Poetry
The Best Speculative Poetry is Creepy AF
Reading from the 2021 SFPA Elgin Award Nominees
Each year, I review my favorite books from the SFPA Elgin Awards nominated works. A full list is available on the SFPA website. This year’s awards chair is Jordan Hirsch, who I would like to thank for diligently updating the website and tracking nominations. Here are my previous reviews:
About the Awards: The Elgin Awards, named for SFPA founder Suzette Haden Elgin, are presented annually by SFPA for books published in the preceding two years in two categories, Chapbook and Book. Chapbooks must contain 10–39 pages of poetry and books must contain 40 or more pages of poetry. E-books are eligible, as well as print. Books that won first–third place in the previous year’s Elgin Awards are ineligible. Single-author and collaborative books are eligible; anthologies are not. Books containing fiction as well as poetry are not eligible. Books must be in English, but translations are eligible. In the case of translations that also contain the poems in the original language, those pages will not count toward the total page count. Nominated books must be made available to the Chair upon request to remain eligible.
Thoughts on This Year’s Books
This year I decided to focus on the major theme I noticed across the nominated books, which is horror. Well, I suppose that is a genre. But this year’s crop of books is decidedly horror-filled and I love it. In particular, there seems to be several books dealing with feminist horror in particular (when I say several, I mean a very large majority), a perhaps-not-entirely-new subgenre of speculative poetry, but one that has seen popularity with larger audiences in the last few years. It’s easy to see why, when you look around at the events of the last few years. Women are pissed and even the meekest of us is ready to fight back. As one of the authors on this list puts it, “We do not wait / around for arrows, heartbreak, drowning / none of that.”
Feminist horror has seen a reawakening in pop culture recently, with movies like The Witch, Shirley, The Invisible Man, and Midsommar to name a few. But beyond gothic poetry, there have been few centuries as rich in dark-af women poets as this one. It is an honor to highlight my favorite books among the list.
How I Create This List
Briefly, I want to touch on how I pick books for this list. This is merely a recommended reading list, not a “best of” because the list I am pulling from is the nominated works from the SFPA membership. My primary concern is highlighting works I feel deserve more reads. I tend to skew heavily feminist with a focus on writers of color, LGBTQIA+ voices, and disabled poets. The list is subjective to my tastes. I spend less time on men (cisgendered, heterosexual) because I feel like those voices have enough support. I always make a Goodreads list of the total nominated works, which you can access here. Lastly, in the past, there has been some (IMHO short-sighted) discussion at SFPA as to whether such lists are “bad” because they skew member’s voting towards one work or the other. Seeing as how I review some 21 books selected, I find this difficult to believe. I also believe the SFPA membership has enough independent thought to be able to do their own voting. The list is not to highlight those works I think you should vote for, but instead to highlight the amazing works that are nominated each year and lift up the endeavor as a whole. Vote as you see fit.
One more note: I am writing from my own perspective. If I make an error for any reason, please comment or message me. I never want to misrepresent a work simply because I misread it.
Full-Length Collections
*Second-Place Winner: A Collection of Dreamscapes by Christina Sng
Christina Sng is a stalwart in the horror and dark poetry scene. She has won two Bram Stoker Awards in poetry for A Collection of Nightmares and A Collection of Dreamscapes. Sng is a storyteller at heart, and this collection is no exception. It begins with a poetic sequence “The Love Song of Allegra,” held together with Sng’s signature unrhyming tercets that expand into longer and longer stanzas, deepening the story. Sng’s poems alternate from myth to fairy tales to monsters with ease, exploring all the darkest of folklore with a simple, accessible style. Of course, the feminist aspects of this collection are also satisfying. Cinderella is “saved…from / a lifetime of servitude / and hell.” Little Red Riding Hood is a “Motherless babe / taught to be self-sufficient / and brave at a young age.” (Another of Sng’s favorite themes: Mothering and all the joy and trauma therein). Some poems are deeply creepy, such as “Grandmother Red” which explores the “trauma / of being eaten” where Grandmother is not weak, but “consumed / with rage / still asphyxiating / inside that wolf’s / acrid belly.” Immigrant stories find their way here too, “First, when we fled the overlords / who took over our country. / For the sake of money. / I gutted them all after they / burned my face and broke my nose. / I kept their ears as trophies.” Sng’s poetry is the kind of righteous anger our world needs. Be on the lookout for Sng’s new collection, The Gravity of Existence (Interstellar Flight Press, 2022)
A Complex Accident of Life: Blackout Poetry Inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Jessica McHugh
McHugh’s collection was just awarded the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award for Best Poetry Collection. Y’all know I’m a sucker for some blackout poetry and Jessica McHugh’s latest does not disappoint. From the “erased” Author’s Note at the beginning (“From / stone /you / break / out / like / art /self /new / bizarre / and / tough / an experiment / of / form”) to the end of this delightful and experimental collection, I was enthralled. The first poem includes an illustration of Mary Shelley staring out of the page and blacked out with black and purple pencil:
Life a dark fairy tale,
She hated the tomb of love
And decided to live in tragedy.
Mary Shelly led a complicated and in some ways, disastrous life as a woman writer and the mother of genre. This exploration of her work deepens our understanding of the writer of Frankenstein while exploring some of the newly established methods of poetic erasure. From circular, bulbous highlights to criss-cross squares to geometric, colorful shapes, McHugh wields a set of colored pencils with care. While some erasures can feel random, the choice of a thematic subject matter in the found text of Frankenstein provides a backbone for McHugh to set to work like a sculptor, using a modern lens to explore the themes of this horror classic. Feminist, creative, artistic, and beautiful.
A Refuge of Tales by Lynne Sargent
The debut collection by ethicist/poet Lynne Sargent is feminist, mythic, and ecstatically horrific. Women crawl into the skins of cats after being skinned “after her pussy is taken.” They are left to grow in dirt, choking on fire, sword-stabbed, drowned, wombs of “endless bounty, soft / suffering.” Sargent refuses to shy away from the realities of femininity, even while disabusing the idea of victim and turning a satirical lens on the folkloric and monstrous roles of gender. In a book born of nightmares, Sargent said on Twitter of the cover, “I’ve had recurring nightmares ever since I was a child about being eaten by a variety of creatures while swimming in water. Most of these are water creatures, but one time I was eaten by Stymphalian Birds, which was part of the inspiration for the poem the cover art is based on!” Still, despite the cruel darkness herein, Sargent’s words are necessary and powerful.
America, Mine by Sasha Banks
America, Mine is a part of the recent surge of black gothic poetics. It takes the bloody icons of history, from Aunt Jemima to Donald Trump, and makes them as monstrous as they truly are. These poems are not comfortable. The future is bloody here too, as Banks asks, “How did the 45th president of america die?” The speculative elements are dystopian horror, “I saw a city crumbling into the mouth of / a many-headed beast. The beast was not / the terror, she was my cousin; the terror / was the sudden knowing that all / empires are made of paper and / damned religions.” Retribution abounds. In a riff on the unofficial anthem of America, Banks writes, “God bless america / this bitter and slender-necked stepsister / land that I love / that I fear will kill me in my sleep or lynch me as I / stand beside her and / braid the blonde ropes of her hair…” First written by Irving Berlin in response to fleeing to America after anti-semitic persecution in Russia, the history of the song feels worth mentioning to me, as it shows how America as we know it is not as we know it for every experience. America, Mine is an acknowledgment of the surreal reality many black Americans live in today, but it also looks to a future that is as of yet unfulfilled and as grim as today — unless we can find a way to reconcile the past.
“I think what poetry has the power to do is to put a voice to something, to make something real just by naming it. There’s so much power and validation in being able to speak on something, and a lot of people don’t know they have shared experiences unless they hear someone else talking about it” — Sasha Banks
Before We Remember We Dream by Bryan Thao Worra
Worra’s work primarily deals with the Laopocalypse — the killing, maiming, and displacement of over 400,000 Laotians during 1964–1973 as part of the Vietnam War. Worra was born in Vientiane, Laos in 1973, yet as Worra says, “Never read my life / as the diary of some sad refugee.” There are speculative elements here, of course — ghosts, myths, valkyries, dinosaurs, gorgons, gods, and wendigos. But, “A poem doesn’t give you much time to talk about Secret Wars.” The true activism of Worra’s work is an attempt to shine a light on the history/future of Laos and its people, scattered across time and history. Perhaps my favorite poem is “For No One In Particular” which addresses the fact that although not every reader may understand the particulars of the complex and rich history Worra is writing about, that is, as he says, “just the truth of it.” Such honesty and truth is lacking in contemporary speculative poetry, which sometimes is all-too-willing to explore the depths of the imagination for a simple escape from the brutalism of our reality. For the readers who are willing to do the work, this collection is beautifully imaginative without making the poet a “janitor of carnage.” After all, as Worra says, “ We must write to the limits of our dreams, if we are to recover our future.”
Burials by Jessica Drake-Thomas
This collection has all of my favorite things: witches, ghosts, changelings, and dead women. From “Bella and the Whych-Elm,” the famous true-crime story of a woman whose body was found in 1943 Hagley Wood, Hagley, England to the Black Dahlia, the story of Elizabeth Short, found murdered and mutilated in Los Angeles, California — these poems explore the darkness of being a woman, a woman slain, a woman loved, a woman witch. The primary focus of the collection is a complicated and traumatic relationship between two lovers, intertwined with the idea of spellmaking as gothic love story. Drake-Thomas takes reference from spellbooks, Anne Rice, music, and true crime. Burials is satisfyingly dark and feminist, and although it may not break entirely new ground, don’t we all need a good ghost story anyway?
Cradleland of Parasites by Sara Tantlinger
Sara Tantlinger’s collection inspired by plagues was released in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis in the US and is a Bram Stoker Award finalist for poetry. Prophetic and horrific, the collection explores plagues as far back as Athens up until the present day. With poems like “Herd Immunity,” some readers may find the subject matter too close for comfort. Tantlinger came up as a poet with a group of dark feminist women poets whose work can be found on this list and many others as women renegotiate horror through the lens of the feminine. We all grew up loving horror — from R.L. Stine to ouija boards to Annabel Lee — and now we are writing ourselves into the narrative, not as the Final Girl but as the Monster. These poems are raw, bloody, and easily consumed. As with Tantlinger’s previous work, horror abides in detail and all-too-real realities, “Close the pubs, burn the mutts / cull the cats, ignore the rats.” All too often feminist horror is a “wholesale massacre of the wrong / animals, no claws and fangs left / to eat the vermin who carry the fleas / all that’s left is invitation to disease,” but these poems are plagues you won’t be able to forget.
Into the Forest and All the Way Through by Cynthia Pelayo
As a true crime fan, I’m well aware of the statistics regarding missing women, rape, and murder. This haunting and very necessary collection of poems gives voice to the thousands of women that go missing each year in the US, numbers that are further disturbing when you consider how many are women of color. The reality is, women don’t just go missing, the empty space where they once resided is deemed unimportant, by police or the men who know what happened to them. As Pelayo says, “For so many women to go missing each year, year after year, decade after decade means that someone knows something.”
Pelayo’s poems are prose-like, each telling a short narrative of a missing girl or woman in terrifyingly real details, “Before the mobile phone you had to trust that I would follow my route / in the morning, in the evening, after practice, after work, I would follow / unlock the door, re-lock the door, and I would sit and wait for you. The / telephone was on the kitchen wall, kitchen counter, hallway table, waiting / this one and only cord was my only connection to you, to tell you that I / am home, I am safe…” (This poem reminiscent of serial killers like Dennis Rader, who would cut phone lines before entering a home.) For each poem, Pelayo has provided an investigating agency phone number so that readers may report details of a case if they know something. For women, the reality of constant surveillance, of constant fear, is just a fact — that one wrong step makes us a statistic. “We can assume there are many / more.” This is horror, this is not fiction, but this is poetry.
Many Restless Concerns: A Testimony: The Victims of Countess Bathory Speak in Chorus by Gayle Brandeis
As the epigraph to this book states, “Countess Erzsébet Báthory of Hungary was found guilty of killing as
many as 650 girls and women between the years 1585 and 1609.” I’ve been obsessed with Countess Báthory since I heard about her on a true crime podcast and how she supposedly bathed in the blood of young women that were brought to her house to be the equivalent of ladies-in-waiting to the wealthy Countess. It is an absolutely bonkers story sure to inspire many more books and films. Brandeis gives voice to the women the Countess killed, who insist, “We want you to know how we lived. That we lived. That we were girls / before we were game. That we were alive. / we were alive. / we were alive /” From prose poems rich with historic details to short, desperate pleas in the form of tiny poems, Brandeis asserts that these women deserve to have their story told, and not just in the gruesome news-worthy details. This book is a gothic historic horror of disturbing proportions that will delight the most morbid of feminist horror fans.
“Many Restless Concerns reanimates the stories and bodies of young women who were tortured to death by Hungarian Countess Bathory in the early 1600s. A breathtaking restoration and reckoning. A tour de force chorus built from the voices of women who refuse silence. A body resistance song for all times. — Lidia Yuknavitch
Monsters I Have Been by Kenji C. Liu
Monsters I Have Been is a type of found text poetic sequence called a Frankenpo: “an invented poetic form” that creates a new poetic text by collage of “chosen bodies of text” in order to divine new meaning, according to the first poem in the book. It is very necessary, in my opinion, for the reader to refer to the notes on page 93 of the book for each poem. “Visa” for example, combines the texts of the Presidential Executive Orders 13769 and 13780 i.e. the “Muslim travel ban” with Octavia Butler’s The Books of the Living and Reflection on the Repulsiveness of the Body from the Satipatthana Sutta, a canonical text of Theravada Buddhism. This is the intersection Liu creates — from US political discourse to racism to the speculative to the spiritual. Liu touches on many topics of social justice, hot-button topics that are sure to irritate the most conservative of readers, and how. “She’s people! 10 apologies” is particularly cutting, combining the words of male celebrities accused during the Me Too movement to show how often “apologies” center the perpetrator of violence, propping up the toxic masculinity that created such monsters, “I offended women, but I’m founded in great hardship. I has stories, hope, grace, touching excuses, I.”
Much of Liu’s book seeks to engage in a conversation about masculinity, which I appreciated given how often the conversation is about how men don’t have a say when the reality is that if we cannot include men in the conversation, there is no way to solve the future hurt perpetrated by the toxic values US society condones. As Liu puts it, “This work is in no way meant to encompass the totality of variations of gender or masculinity that are possible to express. May we tear down the conditions that allow the enclosure, commodification, exploitation, and marginalization of life’s wondrous variety. Numberless beings, may we all be free.”
Tea with Death by Abigail Wildes
It’s very rare that I recommend a book of rhyming poetry. It’s not that I don’t enjoy rhyme, it’s just that it’s very often not very well-executed. Abigail Wilde’s debut collection is a delightful exception. I would call these poems deliciously funny and dark. For example, my favorite line in the below poem is “(did you know he’s a poet?)” because of course the poet would be blamed. Wilde is utilizing familiar forms of the gothic era to engage with dark poetry in a whimsical way. Accompanying Wilde’s playful verses are ink illustrations by Jeanna Pappas, a Savannah artist and graduate of SCAD. The book seems rife for Instagram, but I’m glad to experience these poems on the page.
Someone Poisoned the Tea
Who poisoned the tea?
Was it you? Was it me?
You see that man there,
He fell out of his chair!
He was poisoned, I know it.
(Did you know he’s a poet?)
Oh, goodness me, I think I might swoon,
And look at the time! It is only past noon.
Stop chatting at me,
Are you blind, can’t you see
That somebody here has poisoned our tea?
You pinched me, you cad!
Oh! I’m going quite mad.
Don’t drink from that cup!
This is no time to sup.
Please stop all this babble,
Let’s sift through this rabble.
The Apocalyptic Mannequin by Stephanie M. Wytovich
In her author’s note, Wytovich calls this book “my apocalypse cry, my doomsday preparation list. I hope that it’s a collection of nightmares, but the reality is that some of the monsters are getting bigger and stronger these days, so this book is also a petition, a fight song.” Wytovich satirizes our current moment in reality, from Twitter handles dissolved in stomach acid to the eyes of witness dripping like candlewax. The truth is, many of us are angry. The truth is, the last few years have been a near-constant grind of viral migraines and gasmask couture and last warnings. Is it feminist to ask “is there a hell made for the bones of / girls who were stolen before their time?” There are too many of us who have been asked to sacrifice our humanity for our government, social media, our gender. Wytovich captures the feelings of indecision, of anger, of numbness, of othering at the compulsion of performative justice that many have felt in recent years. I feel that this book is in direct conversation with another on the list, Sara Tantlinger’s Cradleland of Parasites, in the discussion of what trauma puts the body and mind through. Wytovich’s book asks, “How did I miss seeing the world die?” when all of us are slowly missing the world dying, bit by bit, through our devices.
The Cyborg Anthology by Lindsay B-E
Lindsay B-e describes their website name as “a bisexuality visibility moniker, bi-seen-scene.” B-e is a highly experimental and meta writer, and their debut collection takes what might be a trite conceit (an anthology of faux poetry by robots) and makes a deeply satisfying and well-thought-out collection sure to engage any sci-fi fan. These cyborg poets may not be real, but their imagined humanity is fascinating, “met / al / can / feel / pai /n / to / o” . The collection takes place in 2202, after a solar flare wiped out all technology on earth, thus wiping out the history of cyborg poetry. Each poem is written by a cyborg and includes a short paragraph of editorial explanation of the history of the poet. Be-e has deeply thought out the history of cyborg poetry dating back to the imagined past (or rather, our imagined future) of 2027 up to 2204. The collection pokes fun at both poetry anthologies and the “litspeak” often paraded in those publications, “Cyborg poets were uniquely situated to embrace the constantly changing cultures they lived within as part of their poetic practices.” In discussion here is also the idea of gender — as some of the cyborg poets are male/female while others use the “they” pronoun. Whereas many authors chose to place robot characters into a non-gendered or “it” category, Be-e instead choses to treat each cyborg as a unique individual, thus humanizing their personas to the point that I found myself wishing for a whole collection by certain poets, forgetting they are not real. There is also an acknowledgment of diversity within the cyborg poets represented, from “Mi’la Lalpetit” who has “a set of ornately carved wooden mechanical arms and legs” or sex worker Skyenc or Patterson Armitage — who writes concrete (visual) poems with “his printing tool fingers” — perhaps a reference to disabled artists working with prosthesis. This collection should be read far and wide.
You feel. I feel. We feel.
You write. I write. We write.
The Nurseryman by Arthur Allen
In 1553, Englishman Thomas Wyndham led the first English expedition to West Africa along with 140 men. The ship was a trading crew seeking gold and wares. Upon return home, only 40 men survived, one of which was Martin Frobisher, the inspiration, in part, for Arthur Allen’s bizarre and experimental book of poetry.
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Written in the style of the time of Early Modern English/Early New English, the poems utilize common grammar, lexicon, and spelling similar to works such as Shakespeare, John Webster, and William Bradford. (For an example, see the excerpted image below.) For this reason, many readers unfamiliar with this style of early English writing may find this book somewhat obtuse. As a fan of early English, I enjoyed the conceit and diving into the history of the references, but this kind of reading experience is inaccessible to many.
What troubles me perhaps most about this work is the line between historical accuracy and what perhaps should be a critique of colonization and the slave trade. For it’s difficult to separate the “artic gold rush” and other English forays into trade with the early English involvement in the transantlatic slave trade. Some of the poems seem to be approaching a discussion of this topic, such as (formatting not preserved here):
What grows think you
in such far reaches?
It will not grow bodies- there is no soul
or complex compassion
to grow them so far from stars
we recognize.
There dwell men whose head
do grow below their shoulder
& the dread
anthropophag.
Nevertheless, I find the book interesting to read. The speculative here is what is unknown — the very real fear of early people traveling the globe by sea, unsure if they would encounter monsters, humans, mermaids, cannibalism, and of course, death. This is a dense book that should be studied through an academic lens.
Witch Doctrine by Annah Browning
It’s the season of the modern witch. Witches as healers, mediums, domestic and personal. I am reminded of the work of Lisa Marie Basile, Joanna C. Valente, Chloe N. Clark, and Faylita Hicks. Written in mostly non-rhyming couplets and tercets, Annah Browning’s work has had devastatingly little reviews and that is a shame because it’s a solid book of spellwork, feminism, and softness. I love poetry that encompasses righteous anger, because F this world, but every once and a while, I need something that fills my cup of comfort, and Browning’s work does that for me. Ghostly and ephemeral, romantic and floral, these poems are a delight to read, for I too “have been sleeping strangely — / I’ve been living with / a song, that on and off / vibrates me like a beehive.”
Chapbooks
This year’s Elgin Award nominees for best chapbook (10–39 pages) are a rather smaller bunch than in previous years, with only 19 books nominated. I will note that I am biased in my reading and have included a book from Interstellar Flight Press, an indie SFF press for which I am an editor. However, I hope you’ll allow this transgression, as I truly love every book I edit. Chapbooks are small but mighty, and I place them with the same weight as full-length titles, for they often hold more resonance because of their succinct qualities. It takes more to say more with less words.
[re]construction of the necromancer by Hannah V. Warren
Warren’s poems vary in style, from prose-poem blocks to free verse, but this collection comes together as a retelling of the fairytale Hansel and Gretel, where Hansel assaults and leaves Gretel to the witch (“my unbirth mother”) and dark transformations ensue. Don’t worry, Hansel gets his in the end.
Who doesn’t love a fairytale retelling? This one is decidedly feminist, giving strength back to both Gretel and the witch as they transform into beasts to overcome the past. The poems follow a recent trend in re-visioning assault through the speculative: the woman or girl-child traumatized, reverts into herself, and becomes monstrous; the speculative element becomes one that serves retribution. While I find this narrative satisfying over and over again, as a member of the tribe that wishes I had thorns and horns and fangs and claws, the clan of abandoned and left to the woods, many readers may feel the subject matter has been covered already.
Curious to me are the elements of cannibalism explored in the collection, drawing on the real-life inspiration for the original fairytale, which is said to be based on the famine of 1314, in which mothers ate their children out of desperation. In the original tale, the witch captures Hansel and forces Gretel to feed him to fatten him up for later eating. In Warren’s tale, Gretel eats Hansel (well, except his hands.) It is this grotesque that places the book in the gurlesque mode of feminist poetry, that is an “honest assessment of the perverse pleasures of horror — even horror so closely associated with women’s suppression…” (Arielle Greenberg, Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics) For this reason, Warren’s work is a valuable foray into the feminist study and re-vision of folklore.
Broken Nails by Susan Snyder
At first, I was decidedly put off by the cover art for Snyder’s debut book of what I deem “feminist slasher poems” — until I realized the cover is satirizing the B-movies I love quite dearly. This one is not for the faint of heart. It’s not for men, and for that I am thankful. Snyder approaches terrorizing men with a gleeful abandon, “For the first one, we cried / the movements seemed unnatural / nails varnished pink tore into him / for a long time we stared at the meat on our fingertips / disbelieving not that we could / but that we finally did.” Snyder does not shy away from the uncomfortable. In the second section of the book “Reflection,” the entry poem “Sour” reflects on a lover complaining about the taste of his lover’s body, and Snyder deftly transforms this into a discussion of how the body turns sour when abused. Snyder says of this section, in an interview with Stephanie Wytovich, “Reflection,” was the toughest for me to put out into the world. I have been in some terrible relationships where there has been abuse and rampant gaslighting. There were years where I walked on egg shells to avoid setting my partner off. I fell into self-medicating with alcohol. Somehow, I pulled out of it, but with some pretty deep scars. I swore I would never be silenced again.” I for one appreciate Snyder’s honesty and rawness. Decomposing penises not aside.
*Third-Place Winner: Manifest by Terese Mason Pierre
Manifest is Pierre’s first speculative chapbook. From mermaids to aliens to apocalypse, Pierre’s work spans the spectrum of the speculative. Perhaps my favorite is “We Watch the Sun Die,” a romantic apocalypse poem that takes a softer view, like those indie movies that some people make fun of but I love, on the end of the world. After all, if the world ended, you would want someone to watch the sun die with, wouldn’t you?
Pierre’s work is influenced by afrofuturism and black gothic poetics, but I wouldn’t necessarily place it in those categories. It is solidly speculative, ephemeral, difficult to grasp in a pleasant way, like trying to hold onto a feeling that’s gone but still making your heart beat.
*Winner: Otherwheres by Akua Lezli Hope
Akua Lezli Hope is quickly making a name in the speculative poetry genre through important scholarship, including the Speculative Sundays Reading Series and the forthcoming anthology Nombono: An Anthology of Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Creators.
I have yet to find a review of this book online and hopefully, that will be rectified because it’s a solid piece of work. Hope’s poetry is accessible and yet referential, intertwining genre tropes with ease, such as “Five Times More,” which combines the idea of a mermaid with a genii. My favorite poem in this collection is, of course, about a cat:
Watch
He tells me nothing
this dark feline emissary
I serve. But daily, when not otherwise
occupied, watches the portal interdimensional
on the backwall next to the door,
other side of tall kitchen cabinets
near the floor. Exterminators have tested for
incursions of trapped or traveling vermin, insects
and found nothing. What warps or shimmers there
what pulses or dilates, streams or inhales
Is he guard, greeter or communicant
without fear of discovery or relief from duty
for we see little, perceive less and less
and no one believes
The Undead by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett
In a fantastic article at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett says this about modes of address in poetry: “Not only was we vague to the point of presumptuousness, I found myself wondering, within society’s fractured confines, how could I presume a communal voice? In my white hands, how could we read as anything other than a coercive assumption of a palatable collective, flattened and reduced to fit the limits of my experience? Similarly, you started to turn my stomach. Where its hazmat suit once allowed me to approach difficult material safely, it was now obviously a coward’s hedge, a purposeful distance weakening my work from within.”
In Goodlett’s speculative apocalyptic zombie chapbook, The Undead, the modes of address draw the reader into a story of two characters (I infer queer women, although they are not given pronouns, just “I” and “you”) riding out an mysteriously and curiously vague national collapse. In some cases, the “we” is the couple surviving, in other cases, it is the public. As the narrative progresses, the “I” becomes bitten and lives in deep regret, “…as / if it could be taken back, / as if any of this could.” It’s unique to see a zombie story devolve into the point of view of the undead, and it makes me think what metaphors might exist here; Are we all undead? Have you ever loved someone enough to share a corpse with them?
*Second-Place Winner: Twelve by Andrea Blythe
Among the fairytale retellings on this list, Blythe’s Twelve (inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairytale, The Twelve Dancing Princesses) is one worth putting on your TBR if only for its unique format. Twelve is a series of prose poems, each poem following the story of one of the twelve princesses. As Blythe said in an interview with T.D. Walker, “Coming back to the story decades later as an adult was interesting, in part because some of the elements in the Brothers Grimm version didn’t align with the story in the way I remembered. It forced me to reconsider the story from a new perspective. In particular, I was blown away by the realization that no one in the story comes off as being particularly nice. I’m used to fairy tales taking a clear stance on such things — here’s the pure, good-hearted, beautiful maiden, and here’s her mean, spiteful, ugly rival. However, in “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” the lines between right and wrong are not clear. Grey area in the moral compass of a fairy tale. How fascinating.” Agreed.
Andrea Blythe was interviewed in Interstellar Flight Magazine.
Honorable Mentions to Add to Your TBR:
As always, I can’t list ALL of the books that I loved in this short of space, so I like to include a list of books you should FOR SURE add to your reading list, but that I didn’t get time to review.
- Altars and Oubliettes by Angela Yuriko Smith
- As the Seas Turn Red: Dark Ocean Poetry by Morgan Sylvia
- Dragonfly and Other Songs of Mourning by Michelle Scalise
- *Third-Place Winner: Mary Shelly Makes a Monster by Octavia Cade
- Sacred Summer by Cassandra Rose Clarke (interviewed in Interstellar Flight Magazine)
- Shelter in Place by Catherine Kyle
- Maps of a Hollowed World by T.D. Walker
- The Gates of Never by Deborah L. Davitt
- *Winner: The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee
- The State She’s In by Lesley Wheeler
- Borrowings of the Shan Van Vocht by Catherine Moore (interviewed in Interstellar Flight Magazine)
Visit the SFPA website to view the full list of works nominated for the Elgin Awards.
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.” We use affiliate links and Patreon to pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
