Interstellar Flight Press Books Nominated for the 2022 SFPA Elgin Award
Speculative Poetry Is Our Rising Star!
We are delighted that both of our 2021 poetry titles are nominated for the 2022 SFPA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association) Elgin Award! Join us in congratulating Amelia Gorman and Brandon O’Brien on their nominations.
If you are a SFPA member, Voting opens July 1. The voting deadline is September 15, 2022. SFPA members receive voting links via email. We hope you’ll consider leaving a vote for one of our titles!
Can You Sign My Tentacle?
by Brandon O’Brien
Cthulhu meets hip-hop in this book of horror poems that flips the eldritch genre upside down. Lovecraftian-inspired nightmares are reversed as O’Brien asks readers to see Blackness as radically significant. Can You Sign My Tentacle? explores the monsters we know and the ones that hide behind racism, sexism, and violence, resulting in poems that are both comic and cosmic.
“Brandon O’Brien pulls no punches in this brazen collection of poetry leaking with blood and duality, autographs and strangers in lost timelines, motherless choirs humming out of mango roots, thresholds where hope is a phoenix, and bookstores whose owners are an infinity.” — Blake Curran in Aurealis #147
About the Author
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing, the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and the inaugural Ignyte Award for Best Speculative Poetry. His work is published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is the former Poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.
“Even if you aren't familiar with anything related to Cthulhu, Black and other marginalized readers of color will find at least one poem that resonates with them. Every Black person has a few moments in their life when they have been Othered by forces within and without. Since these poems magnify that too literal monstrous proportions, they will make the reader examine themselves in all their glory and flaws.” — Black Sci-Fi
Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota
by Amelia Gorman
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Gorman’s Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota is a poetic journey into the strange and wonderful world known previously only to the wild. Take a walk through the woods of Minnesota, past the Salton Sea, into the high grass of the prairie, beyond the rivers and creekbeds, into a world of the near-future where nature rules all. After all, the biggest ecological danger of invasive species is the monoculture they create.
“It’s a grim enough near-future Gorman foresees. Climate is an inanimate system. But each “beautiful and weird” invasive species obeys the universal prime directive: Survive, and then if you can, thrive. Not being alive in the case of the first threat and needing to stay alive in the case of the second render both these threats innocent. What about us? Doesn’t the prime directive apply to humans as well as the rest of animate creation? I say yes, it does. “ — Tor.com
About the Author
Amelia Gorman lived in Minneapolis for fifteen years before moving to Eureka, California in 2018. She loves the tide pools, redwood forests, and kinetic sculptures of her new home but misses lakes, looking at snow with a hot drink in her hand, public transit, and Eat Street. You can read more of her poetry in Liminality, Star*Line, Vastarien, and other places. She also writes weird fiction, including stories in She Walks in Shadows from Innsmouth Free Press and Nox Pareidolia from Nightscape Press. Find her online on twitter at @gorman_ghast and www.ameliagorman.com.
“Overall, this is an eerie collection, especially upon rereading. Amelia Gorman takes very innocuous, even deceptively helpful, species that are, by definition, invasive and turns their natural conquest into a near-future, preapocalyptic nightmare. What makes it more chilling is the cautionary aspect of this book. This is not a far-distant future, but one in which readers could very well be alive and experience. The subtle but overwhelming horror of this realization builds deceptively through the book until readers are left with a sense of dread upon completion. This is a magnificent collection that any horror reader will enjoy.” — Cemetery Dance
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to join our fan community on Discord. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
