Astropoetry by Christina Sng.
(Alban Lake, 2017). 45 pp. Paper $6.00, digital $1.99.

A Collection of Nightmares by Christina Sng.
(Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2017). 88 pp. Paper $10.95 digital $4.99.

One could argue that the very nature of haiku, senryu, and other short poetic forms is to capture an essence and then deliver a twist. In Astropoetry: Poems Celebrating the Wonders and Mysteries of Space, Christina Sng exceeds and surpasses this, frequently starting with a twist and then delivering another. For example, in “Ceres Mystery,” we see a fact turned into a mystery turned into an ominous technology:

Not enough light for
Earth to see what’s on Ceres
Light absorber works (18)

Even more impressive. “Ceres Mystery” is only one part of an extended poetic series on Ceres that is a fascinating study of the mystery and danger of space.

Even more essential to Astropoetry’s success, beyond its technical acumen and deeply thought-out premises, is Sng’s sense of humor, particularly around Halloween (see “Halloween Detour”). This is most evident in “Halloween on the International Space Station,” and the astronaut’s trickery:

On the ISS
Astronauts dress as aliens
Video call to Earth (15)

This sense of joy mixes with the mystery and awe of humanity moving beyond Earth. Astropoetry captures the enormous scope of astronomical travel by layering its poems in the order of distance from the sun, out. We watch as humans take their first stab at colonization, and we see the beauty of the enormous astronomical bodies that ravage distant space.

With A Collection of Nightmares: Even the Most Exquisite Dreams Turn Dark, Sng spends much more time in longer-form poetry, but the twists of both theme and execution are even stronger than those of Astropoetry. As opposed to the previous collection, which demonstrated a sense of optimism and wonder in the face of a dangerous universe, A Collection of Nightmares spends more time exploring people trapped with their darkness. Sometimes literally, as in “They Do Not Sleep,” in which someone tries to run away from their fears,

. . . only to find
You have locked yourself
In with it[.] (22)

Sng’s sense of humor is still present in A Collection of Nightmares, but here it takes the form of gallows humor of the darkest stylings. A peaceful mother takes a nap holding her child’s head in her lap. A cancer patient tries to fly. Pain is healed through cutting flesh. And in sum, Sng shows how these darkest ironies hold the strongest kernels of truth within them.

Redemption is a large part of A Collection of Nightmares. An offended woman’s husband finds a way to seek vengeance in her honor. A mother finds a mirror to see her dead son. An abuse victim with “bruises / Piled on top of each other” ends the cycle of violence. Even the Twilight Zone–esque story told in “The Atomizer and the Matchbox.” The characters that populate these poems seek lives fuller than the ones they live within, and will take means to reach them. Sometimes bloody, violent means, but means nonetheless.

Astropoetry and A Collection of Nightmares both demonstrate, at their core, Sng’s thematic concerns of human agency. Our ability to succeed, our capacity to fail, and the bounds on both. And within that framework, Sng both places the reader as a human in a vast universe of space and of fear, and reminds us that even when surrounded by this vastness, being human matters.

—Luke Forney

Built to Serve by G. O. Clark; cover illustration by Sandy DeLuca
Alban Lake, 2017. 24 pp. $6 paperback; $1.99 Kindle. albanlake.com

I’ve read a lot of G. O. Clark’s poetry, but I can’t remember a collection I enjoyed as much as this one. Clark takes all our favorite robot tropes: Robby the Robot, Asimov’s Three Laws of robotics, Gort, Bradbury’s the Electric Hound, and even the Tin Man, and puts them into a collection that covers a lot of our hopes and fears about our A.I. friends.
It never occurred to me that Baum’s Tin Man is indeed an A.I., but Clark makes that clear in his simply titled “The Tin Man”:

He’s heard tales
about the wizard, who
performs miracles in the
mythical city they just happen
to be traveling to. A good heart
specialist would be more logical,
but he lacks insurance

Ah, yes—that’s always the case with robots, isn’t it? Their logic is superior to ours, or at least they consult it more than we do. And speaking of heart, here’s a stanza from a poem that is right after my own clockwork one, titled “The Steam-Powered Robot”:

The steam-powered robot
is from another era, one where he still
had time to dream at night, the 24/7
work week not yet standard.

There’s no shortage of sexbots in this book, either; mostly they are treated with humor, although “Lady Robotica” is pure horror:

Your bones are but
balsa wood in her embrace,
and your flesh a practice hide
for this tattoo artist’s painfully
intimate caress.

With all the fun ideas there is some lovely imagery, too, as in “Distant Target”:

The engines of darkness
are idling in the night, awaiting
the slow alignment of the stars,
destination blessed.

I’d say that Clark does a pretty good job combining robots from popular culture with the conflicting emotions we have about the whole idea of mechanical men and artificially intelligent beings. This is accessible poetry, and I’d highly recommend the book not only to poetry readers who are SF fans, but also to robot fans who have yet to see how much fun poetry can be. So score this one highly for me, as it’s the kind of book I’d give as a gift to any robot fan.

But just as I’m about to smile and say how fun this one is, I reread the selection titled “It’s All in the Programming.” Perhaps Clark hasn’t been talking about robots at all, at least not completely…

It’s a discontented robot
who lounges upon an old park bench,
head propped against the rusty, cast iron arm,
all too aware of the waking nightmare
of existence, wishing its processors
would just fail.

In the end, robots are just reflections of those who made them. Nothing makes that clearer that this set of highly enjoyable poems.

—Denise Dumars

*

Built to Serve: Robot Poems is a book of great science fiction ideas. If one of the keys to speculative poetry is to speculate, or ask questions, then G. O. Clark spreads his imagination wide and asks some bizarre questions about robots. How would electricity taste for a robot? What would a robot be like if it were a Luddite? What would a robot prostitute be like for a human being well past one hundred years of age? What would a peeping Tom see if he caught a robot undressing? Clark attempts to answer these and other questions with his poems.

Unfortunately, Clark’s craft is not up to the task. His poems suffer from basic flaws. For example, Clark’s lines are littered with abstractions that leave the reader with vague impressions of his visions, but little else. Describing a robot Casanova in the poem “Built to Serve,” we are presented with a robot who

is ever ready to serve
its mistress, and

is fully functional,
programmed in the arts
of pleasure, classic
and modern.

Lines like these possibly allude to something sexual, but the language is so hazy and unformed as to mean almost anything. This sort of language seems especially prevalent at the end of Clark’s poems. There seems to be an idea that ending on abstract language sums the poem up in some profound way. So a poem about robots preparing to build the human bodies of their masters after a long space journey ends with the fuzzy lines “memory banks ready/to download the essence of those/too finite to go the distance,” which provide a vague understanding of the scene at best, but offer the reader no way in to the poem, no way to experience the situation for themselves.

Occasionally, Clark produces a stanza of strong imagery or language. For example, describing a robotic dance that occurs while the humans are still in cryosleep, he writes

Bathed in red light,
the robots twirl beneath the
view-ports, whirl about like dervishes
before their god, gravity and
the dance intensifying.

While not perfect (“dervishes” is a particularly weak and obvious vehicle for “whirl”), there is at least some visual imagery here for the reader to participate in. There’s also this section from the poem “Museum Piece,”

He has a coffee pot
for a head,
an aluminum hot water urn
for a body,
two stainless steel, conical
lamp shade breasts,
arms and legs shaped from
miscellaneous pipes and scraps,
and a billowing skirt made from
an aluminum saucer-sled.

Again, readers can clearly visualize this robot. Examples like this are rare, and stand out all the more so for it. It’s clear that Clark can use imagery, but for some reason chooses not to in the bulk of his poems, and the reader suffers for it.

Apart from the issues with the poetry, there are clear editorial and design issues as well. The pages are littered with basic errors, from missing or unnecessary punctuation to some misspelled words. While one might expect one or two of these errors in any given text, the overabundance of them here makes the reading and enjoyment of the poems difficult. The biggest issue, though, are the three two-page ads for Clark’s other books on the press. These are major distractions for the reader. One argues that song lyrics are poetry, which is problematic in itself, and uses some of the most unpoetic lyrics to prove its point and sell Clark’s other book. The other two ads are for Clark’s fiction books, and have nothing to do with poetry at all. The overall effect of the ads and other issues is that this book is merely a vehicle to plug Clark’s other works, and that the poetry is secondary to the money.

There are a host of other problems in this book, from clichéd language to misunderstandings with poetic form to ineffective line breaks. Primarily, though, the abstract language and extreme lack of imagery is what separates this book from the reader, and that’s a shame, because the ideas behind these poems have a lot of potential and deserve to be explored fully. Ultimately, this is a collection of really great questions and concepts that are poorly executed.

—Joshua Gage

A Catalogue of the Further Suns: Précis of Reports Compiled by the Preliminary Survey Expeditions by F. J. Bergmann.
(Gold Line Press, 2017, winner of chapbook contest). 48 pages, paperback. $10.00. goldlinepress.com

In A Catalogue of the Further Suns, F. J. Bergmann has given readers 29 dense and well-wrought poems, each a chilling cautionary tale reflecting a space-faring culture’s dangerous preconceptions and damaging cultural misadventures as it careens across the universe. With the neocolonial smugness of the irrevocably unempathic, the scientifically detached reporters summarize their alien first encounters, dwelling most often on the final facts that precipitate their departures. For instance, the initial poem, “Overtures,” describes a culture where infants are given open wounds that are kept open by plugs and slowly made larger, an intentional “emptiness” that’s interwoven with the sexual and the spiritual. Bergmann describes the haphazard process by which sharing begins: “When they caught our chief / zoolologist with her favorite / sex toy, they seemed satisfied / and began sharing their private / cultural practices,” but there is always a dangerous moment where recognition of apprehended similarity turns to reveal inevitable, unacceptable differences, familiarity breeding contempt and taboo commission, apparently unavoidable:  “We had to leave precipitately. / Our departing ship tore a hole / through the skin of clouds.”

Bergmann is the poetry editor of Mobius: the Journal of Social Change, and her poetry explores the morality of social change, interweaving our anthropological past with present trends. “Code of Ethics,” “Cultural Climate” and “Hydromorphology” describe the folly of ignoring a culture’s effect on its environment. In “Xiphiarchy,” which means “rule by the sword,” she slyly takes aim at the present trend of rearming America: “Their children were trained to bear / arms from the earliest age at which / they could be induced to ask for them. / All their toys were dangerous.” In “Cultural Exchange” first contact itself proves mutually destructive, a worst case extraterrestrial scenario based on European explorers’ first contacts with aboriginals. In “Ascendance,” the issue is the connection between cultural (in this case culinary) rigidity and shame. Correspondingly, “Exobiology III” is a horrifying culinary example of the complicity that can be involved in racism. 

Like Ursula K. LeGuin and Ray Bradbury before her, Bergmann reflects on the damage that even the well-intentioned can cause. Overall, these powerful SF poems explore the Alien within, implying important moral questions about boundaries and balance, and acknowledging that fools do indeed rush in (and afterwards rationalize their lack of responsibility for what happened because of it). Highly recommended.

—Sandra J. Lindow

Crossing Paths at Midnight by Alan Katerinsky.
(CWP Collective Press, 2017). 25 pp. Paper, $5.00.

CWP Collective Press is an energetic new publisher in Western New York that has dipped into specpo a time or two. At least a third of this book is not formally speculative, yet many poems that are not overtly genre still touch on genre tropes and vocabulary. Consider the first stanza of “Success Parameters”:

Although I have warrior dreams
and a poet’s heart,
I am, after all,
a paper-pushing functionary
in a bureaucratic position. (25)

Within that quote, the schism between devotees of the speculative and slaves of the literal is outlined and branded into the brains of those of us who have worked at mindless jobs while dreaming of grander worlds.

To go farther with the book’s fusionist trend, I suggest that one strange element of the collection is that non-genre poems often seem genre, and genre poems sometimes feel non-. For example, Katerinsky’s meditation on “The Value of Science Fiction,” which first appeared in the genre magazine FrostFire Worlds, is formally speculative only in the sense that it posits

Science Fiction is the religion
of the second half of the
twentieth century. (17)

It also uses the language of specpo:

It is not that we prepare
for the destruction of society,
the old society has been destroyed,
we are forging a new world
out [of] the shards of the old. (17)

And yet, within the poem there is no literal use of impossibility, no reliance on science or horror, no magic realism. This begs the question: Is poetry about science fiction inherently speculative? After reading this, I say yes.

The other side of the equation, when genre sounds non, is exemplified by “Seven Deadly Friends.” There is a certain brilliance in writing a poem of eight stanzas of 5/7/5 syllable counts based on this premise—

Sisyphus sits by
having a smoke break amidst
the eternal flames (4)

—and having it sound so natural that it could be someone at the bus stop harping about work.

This is the work of an older, and sometimes crankier, writer and it shows at times. The book opens with “Zip Up Young Man!” and contains advice and regret that accrues with the decades such as “Progress”:

The great teacher pain
freely confers her wisdom.
See how much I’ve learned? (14)

Over the last three years Katerinsky’s poems have slowly trickled into Star*Line, Scifaikuest, and other familiar places. This is the poet’s first collection, and having a whole book full of his poems at once is a treasure for me. I’ll be wishing for more.

—Herb Kauderer

Darkverse: The Shadow Hours by Lori R. Lopez
(Fairy Fly Entertainment, 2017) 632 pp. Kindle $11.99.

Darkverse: The Shadow Hours by Lori R. Lopez seems to be an illustrated omnibus of attempted horror poetry. Most of the poems in this volume suffer from basic craft issues and seem to be either linguistic trifles with little depth or prose chopped into weak line breaks. Very few of them seem edited or curated, and the enormous length of this volume makes for a difficult read indeed.

The poems in Darkverse: The Shadow Hours suffer from the most basic of craft issues. From the opening pages, there are the obvious cliches and abstractions that mark this as unedited and amateur poetry:

Snug within my sanctuaries, my havens of light,
the retreats where I feel most sheltered … Safe
inside a fortress of invisible armor and courage,
I vainly endeavor to outwait the storms of the dark.

This opening verse, and the rest of the opening and eponymous poem “Darkverse,” has all the hallmarks of poor poetry—lack of imagery, cliches, abstractions, etc. Were this a one-off piece, it might be okay, but the bulk of Darkverse: The Shadow Hours reads like this.

Alternately, readers are presented with poems like “Haunted House,” which begins:

An eyesore
Crumbling ruins
A scary place
Creaky, peeling, unkempt
Old mansion
Someone’s home
A spooky shell

Again, all the flaws of bad poetry are here—excessive adjectives, poor formatting, abstraction, etc. The only difference between poems like this and the previous example are the length. Lopez’s poems are either pages in length or, alternately, little, short pieces.

The review copy of this book is only 515 pages. The Kindle version on Amazon is 632 pages, so I assume the poems are given their space to breathe in the Kindle version. However, in the preview version, they’re packed onto the pages between Lopez’s own artwork, which makes them difficult to read or separate from each other. That being said, if the short version of this book is 515 pages, there’s a problem already. For comparison, a recent version of Milton’s Paradise Lost is only 512 pages. This omnibus is ridiculous in length, and very few of the poems have been published outside of Lopez’s previously self-published collections, so there’s very little editing here. So, in length, editing, and presentation, this book has all the signs of a poor, self-published book, and only the most die-hard fans of speculative or horror poetry will get anything from this collection.

—Joshua Gage

Dear Deepest Ghost by Meg Smith
(2017) 126 pp. Paperback $14.95

It’s always difficult to review a “new and collected” book. People naturally change, and their voices develop, grow, take different directions, etc. throughout their writing career. Dear Deepest Ghost by Meg Smith is a new and collected book stretching back to the mid-1990s all the way up to 2016. So, with twenty-plus years of poetry in this volume, readers can expect to see various shifts and changes in Smith’s voice, focus, writing style, etc. This makes for a complicated read, but taken slowly, Dear Deepest Ghost is an impressive collection of poetry.

Dear Deepest Ghost is not a pure speculative collection. There are plenty of speculative poems, to be sure, a few of which are award-nominated. But there are plenty of non-speculative poems, too. At times, these poems seem deeply personal, and deal with extended metaphors and simple, direct language. A poem like “Moving Stones” begins:

My mother and I are stone people.
We grew up out of the ground
and no one had to tell us.
We were simple and round,
and the ground said
so be it as if we were
a pub and a house.

It’s a direct poem, and works for an introspective family piece, and a lot of Smith’s work seems focused on those themes.

Relationships, familial and otherwise, also seem to play a large role in Smith’s poetry, and even when she dips into speculative themes, these sorts of ideas are still prevalent, as in “Orion Theory”:

In the kitchen, you begin to tell me
about the true age of the pyramids,
and how pharaohs lay facing the stars,
and reaching for the arrows of Orion.
I want to listen, truly.
I have always wanted Orion in my reach—
a seeker of stars, a core of fir
that knows no death.
But here, on Earth, we are in a small place.
Around is a sound, like mesh, of conversation.
I hear only the name of Orion.
I want only to reach out to you
and a vast place of the comfort
of darkness and stars like hearts whose fever is
without dawn.

It’s a fine poem, pleasant and subtle, but effective in capturing the feelings of a moment in time. This is true for most of Smith’s work.

Smith’s true speculative poetry, the poems that SpecPo purists will look for, are also quite successful. For example, her poem “Astronaut” begins:

The crumbling of stars
makes the trail home
through a track of dark steps
from route to route
and no light in between,
only words.
The page is a long night in reverse
and the words are the negatives of suns.

This is really unique language, and there’s hints of the mythic within the speculative that really works to add layers to this piece.

Meg Smith is a talented and multi-faceted poet, and Dear Deepest Ghost stands as a testament to that. As a “new and collected,” it’s a wide-ranging text, and while all the poems included are not speculative, they are well-written and will catch the attention of poetry readers. However, for SpecPo purists, there is plenty of speculative content here, too, to keep those readers interested as well. Overall, a very successful collection of poetry.

—Joshua Gage

Flying Solo: The Lana Invasion (a novella in verse) by Herb Kauderer.
(Author Series 36, The Poet’s Haven, 2017) saddle-stitched chapbook, color cover, $6.00 US/Canada. boutique.poetshaven.com

Flying Solo is a very small book. It’s about 5” high by 4” wide. Thus, the contents are no more a novella (and no less) than a typical graphic novel is a novel. 

The story of Earth’s invasion by an advanced avian culture is told in 30 short poems. The lana possess advanced tech and a mission to assimilate the cosmos. Their standard procedure for invasion of a new solar system has never failed, as far as this ship’s crew knows. The cloaked mothership enters orbit and deploys a cadre of solitary scouts to infiltrate and find out what makes this new world tick.

From “Indigenous peoples”:

noble birds of prey
feasting on wildness
and defending the skies
...
cleaners
processing remains
of frequent brawls
among the chaos of lower lifeforms

modest sentinels
patrolling
roosting on defensive wires
strung across landscapes

The story focuses on the adventures of a single scout as she struggles to comprehend the essence of this world. One of the first tasks is to communicate with the natives, the intelligent avians who rule this world, as the natives do every civilized world they’ve found. For the first time in her memory this proves well-nigh impossible.

From “first contact”:

feels the thrill of the bird of prey
closing on her at full speed

she waits for the wind
of the sudden halt of its flight
and the modest pecking of dominance
that will open communication
with a new world

This world is unique. Not only have the avians seemingly failed to dominate (and what kind of creature rules in their stead?), but the scout begins to harbor heretical thoughts. The longer she spends on this bizarre world, the more deviant her thoughts become, and the more secretive her behavior. As the true nature of life on this peculiar double planet becomes clear to the lana, they have to utterly rethink their plans for conquest.

I thoroughly enjoyed Flying Solo. This sequence of poems tells its tale well, building suspense, creating character, and bringing the reader along as the story unfolds. Also, each poem works on its own both as chapter and verse, advancing the plot with a light touch. This charming SF story makes no attempt to explain how avians mastered or invented advanced technology, but if you take that as your one big assumption, your reward will be a fun read.

—David C. Kopaska-Merkel

The Magician's Handbook by Grant Clauser. (PS Books, 2017) 94 pp. Paperback $15.
amazon.com/Magicians-Handbook-Grant-Clauser/dp/0990471586

In this steadily escalating series of connected poems, there's an applaudable directness. An eye contact. A symphony that is the opposite of bombastic, but still makes your skin shiver. I mean this: there is a simple and frank directness, none of the usual "poetic" misdirection. These poems wear their everyday grimace and never think about the veils they packed away so many years ago. Clauser stands against fluff, and even his punchlines (for there are quite a few laughs between the cracks) hit like a handshake from a long-lost relative at a family reunion who has an important story to tell you. Stripped down to simple words and carnival concepts we can all relate to, these poems are still beautiful.

The central conceit is a tale about the life of a magician—as in, the sleight-of-hand variety—but this book is like a Penn and Teller routine which baldly explains the details of the trick to the audience even as it goes along. There goes the ball. It's in his pocket now. You were told the words would do this, you were warned, but they still hit. There is no claim to cleverness. This self-deceptive self-effacing power makes these poems greater than the sum of their parts. Although I remarked aloud at several great endings, the effect this collection leaves with me is deeper than its honest schtick and obvious magical metaphors for living, loving, and aging imply. Perhaps this hits me harder as a fan of legerdemain: one who is willing to have his biases and flaws misused, one who is willing to be dragged into the beautiful lie that everything might make sense if... yes, that's my card! How did you do that?

—Daniel G. Fitch

Metastable Systems by David C. Kopaska-Merkel.
(Diminuendo Press, 2017). 141 pp. Paperback $13.00. eBook, $2.99. Introduction by Ann K. Schwader.

Metastable Systems is a large poetry collection by SFPA Grandmaster David C. Kopaska-Merkel (hereafter DKM), and weighs in at over ten thousand words. Poems long and short are represented. After the first poem, the book is divided into five sections—

I. The Tumbler Stars Click Home
II. Space and Time
III. She Blinded Me
IV. Horror and Humor
V. Even Fantasy Has Rules

—and the first two and last two could easily be their own books. In the middle is the slight, four-page section labelled, “She Blinded Me,” conjuring Thomas Dolby’s 1982 hit song “She Blinded Me With Science.” In a sense that balances nicely the physics of the first half and the fantastical elements of the second half.

Perhaps more importantly, it gathers five of the more science term–intensive poems into one place. You see, DKM’s humor and whimsy can distract from the fact that he has a PhD specializing in carbonate geology and paleontology, and he is not afraid to tap into the knowledge or vocabulary connected with that, using words in this collection that include: U-Pb isotopes, bryozoans, mosasaur, Baculites, carid bauplan, pyrophiles, chromatophores, and pinnipeds.

Of course, he also uses remarkable vocabulary not particularly affiliated with his science training, such as cerulean, midden, corvid, and words more or less made up, such as febbish, pellucidity, concijun, and skwEzz’z. (Boy, would I like to play Free Rice with his spellchecker at hand.) The part that impresses is that the vocabulary enriches rather than obstructs the poetry, even when the reader doesn’t happen to know a given word. (Not that specpo readers don’t enjoy rich vocabulary. We do.) Similarly, there are many references to classic horror, such as Tekeli-li, Dunwich Aquarium, and Innsmouth, that adds to the poetry if you are read in that area, but does not detract much if you are not.

Further, DKM’s knowledge of non-specpo poets should not beoverlooked, especially when they write specpo. It manifests itself here in a reference to T. S. Eliot and his cats (57). “The spines that pierce, / the cones that crush” (65) hearkens back to “The jaws that bite, the claws that catch” from “Jabberwocky.” The resonances of the sonnet “Is Mars Dead?” (44) connect to works past.

The differing sections do not divide DKM’s authorial voice. His dry, sometimes dark humor is in evidence with a poem that references another pop song. The poem “My Nano Ain’t Fixin To Waste Its Time On That” opens with a seven-word quote from Smash Mouth’s 1997 debut single “Walkin’ on the Sun.” DKM takes the lyric from the viewpoint of sunwalking as “one of the more expensive, and impractical, forms of suicide” (32) and analyzes it at length both humorously and nihilistically.

DKM often writes of dislocation such as:

dreamed I was the one
who slept on when we arrived
I woke alone
dark and empty corridors
blue world in the viewport (26)

but also with humor of many flavors such as this from “If we lived on an apricot”

You could get drunk
On what came out of a volcano (125)

And “Little Voice in My Head” (31) in which the narrator gets a new memory chip, and his wife wants him to let the computer upload of her dead mother live there.

I believe one of the strongest components of the book is the transportation of locale and viewpoint. When DKM writes “nothing beats / A Cajun trilobite boil on the beach / Under the swift Paleozoic sun” (66), I’m ready for time travel back to when Earth was the planet of the trilobites. “The Woods Look Up” (39) is from the point of view of a forest, dreaming of flight. How can I look at trees the same after that?

In the end, this is a meaty work of high science literacy, creativity, originality, playfulness, wistfulness, artfulness, and fun. And that is a marvelous thing. The last poem in the book, “The Origami Ship” (137), connects all the grandeur of science fiction to the magic of sitting and reading. All the other richnesses of the work should not overlook its power: the power of words.

—Herb Kauderer

New Yesterdays, New Tomorrows by Brian Garrison.
(2017). 26 pp. Paperback $12.00. bugthewriter.com/p/buy-things.html

New Yesterdays, New Tomorrows by Brian Garrison is a 50-poem chapbook, proudly self-published, in other words, with no imprint except his own name. You may know Garrison as the founder and editor of Parody Poetry Magazine, so it is no surprise to find some parodies in the collection, of Frost (“The Sip Not Taken”), Cummings (“Technology I Love You”), Whitman (“When I Look’d Up in Perfect Silence at the Stars”), and Dickinson (“ Fear’ is the thing with dark fur”)—funny but also wise and deep. There is slapstick here too: in “Less Popular Dinosaurs” we find “Achillesheelosaurus” and “Aldentesaurus,” for example.

I’m definitely a big fan of light poetry—you may have read in my intro to this Star*Line issue that we’re highlighting light poetry this time—but I want to emphasize for this review that this chapbook is much more than light poetry; it takes on weighty issues and showcases a wide-ranging perspective on the world, on society, on nature, on what makes us human. His Williams parody, “The Red Spacesuit” brings together whimsy—“my daughter’s red captain’s / spacesuit”—with “earth’s final sunrise” (a comment on runaway technology, perhaps?) and a hopeful image—“beside the white / rockets”—to suggest that humankind may yet survive the impending apocalypse within the universe of the poem and, by extension, our real-world environmental troubles. Quite a balancing act, there. Many of the poems in the book are similar high-wire performances. I highly recommend Garrison’s wonderful chapbook and hope you will consider not only purchasing it but also voting for it in the Elgin awards.

—Vince Gotera

Ruminations by Ian Brunner.
(CWP Collective Press, 2017). 35 pp. Paper $5.00.

The publisher has said “Ian’s poems are an homage to the Elder Gods,” and the cover depicts the author levitating in full lotus contemplating his bedroom with its Star Wars poster, D&D supplies and Spider-Man books, and includes a faux comics code stamp. These are somewhat misleading sales tools. Ruminations by Ian Brunner does in fact quote H. P. Lovecraft, Madeleine L’Engle, and others, but there are no Elder Gods, nor mentions of Star Wars nor superheroes. The book is far more about a college student who loves such things trying to understand the magic of this world, and the pain of being a lonely fan. As a result, some poems are about the genre more than in the genre.

when I was little the books I read
always had a protagonist with a friend.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I always had hope after every summer
“Maybe this will be the year.”
“Maybe I won’t be alone.” (19)

There is, of course, metaphor that leans toward spec:

I know very few people who have managed
to keep their joy.
They are lanterns hanging
along the paths of life
to remind us that some of us do make it (26)

And places that clearly go beyond the literal world.

I have experienced hauntings
although, I may have been more of a ghost
than whatever haunting haunted me. (28)

But more than anything there is an embracing of the fannish manifesto:

“Weird at last,
weird at last.
God Almighty,
weird
at
last.” (29)

I particularly liked the word cloud poem “Escapism,” which is unquotable due to its form.

The title of the collection is appropriate as the poet ruminates:

Science tells us that there are three dimensions and time but it also tells us that what we can see is less than five percent of the matter that makes up the universe. (33)

And perhaps pontificates:

There is something other than what we can perceive and we’re all searching for that other. The trick is to not lose the wonder of this world while wondering about the other. (34)

In the end, I found moments of brilliance and pleasurable reading, but also passages that represent the treading of water that most of us do as we wait for maturity to arrive. I suspect that five years from now the author will realize that 25% of the words in this book didn’t add to its strong parts. But those strong parts convince me that the author is worth reading. And I think he is likely to persevere.

—Herb Kauderer

Secret Histories by Michael McInnis.
(White Knuckle Press, 2017). 20 pp. Free online: whiteknucklepress.com/michaelmcinnis

This is book number forty-four in White Knuckle Press’s online mini-chapbook series. Each book is ten to fourteen prose poems, often accompanied by a quirky “Author’s Statement,” bio, and cover. Most often the poems are titled, or at least numbered with Roman numerals, but in this collection the poems are unlabelled. I will use the Roman numeral convention even though they do not appear in the book.

Secret Histories is an interesting mix of the concrete, the surreal, and the metaphoric in a place that “reject[s] the dictatorship of reality,” though portions seem solidly science fictional. For example, from poem I:

We stood watching a new moon circling Jupiter. A screaming moon,
full of gadgetry and gimcrackery.

And then the metaphoric kicks in as this from poem II:

An angry comet, mad that it was nothing more than a dirty ice ball and vowing to do real damage some day if only it wasn’t stuck in this orbit, scorched across the solar system.

And the surreal from poem III:

We no longer had a use for UFOs, magic bullets or string theory. Our
focus remained on Thoreau’s pencils.

Poem VI is a delightful non-sequitur about the door-to-door exorcist. Somehow it fit perfectly.

Overall, the book held together better than most books that are so amazingly free of writing and narrative rules as this one. I loved some of the individual poems, especially IX. But for me, the overall flow was jarred when the book abruptly broke off after XIII, which for me had no alliance with the established strings of mood, theme, and rhythm. It was the sensation of thinking there is one more stair in the staircase and stumbling over a landing that arrived a step too soon.

I will not fret over the dissonant ending. I enjoyed too much of the book too much to quibble. This is a book of well under a thousand words, so, even going slowly to savor the language and imagery, it’s still only a five minute read. For me, there was a strong return on investment. I will be looking for more from Michael McInnis.

—Herb Kauderer

Strange Land edited by Vertigo Xi’an Xavier.
(Poet’s Haven Press, 2017). 64 pages, wallet-sized. $8.00 US and Canada. boutique.poetshaven.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=139

Poet’s Haven Press occasionally dabbles in speculative works, including the 2014 Elgin 3rd Place collection Inhuman: Haiku from the Zombie Apocalypse by Joshua Gage. Strange Land is a thematic anthology, and also serves as The Poet’s Haven Digest #3.

Strange Land contains 27 poems and 3 short stories about the view of earthlings by extraterrestrials. I suggest that this is also a subconscious metaphor for how those outside the SF field view those of us within. To make this viewpoint a few steps moreinteresting, the contributors are a mix of SF veterans and non-SF writers. The SF veterans include Joshua Gage, Mary A.Turzillo, Geoffrey A. Landis, Deborah Davitt, Herb Kauderer, M.X. Kelly, Brian Rosenberger, Mathias Jansson, Vince Gotera, and Rie Sheridan Rose. The “aliens” are impactful poets from many places across the US, and also from England, Sweden, and South Africa.

As expected, the results are a mix, with some lovely surprises. The argument in literary circles is that speculative fiction is written in code which acts as a membership handshake, and provides shortcuts and backgrounds for the “in-group,” and presentsan obstacle to the “out-group.” Some of the works here are writing without access to the codebook and therefore there are extra explanations, and times when well-used SF tropes are revealed with an expectation of freshness, most commonly the image of humans as children whom aliens need to punish/elevate/fix. But there are also times when this causes the re-examination of “in-group” SF, and I think that’s a good thing.

In addition, placing veterans in proximity to outsiders highlights issues of accessibility. For example, the book opens with “#GREENLIVESMATTER,” a scifaiku suite by Joshua Gage. This is the sort of stuff I find pleasurably entertaining, with an occasional hidden needle to provoke thought. But it does appear written in code. I doubt that my clever eleven-year-old daughter would get much out of the ten ku, despite her wide reading in YA SF. For example:

keg stand
a fratboy in greenface
holds her ankles

To be fair, there are cultural barriers as well as genre-code barriers in the ku.

The last poem in the book, “Just a Stranger in a Strange Land,” presents the counterargument for the insider/outsider dichotomy. Lori Ann Kusterbeck is a mainstream poet without genre credits, and she has done a respectable job of creating a long poem out of Heinlein titles and quotes. Certainly this work has all the hallmarks of “in-group” work. So I have to ask if my daughter would understand:

and when Starman Jones and the Farmer start spinnin’ tales
we learn about the great Star Beast and the revolt in 2100
how the menace from earth and all of Methuselah’s children
escaped from the black pits of Luna
only to cry—“well, blowups happen”
grumbles from the grave are all that’s left.

Of course there have always been different levels of accessibility in the diversity of written SF. The point here is to note that the academic presumption of the barrier being generated by in-group creators does not hold true in this case.

What’s more, this is not to imply that poets (literary or SF) have not perpetrated “literary” poems within the book. Mark Williams’ “Greeting” certainly owes more to the beat poets than to SF. Geoff Landis and Melissa Mulvihill also present work more in the literary camp.

As a reader I have a special spot for works, SF or literary, that cause my world-view to shift. Given the theme of the anthology, it’s no surprise that there are a good number of those, though none of the handful of poems involving recent politics did much to surprise. In terms of worldview shift Mary A. Turzillo’s “When the Aliens Come to Tea” nicely and amusingly questions societal conventions.

We must pretend we live in arranged group marriages
in tents of fake plastic zebra skin.
We must invent creoles of obscure languages
and possibly communicate with scents
or with burps, or with LED screens glued to our chests.

Vince Gotera’s “Astro-Archaeologist’s Log” revised how I think of driving. “Aliens Come In Threes” by Allen Ashley hit me with a few questions about what humanity really wants. I took a different view of naming things after reading “International Star Registery [sic]” by Jack Merrywell.

The penultimate poem, “Mr. Allen’s UFO” by Bruce Deitrick Price, ends powerfully with:

I go to another world,
talk to gods, what does it
change? This is the life
you go on living.

By now you have a clear idea of whether you want to visit these lands. I’m pleased I took the trip.

—Herb Kauderer

Through Immortal Shadows Singing by Mari Ness.
(Papaveria Press, 2017) papaveria.com. $4.99 Kindle, $9.99 paperback.
amazon.com/Through-Immortal-Shadows-Singing-Mari-ebook/dp/B071711RSJ/

Few poets today seem willing to accept the challenge of the epic form, an admittedly daunting task; of those that do, fewer still can do so with the powerful delivery of Milton and combine it with with the elegance and grace of Sappho. One poet who does dare to rise to the challenge is Mari Ness, whose debut novella-in-verse, Through Immortal Shadows Singing, published this April by Papaveria Press, emerges as a very enjoyable poetic journey through classic times. It is the story of Helen of Troy, as told through the eyes (and voice) of Helen herself. The voices of women are all too often absent or ignored in today’s modern narrative and Ness demonstrates historical knowledge (and confidence in her poetic ability) as she adroitly imbues this Helen with a voice that is at once uniquely feminine and strong enough to echo across the millennia.

From the opening line ‘My mother taught me the use of drugs …’ the reader is swept up in this enthralling re-telling of a classic tale, winding their way through a landscape carved from the mythology of the ancients. Ness brings this landscape to life with a quality of writing not usually witnessed in a writer’s debut effort. Fresh and inventive in her use of metaphor and imagery, Ness submerges the reader in Helen’s story of love and glory. Consider the following example:

“… the waters tight about me,
like a newfound lover,
molding the river to my skin …”

Ness seems to have an ample supply of tools that poets value most, but most importantly she seems to be willing to take risks, all of which makes for heady brew of poetry. Consider the following description of her Helen:

“… I am abducted, abductor,
lover and wife, chaste
and whore.
About me coil
a thousand songs, a thousand lies,
and even this song may be a lie,
a song I whisper
to take command of my own tale …”

Comparisons to Milton and Sappho aside, I cannot stress how impressed I am with this novella, particularly in light of the fact that it is a writer’s first published effort. I look forward to hearing more from her in the future.

Join Mari Ness and Helen of Troy—‘Child of thunder, child of swans’— on their journey through classic times and immortal lands as Helen takes command of her own tale.
You just might find yourself singing.
Highly recommended.

—Daniel C. Smith

Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest by Bruce Boston & Robert Frazier.
Crystal Lake Publishing, 2017. 245 pp. $3.99 ebook. CrystallakePub.com

Over the years, Bob Frazier and Bruce Boston have written poems and short stories set in the mutant rain forest, a fantastic place of dangerous wildlife, both animal and vegetable. Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest brings that narrative together, a history in prose and poem of what happens when nature’s limits are not just exceeded, but torn apart. The book contains 8 stories and 39 poems, some written in collaboration, some by Boston or Frazier alone. I’ll focus in this review on the verse. Full disclosure: I’ve published poems by both of these authors in Dreams and Nightmares.

From “Night Fishing on the Caribbean Littoral”

I’ve heard a Carib whisper of stunted duendes,
hairy four-fingered throwbacks who fly the canopy,
fleeting as ghosts, and “cut de t’umbs of de unwary,”
because “dey so bad wanna be like us, mon.”

I could have sworn that the Carib were exterminated long ago, but perhaps I am mistaken. Be that as it may, this account of a foray in questionable company, and perhaps straying a little too close to the mutant rain forest, takes the narrator into a sea where he can’t depend on natural law, known fact, or anything else. The rain forest spreads its arms and lunacy flourishes in its shadow. Human devolution is accompanied by every kind of evolutionary change that’s possible, but magnified and accelerated beyond all possibility of humanity to deal with it, or even apprehend it. Here, we doesn’t have to wait for bacteria to carry genes from a squirrel to a rat, or from maize to dandelions, one by one. Any two or more species can form chimeras, any can borrow traits and organs, capabilities and aspects, from any other. And they do. Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest are dark, as befits a book based on the (only slightly) outlandish idea that, one way or another, for our cavalier treatment of the planet there’ll be hell to pay.

From “Phantom Limb”

Flesh made of wingless bees
A skin of interlocking mites
In this way he strides home
On the rebirth of his sole

Some few do leave, returning, if not to sanity or normalcy, at least to humanity’s realm. There’s plenty of irony in Visions, but little out-and-out humor. So I hope you at least let out a chuckle. If this is the exception that proves the rule, what is the rule? Life may be grim, but it is surprising and wonderful as well. Keep your eyes open, and be ready to offer up far more than most would expect.

From “A Gourmand of the Mutant Rain Forest”

the pains which
rack his portly belly
do not lessen his desire
for spiny bone-white guavas
seasoned with banana moss.
The rash of radiation welts
which erupts upon his chest,
his throat and forearms,
does not delay his hunt
for the perfect table red

These poems are rife with imagery, as if attempting to capture on the page an ecosystem so complex and so unfamiliar that one book is not enough. Which is nothing but the truth. How much has been written about the mundane rain forest? Do we understand it yet? This poem is one of the few in Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest that does not take place in or adjacent to the forest itself. The gourmand has illicit rain-forest products imported to his home in a domed city. The domes are the only bastions of safety that remain in a world wracked by pollution. But what do the elites do? Perhaps it’s a form of cabin fever. Some explore the rain forest, usually coming to bad ends. Others bring the rain forest to them, with equally problematic results. This poem reminds me of Tim Powers’ Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, which features a dinner of similarly dangerous treats.

Frazier and Boston are doing the kind of worldmaking that usually calls for a novel. Or three. Imagine that trilogy torn apart, and most of it recycled. This is what’s left. Images, scenes, and sequences sampling a fecund world not so much mad, but alien. One senses that there are rules, there are reasons for trees with faces, cats with words, carnivorous butterflies, and so on, but we don’t know them. We can’t. They’re changing too fast for that.

So, I’m thinking that before it’s too late, you should buy this book. It won’t help you navigate a natural disasterscape, but it might help you prepare for one emotionally.

—David C. Kopaska-Merkel