Grub: The Misadventures of a Miscreant and his Associates on Alt-Earth by Kate Boyes. BookBaby (https://store.bookbaby.com/), September 19, 2024). 80 pp. $12 paperback. ISBN 979-8-35096-948-1 (also available on Kindle).

Review by Ruth Berman

Grub by Kate Boyes is a collection of satirical, political poetry that is both horrific and funny. Set in an alternate universe in the summer of 1946, a rip in the fabric of space alters all life on Earth. A criminal called GRUB manages to slip from another universe and get itself elected president of the United States.

The book’s preface and the notes on the individual poems explain in mock-scholarly prim precision how the alt-universe differs from ours – chiefly in the eruption of humanoid (“ogres, satyrs, gorgons, ghouls, vampires, etc.”) monsters. Any resemblance between the GRUB and its supporters to politicians in this world-stream is not entirely coincidental. Sometimes the portraits of the supporters are done in a mock-Mother-Goose-doggerel simplicity, as with “In a Rare Sober Moment, the Poorly-Disguised Ogre Brett Kavanaugh Reflects on His Past”:

Here's to my youth –
callous, uncouth –
to girls I made live in fear;
here’s to the boof,
eschewing truth,
and wielding power with a sneer.

The scholarly note attached discusses the gradual process by which a seeming human turns out to be an ogre, remarking that although doing the research is distasteful, “the research has made it possible to recognize budding human-adjacent ogres with a high level of accuracy.”

The longest and most ambitious of the poems is “Leaked Government Documents Confirm Time Traveler Visited U. S. 2015, Reveal His dire Warning.” This striking free-verse poem is the plea of the time traveler from 2209 to the people of his past to beware of the ominous GRUB, but his warnings are largely unheard, being written in a language heavily influenced by an internet slang that has heavily changed the language in the intervening years. The lines are, of course, as incomprehensible to readers of the book as to the alt-Earth inhabitants, but the scholarly apparatus includes a prose translation – working out that the poem actually says what the translation says it says is an exercise of probably considerable amusement for a reader.

Highly recommended. (Maybe depending on whether your political stance agrees.)

Ruth Berman was conceived in Texas, born in Kentucky, and resident in Minnesota most of the rest of the time. As a middle child in a family that went in for reading aloud, she grew up hearing and speaking a wide variety of books, such as Mother Goose, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, Louisa May Alcott, or Christopher Morley. Her work has appeared in The Saturday Review, Amazing, Asimov's SF, Weird Tales, The Poet Dreaming in the Artist's House, Burning with a Vision, Aliens and Lovers, The Tolkien Scrapbook, New Worlds, Shadows, Mathenauts, Xanadu, and many other magazines and anthologies. Her book, Dear Poppa: The World War II Berman Family Letters (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1997), was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. [Biography from Autumn World ]

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