, are regular underlying themes. Having taught Frankenstein, I can easily imagine these poems as a companion to such reading, particularly in relationship to new technological steps that open again the ethical questions if not existential, philosophical, and theological questions of creating consciousness or the semblance of consciousness.

The prompts at the end of the book also connect and highlight some themes from the poems and include thoughtful prompts useful for both the individual reader/writer and for classroom or group settings. For instance, “write about a mechanical object from the perspective of a plant” (a prompt fleshed out [wired up?] over an entire page) references four poems in the collection the reader might refer to or derive inspiration from.

The anthology is well worth a read and then another, and the themes will interest readers already interested in speculative poetry as well as poets and readers looking for updated commentary on a broad range of human-robot issues.

— John Reinhart

The Infant Vine by Isabella G. Mead

(University of Western Australia Press, 2024) 76 pages of poetry (88 pages total). $17 https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/the-infant-vine

The collection starts with “I am walking the river’s slow edge” and the theme of edges proliferates like ripples throughout the rest of the book. The edges of life and death, of what is and “What will remain?…// the unsteady march of ants?” The desperate efforts of a young child to live; human civilization at the heart of destruction. And sometimes despite those efforts, we suffer and lose.

The 76 pages of poems drift into the scientific with ease in light turns. Many of the poems directly compare humanity to the natural world, leaning on scientific distinctions that highlights the rich depth of nature, as in “Megafauna”:

… Less familiar
are the lumbering megaherbivores devouring

sweet malus, elasmotherium bowing their heads
beneath the weight of myth …

While poets have celebrated the natural world for ages upon ages, these poems are deeply personal and project into a future of uncertainty for the author’s children. Mead obits the premise that we’re all, as she describes a child, “miniature planet(s).” The macrocosm is also on display in the microcosm in many if not most of the poems, and this is where the themes of parenting and birth shine through brightest.

“The problem begins when we forget our births.
Trees ignite out of season.
Left unchecked, they blister and blaze
like baby stars.”

(“Genesis”)

Mead’s style varies through the book; some poems take shapes across the page (“The Alligator,” for one), others are blocks of prose poetry, others short lines and short stanzas, and several ekphrastics. The publisher’s website says there are “fantastical elements woven throughout” the collection. While true, readers looking for classical fantasy or science fiction elements will find few poems that lean heavily that direction, most clearly in “The Wing.”

A mother’s wing is very small. Too small
to excise or to see with the human eye.

Sometimes I feel mine straining
against my shirt …

But for what it does not address of swords, dragons, and spaceships, it revels in hard science, in reflections on nature that don’t just celebrate, but remind that we too are megafauna. The poems ponder deeply and remain enjoyable to read. My favorite is the short “Remnants [Morning Walk]” after Karike Ashworth’s “Who Gives a Crap” (2021–2022) that ends

Children form committees to restore wind-torn
petals. We collect and salvage. Slowly, we recover.

Ultimately, this is a collection that celebrates movement: change is reflected evermore in change again. We are the centers of the universe — so many centers: “Dear Jocelyn, your work reminds me of the unassailable fact: only when light passes through the eye do we see each other.” (“Letters of Jocelyn”).

— John Reinhart

Mexicans on the Moon by Pedro Iniguez

(Space Cowboy Books, 2024). 69 pages, paperback. $12.99. https://bookshop.org/p/books/mexicans-on-the-moon-speculative-poetry-from-a-possible-future-pedro-iniguez/21672726?ean=9798989630806

Mexicans on the Moon carries the subtitle “Speculative Poetry from a Possible Future” but that may be an incomplete description. The world/universe is destroyed a time or two before the book has concluded. A few of those poems are “Hollow Earth,” “Option One,” “Ambassador,” “The First Jokes as Told by Budding Martian Lifeforms,” and “Gods of the Landfill” all from the second half of the book.

Portraits of smoking camels and big-eared vermin.
The emblems of emerald suns and yellow seashells.
Earthlings, the Martians discerned, were but primitive savages;
zealots who came to the landfills
offering their waste as tribute to cruel gods;

(“Gods of the Landfill”)

This book is a major work of mainstream poetry for which it is absolutely essential that it also be SpecPo. This takes the present into futures that are by turns absurdist, poignant, disastrous, humorous, nihilist, and every once in a while, sweet. A significant number of poems have endings so powerful that it would be unfair to quote them for risk of spoiling them for first-time readers. The humor can be bitter and political as well, such as “Resting Glitch Face” with its situational comedy, and its scorn of political incorrectness as the narrator’s “3D-printed girlfriend tried to kill me” (10) for mistreatment.

The book is sometimes political right from the start with “American as Atomic Pie” which begins: “Simple instructions for those in power and on the go:/ Start with drilling into the crust.” (3) and includes “Take one stick of marginalized people and melt over skillet.” (3)

At times the political elements hide below the surface only to reemerge in poems such as “Transhumanist Classroom” and “The Things That Killed Us: A History through Art” that are damning.

The book is structured in four sections that present a somewhat chronological future history. The sections are “PART 1: EARTH”, “PART 2: FRONTIERS” which is focused on the title concept of Mexicans on the moon, “PART 3: FUTURES” which contains various SpecPo themes, and “PART 4: AFTERMATH” which begins with the war between Earth and Mars, and ends with the post-apocalyptic “A Black Hole is a Melting Pot That Will Make Us Whole.”

While the book includes its share of grand scale and cosmic SpecPo, it also includes small-scale and personal stakes poems. “Babysitter of Tomorrow” is about choosing an “ideal Augmented Reality babysitter for the night:” (9). “Holograms from Beyond” is about one person’s grave marker (12). “Two Quarters for a Rocket Ride” is about the dreams of one child (15).

While the book often includes big concepts, and small piercings, it also includes strong imagery both lucid and less lucid. Some examples are:

At weddings, moon dust is kicked up
in a plume of confetti.
Soda bottles are dragged
behind lunar rovers: Just Married.
The mariachi’s song carries across the magnificent desolation.

(“Mexicans on the Moon”)

At night, they sleep like sardines wrapped in blankets,
and wake to wide blue sols.
They know red is the color of passion, yes,
but also of hope; that one day,
here too shall rise great pyramids.

(“Martiacans”)

tiny portraits
stamp waxy cartons
and drop into putrid trash bins

(“Martian Milk”)

One day I realized your tears spawned
big cities and thriving societies,
aquamarine seas, lush hills and sprawling valleys.
Little people flagged me, spoke in our common tongue.
They wanted to meet their creator […]

(“From Your Tears, Life”)

café de olla, tacos al pastor, champurrado,
grilled chiles, sweat, tequila,
car exhaust, petrol, sewage,
melted rubber, gunpowder, ozone,

(“The Scents in Mexico City a Tourist May Encounter as Chaos Erupts”)

The moments flash before you:
seeing the first spacewalk; the chinampas over Lake Texcoco;
the sacking of Rome; bearded men hunting game with atlatls.

(“Confessions of a Disintegrated Soldier”)

This is an intriguing book which includes poems in a variety of modes. Multiple poems may leave you feeling as if your legs have been knocked out from underneath you due to their strong endings. As a whole, it is likely to be an award nominee, and previously unpublished individual poems are likely to receive accolades. While the four sections could easily have been separate chapbooks, there is an overall gestalt built from the sections, and varieties of poetic expression. In the end, this is a special book. You may want to give it a go.

— Herb Kauderer

Micropoetry for Microplanets by Brian U. Garrison (illus. by Gowri Savoor)

(Space Cowboy Books 2024) 12 pp. (unpaginated) Paperback (mini handmade chapbook) $5. https://spacecowboybooks.bandcamp.com/merch/micropoetry-for-microplanets-chapbook

Brian Garrison’s Micropoetry for Microplanets contains just eleven poems. Each four-line poem is flanked by a textured illustration and accompanied by a scrap of italicized scientific data. The subject of the first nine poems are individual microplanets like Pluto, Ceres, and the adorably-named Makemake. A footnoted table and a group of reprinted NASA images serve as a two-page appendix. The final two poems are odes to all the as-yet unnamed and undetected microplanets.

One named micro (or “dwarf”) planet, for example, is Haumea. This dwarf planet shares a name with the Hawaiian goddess of fertility (and is also known by the aliases “Santa” and “2003 EL61”). Not much of a dwarf, Haumea’s girth rivals Pluto’s. Steadfastly circling Haumea are two moons, each named after the goddess Haumea’s mythological daughters, Namaka and Hi’iaka.

By the way, Haumea is not the only dwarf planet with daughters. Sister dwarf planets Makemake, Eris, Gonggong, Quaoar, Orcus, and Salacia also have at least one moon.

Back to Haumea, she holds the record of being one of the Solar System’s fastest-spinning objects. Although oval-shaped, she twists about so quickly – a complete rotation every four hours! – that the resulting distortions make her resemble a football. Disfigured with twirling, she resides deep in the Kuiper belt. And on top of all of that, Haumea sports recently-discovered rings; a fashionably-dressed dwarf planet at that! Perhaps a bit vain.

This brief background helps one appreciate the poem Garrison offers for Haumea, which reads:

Rushing ’round the ring:
Oblong, dizzy Haumea.
Edgy narcissist.

The marketing blurb for this chapbook suggests that the poems are “suitable for middle-schoolers as they learn about the solar system.” It acknowledges: “Perspectives and layers in the poetry also provide depth for adult readers to ponder.”

Astrological poetry which blends science and lyricism are relatively unwonted, but felicitous. The core human impulse for doing science, after all, is the sense of wonder. And wonder is a wonderful (ha!) generator of verse. Micropoetry fits microplanets like a glove.

If I still taught middle schoolers, I would not hesitate to buy one of these chapbooks for every student in the class. Micopoetry for Microplanets is an inspirational, fun collection of midget-length poems and it is sure to inspire, educate, and excite; a remarkably delightful little book.

— Thomas E. Simmons

Necessary Poisons, by Andrea Blythe

(Interstellar Flight Press, 2024). https://www.interstellarflightpress.com/necessarypoisons.html

In Necessary Poisons, Andrea Blythe offers 30 “found” poems, several of which have been previously published in Cotton Xenomorph, Quail Bell, Rogue Agent, and other venues. In the “Author’s Note,” Blythe notes that found poems are somewhat like “literary collage,” “a collection of words that once existed in another text, where they had an order and a place that suited them just fine.”

The source for Blythe’s collection is Stephen King’s “incomplete epistolary novel The Plant,” which was self-published on King’s website. Blythe notes that the wording of King’s original text “unveiled a vision of a woman troubled by the questions of her own story and how she has been shaped by other peoples’ interpretation of it.”

The tone of many of the poems is dark and somber; for example, “All But Forgotten” states, “. . . the day straightened, / clipping off blunt hope like an obsolete stem.” Yet there is still room for humor. In “The Zenith,” the narrator states, “I ghosted society and ended up / impersonating a dead dog.”

The poems also yield insights that ring true. “A Matter of Transition” contains the lines “ . . . Time / keeps the living and the dead / in its pocket,” and adds, “My life is full of days I’ve junked / in cheap ideas.” Among the powerful stanzas in “This Unforeseen Country,” one of my favorite poems:

… I thought,
the empty world is
not an engine,
but a cradle
filled with small, trembling
things like us.

There are strange images, like those found in “Never the Last Letter”:

We live in an America
of Motel Six parking lots,
the ordinary zenith of hell—
bright and unsolicited.

This is followed later in the poem by “An old album tapping / on the stereo, bloody glass / on the floor.” Yet the strangeness almost feels familiar, as though the images are tugging us toward some realization, providing a key to unlock places we did not know existed—but hinting, rather than stating. As the poem “The Book” notes, “Even I don’t know / what I mean.”

Blythe varieties the stanza lengths and formats, which keeps the poems from feeling repetitive.

Necessary Poisons has a certain charm about it, blending darkness, humor, obscurity, and illumination. The collection includes some delightful phrasing. Worth checking out.

— Lisa Timpf

Unwelcome Guests by David C. Kopaska-Merkel, cover art by Skinny Gaviar

(Weird House Press, 2024). 126 pp., $16.95 paperback. https://weirdhousepress.com/products/unwelcome-guests-by-david-c-kopaska-merkel

This is a generously-sized collection of mostly short to very short poems (almost all under a page) showcasing Kopaska-Merkel's light touch with both humor and horror -- often in the same poem. There is very little formal verse here, aside from haiku and fibs. The tone is narrative, and the poems themselves are compulsively snackable.

Even in the speculative subgenre, where markets proliferate, Kopaska-Merkel's work has appeared in so many places that it's impossible to keep up with it all. The length of Unwelcome Guests allows groups of his poems to enter into conversation with each other, even if said poems (often haiku) originally appeared in publications years apart.

The overall titles of the collection's two main sections -- Opening Night in Carcosa and The Martian Body Bag -- divide it roughly into horror and SF, though some of the SF works are at least as horrific as anything in the first portion. The cosmic darkness of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle pervades both sections equally:

Waiting in the wings
for its cue,
something with gibbous wings,
goatish eyes, and rugose skin

("Opening Night In Carcosa")

Others examine traditional monsters (vampires and werewolves in particular), through multiple and unexpected angles. Several are persona poems -- notably, a few of these have pitch-perfect feminine voices. Medusa gets her moment in the spotlight, dealing with an obnoxious car salesman. A she-werewolf in withdrawal tries cleaning up the evidence with quality shampoo. And Death herself steals a pitiless judge from a coffee shop, leaving patrons none the wiser.

Time travel's many paradoxes and miscalculations inspire several poems in the SF section, though Kopaska-Merkel's own scientific background shines through in such poems as "Ecological Niche":

the ichthyologist grabs it,
but more slowly than the wide
epiphyte-encrusted mouth
opens below

In fact, there's probably something in this collection for just about any reader of speculative works, whether or not one makes a habit of reading poetry. It's an easy habit to acquire here. Kopaska-Merkel's colloquial voice keeps these lines flowing along from page to page, even when one had only intended to read one or two poems. Unwelcome Guests should be a welcome guest on any speculative verse bookshelf.

— Ann K. Schwader

Wheeling, Yet Not Free by Alan Katerinsky

(Written Image, 2024). E-book $10.

Alan Katerinsky’s poetry collection Wheeling, Yet Not Free includes over 60 poems, just under a third of which have been previous published in Micropoetry, FrostFire Worlds, Bewildering Stories, Scifaikuest, and other venues. While many of the poems are in the range of 3 to 5 lines, there are some longer pieces as well.

Below the title, the book’s cover page includes the notation “Poetry, speculative, fannish, humorous, romantic, and considering mortality,” indicating the multi-faceted subject matter covered by the poems. Time, aging, love, gravity, death and dying, and hard science versus soft science are among the topics explored.

Though not exclusively composed of speculative poems, the collection does contain a number of poems which would be classified as spec. Among these is “Anisoptera,” which includes the stanza, “Information swarm / Clandestine drone eyes compile / Secret ‘Bug Reports.’ ”

Katerinsky’s poems demonstrate the power of brevity. Many of the shorter entries pack a punch, inspire thought, or prompt a nod of recognition or a laugh. For example, “Proper Form” notes, “When the gods pull the / rug out from under someone, / it’s done with both hands.”

Katerinsky’s knack for humor isn’t limited to the shorter poems. In “Outlook,” he juxtaposes momentous feats like “diverting the course of mighty rivers” with more mundane concerns like “Will we have time for lunch?”

“Looking Downward” depicts space tourists using a powerful telescope. Some use it to view the stars, while “Others look downward and say … / ‘I can see my house from here.’” In “After Ever After,” Katerinsky uses fantasy and fairy tale imagery to describe a relationship, noting “The decades blur the noble place / where hung the sword about my waist,” and adding, later in the poem, “Our castle lists, its crenels creak, / Embrasures shake, and merlons squeak.”

Amid the humor, there is also powerful phrasing. “Grace” opens with the lines, “The chords resonate and sound / on the superstrings that hold / apart the worlds.” “Barrels” finishes with the lines:

I feel I’m over the Falls
in a barrel
falling for eons, terrified
of the sound of my
explosive exit.

“Cave Art,” the collection’s final poem, includes the stanza, “Once, here, a man / breathed, bled and spat / defiance into the eye of time.”

Concisely insightful, Wheeling, Yet Not Free contains pithy observations, strange imaginings, and more than a few laughs.

— Lisa Timpf