This page contains reviews of books, chapbooks, anthologies, and collections containing or related to poetry within the SF/F/H/spec genres.
Books on this page were published in 2018.
The Bone-Joiner by Sandi Leibowitz.
(Sycorax Press, 2018). 115 pages. Paperback. $12.95.
In her first collection, Sandi Leibowitz gathers together forty-eight of her speculative poems, drawing upon both world mythology and folklore, and her own imagination. Divided into five sections, with each section named for a different poem, the collection is loosely organized by theme—but that theme is not immediately obvious. The poems must be studied and carefully considered, their imagery and language examined.
The first section, for example, is “Witch-Love.” Superficially, it is centered around the theme of love, and love (romantic, filial, parental, et cetera) does indeed play a prominent role in these poems. But look deeper and the theme is not just love, but the creation and destruction perpetuated in the name of that emotion. In “The Bone-Joiner,” the bereaved bring the bones of their loved ones to an unnamed narrator who restores the dead to some semblance of life. In “The Gifts,” two sisters separated by their very natures (one is spring and day, the other forest and night) bring beauty to the world around them, and leave gifts of love for one another. “On Failure’s Wings,” on the other hand, deals with the love (person and feeling) that motivates a Creator and his disappointment in that creation. In the poem “Witch-Love,” a witch successively marries the sea, a stone, the wind, and the night, each time recreating and learning more about her true Self.
Leibowitz crafts whole new worlds in only a few lines, pulling the reader in, and there is no escape even with the last line. Her poems leave indelible impressions, marking the reader’s imagination and memory. Consider these lines from “Sleeping Gypsy”: “But first I will sing to you / of the moon, / the wind-blessed lands of blue trees peopled with silver cubs / that chase the stars each night.” Or this sequence from “One-Winged,” which is based on the classic fairy tale, “The Wild Swans”: “I will not call it curse. / Air was my element. / I breathed blue.”
In The Bone-Joiner, Leibowitz has created a stunning collection which reminds us that the world—every world, real and imagined—is filled with passion, beauty, horror and pain, and that those ideas not only fuel one another, but are often indistinguishable, flowing in and out of one another “in liquid singularity.” Highly recommended.
—Rebecca Buchanan
Dark Matters: New Sci-Fi Poems by Russell Jones.
(Tapsalteerie Press, 2018). 28 pp. Paperback £5.00.
This is a short chapbook by well-known Scottish poet and editor Russell Jones. He has been published in Star*Line, and John Philip Johnson reviewed Jones’ chapbook Spaces of their Own. I reviewed the same chapbook and the anthology he edited, Where Rockets Burn Through: Contemporary Science Fiction Poetry from the UK. Most recently he has been deputy and poetry editor of the SF magazine Shoreline of Infinity, where I believe quite a few of our members have been published. A new anthology, Multiverse: An International Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, coedited by Jones and Rachel Plummer, includes many, many SFPA poets.
Anyhoo, on to the chapbook at hand. Many of poems collected here (8 of 14) are previously unpublished. Only six were published singly in other publications, all in the UK, aside from Star*Line. There’s a wide variety of forms and styles here and a demonstrated adventurousness, playfulness and humor. One poem has been used in an anthology about poetry and comics: Over the Line: An Introduction to Poetry Comics (“Whatever Happened to the Blue Whale in 2302 AD”).
My favorites in this chapbook (in order of appearance) begin with “Dark Horse,” about people transforming into a herd of horses at night. Jones really pulls us into the transformation so that you can feel it in your bones as you read. Also, the use of the double meaning here in the title is seen often in Jones’ poems; familiar phrases and idioms take on a different meaning in the context, which creates a layering or faceting effect.
A found/erasure poem using only the famous quote “That’s one small step for (a) man…” moved me deeply. It is unquotable here, since much of its effect is in the format.
“Dredd” is a “villain”-elle (pun courtesy of Russell Jones himself!), one of my favorite forms, and Jones uses it with great skill for maximum effect.
There is a set of poems called “Pioneer,” which I don’t understand fully, but contains one of the funniest poems, “iii. Relative,” which is a space spoof on a GPS navigator speak when you’ve taken a wrong turn.
This chapbook was a pleasure to read and reread. Highly recommended.
—Diane Severson Mori
Debudaderrah by Robin Wyatt Dunn.
(John Ott, 2018). 153 pp. Paper, $10.00. eBook $3.00.
The publisher is a one-man outfit from California with at least eighteen volumes previously published, and this book was released as an ebook at the same time as the trade paperback. Debudaderrah is a long book of primarily prose poems. On Kobo, the short form blurb for the plot of the book relates that a far-off colony of Earth is visited by “a sentient robot from some Earth which does not yet exist. The robot has orders to eliminate all life it finds but the robot is also human, and has a troubled conscience.”
My name is Debudaderrah. I am 347,000 years old. I am in love with a sun. I am in love with you, my father. I am in love with killing. (94)
Debudaderrah uses multiple viewpoints and takes a concrete hard science future and layers it with myth and spirits and other core elements of humanity; those symbolic leaps that separate us from cool logic machines.
They kept the god-robot in the freezer (10)
When a poem asks
Do you remember? . . . What part of me was erased? (63)
every one of us can feel the pull of the diminishing past that anchors us with shadows that pull at us too hard, that will not leave us free, and the knowledge that on one level the past exists as no more than an absence of light obscuring the fascism of historians.
Everything I was is gone but new mes keep popping up; it is identity
that is the pain, in whatever form, they must keep emerging, like weather patterns (43)
This book is mythmaking in a concrete hard science future, and creates a tapestry which includes threads of Picasso, Los Angeles, distant space colonies, killer robots, ancient spirits, unwanted voices in the head, dialogue, diatribe, diary, Gilgamesh, Uruk, and more. This is SF poetry with a sense of mystery, of actions unseen like dark planets whose gravitational pulls warp motives in actions unseen, but whose reality and orbits must be deduced without firsthand observation.
I small god, metal agent of my interlocutor my misdirector my home; I small metal man embrace thee with all my heart (54–55)
An overlooked component of the scientific method is that experiments are encouraged to provoke more research and more experiments. This book provokes readers to create their own myths. When they read of “the last scout,” “The launching of the Great Missile,” and the “two lovers, Hiroshi and Sarai . . . nestled beneath the sand of Debudaderrah,” the desire to grant each myth its own book is likely to push readers into fits of reverie. This the author encourages, writing:
Here, please imagine your part of the story (96)
Imagine that the chapters of this book are a disorganized line of saké cups filled randomly with plum wine or sweet grape juice. And just when you find a proper altitude within which to navigate the astral plane, the next cup is full of single-malt scotch, the kind that’s supposed to burn.
You imagine parts in order, but for me they happen all at once (1)
If you are looking for linear narrative verse, or constant lucidity, you are in the wrong place. That the title of the book could easily belong to the Dadaist movement should have tipped you off. Properly you should get whiplash from reading this due to having your reality so frequently recreated. If you like that sort of thing (and I do) this book might be for you.
—Herb Kauderer
Entanglement by David C. Kopaska-Merkel & Kendall Evans.
(Diminuendo Press, 2018). 55 pp. Paper $8.99. Introduction by Bryan Thao Worra.
Entanglement is a handsome slim trade paperback collection of poems by David C. Kopaska-Merkel (hereafter DKM) and Kendall Evans. There are 50 pages of poems including a few short ones, but most of the 27 poems are substantial.
Entanglement, quantum phenomena, or reference to particle physics implying such, are directly mentioned in more than a third of the poems. The macrocosmos and multiverse are mentioned in another third or so. Yet, for me, the book is about viewpoint and perspective. For example, the Rhysling-nominated “The Trajectory of Culture” (36) considers the plight of the Fomalhauts, which is a device for looking at human traditions, especially regarding mail, from a different perspective. I found it pretty damned funny, as I also found “The Bagel Shop Across the Street” (25).
More examples of shifted viewpoints include “Virtual Love” which is a love letter from a virtual stalker with some lovely twists. In “Conestoga” while considering intelligent microbes, they write “Some ponds produce not oxygen, but poetry” (10).
With thematic trends of entanglement, quanta, macroworlds, and alternate perspectives it would have been easy for the authors to depart from the personal, but they have not omitted it. The collection as a whole leans to the cosmic, but there are intimate personal moments such as “Warp Time” where the narrator finds “I’m suddenly as ancient & wrinkled/As Tiresias, as androgynous, / Weary beyond cognition” (23).
“I, A.I. ” offers the view of early human/A.I. interaction from the viewpoint of the A.I. who concludes
. . . the Turing line is a gradient
No sharp division between thought and not
Is there, so Ian and I metaphorically
Dance blind-folded
Arms flailing, somewhere in the mix— (6)
I was stuck with the lines “Maps of anywhere available everywhere / Not necessarily accurate, but extremely detailed” (21) as not only a description of cyberspace, but of speculative poetry’s presence there.
The last stanza of the book was hugely powerful for me, and a perspective shift on the sense of wonder that I still adore in speculative writings. I won’t spoil it for you here. You can see for yourself if it hits you the same way.
—Herb Kauderer
Eurydice Sings by Sandi Leibowitz.
(Flutter Press, 2018). 45 pp. Paper $8.00
An old woman tests her granddaughter’s readiness to take up the crimson hood. A witch warns away the mice who greedily nibble, nibble, nibble at her cottage of sweets. A princess on the run dons a cloak of furs, and takes comfort in the voices of the animals slaughtered to create it. A princess locked in a casket and thrown into the sea patiently awaits the salvation offered by prophecy. A Goddess laments the loss of her love, who set aside his garden for a throne.
In Eurydice Sings, Leibowitz collects twenty-two of her fairy tale– and mythology-inspired poems, including the previously unpublished “A Woman Made of Scarves” and “Snow Bride.” Ranging broadly through European lore (with two pieces based on Mesopotamian and Japanese sources), the poems revisit both well-known and little-known stories and characters. “Crimson-Hooded” draws upon Red Riding Hood, while “Danaë at Sea” focuses on the mother of the Greek hero, Perseus. “Freyja in Falcon-Skin” draws upon Norse mythology, while “The Kitsune Goes Pub-Crawling” features the famous fox spirit on the hunt for a new tail.
A widely published speculative poet, Leibowitz is skilled at taking familiar stories and pulling out unexpected elements or points of view, particularly in regards to the experiences and voices of women.
Leibowitz delves deep into the original stories, dragging hidden horrors, unexpected connections, and unconscious prejudices into the open. In the title poem, for example, Eurydice celebrates when she is finally able to defeat Orpheus in a contest of music—even if that means returning to the underworld. In “Sleeping, I Was Beauty,” the narrator laments: “I try unsnarling the skein of words / one hundred years of sleep have knotted up. / But my husband’s lips twist in distaste. / He squints each time I speak, / trying to imagine her back, / that sleeping girl he loves, / the mute.” In “Sea-Silk,” a woman skilled in weaving and song must wait until her granddaughter is grown to pass on ancient traditions, for “her only child, a son, lacks / blood’s inheritance / or woman’s patience.” In “Brother and Sister,” a young woman contrasts her sibling’s transformation into a deer—and his apparent new freedom of movement—with her own desire to escape the constraints of childhood and become a woman in her own right. In “Mother Gothel Recovers,” the eponymous witch awakens to find that her forest tower has been overgrown by a city; casting aside her “dowdy dress” she steps forth as “the wilderness reclaimed, / deadwood re-greening.”
Throughout the collection, Leibowitz’s use of color, texture, and sound is haunting and hypnotic. Her poems are filled with “cobalt-glass lamps,” hair as “brown as elm-bark” and “gold as clover honey,” “vermillion shimmering to turmeric,” and “the undergleam of deeps shaded / by coral forests / and the dreams of whales.” The result is a sumptuous feast for the imagination.
Fairy tales and myths are not for children or the faint of heart. In Eurydice Sings, Leibowitz guides us across the threshold and into a realm of darkness, power, pain, and heart-aching beauty. Highly recommended.
—Rebecca Buchanan
Every Girl Becomes the Wolf by Laura Madeline Wiseman & Andrea Blythe.
(Finishing Line Press, 2018) 34 pp. Paper, $13.99.
Every Girl Becomes the Wolf by Laura Madeline Wiseman and Andrea Blythe defies reader expectation, decoupling many familiar tales and myths from their traditionally masculine point-of-view in order to impart a different, more contemporary message. In addition to the dark and brilliantly visceral imagery, one aspect I particularly enjoyed about this collection was its motif of transformation, such as in “A Music of Shattering Ice”:
You’ve become so hard I could shatter you, reassemble sharp-edges
until you resemble the shape of this place, heavy with sleet,
headwind, and bite . . .
There is an undercurrent of anger to these poems that resonates, a sense of injustice, if not outright unfairness. Wiseman and Blythe seem to understand full well what it takes for a woman to survive in a world of men—as well as what it takes from women, both physically and emotionally.
People fill spaces with their sweat and sorrow—parlors
or bedrooms or chambers within others’ bodies, the way
he filled mine. I didn’t fight him when he poured himself
into me. I never wanted this motel. Yet, I rot.
While the shape of the poems are as varied as the personalities revealed through them, the poets always do a great job of marrying form to subject. Take, for example, “The Red Inside of Girls,” a pantoum that reframes the tale of Little Red Riding Hood inside her ever-evolving hunger and need, rather than the wolf’s appetite.
Every girl hums her own lithe youth and becomes the wolf
feeding on the elderly, seeing with large eyes how flesh rots with age,
how the wolf opens the door, eats what rots first, swallows what
hums inside every girl, lithe with youth as she becomes the wolf.
In the end, this collection seems to mourn without lamentation, to innovate without tearing apart its mythological foundations. Instead, these poems exist in perfect conversation with the stories that inspired them, like a series of howls that, depending on the reader, communicate either accusation or reassurance to their audience.
—Hayley Stone
The Hatch by Joe Fletcher
(Brooklyn Arts Press, 2018) 122 pp. Paperback $18.00; Kindle $9.00.
It’s very difficult to define speculative poetry. Most readers will know that the SFPA did a survey in 2017 to define the genre, and the results were quite varied. Therefore, it’s difficult to see The Hatch by Joe Fletcher as pure SpecPo. It’s not definitively science fiction, fantasy, or horror. But it’s also difficult for a reader to NOT see it as SpecPo, either. From the brooding cover and it’s dark tones to the rich vehicles, The Hatch is a solid contemporary poetry book with clear speculative elements.
The cover of The Hatch immediately catches the speculative reader’s eye and makes them believe this is their sort of poetry. The title is set against an evening sky. Pointed branches dripping with vines seem to poke at the letters. The scene is framed with thorny vines. Even the author's name is in a pointed, vegetable font. The whole aesthetic set by the cover is one of brooding and foreboding, tones with which speculative poets are quite familiar.
The poems themselves continue this tone. The poems themselves are surreal in their narratives, and it’s difficult to place them into a genre. In “The Bird Nester,” a poem about a man who seduces birds, hints of mythic fantasy are present. The poem “Muselmann” uses allusions to WWII concentration camps to touch on psychological horror. “Umbilicus” seems to move seamlessly between fairy tale and eloquent body horror. However, whatever genre Fletcher touches upon in each piece, the overall tone of the collection is dark and haunting.
Where Fletcher really succeeds as a poet is with his metaphors. The vehicles are vibrant, and whole poems seem to be composed of complex layers of metaphor. The poem “Kindergarten” begins “You pull a child from the earth and stuff five autumns into her./A blue wind dries an eagle heart in canebreak.” This sort of layered metaphor, reminiscent of poets like Sherwin Bitsui, is really evocative and effective in capturing the reader’s attention. Line like “Night was a black stone/dropped from a bridge/by a blind child at night.” turn inward on themselves and dance the reader through their strata of imagery. At times the imagery gets overwhelming, and the reader is forced to pause for a breath, but there are times when the reader is so caught up in the language that the poem seems to end without them even knowing it.
The Hatch is not pure speculative poetry, to be sure. There are no robots, no elves, no zombies, etc. The hallmarks of speculative poetry are not here. However, if 70% of the SFPA consider surrealism to be speculative poetry, and over half of the membership considers metaphors dealing with speculative tropes to be speculative poetry, Fletcher is clearly in our cool kids club. While SpecPo purists may not appreciate The Hatch, readers with wider definitions who desire poetry with rich, allusive metaphors and surreal imagery will thoroughly enjoy this collection.