Interview with Poet Clif Mason, pt 4 Revision & the Future

Clif Mason is an English professor and a poet with four collections published. I reviewed his remarkable debut full-length collection, Knocking the Stars Senseless, here and here (part II of the review). Since then, we've been emailing back and forth the following extensive interview on the art, craft life and development of the poet.

This interview is in four parts:

1. Beginnings & Influences
2. Process & Surrealism
3. Technique & Progress
4. Revision & the Future

What are the critical pieces of a good poem?

For reasons I’ve already elaborated, sound and image. To these I would add line breaks and enjambment, which allow lines and stanzas to gain in power and meaning through the special intentionality and emphasis they embody. A poem comes into being when all of these elements become unified and coherent—mutually cognizant and supporting—thereby gaining its own unique momentum and force. That is to say, when the poem becomes a living thing, with its own circulatory system and tissues and organs and networks of nerves.

As I pointed out in the review, you do extensive revisions, changing not only the poems drastically, but even what poems go in. How do you approach revision in your poems? In your three newest books?

Poems can fail in a “thousand thousand” ways, to paraphrase Shakespeare. The desire to revise comes from an acute awareness of those failures. For me, as for so many others, I’m sure, the ecstasy of composition is often followed—the next day, the next month, or the next year—by dismay, disappointment, and sometimes dejection. Being of a naturally sanguine temperament, I don’t care to live for long in dejection, so I set out swiftly to revise. I give myself enormous freedom in the revising process. I recast long-line poems in o short-line ones, and sometimes back into different long lines. I recast formal poems as free verse and sometimes as prose poems. There’s something I like about hiding the original formal nature of a poem inside prose. I intermix other fragments of a like gesture and sensibility into a poem, and as I’ve said, I combine two, three, or even more poems together. I let these new versions sit for a time and then I revise them as ruthlessly as I did the original poems from which they grew. I do the same thing when fashioning a book. In a sense, the book is a long poem, and the individual poems its lines and stanzas. At the Colrain Poetry Manuscript conferences that I attended in 2012 and again in 2014. I had great teachers—Carmen Giménez Smith, Jeffrey Levine, Martha Rhodes, and especially Joan Houlihan, the Colrain founder and director. From these mentors I learned to place my best poems at the beginning of a book and at the end, and then to demand that the poems in the middle meet that standard of quality. In other words, every poem has to matter in a book; each poem has to earn its place. Of course, I continually reappraise my poems and shift my perception of which of them is “best.” I also tend to tie groups or sections of poems in a book together by theme. And as someone who is addicted to variety, I try to create a mixture of poems in different forms and of different lengths throughout a collection. One can, of course, revise a manuscript forever, moving poems in and around and out and sometimes in again. At some point, one intuits that one has to stop and accept that the book has found what is perhaps its best possible form, given whatever limitations I have as a writer. This was true of Knocking the Stars Senseless and of my chapbook, Self-portraits in Which I Do Not Appear. The Book of Night & Waking, my book-length poem, is different in that it tells a magical realist story of the protagonist, who, despairing because his country is entangled in war and blackened with grief, sets out to walk to Antarctica. Along the way, he experiences both great evil (one of the sections is based on the femicides of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico) and great beauty. The poem is ultimately an epic love poem, as he connects magically with his wife (who is not accompanying him) along the way and reunites with her finally in Antarctica. I found places in the journey for a few poems that had been published separately (though I revised and re-shaped them for the purpose), but much of the book is an original composition. This book is also unique in that it is composed entirely in spaced broken lines that flow down the page. 

I know you have interest in fiction as well. Do you have other books you're working on now--poetry, fiction or otherwise?

Yes, I’ve completed another full length collection, whose working title is Tell Me a Story. I’ve selected poems from it to send out also as a chapbook (provisionally titled Dream Outside of Time). I’m also taking the draft of a dark fantasy novel that I wrote back in 2010 and completely rewriting it, based on new conceptions of its narrative possibilities and new visions of the characters and of the world they inhabit. I’ve also started writing another novel that will be set in a parallel universe, on an Earthlike planet called Oceanus, under a black star called Obsidian. The protagonist of the first novel, a dark priestess named Wing, is a major character in the second. I love Chinese wuxia films, and I am planning to include wushu martial arts in the second book, as well as other fantastical elements.  

How many collections do you have out now and from where? What has yet to be released? Can you describe them for us?

These are my collections: From the Dead Before, Knocking the Stars Senseless, Self-portraits in Which I Do Not Appear, and The Book of Night & Waking. The first is no longer in print, as Lone Willow Press ceased to exist upon the death of Fred Zydek. From the Dead Before consists of fairly straightforward poems, often about the natural world. The other three employ natural imagery but are often written, as I’ve noted, in surrealist and magical realistic modes. Tell Me a Story resembles them in this way, and one of its sections is composed of magical realist stories. I have a certain amount of uncollected work from my first 30 years as a writer. Those poems haven’t fit into the schemes of the collections I’ve fashioned. Should there ever be a Collected Poems—which is purely hypothetical at this point—they might find a place after all.

Interview with Poet Clif Mason, pt 3 Technique & Progress

Clif Mason is an English professor and a poet with four collections published. I reviewed his remarkable debut full-length collection, Knocking the Stars Senseless, here and here (part II of the review). Since then, we've been emailing back and forth the following extensive interview on the art, craft life and development of the poet.

This interview is (or will be) in four parts:

1. Beginnings & Influences
2. Process & Surrealism
3. Technique & Progress
4. Revision & the Future

One of your stylistic penchants is the pairing—often novel or unexpected, often tied intimately in image and sound. Here’s a spectacular one:

There has been another mass murder

in an American town.

I try to expect nothing of flesh or dust

We know immediately what you mean (although sometimes we have to work harder to plot the connections between the sentence/lines/paradoxical pairs themselves. It is simultaneously both amazingly simple and amazingly complex. Here we have images of both life and death that feeds opposingly yet synergistically into the sentence.

How do you settle on a pair? Is it a tedious process of sorting through possibilities, or is it a natural quirk? Can you explain this or a pairing that was difficult to settle on?

These pairings come naturally. Some are suggested by alliteration, some are suggested by image and meaning, as is the case with the example you quote. If one trusts the organic nature of the process, one has faith that meaning will obtain. “Depression” is a poem particularly rich in these pairings, as they flesh out the anaphora that is that poem’s primary technique. That poem flowed out in a single extended rush. I ended up cutting some lines and “trainwrecking” in another poem, but the anaphora parts read very much as they emerged. Some of these make immediate sense, some are still mysterious to me. An example of the latter is these two lines: “of rust & riots, rampages & impulse purchases, / of malarial fevers & red planet hallucinations”. The first of these lines generates speed and momentum and gives the sense of zeitgeist under great pressure. The second line expands upon that but in a way that is more suggestive than perfectly rational. I can’t say that I understand these two lines completely, but I felt they fit the mood of the poem, so I left them in.

Often neglected in discussions with poets is the statement. You have a command of imagery, which we expect in modern poetry, but there’s also the bold statement, the proclamation, memorably worded. Famously, there’s James Wright’s “I have wasted my life” ["Lyingin a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”]—that line that makes the poem peal throughout the images. And of course, William Butler Yeats in “The Second Coming” took on the best and the worst: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

One of your memorable statement lines reads:

This is the age of amputation.

We learn to live with less and still less.

How does one come up with such lines? What makes them resonate? Do you have to tinker much with these? Do you find yourself taking many out, or adding some in? How does/should statement function in modern poetry?

I am by aesthetic temperament ambivalent about statements and I try generally to eschew overt didactic statements. That said, there are statements in my poems. The lines you quote flow directly from the four preceding lines, which offer images of missing body parts, including a “trunk of moldering toes.” The direct statement takes these specific images and creates a larger perspective within which they might gain meaning. The danger in such statements is that the larger perspective may be a distortion. If such lines flow out onto the page, one has to pause to ask if they are genuine and real. If one is at all suspicious of their veracity, they should be cut. In this case, I felt that the statement reflected something I felt about the contemporary world, that more and more human meaning is cut away from our lives by economic and political forces before which we often feel more than a little helpless. There is certainly a place for the didactic in poetry. Without it, we wouldn’t have poems like Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” Adrienne Rich’s “Rape,” Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” or Rita Dove’s “Parsley”—all of which are necessary and important poems.

I’m interested in your motifs like “stars.” Before I understood what you were up to and discouraged you from using them, did you cut them, did you hesitate, or did you stand up for them, confident in what you were up to (i.e. “That schmuck doesn’t know what I’m doing)? Did you take them out and put them back in? When did you realize this would be an important motif in your works? Did you know what they signified during the composition of the first poem? or after several poems? or as you were assembling the manuscript? How do you know what to keep and what to cull?

The incident to which you refer was when I thought I might be able to use star imagery to link every poem in a book. I think you were objecting to the surfeit of such images. The word “star” began no doubt to cloy on the tongue. That was helpful in that I realized it was perhaps asking too much of a single image to unify an entire book—though Rilke is able to do it with great power in the image of the angel in Duino Elegies. The danger was that using stars in this way could become almost a gimmick. I began as a nature poet, and I realized early on that certain primordial images—rivers, stars, stones, and trees—were an important aspect of the way I approached and processed the world. This is probably rooted in my early years on the family farm and in my high school years in Pierre, South Dakota—a town in which the Missouri River looms large in the consciousness of the people who live there. I hope that I use such imagery in fresh and suggestive ways. So, to answer your question, I certainly took another look at the poems in which stars figured. I didn’t remove them, as I felt they were aesthetically justified, but I certainly re-examined them.

As memory serves, can you guide us through the original stimulus of writing a poem, to composition, to revision for publication, to revision for the collection? (If pressed for a poem, I’d say, “Thanksgiving Song” but whatever you have clear in mind is fine.)

“Thanksgiving Song” was originally titled “Praise Song,” and under that title it appeared in Writers’ Journal. I had entered it in one of their contests, but the line limit for the contest was 24 lines and the poem was 45 lines. I had faith in the poem and thought it might be equally effective if I combined many of the lines. I might say that I’ve never shied from re-considering the lineation in my poems, as attempting new line breaks often reveals new possibilities for the poem to make meaning. The resulting poem came in, as I recall, exactly at 24 lines. In the original composition, the poem flowed out associatively pretty much as it now reads, with one exception. A few years ago, I revisited the poem and cut what had been a whole stanza in the 45-line version of the poem: 

Yet the tree frog

wants praise.

Horned owl and muskrat

want praise.

As do red wolf, mule deer,

armadillo, coral snake.

They feel it, know it,

in blood and ravening gut.

The reason I deleted this stanza was because it seemed flat and prosaic in comparison to the imagery of the rest of the poem. Cutting this stanza improved the poem. It was at that time that I changed the title of the poem. I tried further new line breaks, as I felt that some of those in the 24-line version were somewhat arbitrary. The resulting poem was 27 lines. It was in long blocks without white space, and I felt it needed some room to breathe. So, I tried dividing the poem into three-line stanzas, and that became the poem’s final form.

Lone Willow Press published a very different chapbook of yours in the 90s. You waited twenty years before doing another. What was the delay? What made you alter your voice so drastically?

From the Dead Before was a book that combined some of my free verse nature poems and some of the formal poems I wrote in the 90s as an attempt to create new possibilities for my poems. Brad Leithauser’s books Hundreds of Fireflies and Cats of the Temple were significant influences on my writing at that time, as were the poems of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Amy Clampitt. There are a good many sonnets in that collection, as well as a glose (the title poem). I tried my hand at many other forms in those years, and there was a sense of adventure and a zest that came from the discovery of the demands and challenges of received forms, whether it was a pantoum or sestina, a ghazal or villanelle. However, I stopped writing in received forms when I began to feel that, for me at least, the form should not be the trigger of a poem. As I’ve already noted, my poems worked best when words and images appeared in my consciousness and I allowed them to take shape without loss of their essential mystery. This is what Keats called “Negative Capability,” which he stated occurs, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” He thought Shakespeare possessed this quality “so enormously,” and I agree with him. I don’t claim to achieve this every time I write a poem, or even consistently. But I certainly aspire to it.

Interview with Poet Clif Mason, pt 2 Process & Surrealism

Clif Mason is an English professor and a poet with four collections published. I reviewed his remarkable debut full-length collection, Knocking the Stars Senseless, here and here (part II of the review). Since then, we've been emailing back and forth the following extensive interview on the art, craft life and development of the poet.

This interview is (or will be) in four parts:

1. Beginnings & Influences
2. Process & Surrealism
3. Technique & Progress
4. Revision & the Future

Laura Madeline Wiseman pointed out the walking motif in your poems, mentioning William Wordsworth (not to mention Wallace Stevens). Does this commonly inspire poems or something else? What are some ways you breathe to life new poems? What do you do when feeling less inspired?

Yes, walking—both in the daytime and at night—is the catalyst of many of my poems, perhaps most notably in “The Sea Anemone Must Wed Lightning,” “The Reprieve,” “Culmination,” and “Fantasias of the Falling Snow.” As far as literary influences go, Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” and Whitman’s self-depiction as a poet “afoot with vision” in the world have been important, as well as the examples of Wordsworth and Keats. Walking is, for me, a form of meditation, sometimes to the point of complete trance-like immersion in the world around me. I find the rhythm and pace of walking almost perfectly suited to the creative states of being from which words arise as if from nowhere and begin to coalesce into poems. The other main way I find the inspiration to write is to leap almost anywhere into the work of some of the writers I’ve listed above. Within a poem or two I put the book away, pick up my notebook and a pen and begin to compose. When I’m feeling less inspired, I don’t write. As Keats said in one of his letters, “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” Or I use revision of a poem or poems as a portal into new composition. 

You draw equally on surrealism and reality. When did you begin work that in to your work and what do you feel surrealism brings to the table?

I read some surrealists early on, in the 70s—James Wright, Robert Bly, and W. S. Merwin, and a few others, but it was my first in-depth readings of Lorca, Neruda, Merwin, Rimbaud, Trakl, and Merwin in the late 90s and early 2000s that propelled my poetry in a new direction. I had read them cursorily before, but now the full emotive force and electric charge of their image-making came home to me. I read Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads, The Tamarit Divan, and Poet in New York; Neruda’s Residency on Earth, Canto General, and Odes; Merwin’s The Lice , The Carrier of Ladders, and Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment; Rimbaud’s Complete Poems and Trakl’s Selected Poems obsessively, again and again. I felt deeply emotionally at home in these poets’ imaginary worlds, in a way I rarely felt at home in the so-called real world. Their poems lived in the pulse in my wrist, as well as in the impulse in my brain. Surrealism, at least as practiced by these five writers, profoundly de-familiarizes language and helps us gain a new vision of what reality might be and a new alphabet by which to record it.

When did you first feel confident about what you wrote? What remained to be learned?

I don’t mean to sound immodest, but I felt confident about my writing almost as soon as I began to write seriously—about age twenty. I had as many clunker lines as lines that pitched steeply up and took flight, but when the words flew, I knew it and I knew I could become a poet. What I had to learn was the discipline of craft. I tended to write long, mixing in prosaic lines with original ones, and I had to learn to cut—ruthlessly, mercilessly—the bad ones. And I could be a vexingly slow learner. I also had to learn not to write about something just because I thought I should. I wrote a number of bad poems in that way. For me, at least, ideas shouldn’t be the origin point of poems. This is not to say that poems shouldn’t have ideas, but simply that the ideas should arise organically from the images and sonic intensity of the lines. I had to learn to eschew the didactic and let the first words of a poem magically appear in my head and then to nurture and develop—organically, associatively—the poem, to grow it from those first verbal seeds. Assonance, consonance, and alliteration came naturally to me—an early instance was “Frog croak, cricket chatter, / wind keening in the corn blades,” from “Night Wounds”—and I had to learn how to play with them to increase the verbal force within lines and stanzas, and how also not to allow a surfeit of such sound effects to drown my poems. I often pushed the music of a poem to (and sometimes beyond) the breaking point. I had, in revising, to try to repair the lines through careful pruning. Finally, I had to learn how to allow myself to reimagine poems and open myself to radical reinventions of them, often by challenging and changing their form drastically, and also by “trainwrecking” two or more poems or poem fragments together. I had to learn to recognize when poems had a common imaginative origin. I was excited by the new possibilities this practice opened up for my poems.  

If you felt confident at twenty, what took so long to publish your first book? What were the impediments?

I would never think of them as “impediments,” as they were all-important to my sense of who I was and who I might be as a human being, but I would mention three things that kept me from developing as quickly as I otherwise might have as a writer: working on my Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in English, and teaching and trying to support a family. During my graduate studies, I became a bit of a researching, criticism writing machine, though this metaphor hardly does justice to the work. I found the writing of criticism both challenging and enormously stimulating, and I became so immersed in it over time that I almost forgot what it was like to write poetry. Several years into my teaching career, I tried my hand again at poetry, fitfully at first. After several years, I gave up writing criticism to focus completely on poetry. I became obsessive about it. Every day I was reminded how little I really knew about poetry and especially about writing poems worth reading. I set out to re-educate myself, and that project is still in motion. I usually have a dozen or so books of poems that I’m reading at any one time, and I float back and forth between them, as mood and whim and felt or perceived need dictate. I began sending poems out to magazines and reaped bushels of rejections, and a few acceptances, enough to encourage me to keep trying. I was the faculty sponsor for a little creative writing magazine at the University, and somehow Fredrick Zydek, a poet from Omaha, discovered us and submitted a sheaf of poems. We had never published anyone from outside the University before, but the students liked his poems, so we did. I began corresponding with Fred and sharing poems with him. He sent me relatively few poems as he was going through a protracted period of writer’s block, following the death of his mother. As it turned out, Fred was the Editor in Chief at Lone Willow Press, and he invited me to submit a chapbook manuscript. I sent him From the Dead Before, and he published it.

Interview with Poet Clif Mason, pt 1 Beginnings & Influences

Clif Mason is an English professor and a poet with four collections published. I reviewed his remarkable debut full-length collection, Knocking the Stars Senseless, here and here (part II of the review). Since then, we've been emailing back and forth the following extensive interview on the art, craft life and development of the poet.

This interview is (or will be) in four parts:

1. Beginnings & Influences
2. Process & Surrealism
3. Technique & Progress
4. Revision & the Future

When did you start writing?

I wrote a few decidedly juvenile pieces while in high school (including a wretched imitation of Chaucer’s Prologue to The Canterbury Tales), but it wasn’t until the summer after my freshman year in college when I became friends with a young poet. His name was Mark Porter, and he had been a member of the Classics honorary society, Eta Sigma Phi, into which I had recently been inducted. Until that summer, I hadn’t really gotten to know him very well. We both went to summer school and lived in the same dormitory complex. I learned that he was a devotee of Joan Baez, as well as many other folk singers and groups, and that he also loved opera and classical symphonic music. He introduced me to much music I had never heard before, and he shared with me his translations of Catullus, as well as his own poems. I was struck by their naturalness of tone and their beauty. His translations compare well, in my view, with those by well-known translators. The previous year, I had read widely in Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among other poets. I had been listening semi-obsessively to Bob Dylan for several years by then. I was struck by the surrealism of some of his imagery. The confluence of these influences and the encouragement and example of my friend (and now mentor) helped me realize by the end of that summer that I wanted be a poet. That is, I wanted to be in the world, thinking, feeling, and perceiving, as a poet—and expressing that existence through words.  

Which writers inspired you and what about them fired your imagination?

Their number is, of course, legion. However, if I had to limit myself to a handful, they would be Sappho, Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, Plath, Lorca, Neruda, Merwin, and Clampitt. Sappho for her passion wed to her incomparable skill. Shakespeare for his vast ocean of original metaphor, delivered in a startling rhetoric that still leaves me speechless in admiration. Keats for his peerless lyricism and grace and for his sense of himself as an artist. Whitman for the breadth of his human compassion and for the robustness of his interest in the world around him, both the world of nature and of the city. Dickinson for the depth and genuineness of her (sometimes) melancholy and for her fearlessness in detailing it. Hopkins for the bold force of his poems’ sonic effects. Lorca for his tragic sense of life, expressed in a baroque language and surrealism that always leaves me in a state of wonderment. Neruda for his supremely fertile surrealism and for the depth of his imaginative involvement in the lives of the working class. Merwin for the stunning originality and power of his surrealism, delivered in the most simple and straightforward of language. Clampitt for the lush zest of her language and the precision of her knowledge of the natural world. I believe that, among contemporaries, she is the closest we have to Keats. Of course there are innumerable others I might mention—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Coleridge, Christina Rossetti, the Eliot of “Prufrock” and Four Quartets, Georg Trakl, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Paul Celan, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, A. R. Ammons, James Dickey, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, Mary Ruefle, Matthew and Michael Dickman, Natasha Trethewey, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Ilya Kaminsky, Joan Houlihan, Nick Flynn, Diane Seuss, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ada Limon, Kaveh Akbar, Ocean Vuong, Tiana Clark, and Joseph Fasano are a few. And this is not even to mention the long list of the Nebraska poets—the late William Kloefkorn and Ted Kooser and an array of other exceptional living contemporaries. But I’ll leave it at my original list. 

Who are some of your mentors--in person or otherwise? What did you take away from them?

My college friend, whom I’ve already mentioned. Some of my English teachers, such as William and Dorothy Selz, Thomas Gasque, John R. Milton, Gervase Hittle, William Lemons, and Paul Pavich, from the University of South Dakota, and Linda Ray Pratt, Bernice Slote, Louis Crompton, Walter Wright, Elaine Jahner, Fran Kaye, Charles Stubblefield, and Paul Olson from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Each of them offered me an intense appreciation of particular writers or literary periods and helped deepen my commitment to literature as a way of both knowing and recreating the world and to criticism as a way of passionately experiencing literature in one’s nerves and synapses and of taking action in the world. I would be utterly remiss if I did not mention three other significant mentors from USD: Nancy Skeen, my philosophy teacher, who introduced me to the love of ideas and the desire to continually pursue the truth of things, even if that truth remains elusive; and Helen Fremstad and Frederick Manfred, my two creative writing teachers. Their approach was one of deep encouragement of what was best and fresh and distinctive in each of their students’ work, without imposing their own predilections. A writer who also studied with Manfred at the same time I did was the novelist Michael Doane, who primarily wrote poetry then. The well-known novelist Pete Dexter also studied with Manfred, as did my friend, Mark Porter.  

"The Frozen Sky"--The Frozen Sky--The Frozen Sky 2: Betrayed by Jeff Carlson

Note: Another Jeff Carlson short story that became a novel--"Interrupt"--is discussed here.

Jeff Carlson passed away in 2017 at the height of his career, making his biggest splash in writing the best-selling Plague series, one of which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award.

Around the same time, he began this series in the pages of Writers of the Future. with a lengthy novelette/novella.  Apparently, these are not accomplishment enough to rate a mention in the SF Encyclopedia, which is still growing, perhaps outpaced by the field.

The tale tilts at a break-neck speed. I thought I'd reviewed it, but apparently not. It was the tale of a woman who dives into Jupiter's moon of Europa where a shell of ice covers a deeper sea where life may exist, being warmed by tidal forces. And, lo, life does exist--a rather violent race of beings controlled by matriarchs. These "sunfish" are armored on top and tentacled on the bottom. Carlson's version of Europa is Steven Baxter's "Cilia-of-Gold" on amphetamines.

What my memory serves is that "The Frozen Sky" was a little too fast. While energy excites, it comes at the expense of variety. Like the movie Speed, it becomes less thought than non-stop adventure, but some enjoy that. According to an interview, the novelette/novella version sold 40,000 copies before he converted it into a novel--the story's success urging him to do so.

Starship Sofa has an audio version of the tale here.

The novels adjusted for this a little, expanding a little on the characters--Betrayed takes us deeper into the alien psyche as well--but the novels still gallop. After an extensive timeline of future history, Betrayed leaps into danger.

Showing fear can lead our space-suited heroine, Vonnie, into being attacked. And so she is. She takes what she's learned and begins to probe deeper into their understanding and cultural ways. After grappling with and befriending one, she slowly introduces foreign concepts into the minds of these creatures as one species tries to understand the another. However, a misunderstanding brings an attack on the small crew and the mechs they have protecting them. Do they defend themselves, perhaps leading to genocide, or try to reason with the hive-mind creatures?

As the series has progressed, it seems to have become less about a exploration hard SF concepts and more about female rule with a few interesting comments about such a society.

As you can see, this comes "highly recommended" by Seanan McGuire, but there is some complexity here. If you like this sort of discussion, it might be worth exploring the series although I have yet to read the others to see where it goes. I may yet do so.

While Carlson didn't quite become a major player in the field--which could be debated that he might have been had he continued--he is fun and supplies some food for thought.

“The Goddess on the Street Corner” by Margaret St. Clair

First appeared in Beyond Fantasy Fiction, reprinted by David G. Hartwell

Summary:

Because a Greek goddess appears, you’d think the result would be humdrum. It isn’t. A man finds her on the street corner, takes her home and recognizes her as a goddess, feeling her transcendence in her touch. He treats with delicacy and brings color to her cheeks with liquor—liquor he won’t touch since she touched it. 

Commentary with Spoilers:

St. Clair holds off on the revelation of which goddess she is until the ending. This is something of a cheat if he’s known all along, but maybe she thought it might cheapen the theme had the reader known in advance that the mystery goddess is Aphrodite. His love for [worship of?] her leads to him spend all he has and sell his blood to keep her in expensive brandy he cannot afford. She rewards him with the gift of love, promising that women fall for him. He goes out and returns with amorous tales of his supposed conquests to please her of her power, but she still wanes, less and less substantial. She feigns the creation of flowers below his window and [he thinks?] he sees a single pink flower. He claims to see a whole street of them. She disappears. 

Is this story about gods? or about love? Possibly both. He despairs at her disappearance, worried who will take care of him, when plainly he was taking care of her. But in a psychological sense she had been taking care of him although the irony of his feeling remains palpable—simultaneously both true and untrue. My one complaint would be--if she is disappearing due to lack of believers--how did she live this long? If her meeting this gentleman makes him a strong adherent (and she's gone this long without adherents), why would she disappear now? 

Not a classic in terms of speculation, but a thought-provoking keeper to file among her best. Contrast this to her most famous tale, “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” (my first, briefer response to the story) which is the inverse: speculatively rich but not nearly so thought provoking.

“The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” by Margaret St. Clair

My first, briefer response (and with a slightly different perspective) I recorded here.

Written under the pen name of Idris Seabright, it first appeared in F&SF and was reprinted in a few major retrospectives by Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr, Martin H. Greenberg, David G. Hartwell and Robert Silverberg.

Summary

A salesman, new at his trade, having just finished reading his manual (the narrator warns us that he fails to pay attention to the sales rule concerning “tact and keen power of observation”), goes to sell rope to gnoles, a people who live at the end of Terra Cognita. The senior gnole, with multifaceted jewels for eyes, indicates that he doesn’t understand spoken languages, so through pantomime, they make a promising agreement about a purchase.

Commentary with Spoilers

In the nineties, SFWA writers considered this one of the top thirty fantasy stories in a fifty-odd year period. Hartwell included it as a “masterpiece” (according to the title of his collection). Who am I to disagree? I will say I’d recommend swapping this with “Brenda” [see discussion in this review. Page to second story. Whenever my mind reels back to this story, all of her other works pale--wonderful character, wonderful speculation, and a thoughtful piece].

It’s a simple classic story of cultural misunderstanding. It isn’t greed that is our salesman’s fatal flaw, but simple ignorance. In fact, "tact and keen power of observation" is a bit of distraction, as if he'd failed what we see, but we only see it because the narrator tells us (the narrator, after all, stated that that "may be" the salesman's problem).

He turns down a too-valuable jewel for trade in order to go for two smaller jewels which happen to be the gnole’s alternate pair of eyes, which offends the creature enough to tie up, fatten and slaughter the salesman without torture to be eaten. Was the story selected as one of the best because the victim was a salesman? Or simply for the cultural faux pas so easy for anyone to make?

Martin Greenberg pointed out the correlation between this story and St. Clair’s former occupation in horticulture. Under that lens, this story makes an interesting comparison to her tale “The Gardener” (which is superior in execution if not speculation--I discussed it in this review. Page down) but remains one of her best works, especially at such length, capturing a culture with compact dexterity.

"Brightness Falls from the Air" by Margaret St. Clair (plus Thomas Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague")

First appeared in F&SF as a contest story, reprinted by J. Francis McComas and David Hartwell, the latter a major retrospective. I commented more succinctly, but with slightly different insight here. 

Summary:

On occasion Kerr watched the bird people fight, who left luminous trails in their wake, until he met Rhysha, face to face—her plumage glowing. She came to Kerr’s identification bureau to identify her brother, dead from a bird people fight—fights that the Earth people put on after forcing them to migrate. The bird people join the fights that used to be rituals, but now are a means to exit this life. The Earth people despise all extraterrestrials—even the beggars. Kerr befriends her and goes to speak for her people to give them a new planet to populate.

Commentary with Spoilers:

The hearing doesn’t go well. Kerr gets Rhysha to promise her people will stop fighting, but when Kerr gets sick, she fights anyway, leaving a note behind of how she had tried to get to him.

The title comes from a famous poem (one of the top one hundred most printed poems in the English language) by Thomas Nashe, called sometimes by "A Litany in Time of Plague" or by its first line "Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss" (which might be recognized as the title to D.G. Compton's Mars novel). James Tiptree, Jr. also used the title "Brightness Falls from the Air" for one of her novels. 

Thomas Nashe sounds like something of a impish troublemaker, which may help in interpreting his poem (see Nashe's Wikipedia page and the image of him in chains, which seems to have been more wishful thinking, but not for people's lack of trying).

The poem originates from the comedy "Summer's Last Will and Testament" about a plague that hits earth--not unlike our own time of Covid-19 although with more devastating results--where everyone is bound to die and nothing can avail us. It sounds rather somber; however, note that it is a litany, recited in church where a lay reader or preacher would read a passage, and the congregation would recite the chorus ("I am sick, I must die"--a pair of seemingly linked statements which would have had no actual religious significance in Nashe's day and region). That might create bleak humor if one is expecting some grander purpose or optimism from their church. Also, the chorus doesn't really show one's actions as contributing to one's destiny. It sounds like more of an apocalyptic prayer. I haven't read the play to see how it's used.

Just as Nashe's poem may read differently divorced from its source, so does St. Clair's title. In the poem, "Brightness falls from the air" is something of a non-sequitur, perhaps merely denoting sunlight (perhaps it is linked with youth which precedes it, or with royalty which follows, but these semicolons seem to suggest separate statements building up to the chorus].

St. Clair's tale is meant to be neither humorous nor, I think, resigned to death, necessarily, as a plague outside human control decimates Nashe's population. Instead, she takes her title literally, and her readers are meant to witness an injustice: the mistreatment of outsiders. 

Clair’s tale is simple, moving and worthy of her best, capturing strange, colliding cultures in a few deft strokes. Hartwell writes that her story accomplishes her goal to “develop a global consciousness” by dealing with “beauty, death, and colonialism.” The tale doesn’t make clear the connection with Kerr’s amateur singing, but perhaps it is an irony that he would try to impress the bird people with his singing although the text isn’t explicit about the bird people’s abilities in this matter.*

* Interestingly, I'd mentioned this in the first explanation. Not recalling my first analysis (lacking internet when I wrote this up), I mentioned it again, thinking it just occurred to me. 

Long Poems of Merit from the 2020 Rhysling Award Anthology

Note: The poets appear here, alphabetically as they do in the anthology. A summation follows. To read last year’s commentary, go here. To read this year's short poemdiscussion, click here.

Alexandria Baisden’s “The Scarecrow’s Lover” [Abyss & Apex] is a moving love-story/tragedy between a scarecrow and some strange plant that crawls up its pole. It is composed of sunflowers, strawberries, ivy, etc. If the poem could have explained or kept it to one, and if it had shortened itself, this would have ranked higher, possibly my favorite. Also, I’m not sure the special typographical displays added substantially, but it’s worth checking out. (See the Inverarity poem below for the same problem, which could have made it a contender as well.)

F. J. Bergmann is represented by three dark, brooding poems—all unusually described, the best being “Maculation” [Spectral Realms]—a kind of Lovecraftian starship horror with the gradual decay of the senses toward a greater horror. It opens:

What I missed most were splotches

of color and shade: irregular clouds

above and around me

Frank Coffman missed his calling in “The Scroll of Thoth” [The Coven’s Hornbook and Other

Poems]. The set up surrounding the poem is nothing short of a Borgesian wonder. The poem itself ponders and pales in comparison. Frank, if you’re out there, please (re)read Jorge Luis Borges and see if he inspires.

While the speculation didn’t sell me on Deborah L. Davitt’s “Children of the Trees” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] the structure and close suggest she is getting close, and may be a poet to keep an eye out for.

Emma J. Gibbon renders “Consumption” [Eye to the Telescope] quite viscerally and sadly. Is this verse the best form for her words? I’m less sure. Still, it’s got quite a bite.

“The Woman Who Talks to Her Dog at the Beach” by Geoff Inverarity [Geist] has some wonderful shifts in surprise. It begins with a woman who asks the dog typical questions an owner might ask, without expecting an answer. However, we are given answers, and the dog seems astute, contemplative to the point of brooding about their greater implications, which is lovely. However, there are problems. Who is relating the story? Definitely not the owner [labeled as “The Woman”] and not the dog as it starts outside the dog and goes inside the dog’s thoughts (how? god-like omniscience? the poet?) and back outside the dog (commenting on “the simple love of dogs,” which no longer seems so simple). Who is our narrator and how is he privileged to get his information? How does the dog go from simple [typical happy-go-lucky dog actions, no brooding] to deep [inside his head] to simple again [by some unnamed speaker]? This might have been a wonderful poem had the poet considered these questions and perhaps become a greater poem at having arrived at an unusual conclusion. (See the Baisden poem above for the same problem, which could have made it a contender as well.)

The best image lines from Herb Kauderer’s “Green Sky” [Influence of the Moon]:

human shellfish

invaded the moon,

skittering around

in personal metal houses

like vacuum trilobites

It treads some profound ground but would likely have been more successful at a much shorter length.

Marsheila Rockwell,’s “Stormbound” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] might have converted me to its revelations if it hadn’t felt familiar.

Cynthia So’s “If Love is Real, So Are Fairies” [Uncanny] tantalizes with a couple of nice images well phrased:

working her powdery

magic ....

a shiver

elicited by her microscopic fingers

whispering across the back of my neck.

D. A. Xiaolin Spires penned my favorite ten line last year. This year’s Rhylsing nominee, “tetrahedral edifices of a sticky rice realm” [Mithila Review]—as the title suggests—is an imaginative and evocative work, but a bit too on the nose and, paradoxically, too dream logicked:

light

shocks jangling my jade bangles

i smell the pungent odor of

temple incense and feel

a thousand eyes pressing against

my forehead...

i blink away the doubt, swallow my reservations and

proceed forth

T. D. Walker has two poems—“Eight Simulations for the Missing” and “For My Daughter, Who Will Ask for a Seismograph Implant on Her Sixteenth Birthday” [Small Waiting Objects]—and

Holly Lyn Walrath has one—“The Mining Town” [2019 SFPA Poetry Contest]—that were I an editor, I’d sit on to mull over. They are more ambitious than most, but am I or am I not sold on these? They are all told in piecemeal with strange and lovely structures. However, are any greater than the sum of their parts?

The first, “Eight Simulations for the Missing”, describes “sightings” (real or imagined—simulated or desired) of a loved one. The second is a mother addressing her daughter via earthquakes sensed on a seismograph.  “The Mining Town” seems to be an old West mining  ghost town, leading us eventually to the devil. In each narrative bit, the sections end with a question, not unlike the quiz at the end of reading to check if you were paying attention although the answers aren’t necessarily found within the texts.

Summation:

From these poems selected, there is no clear winner that stands above the rest. A number of these would have been more successful at shorter lengths. I commented on about two out of every five of the shorter poems, and one out of four of the longer. Note that I read for aesthetics first and then become curious about ratios and statistics, afterwards. Trying to put politics above art strangles both. A few poems were well written, but their speculation didn’t strike me, so I didn’t comment.

At a later date, I’ll need to reread the aforementioned three poems to determine how I felt about them. My gut instinct is to cast my primary vote for F. J. Bergmann’s “Maculation” with T. D. Walker’s “For My Daughter, Who Will Ask for a Seismograph Implant on Her Sixteenth Birthday” as runner-up, but maybe I’d reverse that later, or some other combination.

Of these long poems, my aesthetics didn’t happen to select poems from more than one magazine (two from what I suspect is T.D. Walker’s collection, which I’d be interested in reading) except Polu Texni, which I selected three of their poems before, making them seem to have been a magazine to read and appear in for speculative poetry—at least for getting noticed in the Rhysling awards.

Asimov’s, Dreams & Nightmares, F&SF, Star*Line, Strange Horizons are the usual hot beds for SF poetry, but Apparition Lit, Liminality, Polu Texni,  have all caught my eye of late in addition to a few others I will have to check out. I regularly read Rattle and Poetry, but an SF poem is a rarity. I suspect the genre’s an acquired taste, especially given the special challenges of trying to fulfill two genres at once.

The ratio of female to male in long poems is about 2:1, which is close to my selection of poems to comment on although it appears only females will get my votes for long poems this year. Before I vote though, I will reread the four poems by women (please forgive me if I messed up someone’s gender) and maybe a few other poets who are usually strong, in case I read them too quickly.

Good luck to all the poets nominated.

Top 5 Poems and Discussion of the SF Poems from the 2020 Rhysling Award Anthology

[To read the discussion of long poems, click here.]

A good speculative poem is a difficult thing to balance. Writing a good poem is hard. Writing speculative fiction is hard. Trying to do both is like scale Everest while spinning plates.

The term suggests it’s going to be a narrative. Most are, generally—in a basic sense (not in a traditional story sense). It also suggests it’s going to be speculative—that is, suggest a sense of wonder—which most also do, albeit to do something astounding in so short a space is unusual, so the good speculative poem tends to focus on the emotion. I’ve seen a few excel on their technical delivery. Sometimes, instead of speculation, science appears in lieu of speculation, usually the space variety.

The trick is often the poem part. What makes a thing a poem? Emily Dickinson said it takes her head off.* And so it does, usually on a word level, asking you to see a thing anew. Billy Collins does this mainly at the image level, which some criticize him for, but note that ninety to ninety-nine percent of what appears as SF Poetry is exactly that: working at the image level only. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as some spectacularly great works can be written at this level, but it does leave a whole world of poetry to explored: the words, recombinations, juxtapositions, references, line breaks and a grab bag of literary devices to make the reader to rethink, resee what’s out there.

*SF does this, too, except in a different way, usually larger, narrative and philosophic scales although poetry can be philosophical, too.

A good work of art also turns the reader to look back on himself (or whatever the pronoun). Who are we as individuals or as a species, etc. Compare, however, the fourth poem listed here to the first. The fourth occupies its human realm with forays into the speculative. The best one lives in the skin of SF and asks us to see our own world anew. That is what makes it not only the best short SF poem in this anthology, but probably in the field.

Can a poem simply make us laugh or feel (horror, love, anger, stun, awe)? Can it simply capture a moment or a mind? Sure. But ideally it can do more than one thing. These are the major aesthetics that should govern the judging of the arts—not politics or gender or race or religion (or the poem is propagandist whose agenda isn’t the arts but whatever propaganda it’s trying to propagate). And so, with this rubric in mind, I’ll look for the best of those.

The following magazines had short poems of some note nominated here:

Star*Line – 4

Liminality -- 3

Polu Texni – 3

Asimov’s – 2

Fireside Fiction – 2

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – 2

Rattle – 2

Spectral Lit – 2

Strange Horizons – 2

These aren’t necessarily the best publishers of SF poetry (although they might be), but happen to be the center of a Venn diagram of Rhysling voters, the magazines they read, and my aesthetics.

This year, like last, more women were nominated than men. About three to one. Is this a pattern? Are women more likely to submit and publish poems and represent the legitimate majority? Or is this selection sexist? The same thing has been happening with most awards. Since a male penned the best short poem this year, it will be interesting to watch how the tally goes.

Last year, I lumped the poems into of good candidates--fewer candidates, fewer notes. This year, the best poems out paced the main body of candidates.

The Top Five Countdown:

5.

Tim Jones’s “Encore” [Big Hair Was Everywhere] is remarkable mostly for its mix of emotions—an interesting, darkly humorous voice—but also the close snaps shut with some resonance. The line breaks are unimpressive, laid out for emphasis, and seem not particularly poetic. For example: suddenly cropped lines with only “the dead” or “Fingernails” in them. Still, solid work. Sample:

Four guys, four shots of whisky.

They like their liquor strong,

the dead.

Twin guitars, bass, drums.

Eight rotting hands

poised above the downbeat.

Good tight voice and imagery. I tried quoting just one stanza, but the poem builds and so, without some context, the lines seem not as potent. Do read the full poem.

4.

Mary McMyne captures a poignant human emotion in “The Mother Searches for Her Own Story” [Strange Horizons] although the last line seems to overstate its case. The “staying alive” is merely the psychological sense, not the literal one. The line might have had a dual sense had she made that come into play within the poem, which would have added more power and resonance. Also the speculation isn’t shaped but suggested. Nonetheless, taking her speculation into our world makes it more poignant than most of these.

2 + 3.

I won’t separate these two, but will discuss their relative merits:

“The Night the Unicorn Leapt from the Tapestry” by Kate Pentecost [Liminality] is truly magical and sweet. Nice images. The most memorable line is “velvet ropes unhitched themselves as [the Unicorn] moved among the still lifes.”

To read Lily Zhou’s “From ‘Moon Sonnet’” [Poetry], one may need to be conversant in the Chinese myth of Chang’e. Still we can see a semi-unreliable persona:

“I am terrible

at playing heroine. I’ve done all I can:...

saved the tortoise from its slow drowning.”

The tortoise is presumably not drowning although he may have after a natural death, but it sounds like his death had been hastened. The language here is suggestive and taut, which is the poem’s strength. Contrast that with Pentecost’s which might have worked as well in prose. Pentecost’s, however, has a stronger sense of wonder.

1.

Bruce Boston’s “The Ruined Library” [Asimov’s] is the best poem. Why? First, he sets up an atmosphere of decay. It pays attention to the lines and the big picture. We have a “blast // building and broke” where we get the sound matching image. Plus there are fascinating phrases like “cargo of words.” The killer, though, is the double play of his ending:

Yet the deserted library

still has many patrons.

Creatures small and pale...

tunnel through one

volume after another,

devouring one letter

at a time until they

have the last word.

Damn. That’s good. Tape this sucker on your locker or above your writing desk to inspire.

                                                                                                                            

For comments on other short poems of merit that appeared in this year’s Rhysling Award anthology, click here.

Short Poems of Merit from the 2020 Rhysling Award anthology

Note: I will discuss my top five here, and semi-loose selectioncriteria, including an overview.

Mike Allen conjures some dark, wild imagery in “The Sacrifices” [Sycorax Journal].

Two light verses that work as speculative humor are David Clink’s “Steampunk Christmas” [Star*Line] and P S Cottier’s “[Aliens declutter]” [Scifaikuest]

Good lines from Deborah L. Davitt’s “The Journey” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] (reminiscent of C. L. Moore’s famous tale, “Shambleau”):

She found him on the shore, ship-wrecked, sea-wracked—

his eyes had lost their light...

her serpentine locks twined

around him, supple, sleek, and scaled.

Lamentable repetition: “Every love’s a journey into darkness”

Good lines from Robin Wyatt Dunn’s “Disassembly at auction” [Mobius: The Journal of

Social Change]

And a hallucinatory blue smear over the left retina

Chassis intact, with some bruising of the metal...

Gonads still functional

Brain missing.

Left leg is a total loss

Right, still has...

Good finale from Amelia Gorman’s “Alternate Galatea” [Liminality]:

 the base is strong and the paper

whispers and rustles in the wind

Vince Gotera’s “All-Father” [Dreams and Nightmares] is a nice tribute, clever with a morsel of wonder.

Good lines from Jessica J. Horowitz’s “Taking, Keeping” [Spectral Lit]:

When at last they took her tongue, she etched each letter

into the tips of her fingers, across her ribs,

in the hollow places behind her eyes.

She carved epics between the layers of her skin,

stitched verses into each sinew.

Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s “Area 51 Custodian Gets Coffee” [Star*Line] is the kind of poem you’d think would find its way into this type of anthology. Nice narrative fragment, nice little visceral shock at the end.

In “Goddamn These Minotaurs” Persephone Erin Hudson [paintbucket] displays voice and energy, but nothing yet to quote. Not quite there.

John Philip Johnson plays with bitter-sweet irony in “Mothsong” [Liquid Imagination] although no particularly striking lines. His “Fly” [Rattle] poem closed nicely.

Catherine Kyle’s “Seven Reasons to Have Hope for a Better Future. Number Five Will Really Get You!” [Quail Bell] has an ironic tone that works for it although the best thing is its fantastic title. It mixes Biblical apocalypse with common jokes about the latest generation’s penchants.

Kathleen A. Lawrence retells “Hansel and Gretel” [Star*Line] from the witch’s perspective in “The Nonpareils: As Told by the Woman in the Gingerbread House” to some advantage.

Mary Soon Lee tells some entertaining verse: “To Skeptics” [The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction] being the most effective.

Francine P. Lewis ["drag strip drag" in Eye to the Telescope] and Jeff Crandall [“Halsted IV” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction] had some impressively structured poems. Crandall’s being the more emotive due to the nature of Lewis’s tight structure, where the poem is reverses itself in two directions. Crandall is more loose with his redeploying “The House that Jack Built”—not forcing himself to repeat events each time, but uses that to create a sense of an inevitable outcome.

Sandra J. Lindow’s “Creation: Dark Matter Dating App” [Asimov’s] is a charming misinterpretation of a scientific sentence.

Nisa Malli’s “Abeona, Goddess of Outward Journeys, Pilots the Interstellar Ark” [Spectral Lit] has what could become a fascinating speculative examination, but it doesn’t feel quite there yet. I gather it’s a problematic A.I., but we need sharper details (same number of words, just sharper—not so much sharper images but the effect she wants).

Caroline Mao‘s “when my father reprograms my mother {” [Strange Horizons] is effective, even moving, but it never quite arrives.

“The Certainty of Seeing” by Michelle Muenzler [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] captures a moment of revisiting an ailing patient (through a psychological time travel) although we aren’t given much context.

Jason O’Toole’s “Samsara” [The Scrib Arts Journal] suggests that reincarnation means you should give your kids cupcakes, which will benefit you somehow. I wanted this to work, but we need more dots to connect.

Uche Ogbuji’s “Kolanut or kola tree  Íjè [Kola Journey]” [FIYAH Literary Magazine] has interesting translations and cultural aspects. As a poem, it is at its strongest when it comes up with lovely strange descriptions; “no sick greengray” “a shovel breath” “toes spadeing the soil.” Some are simply strange ones: dialogue croaked and “She grimaces while replying:” The kolanut is kind of a totem that carries freight although it doesn’t quite get to that and could probably use more development. There’s a lot of bandying back and forth since a third (?) of the poem is in a different language. I decided to search and replace to see if that helped and notice that could have conveyed a different culture just by substituting “Until the dawn!” for goodnight. That way we’re not floundering for the primary sense of what’s happening (unless confusion is called for), but we are within this culture and should hear the phrases as the other native characters hear it. I know there are other hypotheses, but poetry has barriers enough. Let people enter the poem smoothly. Use cognates if you have them unless you mean to exclude (but then why a poem?) and I don’t think Uche Ogbuji means to do that, especially given the translations provided.

Christina Olson [from her prize-winning Rattle chapbook, The Last Mastadon] has some science poems that offer bright, little moments and occasionally nice structure, but the whole doesn’t quite click for me.

Terrie Leigh Relf hints in “Revisiting the origins of language” [Space & Time Magazine] (if one compares the title to the ending) that language was created as a poem to lost love, which is sweet.

“The Ghosts of Those” by Ron Riekki [Star*Line] is a non-speculative poem about PTSD in the aging with some word- rhythm (“emptied, struggling for words, for worlds, / for wars other than the faded wars, the fading wars,”) and fun word pairings (“in my farmhouse mind, strange-keeled, fog-queened,”), but again it’s not speculative.

WC Roberts captures an intriguing scenario and atmosphere in “Phobos and Deimos” [Chrome Bairn] but it needs more time percolating.

Marge Simon’s “The Snow Globe” [Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts] captures a tender moment between lovers who only come alive when it's shaken. Through a confusion of pronouns, it sets up the boy to be the man inside—neat trick.

Christina Sng in “Styx” [Spectral Realms] admirably takes something should stir horror and turns it into something tender. Quite a feat.

“Three of Swords, King of Cups” by Ali Trotta [Fireside Fiction] presents an extended metaphor that mostly works although it might have be shortened to greater effect.

Jacqueline West discusses “Lady Macbeth’s Green Gown” [Liminality] in the 1888 play which “was sewn / all over with real green beetle wings.” What a beautiful found image.

Fran Wilde’s “The Unseen” [Fireside Fiction] talks about fog in a pleasant manner—better fare than most novelists. The best lines: “it takes the distance first, / that mountain we always said we’d climb” although it isn’t really speculative. Scientific? Maybe?