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 2025.
Astrosommelier by R. Mac Jones. (Bottlecap Press, 2025?)
24 pp. $10 paperback. https://bottlecap.press/products/astrrmj
Sommelier is a word that has been co-opted in recent times to mean someone who is both a connoisseur and a professional advisor on some subject deemed to have merit. Yet the dictionary still defines it as someone who is a certified wine professional, sometimes extending to beer and spirits. This book is accurate. It is literally and figuratively about the wine of the stars. Ten poems over eighteen pages explore space via drinks.
The book opens with the title poem, which received Honorable Mention for the 2025 Dwarf Star Awards. The author is a professor at the University of South Carolina–Palmetto College. This is relevant because red wine consumption is pretty much a professional obligation for English professors. From the beginning there is a hint of a scholarly conference, and a table full of wine drinkers pondering “geocached liquor stills”, “Moon Dust Chardonnay”, and “snifters of burnt earth”.
The poem “Ours Is Simply One Universe in the Varietalverse” asks if God is “the percipient waiter?” The opening and closing of the poem reads:
Since there is an edge,
a rim, she said, couldn’t we
think of the universe as
a wine glass?
* * *
his sobering a sure sign
of the last
call?
The comparisons of space exploration to wine work persistently. In “A Rack of Interstellar Hypersleepers” Jones says this of the cryogenically hibernating crew:
until the prejudged day
uncorked, and to be repoured,
a vintage person,
aged in the ferment of dreams.
“In a “Pre-” Bottle” includes an important note for an era of computer thinking:
Imperfection’s always been
the code that can’t be cracked
There are surprises in this book, laughs, startling moments, dark views, reflective passages to look at realities in new ways. There is a Baudelaire moment as well. This review limits quotes to the first third of the book to maximize the experience for the reader.
For such a short book, it has beauty, depth, and originality. There is a definite plus if the reader is familiar with some of the vocabulary of the sommelier. But even the staunchest teetotaler may enjoy this analysis, and sometime deconstruction, of the place of alcohol in our society, and in outer space. Recommended.
—Herb Kauderer
Cancer Courts My Mother by LindaAnn LoSchiavo
(Prolific Pulse Press, 2025). 44 pp, $10.95 paperback. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cancer-courts-my-mother-lindaann-loschiavo/1148585915
Cancer Courts My Mother by LindaAnn LoSchiavo uses poetry to deftly trace the emotional impact of dealing with the cancer diagnosis of a family member—in this case, the poet’s mother. In the “Artist Statement” at the start of the book, LoSchiavo notes, “In this poetry collection, I’ve tried to illuminate the difficult daily rituals of taking care of a patient who will neither show improvement nor recuperate.”
Complicating this journey is the fact that LoSchiavo’s relationship with her mother was a fraught one. The poem “Flash” observes, “We never mastered the mechanics of mother-daughter camaraderie,” while other poems offer glimpses into past frictions.
Cancer Courts My Mother traces a journey from diagnosis to remission, the return of the disease, declining health, and ultimately death and its aftermath. LoSchiavo skillfully employs metaphor to connect the reader with the emotions evoked by each of these stages. In “Diagnosis,” for example, she notes how “the mind’s garden is overrun.”
“Mother Magnified” captures the rise of hope tempered by realism. In this prose poem, “remission repainted the daylight a kinder shade, hinting at a longer stay. But in the rasp of her breathing, death listened for its cue like a stage-door Johnny.” Foreboding, another feature of many of the poems in this collection, is illustrated in the same poem in the reference to “a gurney whose wheels chattered despair,” while “Arrival” speaks of “the dusk’s fatal crawl towards night.”
Cancer Courts My Mother speaks of the way we sometimes find comfort in the completion of daily tasks: the line in “Mother on Morphine, Dreaming of Anna Magnani” captures this perfectly: “she’ll close her eyes while I beat grief from rugs.”
The seeming incongruity of the way life goes on around us, despite what is happening to our loved one, is depicted in “Sickroom at 138 Degrees Fahrenheit,” “I sneak the phone outside, hear bright bird sounds, / Malignancy obscured from this angle.”
While the individual poems depict the broad picture, there are some lines that stand out, such as one in “Mother Magnified,” “Bad memories are cadavers that refuse burial.” “My Mother’s Ghost Dancing” concisely notes, “Tick, tick—mortality’s metronome.”
Throughout the collection, LoSchiavo’s choice of wording creates musicality through repetition of vowel or consonant sounds. The poems are written in a variety of forms including cento, golden shovel, villanelle, haibun, haiku, prose poems, and free verse. There is humor ranging from the subtle to the satirical, with an example of the latter being the comparison of cancer to a lover courting its victims.
“The Closet as She Left It,” which includes the lines, “The nude audacity of death dismissed / As long as things remain, her door pulled shut” might evoke memories from anyone who has had to deal with the personal effects of a family member who has died.
Cancer Courts My Mother captures the emotional challenges of caregiving, and the despair-hope rollercoaster that many readers may have also ridden. Though some of the poems speak of personal matters, there is universality here as well, and many of LoSchiavo’s poems echoed elements of my own memories of cancer-related health challenges faced by family members and friends. A resonant and eloquent collection.
—Lisa Timpf
Cats and Dogs in Space by Lisa Timpf, cover and illustrations by Marcia Borell
(Hiraeth Publishing, 2025). 67 pp. $9.95 paperback. https://www.amazon.com/Cats-Dogs-Space-Lisa-Timpf/dp/B0DV6Y19YG
Cats and Dogs in Space is not the kind of poetry I write, in which, like as not, everyone comes to a bad end. This is also not the kind of sappy sentimental crap you might expect on a H------- greeting card. Timpf loves animals, that's clear, but these are real poems about almost-real cats and dogs. There is honor, love, and loss, with a double helping of realism, both about the characters and the situations. I couldn't have written these poems, but I loved reading them.
Cats and Dogs in Space begins with a series of poems derived from news headlines (references cited at the end). Laika is here, the first dog in space, who didn't know she was on a suicide mission (I wonder how many poems have been written about her), but other heroes, of one kind or another, are represented too. For the most part, Timpf interrogates the animals as if they could respond in ways intelligible to us. Even where the animals are not really animals! From “Canem Roboto.” Here, a tech has just “put down” aged robot dogs, and feels some kind of way about it, as they say in the Deep South. I've learned a lot of new-to-me idioms living down here, but I'm fixin' ta stop inflicting them on you.
Had he asked, Ace and the others would have told him not to worry. Told him that there is no fault in mercy. In providing dignity at the end.
to everything its time—
called home
like all good dogs
Section two contains poems based on legends, myths, and so on. These include a fiddling cat and a laughing dog, having one of the most carefree parties on record; Cerberus from the point of view of pet owner (but I wonder who takes his place when he takes walks); the tale of how wolf became dog, from the point of view of dog, not wolf; and more.
From “From Cat to Fiddle”:
the stark light
of morning-after, cow
nursing a sore leg
from a rough landing,
dog holding her aching sides—
The original poem glossed over the aftermath of the party. Good thing none of the players were into the hard stuff before the extra-planetary foolishness began!
Section three: partings. These are inevitable, and always sad, but these poems are not all speculative. They do not take place in space, and actually seem autobiographical. To the extent that this is speculative, it is because in some of the poems, inferred thoughts of the pets are put into words, and, in some, there are ghosts. I guess that's enough, although dog thoughts and dog ghosts are pretty pervasive in modern literature about pets. From one poem that seems to lack any speculative elements, “Without Her”:
I’m no longer on call
for nature’s call
doesn’t feel like a luxury—
I’m left behind, bereft,
like an unpaired sock,
Reminds me of all my pet partings, past and impending. Each companion individual, and too quickly gone.
Section four: Cats and Dogs of the Future
Maybe some day animals will be uplifted, perhaps via gene splicing, a wonder drug, embedded chips, or some esoteric method we've not thought of yet. Some people say you can always tell (remember when some learned folks said skull shape was a tell-tale clue to personality type?) Maybe there will be more reliable signifiers.
From “The 22nd Century Guide to Purr-sonality Types”
Excerpted from HR Today, July, 2120
How to know
if you have a plethora of cat people?
Check out the cafeteria’s sales trends
for fish Fridays. And there are other clues.
Shredded memos in the copy room,
when you know the shredding machine
has been broken for months.
Cats and Dogs in Space is a paean to our favorite pets, with a generous helping of what if. Timpf could have followed a darker path here, or looked into the far distant future, but she did not. She stayed with the relatable recent past and near future. If your dog went into space, her story would fit comfortably amongst these poems.
- David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Cryptids, Kaiju & Corn: Poems and Micro-Stories about Modern Midwest Monsters, ed. Randy Brown
(Middle West Press, 2025). 152 pp. $9.99 ebook, $19.99 paperback. https://www.amazon.com/Cryptids-Kaiju-Corn-Micro-Stories-Monsters/dp/1953665349
Harvest men, wendigo, frog men, and lake monsters are among the creatures stalking the pages of Cryptids, Kaiju & Corn: Poems and Micro-Stories about Modern Midwest Monsters. This anthology, edited by Randy Brown, includes more than 70 entries, written by over 50 contributors.
Cryptids, Kaiju & Corn includes both poetry and micro-fiction. The fact that the micro-fiction is capped at 300 words keeps the collection balanced, as the stories are short enough not to interrupt the flow. Thematically, the book is divided into four sections: “Little Houses, Dark Harvests,” “Not From Around Here, are They?,” “Squonks, Squawks & Sirens,” and “Neighbors, Stones & Curses.”
Some of the featured entities are widely known. The anthology includes poems and stories dealing with Paul Bunyan, Bigfoot, and werewolves. But there are also lesser known creatures, like Dogman, not-deer, and hodags. The pieces range in mood and content, from terrifying encounters to attempts at friendship, and from creepy foreboding to humor.
“The Harvest Men” by John Tyler Leonard was one of the poems I found most striking. “The Harvest Men” begins:
Way out of town, a little further than the county line,
when it’s so hot that even the birds don’t sing,
we plant our dead in stone gardens and leave out
bottles of cold beer for the Harvest Men.
As the poem continues, “The Harvest Men take up a sort of dancing, hand in hand / as they sway in circles to their own breathless silence.”
Many of the poems contain lyrical elements. “the hangman’s propensity to gobble the earth” by Julie Allyn Johnson asks, “what sort of business has brought you here / in the bitter-black of this frigid-cold, stormy Hallow’s Eve?” and speaks of “the low whistle and whine of a northwest wind” that “rattles gnarled limbs and sere crisps of autumn surcease.”
Many of the entries include surreal elements, as in Sean Glatch’s “The Rhinelander Hodag”:
The Rhinelander Hodag drives my car
down Capitol Road, street lights silvering
the gleam of his teeth.
Others contain a grim humor, like “Woman dreaming winter away in the Michigan U.P.” by Callie S. Blackstone:
Dogman: 7 feet tall.
The legend tells of blue or golden
eyes—take your pick. They burn
with hunger either way.
“Daytime Hauntings” by John Tyler Leonard begins, “Looney Tunes is playing on the parlor TV. / What concerns me is the power is out.” The poem continues with striking metaphors, including lines like “The day is a white bedsheet drifting down the stairs,” and “Today is colorless, but also a flower. / It’s a windmill dragon and leftover chop suey / that has tragically become self-aware.”
Some of the poems and stories build empathy for the featured creatures. “Godzilla at the Pow Wow” by Juan Manuel Pérez, includes the lines, “drumbeat, drum, drum / reminds him of something gone / he never says what.”
Others underline what we can learn from myth and monsters. “The Flint Hills Have Eyes” by Brittany Redd begins by talking about seeing the bones of a plesiosaur, then notes,
later that night,
on a starlight stroll, I saw her
in spectral wholeness,
swimming through the Milky Way
The poem goes on to say,
She turns to face me and her gaze speaks
an inconvenient truth
that the stars will claim us all
in time.
At the end of the book, seven discussion-starters are offered. Each of these revolves around a specific topic, like “A Stranger in These Parts” and “Home is Where the Hearts Are.” After a brief introduction to the topic and some comments about, and quotes from, relevant poems in the collection, discussion and writing prompts follow.
Giving glimpses of many different entities through poems and stories that vary in mood and tone, Cryptids, Kaiju, and Corn offers a strong flavor of the mythical, monstrous side of the Midwest. The good news is you don’t have to be from there to enjoy this collection.
—Lisa Timpf
Dream of the Bird Tattoo: Poems and Sueñitos by Juan J. Morales
2024, University of New Mexico Press. 136 pp. $18.95 paperback, 9.99 ebook. https://www.unmpress.com/9780826367587/dream-of-the-bird-tattoo/
The author and publisher of this book seem to be eager to market it as SpecPo, and a small amount of it is. The acknowledgments include “Thank you to Andrew Jones for talking ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, X-Files, creation, and process” as if this book was about those things. The publisher has chosen a blurb that claims the book “guides the reader through ghost hunts, conversations with mediums, a series of dreams in which he and his father work through his father’s crossing over together” and the publisher repeats much of that in the Amazon blurb. Fifteen of the poems are dreams written down, so it is up to each reader to decide whether these are speculative. They all use the word dream in the title. Some dreams are more SpecPo than others. For example:
“Don’t be surprised when all this junk moves on its own,” one of them snarls.
from “Dream of the Old Antique Shop”
and
I wander the night made of many fragments that assemble into a flea market full of my students. The most important object is the old coat I am wearing. Someone declares it magic.
…
They call me unworthy because I still don’t know how to unlock its powers.
From “Dream of the Magic Coat”
Besides the rest of the dreams which are SpecPo to some and not to others, there are two poems about the cryptid Chupacabra, who is also mentioned in the poem “Looking for Duende” another cryptid.
I find disappointment in the Midwest—how they keep wanting
me to be Mothman. We both wear read eyes and wings, but I take no joy in knocking down bridges
from “El Chupacabra Visits Chicago”
There are also two poems about the medium.
On the ghost hunt, in the abbey’s basement,
our hosts invite the dead
to wake up motion sensors
from “The Medium Speaks of Birds”
These five poems are easy to categorize as specpo. Other poems explore the uncertainty reality gains after the loss of a loved one, such as:
We accept his bread crumbs
from the afterlife,
as reminders that
we are together now
and lucky to be here.
from “Grandpa Money”
My sister’s home security footage
records orbs and streaks
of light manifesting
in her kitchen and living room.
from “One Year Later”
Overall, this is a lovely book inviting the reader into the poet’s life and family. There are moments that feel like magic realism. But the truth is that a generous accounting might consider twenty-two of the sixty-seven poems speculative. That includes the nebulous realm of dreams. The reality is that this is a mainstream collection reaching out to the speculative poetry field. That may be a mark of how far the academic reputation of SpecPo has risen. That said, I will be surprised if the book manages to grasp SpecPo audience.
-Herb Kauderer
The Enigmatical Sphere of El Chupa-Ku / El Esfera Enigmatica De El Chupa-Ku by Juan Manuel Pérez
(Space Cowboy Books, 2025). 113 pp. $11.99 paperback. https://www.strandbooks.com/the-enigmatical-sphere-of-el-chupa-ku-one-century-of-chupacabra-haiku-9781968958015.html
The chupacabra is only a myth to those who have yet to enter the world of this goat-eating cryptid. This collection of a hundred bilingual chupacabra haiku goes all in on a familiar figure in Latin American storytelling by combining the brevity and contemplativeness of haiku with an irreverent creature known for what it devours. I would expect nothing less from Juan Manuel Pérez, the 2019-2020 Poet Laureate for Corpus Christi, Texas and El Chupacabras Poet Laureate.
Far from being repetitive, these chupa-ku really do “reach out and grab ya’” with humorous vignettes of the chupacabra’s life and its endless quest to suck the life from goats, pets, and anything else that falls in its trap. Across the collection, chupacabras stalk the woods of South Texas, a “radioactive / chupacabra bites human / Chupa-Man is born,” and “Chupacabra Flats” becomes the name of the new Tex-Mex colony on Mars.
loves to write haiku
about wild chupacabras
chupacabristasle encanta escribir haiku
sobre el chupacabras salvaje
chupacabristasGreat bilingual poetry plays with the words and cultures of both languages as Pérez does here. While readers can traverse the woods of the chupacabras without the Spanish haiku, don’t think that you are safe just because you are reading in English. The Spanish verses offer a better rhythm and pacing as well as a poetic voice that, at times, serves as a better guide than its English counterpart thanks to the Spanish verb conjugations. Of course, these bilingual haiku wouldn’t be complete without the small image of a goat placed between them. It’s a nice touch and it keeps the focus on the suspense of the chupacabra’s insatiable appetite.
the dead grass crumbles
as the gray beast stalks its prey
under cool moon light
la hierba muerta se desmorona
mientras la bestia gris acecha a su presa
bajo la fresca luz de la lunaI’m almost lulled by the cadence of the Spanish haiku where something so foreboding as grass crumbling sounds beautiful. Rhymes and slant rhymes occur far more often in Spanish, and you can almost hear the footsteps of the chupacabras in the above haiku. There are a few small inconsistencies that pop up in the Spanish haiku, such as a missed accent mark and a subject-verb agreement error, and I’m still mulling over the Spanish title of the collection. Sphere is a feminine word, but the use of the masculine article “el” connotes a sort of masculine power of the chupacabras. Their world is full of vengeance, both the senseless and calculated types, and the chupacabras all know the wrongs humans have committed.
trying hard to be
a good, gray chupacabras
goats still go missing
tratando duro de ser
un buen chupacabras gris
las cabras siguen desaparecidasI didn’t expect to feel much empathy towards the beast, but I do feel some fondness for its enduring presence in Latin American culture. Gray chupacabras really do try their best in an imperfect world, and they seem quite protective of their goat-eating lifestyle.
This century of haiku is a quick read, and the combination of horror and humor makes for witty, enjoyable speculative poetry. Though there are some clichés and a few haiku are only speculative insofar as they can be read within the cryptid context, the collection promises an unparalleled view of a community of chupacabras with their own rules (“chupacabras don’t ever / rat each other out”) and ways of surviving on the margins.
Angela Acosta
Entropocene by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
(Space Cowboy Books, 2025) 84 pp. $13.99 paperback. https://bookshop.org/p/books/entropocene-jean-paul-l-garnier/81692fc8bbf37e9d
The title is not a word the author made up, though its similarity to anthropocene makes it feel like he might have. The entropocene is the era marked by the increase of entropy, especially in the forms of energy, biodiversity, and knowledge. The last point suggests that the virtualization of knowledge and the reduction of knowledge to data is a form of entropy that may contribute to the post-fact period of the world.
The book is organized into five sections, the first three of which originally appeared as chapbooks, “Utopia, Time, and Telepathy: all cornerstones of the science fiction genre”. In each of those sections some early works depart from typical SF handling. Here are samples from early in each of these sections.
a kind word
given freely
passed from one hand to another
[…]
reaches all the way across the world
an ill glance
does the same
“Global Contact, Neighborly Love”
Planck length and perfect
the arrow freezes
when velocity and position
cannot meet
[if the cup breaks]
I wish I could read your mind
but would you understand
“The Wish”
“Odes to Women of Science” is the fourth section, and it contains six poems each written in the second person and titled with the name of the woman addressed.
thanks to Turing’s reminder
we can run the punch cards of your thoughts
“Ada Lovelace”
The fifth section of the book is titled “Miscellaneous” and it starts with a quintet of poems considering augmentation.
all sensors replaced
I see you from a mile away
touch with polymers
smell from a distance
“Augmented”
The next group turns dark and mystic with references to death, “Imbibing with the Spirits”, Hell, possession, skulls and killers. The final group deals with finality, though ending with an ode to dreams. Does this suggest that death is the entrance to dreams? There is much to contemplate in this collection. It is more verbal than visual, more thoughtful than spectacle inducing. That will suit many readers.
—Herb Kauderer
To Faery Lond They Came, by Ruth Berman
(Crumbfairy Press, 2809 Drew Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55416, 2025) 44 pp. $6.00. berma005@alumni.umn.edu
Thirty quirky poems based on folk and fairy lore, originally published in the fifty and change years between 1973 and 2024. The title comes from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene although the poems themselves have a modern sensibility and colloquial expression. It’s as if a no-nonsense bard entertains the Faerie Queene in Anoka or Fargo. For instance, “The Riches of Cloud Country” relates how “After the beanstalk was cut down” […] Jack “opened up a bean-soup restaurant. / Got a gold star from Michelin.” 2003 Rhysling winner “Potherb Gardening” offers advice for exceptional needs gardening: “Unicorn-soil gets rid of poisons / Spreading from your upas tree. / It also discourages rabbits and tent-worms.” “Elemental Scales” compares the talents of magical creatures either fat or thin and begins:
The fat sylph lives in the cumulus clouds.
Comes in handy for avoiding would-be shamers
Who think elementals
Gotta be aerodynamic. (22)
“Elfin Godmothers” describes the dangers of choosing an elf to godmother your orphaned child: “An elf might think / The Charming part / Of more importance / Than the Prince.” “Dragons Got Wings” examines the reasons that a dragon with wings might still be slain: “Well, yes there’s that hoard to guard / All that lovely gold / So soothing on a patch of itchy scales / When the weather’s been dry.”
Overall, Berman’s poems take readers to strange and engaging places that could be next door except for a tablespoon or two of “what if.” Her diction is rye and dry, immediately recognizable. Buy this book, it will make you smile and want more.
--Sandra J. Lindow
From Ruth Berman on little cat feet comes a slim book about fairies, elves, legends of all sorts, ducks and other people. In short, you name it, but the poems are all retellings or reimaginings of stories that every one of us knows quite well. Or, we thought we did, until Ruth got a hold of them.
From "The Riches of the Cloud Country:"
An egg a day
Solid gold, too,
For a little while, anyway,
But away from whatever it was
She'd been used to in the Cloud Country,
The gold gave way inside
To proper yolk and white
Ruth's slant on fairy tale and legend is legendary, or it should be. Reworking and reimagining these old stories has never been done better or with a gentler touch. To Faery Lond They Came is her latest self-published chapbook, and you need to get it before it's gone (see above how to do that). Whether she is telling us what happened to Jack and the beanstalk after the part of the tale we know, or questioning the myth of Narcissus, she has her own insightful take on the matter.
From “Narcissus by the Pool”
Looking straight down into yourself
May be enough to comb your hair
(Probably not enough
To get the parting straight)
I have written enough essays in my life, but if I hadn't, the next one would be an urgent exhortation to the members of the SFPA to elect Ruth their next grandmaster. In the meantime, five bucks will get you this beautiful little book that you will probably want to read and reread, and maybe nominate for the Elgin award. Yes, I like it that much. At 38 pages of poetry, this one is officially classified as a chapbook for Elgin purposes.
To end on a pedantic note, I like a chapbook whose pages are numbered, and this is one of those.
- David C. Kopaska-Merkel
The Future is Antifascist, speculative poems for today & tomorrow by Brian U. Garrison
(ind. pub., 2025). 15 pp, $10 paperback. https://www.bugthewriter.com/p/buy-things.html
This chapbook has fourteen pages of poetry, so it would be very easy to over-review and over-quote. I would argue that at least eleven pages, and probably more are SpecPo. That includes poems based science as SFPA’s bylaws include them in the definition of SpecPo. It is eligible for the Elgin Award. As the title suggests, this is an overwhelmingly political book. To test if it may appeal to you, here is an entire untitled poem without its graphic art:
The value of the dead is nothing
to the capitalist machine.
The cost of the dead is nothing
to the capitalist machine.
We must be more than machines
of capitalism.
And to balance that, here is a sample of SpecPo from the poem “Stereotypes aren’t real, but neither is Kumbaya” on page six:
You wouldn’t expect a jukebox on Mars
to sing the same songs to its water bears
as the selections picked by Venusian vampires
soaking in their post-masquerade acid baths.
Other portions are freer from grammar rules such as this passage from later in the previously cited poem:
In a crowd of synthophilic June Valley A.I.s,
infra-cosmic oscillations that pass for music
are not what fruit flies ever-so-quietly buzz about.
Though the book is short, the poems are various, some Spartan, some lush. The author has a strong knowledge of SF especially Ursula K. Le Guin’s works. While some of the book is dystopic, it still manages to have optimism. It is highly recommended.
—Herb Kauderer
Gathered Here Today: An Open Casket of Art and Poetry eds. Kala York and Kelly Grodin
(Graveside Press, 2025) 257 pp. $4.99 ebook, $15.99 paperback, $32.99 hardcover. https://graveside-press.com/product/gathered-here-today/
Reviewed by Denise Dumars
Somewhat uneven in both form and sophistication, Gathered Here Today, oddly, has something for every poet of the macabre to enjoy! While the first poems might lead you to think that this might be exclusively formalist poetry and/or humorous poetry, you’d be wrong. I took the poetry lightly until I ended up skidding to a stop when I read Alex Carrigan’s “Wicked Stephmother, A Golden Shovel After Brennan Lee Mulligan,” which is very dark and very artful. A few lines:
Even from the corner, you feel compelled to worship
her, and compelled to placate her growing wrath before she enters the
range of candlelight. You have probably realized that you are fucking
dead once you can make out the sharpened tips of that insatiable smile
The art varies as well; I particularly liked the detail in Natalia Díaz Jiménez’ drawing “Devious Dining.” Some of the art seemed simplistic, and other art was quite sophisticated and impressive.
The poems go back and forth between the tongue-in-cheek formalist and the dark romantic horror, much of it free verse. The whole thing has a decidedly Halloween atmosphere, and would be a wonderful gift for someone who enjoys, for example, the Halloween poetry books of Kyle Opperman. Most of the poetry really screams to be read aloud, and that, too, would make it a Halloween treat.
I liked Kurt Newton’s “A Cold, Windswept Place,” so here’s a sample:
But seduction is a feral beast,
With fathomless eyes and supple lips.
Once attached, she began to feast,
Slowly, drip by drip
A bit of a nice surprise was Ritishka Sharma’s “Specimen 401 (A)” and its clinical, Frankenstinian approach:
At first, Hector was born,
With extracurricular stimuli, having been had
Like a dinner table fool, consuming
an intellectual protest
I Wrote
Specimen 401 (a) woke up disoriented.
As we pity poor Hector we can move right along to the charming illo “Date Night” by Camellia Paul and its cats and bats and then cringe when we view the truly disturbing photo montage “A Slug in the Eye” by Joshua Dobson. I wouldn’t normally discuss the art so much in a review, but since the book prides itself on being both a collection of poetry and art, I must say that the art selections, although varying in sophistication, were all certainly food for thought and did add to the atmosphere of the poems quite a bit.
One poem that really made me laugh was the parody of Poe’s “The Raven,” called “The Crow,” by Terry Campbell, and it’s a standout of the humorous verse:
I think it must’ve been late December
It was cold enough to freeze my member.
The kids must’ve kicked so hard they blew open the door.
I wished like hell that it was morning,
This same shit was gettin’ boring.
Just thumbin’ through my Penthouse and Hustler,
Thinking about that freakin’ whore.
She done me wrong, I’ll say no more
On that happy note I’ll say that this is quite a varied collection of both serious and humorous verse on horror topics, much of it Halloween-oriented. I’d estimate about 50% is formalist verse in one way or another, including not only rhyme and meter but also concrete poetry and even haiku. Worth buying, especially as a gift for that Halloween-lovin’ friend or anyone who likes dark and spooky poetry.
Green Man Ascendant by A.J. Dalton.
(Wild Man of the Woods Press. 2025) 110 pages, digest-sized. $13.99 US. ISBN: 979-8-9930162-3-8 Available on Amazon.
This collection begins with a three page essay on the nature of speculative poetry by Dr. Adam Dalton-West, which is the real name of AJ Dalton. It is a somewhat scholarly work that says valuable things about the field.
The poetry is presented in eight sections, all lost or new as in, “Lost Gods”, “Lost Monsters”, “New Darknesses” and “New Dreams”. This is a format parallel to that of his first poetry collection Dark Woods Rising (2024).
The first nine pages of the first section are dedicated to Herne, a legendary ghost of England first been mentioned in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. By themselves they would be a fine and tight thematic chapbook. Dalton connects the rascal Herne to the Green Man whose face is made of leaves, and who represents rebirth. While Dalton is known as a fantasy writer, he quickly recasts this character of fantastic legend into science fiction.
The labs have stored, we’re assured
sufficient animal DNA
to resurrect all that was:
except with fewer humans, I guess
-“Herne Ascendant, or the Final Season of the Green
Man” 3
Other Herne poems cast him into the modern world. He has to deal with a world of druggies and dropouts in which he hides
waiting on a final pandemic and species collapse
when at last all chaos and wild abandon
will come to rule once more
-“Hunting Herne 5
He is eventually arrested as “a wild animal/ too dangerous to be allowed/ freedom.” (7) The eventual resolution of his story is not revealed here to prevent spoiling it for the readers.
The section “Lost Monsters” includes five shape poems titled “Centre of the Labyrinth”, “Hydra”, “Wyvern”, “Cyclops”, and “Roc”. It’s followed by a section on “Lost Times” which looks at old legends including “Ultima Thule”, “The Broch of Gurness”, “Golem”, and “Banshee”. These are rich in historical research.
“Lost Worlds” is a science-fiction-in-space section and it includes four poems set on a hostile colony world named Yarn. As any intelligent reader should expect, things do not go according to plan. Life never does.
visitors to this death-planet speak
of a swirl of starring hues that distract
and mesmerize, mazing thoughts…
-“The Ghosts of Yarn” 40
The iridescent seas of Yarn
Still fizz with radiation, […]
The mutants thrashing deep below
All fight intoxication
And try to charm us to our deaths
With Siren ululation.
-“An Intergalactic Interlude” 42
Later Dalton invents a useful term in the title of the poem “Technorati” riffing on the Illuminati secret society. Or perhaps he co-opts it from the search engine of the same name.
I saw the best minds of my own generation
dragged hither and thither down virtual streets
[…]
thought riddling oracles and hieroglyphic propagandists
gaslighting us with burning helium, toxins and fixes
- 54
It is important to stress that Dalton writes in such a way that it is unimportant that the reader recognize the allusion to Ginsberg’s “Howl”. His research and references add to the content, but do not require homework. For example, even such a widespread reference as Atlas can be understood from the context of the poem.
I try to lift my head like Atlas
but only shift that precariously precious weight
of my world carried between my shoulders:
At the end of the poem makes the final statement of Technorati as other when he says of his father:
he refused the Final Upload
and I cannot understand.
- “Technorati” 54-55
Later in the book and in another section Dalton riffs further on the term with the poems “Technocracy”, “Technosavant”, and “Technomancer”.
Overall the book is an interesting mix of techno specpo, fantasy, and well-researched mythopoetic works. The reader is likely to be unfamiliar with some of these myths, as Dalton mines some lesser known ancient stories of the British Isles. But, as noted, this shouldn’t be a problem. This is a robust collection with some extended themes and sometimes elevated language. It is a step forward from his strong debut collection last year. Recommended.
—Herb Kauderer
Haunt Me by José Enrique Medina
(Rattle Foundation, 2025). 40 pp, $9 paperback. https://rattle.com/publications/haunt-me/
What haunts me is the fact that I attended the Cobalt Poets reading by José Enrique Medina in which he read from Haunt Me and from other works, and then a few weeks later I was sent the chapbook to review. Guess it was meant to be. Part of The Rattle Chapbook series, the book is sent free to all Rattle subscribers and is $9 for the rest of us. Haunt Me is a meditation on family, most of all, those who die but won’t quite go away, even if we want them to. Think of the ways in which hauntings take place, and the alleged reasons for those hauntings. That’s what these poems are filled with, along with regret, tenderness, sadness, and not a little bit of horror.
For example, in “Three Ghosts,” the cause of death can be transformed into an even greater horror, as it was for Tia Tencha, who:
scratches her forehead, the spot where the cancer
started. The scab falls, exposing pink meat. It regrows
bigger, and again she tears it off. She mumbles,
Crickets are trying to get me, claws at her scalp, shrinks
from light, refuses to go outside. The crust is scarab-shaped,
grows back wider, fatter. She holds it
in her hand, strokes it, and whispers, Sleep, chiquito, sleep.
In “Tio Arturo’s Manifesto,” we see that:
An old man has the right
to become a ghost.
An old man, finally, can
retreat to an abandoned beach.
In this book, so often, ghosts have lives of their own, and like Tio Arturo, are adamant about setting their own rules. And sometimes, even when the author wants them to, some ghosts refuse to appear. In the title poem, “Haunt Me,” the poet begs his late mother to appear to him, and so far, she has refused:
And still
you haven’t stepped into my garden
or caressed my amapola blossoms.
What are you waiting for? Haunt me.
Crush lemongrass under your heels,
let me smell you. Ring wind chimes
when there’s no breeze, so I’ll know.
People aren’t the only things that can haunt a person—locations can too, like in the poem “A Fistful of Cursed Desert”:
As a toddler, I crawled into the United States,
smuggled a fistful of haunted desert.
Now grown, I carry grains of that sand in my wrinkles.
Beneath my fingernails, the brown dirt grins
and whispers,
Quique—when are you coming home?
Medina’s poems resonate with why we find hauntings both fascinating and disturbing, and why sometimes, even, we want to be haunted. The poems also resonate deeply with Mexican and Mexican-American culture, that which is so different in its approach to coping with death, as is best known to the larger culture from El Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. As a Californian, this holiday is part of the entire season of death-holidays that we celebrate, everything from Samhain to Halloween to All Saints and All Souls and El Dia de los Muertos. But not everyone in the U.S. is comfortable with all of that, and it shows in some of the experiential poems in this chapbook. For example, these lines in “Broken Seashells,”:
I vanish too
when white boys shout spic
and flush me from English-only restrooms;
when you drool, tremble,
and doctors look away;
when the world’s a chainsaw
and I’m soft-hearted wood;
when seas split open
and I can’t straddle both shores.
Overall I highly recommend this book to anyone who finds hauntings and meditations on the dead to be of interest, as well as those interested in Latino culture and family. Remember, borders are a liminal thing, and a person with ghosts on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border is more likely to feel haunted than those who are restricted to one side or the other. The book spoke to me a great deal. I think you will feel the same way.
—Denise Dumars
Life During the Lazarus Age by Robert Frazier
(Space Cowboy Books, 2025) 72 pp. $13.99 paperback. https://bookshop.org/p/books/life-during-the-lazarus-age-robert-frazier/a20fca601787de59
Robert Frazier is a giant in the field of speculative poetry. It feels a bit presumptuous of me to review his latest book. But here I go. Life During the Lazarus Age chiefly consists of SF poems, as does Frazier's oeuvre as a whole. The book is divided into three sections: SF, your clone, and magic (not the actual section titles), but only the clone section is aptly named. Poems in the other two sections are unexpectedly varied. In the entire book, you don't read these poems, you fall into them.The extravagant use of language conjures images with almost every line.
The title poem chronicles the return of Earth's billion extinct species:
Dodos colonize Maui and Oahu pineapple groves.
Ankylosaurus routs the ‘cocaine hippos’ from Colombia.
Two passenger pigeons stow away on a moon mission.
Would ankylosaurs be more or less vulnerable to humans than hippos are? Are bird-borne love letters possible in the lunar domes? No one knows how many species occupy Earth today (estimates range up to 30 million), nor the number that did and are gone (most species are small, and tend to be short-lived). A billion is a reasonable estimate. Every species goes extinct for reasons, but the world of today might suit some right down to the ground. Remember, the extinction at the end of the age of dinosaurs had a purely astronomical cause. Many of the poems in Life During the Lazarus Age share a common trait with this one: each changes a couple of things about reality, and the poem becomes all too realistic.
From “A Caution: On Being One of the Invisibles”
the winters trapped in clothing,
Mummy-wrapped like a burn victim,
When you actually have to pay for things.
This is a perfect example, featuring a single change. I am sure we've all had thoughts like these after reading The Invisible Man. Bare naked or fully swaddled leaves most of us uncomfortable most of the time. Much early SF is similarly problematic, but this story is definitely low-hanging fruit.
The clone poems form the shortest and most cohesive section. Sets of clones have more to lose than singletons, and more to gain. This section of the book explores how clones interact with one another and the world around them.
From “Your Clone Finds Her Stray”
your clone susses out her lost sister
using your morphology as a code
a shared face as a tracking device
when they meet their embrace runs
gravity tight and teary-eyed
oh what bones must this one bury
This poem begs the question of why a clone would run away? And from what or whom? The last line I've quoted increases the confusion. This may become clear, but Frazier is not one to tidy it all up. This is an attribute of his work that I admire.
The last section of the book, despite its magical title, is a grab bag.
From “Salinity”
they haunt my veins
those molecules of his within me,
that ocean within the head of a pin.
There whole ecologies of salinity,
of the evolution of things
once left unsaid,
Biogeochemistry, in the service of interpersonal relations, yet is this a spec poem? Nothing in it couldn't happen irl. Context may tell all, by which I mean its original publication venue. This is a common problem with spec poetry. A genre publication may include poems that are explicitly genre, can readily be interpreted as genre, and some that would seem mainstream in a different place.
The poems in this book are not horror poems.
Should you read this book? If you like spec po, how can you even ask?
—David C. Kopaska-Merkel
The Limerick in Chains ed. Jacob Bergstresser
(Lightning Cellar Publications, 2025) 100 pp. $9.00 ebook, $13.99 paperback. https://www.amazon.com/Limerick-Chains-Jacob-Bergstresser/dp/B0FG6QSNPH
Let’s be honest: nobody expects much from a book of limericks.
You hear the word and immediately think of bad puns, worse punchlines, and maybe your uncle trying to rhyme something with “Nantucket” after his third beer. So when I picked up The Limerick in Chains, I figured I’d get a few cheap laughs and move on.
I was wrong. And weirdly glad about it.
This book is a strange little miracle. It takes one of the least respected poetic forms in English and uses it to explore time travel, trauma, AI ethics, love, betrayal, metaphysics, dead astronauts, mutant cats, and—yes—dirty jokes. But it’s not just jokes. The writers here, somehow, managed to turn a literary bar trick into an actual stage.
The Concept
The editor, Jacob Bergstresser, kept the rules loose on purpose. The only real requirement: the poems had to be “chained limericks.” That means more than one limerick per piece, connected in some way—through rhyme, story, theme, repetition, or structure.
But beyond that? Chaos reigns. And it works.
Some poets play it straight: classic rhythm, snappy punchlines, tight form. Others take the format and twist it into narrative poems, love letters, space operas, even Dadaist nonsense. There are poems here that feel like science fiction episodes, some that read like personal confessions, and at least one that belongs on the wall of a dive bar bathroom—but in the very best way.
When It’s Good, It’s Very Good
There are a few poems here that don’t just rise above the gimmick—they own it.
Take “Paradox” by Robert Dawson. It plays like a science-fiction comedy: a time traveler keeps interrupting the night of his own conception to prevent his existence. It’s tight, escalating, and deeply nerdy. Here’s one of its most perfect moments:
He (or she) reappeared to the twain,
Interrupting again and again,
Till, annoyed and distressed,
They got up and got dressed…
And cheerfully childless remain!
It’s funny. It’s logical. And it’s built on a real speculative “what if?”—the kind of thing SFPA readers live for.
On the other end of the emotional spectrum is “First Officer’s Dirge” by Gerri Leen. This one surprised me most. It uses the limerick form to explore grief, respect, and unresolved emotion between comrades-in-arms—something like a farewell eulogy in staccato. It’s raw without melodrama. Here’s one of the stanzas:
The secret that I’ll never tell
Is that I might have loved you as well
If we’d just had more days
With our walls blown away
And found something good in war’s hell
That’s not parody. That’s a real wound rendered in rhyme. And it works—because it doesn’t try too hard. It just speaks plainly.
Finally, “Pluto Persists.” by Veda Villers gives us cosmic loneliness dressed in quiet defiance. Pluto, stripped of its planetary status, just keeps orbiting. The voice is small, distant, and dignified:
Though they shift and redefine,
Steadfast, I hold my line,
Steady in orbit,
resisting their note.
I persist, unchanged by their vote.
This is what happens when metaphor, science, and form line up perfectly. It’s not flashy—it’s true. And that’s rare.
When It Doesn’t Work…
Not every poem in here hits that mark. Some go straight for the gross-out (Pinocchio’s Nose Job), some collapse into nonsense (The Boy Toy), and a few read like inside jokes that should’ve stayed on Discord. The form allows for failure, and this collection lets that happen. Which, honestly, I respect.
You don’t have to love every piece. That’s not the point.
Bigger Than It Looks
What really impressed me was how much this anthology manages to do. Some poems are comedies. Some are prophecies. Some are weird little love letters to planets, programs, or people. And the “chained” form—the series of five-line stanzas building across space and theme—lets each poet play with shape and escalation.
And yes, a lot of these poems will land especially well with speculative poets. Time travel, AI, planetary grief, cyberpunk revolutions, and metaphysical riddles—they’re all here. And somehow, they all rhyme.
The Takeaway
The Limerick in Chains isn’t perfect. But it’s not trying to be. It’s ambitious, unfiltered, full of risks. It lets poets fail, succeed, contradict each other, and go weird on purpose.
And that’s what makes it fun.
It’s also very clearly—and proudly—human. You can feel the fingerprints on this thing. These poems weren’t written by algorithms or machines. They were hammered out late at night by people with real voices, big ideas, and a sense of mischief.
So if you’re looking for poetry that plays it safe, you won’t find it here.
But if you want a book that smashes form, breaks tone, and still finds a way to say something true—sometimes in five lines or less—then The Limerick in Chains is worth your time.
—Art Holcomb
To Love Unquietly by Deborah L. Davitt
(2025, Island of Wak-Wak, 2025). 42 pp. $15 paperback. https://www.amazon.com/Love-Unquietly-Coffee-Table-Chapbook/dp/9198959905/
This is a collection of speculative poetry related to love and romance, that eases into its speculative nature. It lives up to its unquiet title from the first lines of the first poem, “Patchwork Girl”:
Set a stitch into my skin
press the needle in
The second poem is a burning minimal titled “The Quarrel,” while the third, “A Garden of Flesh” is full of thorns. This is not to say that all the poems are painful, or even speculative. Many of the early poems could be metaphorical. The third poem is clearly speculative but does not use any notable speculative tropes.
Some poems are gentle and kind such as this minimal:
Sipping Sunlight
from your lips
at midnight.
Poems such as “Losing You” are powerful works on the edge of spec, including:
It would have been a chalk outline
if we lived in some ’40s noir,
all black and white with fog-like shroud
sidling through the streets—
The early portion of the book was interesting but not its final destination. It eased into more speculative areas such as the long dark fantasy “Red Blood, Dark Water,” which is about a maiden accidentally summoning a supernatural being. There is more dark fantasy in the book than anything else, which makes sense given Davitt’s scholarly work in Medieval and Renaissance literature. But it contains a good variety of different kinds of poems gathered around the title theme. The mix of spec and spec-adjacent verses builds something of a secondary world rooted in medieval magic, but reaching into the stars, and spanned by the wonderful poem “Not the First” which begins:
Each generation thinks that they
are the first
to have invented sex
—that they came immaculate
from some cabbage leaf—
Despite the prevalence of dark (and often high) fantasy, Davitt choses to end the book with “Cold Motion in the Universe”, a poem steeped in the language of science, and nicely exploring a relationship without removing too many veils. It begins:
What are you?
Too large to be a planet
too small to be a star
and ends:
we can only infer,
but never truly know—
one more great, grand mystery,
like every stranger that passes by.
This chapbook is a rich experience for such a short collection. Davitt is a major specpo author, and this is a major work by her despite its brevity. I look forward to seeing it again when the Elgins are nominated next year. It also represents a new publisher who promises to become a big contributor to the field.
-Herb Kauderer
Midwest Futures: Poems and Micro-Stories from Tomorrow’s Heartland, ed. Randy Brown
(Middle West Press LLC, 2025). 90 pp. $14.99 paperback, $9.99 ebook. https://www.amazon.com/Midwest-Futures-Micro-Stories-Tomorrows-Heartland/dp/1953665322
Farms, floods, fields, and funnel clouds—these are some of the phenomena readers will encounter in the 29 poems and ten micro-fiction pieces that make up Midwest Futures: Poems and Micro-Stories from Tomorrow’s Heartland. Edited by Randy Brown, Midwest Futures uses a strong sense of place as a springboard to futures that are, by turns, haunting, hopeful, or despairing.
In the Foreword, Brown notes that the anthology offers “new visions and interpretations of the American Midwest’s character, population, and landscape.”
Midwestern pluck is seen in Herb Kauderer’s “Flight Attendants,” which states that “Iowa ethanol is the best for rocket fuel” because “it pushes ships outside the atmosphere / with a meat and potatoes practicality.” In “Dust Bowl Revisited,” also by Kauderer, an aquifer running out of water prompts a return to “dryland farming methods” that in turn are used on Mars, with a surprising twist: “And that’s how / the capital of Mars came to be / named Kansas City.”
The collection kicks off with a bang with “Rain Country,” by Bella Rotker, which notes, “The clouds are always thick like dark feathers.” Rotker writes about
… Clouds
twisting into funnels against dark sunsets. Cattle
running for the hills. It’s not beautiful but I wish
it was.
The poem also includes the resonant lines “I am a servant // to this world of hurt. Always something / undoing.”
“A Tale of Acceptable Loss” by D.A. Gray begins:
Organizers planned a parade
for the coming extinction
though we called it something else,
even decorated with flags.
“Stealing Raspberry Kisses” by Maggs Vibo juxtaposes thoughts of innocent times with dystopia. The poem opens with the lines, “Corn-fed cattle rattle inside their steel boxes / Wages stagnate again.” The narrator remembers a time
Back before autonomous wars scarred the fields with ash
Back when the soil was rich in Iowa
When we’d barefoot-wander—never considering landmines
Before the age of tracking devices
And satellites scanning our whereabouts
Some poems hold out hope for the future, like “Minneapolis 2064,” by Casey Fuller: “Your garden will grow / in old ways in bright green.” “When first the winds of change return home” by Brittany Redd describes “Seeds scattering solarpunk dreams—a vision of sky: the night sky a beacon,” and “Giving Years” by Jared Spears envisions activity “hastening the reclamation.”
Still, there is human nature to be considered. “Texas Innovation” by N. Jed Todd imagines the first person to be convicted of insider trading against climate change: “He was careful to follow the science / All the way to the bank.” The poems begins
There is a market for weather derivatives, did you know?
A way to insure that even though the rain falls
On the just and unjust alike
It still profits mostly the rich
And well-connected.
Many of the micro-fiction pieces have a lyrical flair as well. “When the mayor tells us to shower with a buddy” by Bethany Tap imagines a future that includes flooding: “Knee-deep in our wet former-lawns we will wander and wonder at the landscape transformed, at this brave new watery world, at the assumption we’ve always held: that we are the masters, that any of this is ours.”
While rooted in place, many of the poems also muse about universal topics and concerns like climate change, how we change the land and it changes us in turn, environmental and man-made catastrophes, hidden truths, the barriers that separate us, and the difficulty in deciding whether it’s better to stay in, or leave, a familiar place. Though the poems and stories resonated with a flair of the Midwest, I found them sufficiently universal to appeal to someone outside that demographic. Some of the futures depicted, unpleasant as they may be—aquifers running dry, widespread recurrent flooding, and so on—seem plausible given the events of the here-and-now, and many of the pieces feel very in-touch with the present.
Included at the end of the anthology are seven “discussion-starters and prompts, for use in workshops, book clubs, classrooms and other gatherings.” The prompts use some of the stories and poems in the anthology as a springboard.
When I started reading Midwest Futures, I figured I’d work through it a few poems at a time. But I found myself thinking, “just one more,” and before I knew it, I’d read the whole thing. Will it be equally compelling for other readers? Grab a copy and find out.
- Lisa Timpf
Mother Hubble’s Cupboard and Other Poems About Inner and Outer Space, by Sandra Lindow
(Island of Wak-Wak, 2025). 72 pp. $15.00 paperback. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mother-hubbles-cupboard-and-other-poems-about-inner-and-outer-space-sandra-lindow/1147851266
Black holes and bubble universes. Creation myths and the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Dark matter and the divine feminine. These are just some of the phenomena encountered in Sandra Lindlow’s Mother Hubble’s Cupboard and Other Poems About Inner and Outer Space.
Mother Hubble’s Cupboard is divided into four sections; Mother Hubble’s Suite; Creation, Black Holes, and Big Bangs; Quantum Theory; and Space and Time. The collection includes 45 poems, 29 of which have been previously appeared in Star* Line, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and other publications. Poems are offered in a variety of forms, including free verse, abecedarians, golden shovels, and others.
Many of the poems are prefaced with introductory quotes. Stephen Hawking, Science News, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Paul Simon are among those quoted. These introductory quotes complement the poems and provide additional texture.
The “Mother Hubble’s Suite” section includes poems revolving around the Hubble Space Telescope. Among them are “Mother Hubble’s Last Will and Testament: June 13, 2021,” which begins:
Mother Hubble’s cupboard is filled with stars
She remembers how her eyes mirrored anticipation
the first time she looked outward to see the universe,
its mysteries of birth and growth …
The poem also includes an exhortation to humanity to “Relax your grip and wonder in the vaulting of the sky / how the great blue beast you ride cries under the weight / of your self-indulgence. She’s all you have, ride gently.”
The poems make fresh and interesting observations about the wonders of the universe. “Mother Hubble on the Nature of Light” notes that light is “quicksilver, slippery / nearly unmanageable,” something that Mother Hubble tells us “slips through my apron pockets / leaving only imprints of its passing.”
Topics of other poems include a birthday wish from the Hubble Telescope to the James Webb Space Telescope and an elegy for the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI).
The section “Creation, Black Holes, and Big Bangs” includes one of my favorite poems in the collection, “Black Hole Haberdashery.” This poem begins:
Black holes are bald,
and are uncomfortable about it.
Preferring to dress with timeless charm,
they’d wear bowlers like Steed,
|if they could get them mail order
but they’ve got no hands
and their voices are ultrasonic
Memory, neural space, and trauma are among the topics explored, as are concepts like absolute zero, Chandrasekhar’s Limit, gravitational waves, and the Big Bang. There are also flights of fancy, as in “An Introduction to Alternate Universes: Theory and Practice,” which includes the lines,
Somewhere onions dream,
whales sing oratorio; Elvis lives.
Universes not yet conceived
quicken behind a dreamer’s eyes
The “Quantum Theory” section includes musings on geodes, string theory, dark matter, mass, energy, relativity, unified field theory, and other phenomena. Again, there is humor in some of the poems, including one titled “Creation: Dark Matter Dating App,” which includes the lines, “He was Dark Matter when she met him, / all Camp Fire and Camel cigarette.”
There are also lyrical and inventive descriptions, such as the one in “Studying String Theory”:
Universal violin, ultra-thin
Stradivarian skin,
turning out, turning in,
turning back where it begins
“Coming Out of the Dark,” like many of the poems, makes a connection between the everyday and the mysteries of the universe. When the narrator has to brake suddenly to avoid some deer,
. . . my case on the rear seat is tossed,
spilling poetry, that quirky, quarky
quantum matter of bright and dark,
spirit and memory . . .
The “Space and Time” section muses about Georgia O’Keeffe, the seven dwarves, and the appeal of stargazing, among other topics, and again includes some lyrical sections, as in “Perspective: Sunset Through the Telescope”:
Looking westward from the patio rooftop of the hotel,
the sky is pale linen warming to luminous yellow voile
above the seam line of a boulevard and a lacy selvage
of green deciduous trees, the fabric of late July twilight.
The collection’s extensive “Notes” section provides background about the inspiration of some of the poems, as well as additional information about the phenomena explored.
Those who like to contemplate the wonders of the universe and the quirks of science, or who appreciate well-written and thought-provoking speculative poetry, should find this collection appealing. An enjoyable read.
—Lisa Timpf
Over It: Goddesses Who’ve Reached Their Limit by Gerri Leen
(Island of Wak-Wak, 2025) 44 pp, $15.00 paperback. https://islandofwakwak.com/over-it.html
Gerri Leen’s Over It is a work of deliberate pressure and precision—revisionary mythmaking that neither genuflects to antiquity nor treats it as ornament. The chapbook understands something essential about old stories: they persist not because they are quaint, but because they remain brutally useful. Leen’s premise—goddesses who have exhausted their patience—could easily veer into grandstanding or grievance. Instead, the poems proceed with measured force, testing the edges of power, care, ecological endurance, and a culture disturbingly skilled at rewarding harm.
What distinguishes this collection for speculative poetry readers is its refusal to let myth behave politely. These deities are not symbolic mannequins or nostalgic echoes. They are thinking entities, responsive and adaptive, navigating contemporary systems that grind just as relentlessly as any ancient fate. Social media, environmental ruin, viral recklessness, and patriarchal inheritance are not topical garnish here; they are load-bearing structures. Myth is not invoked as backstory. It functions as grammar—active, present, and unforgiving.
The opening poem, “Re-Do,” establishes this stance with quiet authority. A goddess moves across dark water through an abandoned industrial harbor, the detritus of modern commerce looming like a failed prayer. The questions that anchor the poem—“Where to start? / What to fix first?”—strip divinity of triumph and replace it with responsibility. Creation, in Leen’s hands, is iterative and bruised, haunted by the knowledge of prior failure.
Leen’s tonal discipline is especially sharp in “Hecate Observes the Ladder Challenge.” The poem addresses the fatal absurdity of viral social-media stunts without scolding or spectacle. Hecate waits at the crossroads, calm and professional, uninterested in intervention. The humor is dry, almost throwaway, until it curdles into something colder: the realization that human hunger for spectacle feeds ancient economies of death with alarming efficiency. No curses are required. We deliver ourselves.
Form, throughout the chapbook, is never decorative. “Echo’s Lament,” a villanelle, stands out as a technical and emotional achievement. Repetition becomes both song and sentence. The form enacts the curse rather than describing it, tightening until the speaker’s voice feels erased by its own necessity. It is a reminder that speculative poetry gains its sharpest edge when structure and subject collude.
The collection’s most explicit confrontation with the present arrives in “Medusa Ups Her Game.” Here, Leen retires petrification in favor of something more familiar and more insidious. This Medusa curates feeds, stokes fear, engineers obsession. Bodies no longer freeze; attention does. The poem succeeds because it remains loyal to the myth’s core anxiety—the violence of the gaze—while translating that violence into contemporary systems of surveillance and manipulation.
Leen’s control is evident in lines that manage to be wry and ominous at once:
“Turn you to stone?
Very old school — let me work
More subtly this time
As I weave my way into your
Social network…”
Elsewhere, Leen consistently resists flattening her figures into allegory. Hera’s fury is rooted in long betrayal rather than theatrical jealousy. Demeter and Persephone are rendered not as seasonal metaphors but as a family negotiating grief, compromise, and divided sovereignty. Hestia’s refusal of marriage reads as strategic self-possession—quiet, durable, and politically astute rather than virtuous for its own sake.
Taken as a whole, Over It argues persuasively for myth as an ethical instrument. These stories have not loosened their grip on us; we keep reenacting them through technology, environmental neglect, and inherited hierarchies of power. Leen’s poems are intellectually alert without becoming opaque, accessible without dilution. They invite close reading while remaining emotionally legible.
For readers drawn to speculative poetry that fuses mythic lineage with contemporary critique—and does so with formal control, tonal intelligence, and moral seriousness—Over It is a chapbook of consequence.
—Art Holcomb
Pit Stops and Proton Beams, by Aurelio Rico Lopez III
(Hybrid Sequence Media, 2025). 86 pp. $14 paperback. https://hybridsequence.wordpress.com/pit-stops-and-proton-beams/
Fans of speculative haiku are in for a treat with Aurelio Rico Lopez III’s Pit Stops and Proton Beams. The collection includes more than 200 three-line poems, arranged three per page. This layout struck a good balance between frequency of page-turning, versus readability and aesthetic appeal.
While some poems are spooky or foreboding, most contain elements of humor. Whether the humor is sly, ironic, clever, subtle, or makes you laugh aloud, the collection is entertaining as a whole, with some gems among the content.
A number of science fiction tropes are explored, with frequent references to aliens. There are poems about war with aliens, first contact, misunderstandings, mishaps, and odd encounters. There are even aliens snubbing Earth as a honeymoon location because it’s so passé. One of my favorite alien-related poems was
Martian steps on Lego
blame Lucy’s kid Josh
for the end of the world
There are poems referencing space, as one might expect from a speculative collection:
NASA launched time capsule
of goodwill
smashing into warship
There are also poems about class trips, dump sites, and human customs (which, understandably, may seem bewildering to those coming from other worlds.) What will extraterrestrials think of our writing? Here’s one take on that question:
inside used bookstore
aliens browse sci-fi section
with stifled laughter
As someone who struggles to rein in their wordiness, I admired the economical, spare nature of many of the poems, which leave the reader to fill in the blanks. As an example:
harness tears
spinning towards black hole
well, this sucks
The poem could have provided more background, but why? We don’t need to be told that the narrator is in space. That becomes evident, as does the nature of their predicament.
Because of their compact nature, many of the poems bear lingering over, not because they are obscure, but so the reader can savor them more deeply. I found myself enjoying Pit Stops and Proton Beams even more on a second reading.
Those who appreciate compact, humorous speculative haiku should find much to like in this collection.
- Lisa Timpf
The Reducing Flame by Richard Magahiz
(Space Cowboy Books, 2025). 12 pp. $6 pamphlet. https://spacecowboybooks.bandcamp.com/merch/the-reducing-flame-chapbook
I first encountered Rich Magahiz' poetry in the late lamented scifaiku list. I found most of his poetry there to be nearly incomprehensible. A mystery wrapped in an enigma, as the saying goes. For a year or so I didn't know that he wrote any other kind of poetry. After a while I started to see longer pieces here and there, some narrative and some not, and I thought huh. But this book, The Reducing Flame, is both insightful and pellucid. In this way it reminds me of Bryan Dietrich's poetry, which is otherwise quite different. Now some folks like to work to understand poetry, but to the fan of speculative literature, these poems elicit the Oh yes! Hit me again! response.
Some poems seem whimsical, but are actually incisive social commentary. This book demonstrates that it's possible for a poem to be both. From “Winning Chess Brilliancies for the 21st Century:”
4
from an attack submarine
under the fourth rank
launch cruise missiles
at the enemy's back rank
5
infiltrate
the knight's water supply
with a slow-acting toxin
with a secret
antidote
Other poems are metaphors, but are not easily sampled in intelligible ways. They present indivisible gestalts. But some of these can be sampled. From “Oath”
I'd share that sacred sound
with seven billion friends,
some smacked by black storms,
others standing in hot shame
when soldiers have had their fun.
Magahiz reaches into the hidden places and shows us what he finds, like we should recognize it. And we do. From “The Irresistable”
with amnion and chorion cleft
she has only the very little time
she has grasped every future need
she fetches it from the dank cellar
The chapbook is thin and has a monochromatic cover illustration. You'd be making a mistake to ignore this slim volume; it's likely to be an Elgin contender.
- David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Risk Assessment by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
(Island of Wak-Wak, Orebro, Sweden, July 2025).
Fans of horrorku, fantasyku, and scifaiku will find bang for their buck in Risk Assessmentby David C. Kopaska-Merkel .The collection offers more than 100 senryu poems, the majority of which have been previously published in venues that include Five Fleas, Random Planets, Scifaikuest, and Star*Line.
The book is divided into three parts: Horror, Fantasy, and SF. As a reader, I found this grouping helpful, setting the expectation for the poems found in each section.
In the “Author’s Note,” Kopaska-Merkel notes that he finds writing senryu poems intriguing, likening them to puzzles. “The idea is to pack as much information into an elegant three-line poem as possible,” he notes. The poems in this collection bear out his comments.
For example, the Horror section includes this poem: “a stir / in the milky air / ‘They’re back,’ Pa says.” There’s a lot of information in those ten words.
The collection includes a few speculative onebreaths, like this one: “shooting stars I always miss.” The play on words and the subversion of expectations is a common thread for the collection. I particularly liked, in the fantasy section, “lily pad throne / the former king slides down / a heron’s throat.”
Some of the poems offer a speculative take on everyday human foibles, including this one: “halfway / to Alpha Centauri / where’s my wallet?” Others acknowledge humanity’s destructiveness, like the only titled poem, “Intelligent Design,” which imagines a recreated universe: “This time there / won’t be / humans.”
Some poems play with scientific concepts like event horizons and antimatter. Some require a little thought before the aha moment, like “star pilot lays / flowers on her great great grand/ daughter’s grave, ” or “table dancing / in the Red Hot bar / chairs too.”
The end of days, whether it’s the last bird, the last woman, or the last night on Mars, are visited, as are strange stomach bugs and odd creatures: “plague of hippos / thank God most of them / only have one head.”
Risk Assessment offers a plethora of sparely-told poems that paint suggestive pictures despite this economy of words. Enjoyable for its cleverness, its range of themes, and its observations of human nature, this collection makes for an entertaining read.
— Reviewed by Lisa Timpf
Science Is Not Enough: Speculative Poetry by Ken Poyner
(Barking Moose Press, 2025) 158 pp. $2.99 ebook, $13.99 paperback. https://www.amazon.com/Science-Not-Enough-Speculative-poetry/dp/B0FGJB125T
Reviewed by Lisa Timpf
Robots as you’ve never imagined them. First contact with aliens that range from inimical to inscrutable to underwhelming. Generation ships, space-faring vessels, and space junk. All of these, and more, are present in Ken Poyner’s Science Is Not Enough: Speculative Poetry.
A number of the poems centre around robots, exploring how they might evolve, what their behaviours might tell us about our own, how they might mimic humans, and how they might choose to differ from us, as well as other notions.
“The Symbiont, Cyborg, Robot Enfranchisement Workers Union” envisions the future as robots become more intertwined in our daily lives:
We whirl about your world, turning it from raw into
The mature success you enjoy and expect,
A hive of intertwined processes, one misstep
From chaos, but a howling perfection nonetheless.
Having worked in a manufacturing facility that used robotic equipment for some of the processes, I can identify with this assessment, which may become magnified in the future as robots are used in more and more applications.
The potential for robots to carry on long after their makers is captured in “Automated”:
Our serviceability
Is legendary; and long after
The tasks we were manufactured for
No longer need to be done, we will be
Doing, doing and doing.
Doing, in memory of you: you,
Who, in the natural order of all things,
Comfortably kissed extinction,
And left us to putter companionless on.
And there’s more: dancing robots just this side of creepy, robots achieving sentience, robots on strike, and so on.
Encounters with extraterrestrials is also a frequently-visited theme. As with the robot poems, Poyner demonstrates an ability to succinctly outline thought-provoking images. “Alien Found,” for example, includes the lines, “Why we thought you would be / Like us, I do not know.” Later in the poem Poyner muses, “How long is it that we have missed / Your shout? Atmospheric electricity dances: / Do you visit us, or do we visit you?”
In some poems, we find that aliens do not live up to our expectations. In others, it’s the aliens who find humans disappointing or even insignificant. In “First Landing,” extraterrestrial visitors are more interested in the plant life than in the humans who are trying to get their attention.
Space travel, living on other planets, and generation ships are also among the topics examined. In “Moisture,” someone who has relocated to an arid planet ruminates about their former home:
. . . I cannot reform the memory
Of once, on another world,
A hurricane warning, three days
Of rain, water in the kitchen
Speckled with floating shoes
And socks, a cat’s bed,
A cork drink coaster. We
Did not know how wealthy we were;
We thought we knew excess, and were lying.
The images bring home the point, and the poignancy is echoed in some of the other entries in the collection, like “Place,” which is about a generation ship.
Humor is a feature of many of the poems. In “Space Junk,” an outdated deep space probe comments:
If it will help you, you can copy
my logs from origin to here.
Could be it might orient you and you
can tell us both where we are.
“Building a Ready Workforce” begins, “The last person to see Nicholas alive / Was also the first person to see Nicholas / Automated.” “Robot Motivation” observes, “Robots can be as maddening as they are useful, / As fascinating as they are diligent.”
Some of the poems have offbeat or surreal tinges. “Ineffective,” for example, begins,
Tuesday, they broke the light.
The next three days they tried to fix it.
Staples, paperclips, hairpins, glue;
Nothing would hold it together.
Later in the poem, “People were publicly serving / Cups of broken light at corner / Photon bars.”
The poems in Science Is Not Enough whisk us from the familiar to the strange, exploring concepts and themes in new ways. Humorous, imaginative, and original, Poyner’s poems provide unexpected twists and clever observations, sharing intriguing stories about the future and about humanity. Speculative poetry fans should find Science Is Not Enough an enjoyable read.
The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee
(JABberwocky Literary Agency, e-book 2020, print edition 2025). 27.99 paperback, $6.99 ebook. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-sign-of-the-dragon-mary-soon-lee/1136903418
The print version of Mary Soon Lee’s The Sign of the Dragon will likely have two potential audiences: people who have read, and enjoyed, the e-book, and readers who are new to The Sign of the Dragon.
First published in 2020 as an e-book, The Sign of the Dragon is an epic fantasy told through poetry. Over 300 poems make up the work, with a number previously published in Uppagus, Star*Line, Tales of the Talisman, and other venues. The Sign of the Dragon earned first place in the 2021 Elgin Award Book category for works published in 2019 and 2020.
The Sign of the Dragon, which draws on Chinese and Mongolian elements, tells the story of the fictional King Xau’s reign in Meqing. The presence of dragons and demons, and Xau’s uncanny ability to win the loyalty and obedience of horses, are among the magical elements.
Individual poems deal with heroic exploits as well as the everyday. We see King Xau’s struggles and uncertainties as well as his victories, large and small. While most of the poems revolve around Xau, some provide us with insights into other characters’ thoughts and experiences. We get a peek into the lives of members of the royal guard, Xau’s spouse and children, his allies and enemies, and even the palace cat. The multiple viewpoints add texture and context to the story.
Using individual poems to portray the narrative gives the reader snapshots in time, flashes of mood and emotion. In this case, it proves an effective way to tell the story. We experience, among other things, the camaraderie between Xau and his guards, the weight of leadership, and the joy Xau takes in spending time with his family. Some poems also make us privy to action taking place elsewhere, creating foreboding as we become aware of threats that are not yet on Xau’s radar.
The poems are mostly free verse, but line length and stanza format vary from poem to poem, providing variety. Poems like “Target” and “First Lesson” are presented more like scenes from a play, with dialogue between characters. There is also the occasional rhyming poem like “Rope Skipping Chant” and “Cure,” which includes the lines “Not healing herb, nor dragon’s wing, / nor surgeon’s skill, nor serpent’s sting, / nor spell, nor ghost, that healed the king.”
Lists, alliteration, and metaphor are used to good effect. “Wedding Gifts” itemizes gifts given at King Xau’s marriage to Shazia, beginning with “Bows, breastplates, broadswords, / spears, scabbards, shields, / helmets, horses, harnesses.” The concluding lines, as is often the case, add a twist. The final item, though not the least important, is “One treaty, long sought.”
Though events of war and bravery are depicted, some of the poems also deal with small, everyday happenings. A short poem titled “Pigeon Six” portrays a pigeon sent to carry word of an invasion:
Pigeon Six: no honors,
her message all that mattered
to any but the pigeon-girl
who cleaned her empty perch.
As the story progresses, Xau, who took the crown reluctantly, matures into his role. He demonstrates strength and courage, as one might expect from an effective ruler. But right from the start, Xau also shows humility, compassion, and empathy for others. In this way, The Sign of the Dragon is also an examination of what makes a good leader, one whose followers willingly obey not because of fear, but because of love and respect.
Many of the poems are insightful, and some contain beautiful and compelling imagery. “Micha,” for example, depicts King Xau watching the birth of a foal:
Dawn floods the river of stars;
the foal born, the mare resting.
Khyert beside his king, his heart full.
A night worth a month of days.
The poems also contain humor and insightful observations. In “The Cat’s Epilogue,” one of my favorites in the collection, we are made privy to the thoughts of the palace cat after a change in leadership. “Peace, war, treaties / mean nothing to” the cat, who observes of the new (and grieving) king, “He has not groomed recently, / yet his face is wet.”
Measuring 6 inches by 9 inches, the print version of The Sign of the Dragon has respectable heft and the print size facilitates easy reading. Rather than each poem starting on a new page, the next poem begins where the previous one left off. This aligns with the nature of The Sign of the Dragon as an epic story, creating a good flow as well as keeping the book to a manageable page count.
New for the print version are 40 full-page illustrations by Gary McCluskey. These detailed drawings add another layer of context, and are a worthy accompaniment to the text.
- Lisa Timpf
Seed Beetle: Poems by Mahaila Smith (Stelliform Press, 2025)
111 pp, $5 ebook, $15 paperback. https://www.stelliform.press/index.php/product/seed-beetle-by-mahaila-smith/
Mahaila Smith’s Seed Beetle: Poems (five of which previously appeared in Star*Line) is not only a poetry collection but also something of a novella in free verse. As Smith states in the Notes at the end of the collection, Seed Beetle is “an expression of my climate anxiety”—a theme that is explored through recurring characters and their points of view (most importantly Gemma, Nebula or “Nebby,” Nebby’s lover Dip Seshadri, Cortical Update, Utopic Robotics, and automated megafaunal seed beetles).
The book has a recurring setting too: “It imagines New Haywood, a fictional Southern Ontario farming community that has experienced widespread desertification” (also from the Notes). Also recurring are the illustrations—images of Gemma, Nebby, and Nebby/Dip that begin each major section of the book, but also the myriad images of automated seed beetles doing all sorts of things (even blowing apart) in the bottom left-hand corners of succeeding pages, all of which also add to the book an intriguing thread of hybridity between a flip-book animation and an avant-garde text/image experiment.
Seed Beetle has plot situations as well—beginnings, middles, and ends involving “a corporation [Utopic Robotics, UR] that takes advantage of the [New Haywood] community’s desperation, promising to heal the land, while in the process physically and mentally abusing its employees.” UR functions as a villain, whose exploited workers “are given non-consensual medical procedures, receiving nanobot implants which serve as widespread surveillance tools.” Seed Beetle also has a plot twist in that (spoiler!) the non-consensually implanted nanobots of the Cortical Update “have the unintended side effect of allowing those who have received them to innately feel the emotions of others who have also been implanted.” (Notes)
Smith avers that the “inspiration for Seed Beetle came from so many sources”: Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora; McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald E. Purser; The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin; the Sun Ra film Space is the Place; and Christi Belcourt’s painting “Offerings to Save the World,” among other materials. Smith also acknowledges that “Throughout the writing of this collection, I was inspired by the future imagined in The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, particularly the poetry that makes up Lauren Olamina’s Earthseed religion and the long-term effects of Lauren’s mother’s use of Paracetco that caused [Lauren] to experience embodied feelings of those around her. The effects of this drug inspired some aspects of the Cortical Update.”
Beyond this link between Seed Beetle and Earthseed, beyond the similarly telempathic effects of the Cortical Update and Paracetco use, Smith shares with Butler a particular political emphasis. If “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (as Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Zizek, and Mark Fisher all note in analyses of what Fisher calls “capitalist realism”), then what most deeply links Smith’s Seed Beetle and Butler’s works (especially the Parable books) is the attempt to imagine systems of action, thought, and feeling beyond the end and ends of capitalism.
I find that attempt in Seed Beetle intriguing, probably because in both the literary and economic realms I oppose the galactic-empire lebensraum mythos of the longtermists and cornucopian economists who strive to make a delusional limitlessness the immortal enemy of a realizable sustainability. Because human imagination that can’t imagine a limit to human imagination is ipso facto limited, I am likewise no fan of the supposed infinitude of collective human imagination that purportedly underlies “limitless” technological innovation and invention.
That capitalism’s more-of-the-same-corporate-business-as-usual increasingly is the end of the world (as Jodi Dean suggests) is something that can be imagined. Failing to make every plausible attempt to imagine a viable and better alternative beyond capitalism is a recipe for the extinction not only of other species but also of Homo sapiens.
Have hopepunks and cli-fiers yet come up with a more viable and better alternative to a fantastical unlimited capitalism? More importantly, have they presented a solid prospectus for that realizable sustainability? The answer is probably No, given the degree to which their proposed “hopeful futures” too often realize themselves in backward-looking agricultural or pastoral utopian pasts, incapable of supporting the human numbers we already have (and thereby passing over in silence the vast suffering of a great Collapse).
This pastoral future is put forward in Seed Beetle too. In the Foreword, Dip tells us that, returning to New Haywood after a six-month incarceration for her activism, Nebby “worked with her mothers and the community to take back the land from Utopic Robotics, dedicating our efforts to creating community gardens and supporting the young people and children above all else.” Although such a community-garden vision of the future is reminiscent of the conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide and may be quite problematic when applied in the contemporary world, at least such writers as Smith and Butler are trying to do that heavy lifting and hard imagining beyond business-as-usual, reminding us that we’ll never change the system if we never attempt to change the system.
Smith’s Beetle not only purposely blurs the distinction between novella and collection and text-hybrid experiment and flipbook, but also between fiction and what is traditionally the preserve of fact. Consider the collection’s Foreword. Although forewords are usually presented as factual, the Foreword here is presented as having been penned by the fictional Dip Seshadri, the fictional lover of the fictional writer and activist Nebula Armis.
Yet the “story” of the collection does not begin with Nebby’s history, but with that of one of her mothers, Gemma Armis, in “Part I: Gemma.” During Nebby’s childhood (as the Foreword notes) Gemma lives through the abusive conditions that are rampant at the Utopic Robotics manufacturing plant in New Haywood. Gemma is surrounded by climate change denial and its consequences: “There have always been fires, /they say./ These are no different.… We stay inside for days./Burnt wood floors/and walls and wires/desensitize our noses/to the smell of lilacs” (from “An Invitation to Burn”). Also, “It happened slowly. / The number of bees, diminished. / Corn stalks, as far as you can see, / lying flat and unproductive. / Husks drying to dust … The lakes being choked / by plastic and heat. / Trout killed and eels / forced to leave/for cooler water. / The deadlands/being fed” (all from “The Creep”).
What Utopic Robotics—satiric stock symbol $UROB—offers is something very much on offer in our world today, a supposedly salvific technology that purports to guarantee a utopia: “Utopic Robotics calls itself the New Savior … that will revitalize our local cracking earth/That will sift through contaminated soil, / picking out microplastics and residue from pesticide” (from “The Gift”). Yet it is women’s handwork that builds the automated technology: “It is the femmes … / who usher in new hope, / punching in daily at the Utopic/ Robotics manufacturing plants, / focusing their hands on making/mechanical, megafaunal beetles, /who (They say) / will bring the fresh food back” (from “The Creep”).
The drudgery of the work, however, has built-in psychosocial costs: “All our employees have the Cortical Update, /it’s a benefit of working with UR 😉 / Bad at balancing your work and life commitments? No Worries! / We will make the appointment for U / to see our in-house specialist. / The Update is a mind-changing Wellness in(ter)vention. / It reminds U to breathe, to take care of Urself! / To focus on the one thing that matters: U!!”—and “Together we can save the world!” (from “New UR Employee Benefits”).
These “benefits,” as Gemma makes clear, are not enough to prevent rage against the machine: “I keep a hip flask filled with gasoline. / To remind myself that we could escape, / but choose to stay—for now … /I ball a lacy handkerchief in my pocket, / think about stuffing it into the glass flask, / hurling it at those who line their pockets / with our starvation, / unsure where to aim, I take a breath/ and follow the group and our leader, / beside the unending assembly line” (from “The Work of a Housewife”). Gemma stays with this work, even though she can’t give her little daughter Nebby attention at home after work because “I spent the rest of my energy / pretending I wasn’t exhausted” (from “The New Job”).
Trapped by her circumstances, Gemma lets UR “colonize [her] mind with minute nanites,” hooking her to the cloud through the Cortical Update, for the sake of increased productivity (from “Remodeled”). The Update merely informs her that “WARNING! You may find your / hands living outside of time, putting together robotic beetles” (from “Software Update”)—a description eerily reminiscent of the premise of the TV series Severance. We even get a bit of introspection from the Cortical Update itself when it says, “I am linguistic virus / embedded in the soft space between tongue and inner ear”—reminiscent of William S. Burrough’s statement that “Language is a virus from outer space,” an idea underlined when the Update asserts to Gemma that “You are a self-fulfilling creation story, / a medical test subject for language experiments” (from “Hi! I am your Cortical Update!”).
Despite her apparent powerlessness, Gemma still hears the call of rebellion. Meditating on how she was violated and contaminated by the Update’s nanites, in “Insomniac” she “lie[s] awake, planning how to undo it. / I read the manual / a young nurse handed to me / on My Cortical Update.” We hear the depths of Gemma’s alienation from her work when, in “The Mindworm is Spreading,” she tells us “I move in a diurnal mass of workers turned consumers, / with no obligation to the people I see most often.… / I rush to keep my mind distracted / and my hands in perpetual motion. / I assemble megafaunal robotic beetles / and hope they can revitalize the desert.” In “Adjusting,” this ultimately leads to an alienation at the core of Gemma’s thought: “mostly I remember the sharp divide / between A mind (my own), / created by embodied memories, / and A mind, colonized / by the implanted voices / and eyes of Utopic Robotics.” This alienation is perhaps most deeply expressed in “Breaking the Spine,” when Gemma (whose literary tastes run to Paulo Coelho and the poetry of Mary Oliver) is told by the Cortical Update that it “limits the intake of information / it determines will upset its users. / This has been shown to increase user job satisfaction.… / Cool tears leaked from the corners of my eyes, / Understanding my mind would never be my own again.”
Even before the collection moves on to “Part II: Nebby” we begin to encounter the seeds of Utopic Robotics’ self-destruction. In “Networked” we learn that, after they swim in the river, the four children (Ezra, Quinn, Lin, and Nebby) “notice their feelings /sliding into each other’s minds.” We learn the source of this telempathy when we are told (also in “Networked”) that “A year later, a local journalist uncovered that / Utopic Robotics had been dumping nanites into the river / instead of paying for proper disposal.” In “Wondering,” we learn that this “collective interiority, shared / over the electromagnetic field that connects each of us” (a psi power that sounds almost scientific) is spreading beyond the children to the adults. We learn (in “Threatened”) that, although people are “breaking apart the [beetles’] metal exoskeleton to extract / the valuable battery cached inside,” and that the “destruction of agricultural drones / and automated beetles / does not concern Utopic Robotics, / who budgeted for casualties,” in “A Young Automated Beetle Writing Home” and “In Multitudes” we learn of a telempathic collective interiority developing between some beetles and some humans, a process that gains momentum in “Part II: Nebby.”
In Part II, specifically in “Networked II” we get a fuller description of the situation that led to the four children’s experience of collective interiority that we first encountered in the “Networked” poem of Part I. In “Academic” we encounter a similar deeper dive beyond Gemma’s somewhat inchoate rebelliousness, to her daughter Nebby’s more programmatic use of political analytical tools: “Teaching myself postcolonialism and anti-capitalism, / history, anarchism and Marxism. / Our unproductive land, privatized / through primitive accumulation. / I read Fanon, Coulthard and Deloria Jr.… / Orientalism, self-determination, alienation. /New words weaving through my psyche. / Reforming and rephrasing theory to suit my needs.” Later, in “Poetic Influence,” this self-education will include mention of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lord, and Maya Angelou.
Some readers might see this listing as a canonically Left or “woke” self-indulgence, but that misses the point: Nebby’s story is a portrait of the poet as a young activist. That activism includes her fascination with eels as ecological symbols (in “Thesis,” “Field Notes,” and “Sidereal Period”) and scientific reality (“EELS,” After NASA/JPL-CalTech Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor) at least as much as her political and poetical interest. It is through poetry that, in “A Room of One’s Own” (with its nod to Virginia Woolf ), Nebby gains an appointment to the International Space Station Writers’ Retreat, “A chance for the world’s best writers to leave behind / children and hurricanes wailing below, / offering the unique opportunity to immerse oneself / in the creative atmosphere of writing / perilously close to the infinity of the cosmos.” Even the solace of the supposedly non-decommissioned Station is conflicted, however: “I have time to think, to grieve my family who / have become part of Utopic Robotics’/ newest generation of automated tech. / I write praise for my sponsor and the celestial bodies. /After all, we are relying on UR’s spacecrafts /to keep us fully stocked.” In this sense Utopic Robotics is an echo not only of RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) but also super-corporations like RAMJAC (capitalist West) and BIBEK (socialist East) in Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction.
In space Nebby does manage to contemplate panspermia (in “The Writer’s Retreat”) and evoke the contrast between living world and dead space (in “Down or Up”). After her retreat year, her activism kicks into higher gear in “Water-Kin” when “Channel 24 broadcasts that the world’s / richest oligarchs have cross-sectioned Mars amongst themselves. / I watch as the owner of Veil, the largest global mining corporation, / addresses a crowd of reporters, fans, and protesters.… Soon we will be creating a glut of new jobs / and sending new miners and ice harvesters to the red planet.” With “the EELS discovery of microscopic fish living in the seams of the planet’s polar caps”—and the likelihood that human destruction of habitat will now extend to Mars—Nebby and Dip lead a turn toward sabotaging Veil’s efforts: “We enlist in the corporation’s work program, / learning about the ways we might need to repair /their spaceships in an Emergency.… / When launch day comes, / our supervisor finds the ships are empty pods, / stripped of their soft inner parts, unable to leave Earth.”
Soon thereafter (in “Making a Plan” and “Seed Beetle Diary”) Nebby and others devise an attack on the share value of Utopic Robotics itself: “Together we reached, / into the entangled communications networks, / tapping at the web that connected us all / to the automated beetles / our parents had wrought to life. / We projected our plea / asking megafaunal family / to pause their important work / and please come home.” The result is bad headlines for UR: “Utopic Robotics has identified an operating system failure / in Seed Beetle v.3.1.0, products are being recalled” followed almost immediately by “Utopic Robotics ($UROB) plunges / as products are recalled across North America” and “Utopic Robotics was unable to suppress the general strike / at the New Haywood assembly plant, operations closed seven years after opening.”
The result of a couple of corporations going down here seems to precipitate a much broader collapse of post-industrial capitalism (a common trope in cyberpunk for decades). The result here is also “Making Up,” by far the longest poem of the collection and the realization of a Voltairean community-garden hopepunk utopia of “big families and big parties” (curiously, population issues seem to no longer be issues). Beyond this, in the direction of the far future, lies “Our Time and Space,” with its perhaps too-easy reconciliation of present with past and past with future, and “Exodus” in which “Young researchers listen / and spin harmonics into spaceship fuel. / Powering a perpetual motion engine / that combines music and silence infinitely”—salvific technology veering from science to magic. Then again, Arthur C. Clarke did say that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.…
With such magitech humanity is faced with return to the space from which panspermian life first came to Earth’s oceans and in “Seed Beetle Futures” the seed beetles are recycled into space probes, among other things. In “Offerings to Save the World,” the I of the poem achieves a transcendence that is apotheosis, an apotheosis that is transcendent. Although I may not agree with all aspects of the vision of the future put forward in Seed Beetle, it is a grand vision nonetheless.
—Howard V. Hendrix
Sleepless Nights in the Dreamers Mall by Herb Kauderer
(Island of Wak-Wak, 2025), 56 pp, $15.00 paperback. https://www.amazon.com/Sleepless-Nights-Dreamers-Coffee-Chapbook/dp/9199046849/
Herb Kauderer’s 23rd poetry collection, Sleepless Nights in the Dreamers Mall, might be his finest due to its engagingly nostalgic images, unity, and psychological complexity. It describes a future where an aging population is encouraged to upload themselves into a virtual “tank” that offers “intermittent” sensory reinforcement at irregular intervals”—what psychologists report to be the most addictive kind.
Set in 2050, the virtual Mall that dreamers enter represents a heyday of malls more suggestive of the ’90s than the post pandemic present. The everchanging three story Mall suggests a Tardis, larger on the inside than on the outside, with “most shops only open once a night” and some “only open once in a lifetime.” Each poem is a visit to a different place in the Mall, where world and personal history interact with aesthetics of music, art and craftsmanship. For instance, “Gumball Machines” begins:
Bright hued glimpses of childhood
sell for a quarter each
every color a different childhood
and no way to pick your own
or even recognize it.Time is flexible, as is biology. Joseph Conrad can sign books in the bookstore. Joan of Arc can play checkers with Ptolemy, and ostensibly “living” pets can be made of chocolate. “Existential Semantics” describes a dating service where the reality of potential dates doesn’t seem to matter. The essence here is that unreliable place between desire and fulfillment that keeps people looking for a past or future event where perfect happiness is achieved. But what do dreamers really want and what are they afraid to see? “Pictures” relates this conundrum:
Inside, a vertical row of buttons
lets you choose what pose to snap.
Here & Now is a favorite, as is
How I Remember Me.
People learn fast not to push
What I Could Have Been.
There’s not much call for
How I Am Remembered, either;
but What I Wanted to Be still
gets pushed a lot.
And How I Remember You
does the very best business.Of course, none of these possible pictures actually reveal the digital nature of virtual consciousness and the Mall itself is a kind of lie. In the closing “About the Author” section Kauderer notes that “lies” are a “social lubricant” that allow people to live together. He concludes “that conflict in the levels of untruths” is the stuff of myth and fable, and therefore at the core of storytelling.” Highly Recommended.
—Sandra Lindow