The imagery is always breathtaking, startling, and the action usually violent, often gruesome. Consider “How Conrad Fell in Love,” in which Conrad’s family tries to dissuade him:

”Conrad, honey,” mother cooed. “Love is only for humans.
You are somwhere up there in the food chain.
And that girl’s hair has clogged our drain pipe.”
Conrad bowed his head, and I knew that he would think about her
tonight, how she had clawed at him when he lifted off his face
and how she had called him a “monster, monster, ugly beast.”
I would drag that girl into the kitchen tonight, keep her alive
for a while, make her understand what monster love was all about.

(The next poem is titled “Conrad and His Bride,” so we have an idea how successful Conrad’s family’s efforts were.)

Giger’s Tracts is about encounters that don’t go well. In fact, the last three poems are about closing doors, mouths, conduits—sealing off one thing from another. In “Disinfecting the Tourist,” a tourist is subjected to drastic disinfection methods, and in the end,

Dazed and sore all over, he gave the travel agents
his name and his memories. He had nothing to hide.
They gave him a badge so that the citizens
would not stone him to death. He was only visiting.

From the perspective of the locals, there are these lines from “The Invisible”:

. . . Who would’ve
thought that such a soulless, outnumbered thing in rags
would grow strong enough to ring the bell, to want
to be found, to be let in, to live among us. Years later,
we were cutting away the eyelids of our dead
so they could see your approach.

In Muir’s Horses, beautiful, incomprehensible horses, who gallop at the speed of light and have spines curved by gravity, wander among us. The first poem, “The Strange Horses,” is gorgeous:

. . . although their bodies were
sinuous, unscarred,
their eyes were very, very old . . .

From the windows of our secret rooms,
we studied their mane and the wind
they brought in the spaces between the strands.
The radios hissed; we turned to white noise
and heard the sound of their galloping
before the Prime Minister’s door.
And the Prime Minister asked:
“What do you want to know about us?”

As too often happens, we destroy what we cannot understand:

The next day, bereft of weapons,
we slaughtered the strange horses
with our bare hands.

“We must learn to tame what we cannot see,” the people declare in “The Arrival of the Invisible Horses,” but it always comes down to destruction.

Vengeful Strangers is the poetry edition of the family stories your older cousin would terrify you with at family gatherings—filled with murder, abuse, illicit doings, the works. Anything hinting at sweetness and light is turned on its head, as in “Sabrina and the Sparrows,” in which Sabrina puts out breadcrumbs for the sparrows each morning, and then, when the birds are “distracted by the food on the sill . . . fishes / the creatures one by one and puts them into her mouth.” One poem, “Storytelling,” seems to poke fun at the grisly nature of this series: in it, the narrator tells her dolls a grim version of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” as her dolls get up to the same sorts of bloodthirsty shenanigans as the humans in the other poems in the series.

Then comes Body Horror, probably my least favorite of the grim series, simply because I’m not much of a fan of body horror. I think even if you enjoy a ghoulish poem now and then, you may want to parcel these out in small doses, because reading poems like “Stillbirth,” “Sack of Heads,” and “An Experiment in Thresholds of Pain” all in one go might get a bit overwhelming. But even in this section, there was one a reader like me could love: “Moths” was downright beautiful. Have a taste:

Pitiful and angry, the tiny brown moths
clustered before me while I wrote love letters
deciphered as insincere prayers under the
fluorescent light of a plastic desk lamp.

”Life is a nightmare train,” I told them each night.
“It will take you everywhere at the speed of its own
choosing, will not wait for you to find out
how far it can lead you away from home.”

There’s more, but that taste captures the feel.

And then we come to my favorite series, Strangers. Some of the strangers may be familiar—the seventh stranger is something like Circe and something like Voldemort, and certain marks link the eighth stranger to Jesus. The tenth is just a voice on the radio, and the twelfth is a soul train. But my favorite is the third stranger, the mother of oceans. It’s a short poem, but one of my favorites:

She claimed to be
the mother of the oceans.
We laughed at her
until she opened her mouth,
and we heard
the rush of the waves,
the sloshing of a thousand fishes.
In her breath was the smell of brine.

All in all, an excellent collection for those who who appeciate a walk in on the dark side of poetry now and then.

One might call this little book of jump rope rhymes a revival, but that would suggest that these childhood rhymes were — at some point — dead. Looking at the examples in this collection I find that very doubtful. With the originals still very present in the poets’ minds, Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes presents itself as a string of re-imagined children’s poetry, going through a spectrum of lemon to flame in the process. The poets involved didn’t just bring a rainbow arsenal of crayons to the table however, they also added a pinch of wickedness, something dark, something mean, and something silly; the result is really quite enjoyable.

Apart from devilishly sweet verses, Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes showcases the fruitful result of a collaborative effort of eight poets, Francesca Forrest, Erik Amundsen, Nadia Bulkin, Kyle Davis, Samantha Henderson, Rose Lemberg, Julia Rios, and Sonya Taaffe. Adam Oehlers treats the reader’s eyes to illustrations of the weird that transform this project into a stage on paper for the rhymes to act out their magic.

Cinderalla Jump Rope Rhymes is recommended, even for those ostensibly too old to jump rope.

This work, Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes, is a derivative of Cinderella Jump Rope Rhymes by Alexandra Seidel, which appeared in A Periodical of Liberated Literature aka http://www.Fantastique-Unfettered.com, on Friday, March 30, 2012 and is licensed in kind under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I absolutely love to see fairy tales of old develop new twists in the hands of new writers, I love to see these familiar stories re-invented and re-imagined so they can shine in a new light. Thus, when I got this title for review, I was very much excited about it.

The collection itself is a cute little booklet. It fits comfortably in one palm and is about 30 pages long.

However, despite my wanting to like, even love, this book, Fairy Tales for Writers did not fulfill my expectations. True, the frameworks of such Grimm classics as “Snow White” or Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” are used and their plots cleverly twisted around the individual experience of writers, but that is all; the poems do not venture beyond their new settings in the world of writers, editors, and publishers. Another thing that — for me at least — was lacking is a distinct speculative element. These poems are not about magic and transformation as I had expected, rather about the magical experience of writing (and yes, the pitfalls writers might run into).

Furthermore, the language here is rather like what I would expect in solid prose, not so much like the kind of thing that I want to see in a poem, although every now and then there was a line that was a little more colorful than the rest, a metaphor that managed to capture my imagination.

All in all, if you are looking for magic and for a remaking of old myths, Fairy Tales for Writers is not what you want, but then again, if you are a writer just looking for some like-mindedness, this is definitely the book for you to buy.

The Moment of Change, a collection of feminist speculative poetry edited by Rose Lemberg, has already received much-deserved accolades, reviewed by Strange Horizons’ Brit Mandelo at Tor.com and by the speculative poet and short-story writer Rachel Swirsky at the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

It’s a stunning treasury of speculative poets, including several Rhysling Award winners and nominees, as well as prize-winners from the world of speculative fiction, including Ursula K. LeGuin, Jo Walton, and Greer Gilman. It offers a tremendous opportunity to get a taste of some of the best of speculative feminist poetry.

A champion of diversity, Lemberg has chosen poems that represent the unruly, ungeneralizable expanse of human female experience. There’s no one agenda here: there are angry poems, but also joyful ones; there are poems of childhood and old age, poems of hope and despair. There are poems in which gender is central and others in which it is peripheral. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s the importance of finding one’s voice and then using it. Lemberg writes,

We re-remember ourselves, constantly remake ourselves, grapple with theory and life’s challenges. “See us,” the poets of this collection say. “Change with us. Walk with us. Dream with us.”

Lemberg’s skill as an editor shines in her placement of the poems. The Moment of Change is no odd-sock drawer of poems; Lemberg sets each contributions as carefully as the colored tiles in a mosaic. So, for example, one trio of poems (“The Haunted Girl,” by Lisa Bradley, followed by “Tertiary,” by Mary Alexander Agner, in turn followed by “Owling,” by Sara Amis) deals with women as formed or deformed creatures: Bradley’s reveals the cost of male gaze; Agner’s is a radical reclaiming of the right to shape one’s form oneself; Amis’s takes the Pygmalion story and gives it a metamorphosis twist: perhaps it’s input from the goddess Athena that leads to Galatea’s escape in owl form.

Another trio, Meena Kandasamy’s “Six Hours of Chastity,” Samantha Henderson’s “Berry Cobbler,” and Sofîa Rhei’s “Bluebeard Possibilities” (translated by Lawrence Schimel), offer contrasting husband-and-wife tales. Kandasamy makes use of the traditional story of Nalayani, a wife faithful to her leper husband who, when asked to claim a reward for her devotion, asks her husband to take the form of five different men to satisfy her desire. Kandasamy’s poem features six different men, and her portraits of them show their hypocrasy and pride, but also their vulnerability and need. The husband in Henderson’s poem is abusive and doesn’t survive to the end: having liberated herself, the wife enjoys her berry cobbler just the way she likes it. In Rhei’s recursive retelling of the Bluebeard story, it’s not clear if all or none of Bluebeard’s wives have been murdered; the poem plays with several possibilities.

The theme of speaking or singing out weaves through the collection. Phyllis Gottlieb’s “Robot’s Daughter” cries “Mother / what song have I to sing?” and the next poem, Vandana Singh’s “Syllables of Old Lore,” deals entirely with finding a voice when one is silenced:

My words are ash on the lips
They shrivel on the tongue …
… So I must speak slant
In languages I can trust
Wind, leaves, clouds, and rain,
A symbolic tongue of joy and pain

In Sofia Samatar’s “Year of Disasters,” an alien invasion (perhaps science fictional, perhaps a metaphor for literal or cultural invasion as we know it in our present world) strips a region of birds, then cats, and at last of language itself:

I myself saw songs being butchered in the street

Now when I meet an old friend by chance
we gesture at one another with open mouths,

clacking our fingertips

in their language.

But it’s not all grimdark. River in Sheree Renée Thomas’s sexy, sensual “untitled Old Scratch poem, featuring River” is in clear possession of her voice, an assured voice, a confident voice. River listens to Old Scratch “hum humming softly, wine / and sultry whispers” but won’t be moved by his importuning:

like I don’t know he sang
that same tired song to Old Sista Sky …
I let his sugar lies
drop like old stones
in the bottom of the sea
and swing my big hips
on by, on by

And this brief survey doesn’t even begin to cover the collection’s riches. There are wonderful monsters, a loving lesbian selkie (and a lesbian Cinderella), scatterbrained witches and wise ones, Mary Shelley and King Lear, starship navigators and travelers to the moon, and a quite excellent trenchcoat. Go forth and discover your own favorites.

Fairy Tales in Electri-City is Francesca Lia Block‘s third collection of poetry, and the first one I have read. I have thoroughly enjoyed her prose, especially in The Rose and the Beast, I Was a Teenage Fairy,  and the first couple of Weetzie Bat books, and was very excited to read her poetry; I figured that so brilliant a prose stylist, whose words are petals and fruit flesh on the page, must be something else again as a poet. I expected luminous images, sharp and startling lyricism, and, given the title, a focus on the magic of urban places, like a more fantastical instance of what David O’Meara did for Ottawa with The Vicinity.

This collection was not what I expected.

The blurb on the back says the following:

Elves and centaurs, nymphs and fauns inhabit this new collection of magical, erotic poems about a girl yearning for and searching for love in present-day Los Angeles.

I think it is crucial to the enjoyment of this collection to understand that all these poems are telling the same person’s story with incremental changes in between. Not having read the back before I started in, I enjoyed the first poem, for which the collection is titled, thinking that its narrative was a stand-alone; I liked some parts better than others, and thought that its style, while not the lyrical imagism I had expected, was suited to its fairy tale content in being quite matter-of-fact storytelling. Electra is born into a magical city; her father dies; she dreams herself two children and a beautiful home; she longs for romantic love, suffers in seeking it, and learns to live with the pain of its absence.

But while “Fairy Tales in Electri-City” impressed me in its own right, many of the poems following it did not. I found myself thinking this is so repetitive; these images are so conventional; this tone is so conversational it is almost prose, certainly more prosaic than her books of prose! But by the time I hit “The Garden Speaks,” I began to understand that this book could actually be read as one long narrative poem. It’s as if Block’s poetic unit is not the line but the poem; where I am used to a line of poetry containing multitudes, affecting me in the way a whole song does, Fairy Tales in Electri-City is a narrative poem the lines of which are made up of narrative poems, and the effect lives in between them.

As it turns out, the first poem is a roadmap to the whole: the collection is divided into sections, titled “Electra,” “Beasties,” “The Eldritch,” “Love’s Songs,” and “Change: the Fairies’ Tales,” which explore in more depth each of the major movements of “Fairy Tales in Electri-City.” Characters recur, often startlingly, and the poems in each section are often revisions of the stories presented in the poems preceding them. A centaur seems a saviour until he is not; an elf seems like the answer to a prayer for a soulmate until a later poem pronounces him otherwise. And it is this narrative that draws me in more than the language of the poems themselves, as you see this beautiful woman trying to make her search for love fit into the tidiness of a fairy tale over and over, only to see it outgrow and outspill those stories to become something different each time.

This is not to say that individual poems are not also beautiful. My favourites are “The Huntress” and “The Garden Speaks,” but most of them have a passage or two that shine out particularly fiercely, especially italicised passages where someone in the poem speaks.

The physical object that is the book is beautiful as well: it has that pleasing, perfect-bound tidiness and tiny-ness which I’ve enjoyed from A Midsummer Night’s Press before. There were a few typographical errors in the text, but not enough to impair my enjoyment or distract me from the experience of reading. Elisa Lazo de Valdez’ cover image – a woman’s silhouette, antlered and smudged against a white background beneath a strip of upside-down cityscape, is gorgeous and well-suited to the contents.

Ultimately this collection is much more than the sum of its parts, and the whole it makes is moving, tender, and fierce, both by turns and all at once.

I once told Sonya Taaffe that, on the day she wrote a poem that didn’t move me; a wolf would eat the sun. Take a look outside if you want a spoiler alert for A Mayse-Bikhl. If you do not see the sun shining, that’s because it is night when you read this, and be most certain that the reflection staring in at you is you, and not a dybbuk, because in reading this collection, you stand a strong danger of being possessed.

For a while, this has been all I have been able to say about Taaffe’s collection, a score of poems from almost a decade’s worth of years, some of which I saw in early forms (“Domovoi, I Came Back!”) and some I read here for the first time. These all collected under an explicitly Jewish theme, under several explicitly Jewish themes, since the history and entwining of that culture with the places the Diaspora has traveled and settled and given to and gained from all the other cultures it touches… These are roots and rhizomes, a symbiosis that feels too big and too complicated to hold in the head all at once.

Still, all of these poems are familiar, people you meet and wonder if you’ve met before, because of the impression they make; the kind of impression so strong, it defies time, and makes itself retroactive. I feel like I’ve read all of these poems before I read them. They are not predictable, but I feel as though I should have known them from before. They read as though they are fated.

Taaffe knows, more than anything, and more than anyone I have ever met, the functional questions of myth: How myth? What myth? Why myth? And this transfers to any cycle she chooses, any culture I have seen her interface with. Here, she is looking at the myths and the fabric of a huge part of her own origin and her own culture. These are personal journeys, some of them. Some of them journeys into a community of which I am not part and could not fully understand. Most of them are both at the same time, but all of them use the power of myth to bring the journeys into a place of value for anyone. This is not religious poetry, exactly, though the numinous is in here. It’s not the memoir of immigrant experience, though immigration, emigration and crossing of borders all feature. I’m not going to say accessible, since that implies you can pick these poems up and put them down and do what you want with them. They have identity and volition and they will be respected. They are not universal, for all that they are mythic; they are too intimate to be treated as or by a group, to exact and particular to just fill in anywhere. But they are identifiable. You know these poems, or you will have known them.

Taaffe invokes two figures of Jewish folklore more than any other; the dybbuk and the golem, the possessing daemon and the human created by humans. Immensely powerful, both, appearing and reappearing; they are the other that is also an aspect of the self – the internal, the dybbuk, who Taaffe writes in “Kaddish for a Dybbuk”

…entangled
in the delirium of stolen fingers
heart, brain, spilling with thoughts
no corpse can claim-

Taaffe works the lines of desire and death wherever her words fall, but it is in the dybbuk, the one who has not had enough life, where it always seems to focus most brightly, most sharply.

There is also the golem, the external other, but so informed by the self, made, sort of… Taaffe’s golems have their own existence, both self-determined from the moment of their awakening and also in that they always were; the sense that they existed in some ineffable mind before their ostensible creator started working on the clay. Strip away everything that was not meant to be a being, whether the golem is a metaphor for the lover as sometimes seems in “Madonna of the Cave.”

As if you were a golem all those years
before our faces rested together in the dark,
the dumb shammes, turning in clockwork
…red figures on the blackest ground

Sometimes they appear as words in “Sefer Yetzirah.”

Every golem’s letter is the letter
the sign of holding fast as truth to death.

Did I mention these poems will change shape on you? I read them differently every time. Makes writing them up as a review very, very tricky.

A thing struck me early; how much earth and how much fire are in these poems. Taaffe always struck me as someone who brought us more to wood and to water, and she makes no secret of her love of the sea, but still, here we have clay and kiln, road, candle flames and ashes (yes, even those ashes, though they are not an ostensible focus of the collection). But, here there is still the sea, still the wood and the water. They’ll change shape. Like a dybbuk, once it’s gotten into you.

I’ve spent so little time on the individual poems; it’s not enough to say there are no false notes, here. Or that “Shnirele, Perele” is still my favorite for all its joy and determination. Or that “Tzaddik” makes me chuckle and “Domovoi, I Came Back!” gives me chills. I haven’t even spoken of Ashmedai or the Lilim, and I am running out of space. So let us visit them, the transient trickster daemon, sometimes a lover:

You are a demon dressed in yesterdays,
and I fall into mirrors, falling in with you.
Little Ashmedai, leave me with my broken glass.
Ours is a season that never stays.

Then the faces given to desires hidden, even from the one who desires:

…The kind
Of names that were whispered once,
Spat against three times, charms traced

This is a book full of demons. Daemons, spirits; I keep running into them every time I flip through, desperately trying to find the passage I meant to write about. There they are, tugging, pulling at me, telling me to read this passage instead, talk about that poem, tell my story again, even though I cannot do them justice. You are going to have to read this collection yourself to know them; I know they aren’t going to let me be even if they get you (and they will get you), but they might not tug and pull as hard and sharp on me if I’ve done this thing for them. I owe them that much for what they’ve shown me.

Stone Telling’s seventh issue, called Bridging, has as its frontispiece, the painting of a horse and rider jumping a chasm, and for some reason, this image keeps coming back to me as I read the poems collected here. I almost wrote contained, but that seems like the worst possible word for the poems themselves and the purpose of this issue (as well as being generally wrong for the publication and its mission).

This is the queer issue, and it makes no attempt to constrain the definition simply or solely to same-sex desire or the stories of the people made thus. Make no mistake, it’s not neglected, that desire, those longings and fears and challenges that crowd around those people who are of them, but there is a broader net cast here, and what comes out of this net, the catch, is a strong theme that makes me think of the horse and rider. “Bridging” is the name of this issue, but it’s clear that the bridge is one that each person must make for themselves, and, more importantly, of themselves.

Michele Bannister begins with “Seamstress,” an elegant three-way bridging of SF, tailoring and desire, piecing together orbital mechanics, a garment, and the body of the one for whom the garment (and presumably the orbit) were created. It works; the needed care and technique of the work described match well with the technique and the language of the poem.

Sergio Ortiz’s “Rain and Sound” is a less tricky affair, more an observation and a statement of longing to be heard, listened to, and it has hibiscus, which I think are cool flowers:

yet the hibiscus have been censored
like men trying to show their affection
for each other.

Nancy Sheng introduces us to the mechanical Turk, a luminal character out of history, and getting points off the bat for teaching me something about history, she goes deep into identity with “Inner Workings;” man or woman, human or machine, and the identity of a stage persona; again three different elements all skillfully woven.

Next, we reach Jack Marr’s “Lunectomy,” which, true to its subject matter, is a powerfully visceral, and movingly witchy account of the Bridging as transition.

Okay, we should be clear on where I stand with Sonya Taaffe’s poetry, and that’s in the fanboy choir. “The Clock House,” a coda for Alan Turing and Christopher Morcom, which, again, my thing for being let in on history I didn’t know. Then the language, the story, and the tragedy of what might have been. Breaks the heart, along the best possible fault-lines.

Peter Milne Greiner’s “The Earth Has Rings” does lovely things with language. At first, I thought “This is my favorite closing line of any of the poems here:”

we murmur like stamina into each other

But then I notice the opening line is killer, and starts with “Hey” and then pulls it off! And then the stuff in between is cool too. I like this one.

“Ardat-lilî” by Jeannelle Ferreira brings a dose of myth and wild to the issue. Hel Gurney goes on a deep exploration of the meaning of hair as it intersects with culture, narrative and self, particularly in gendered expression in “Hair.” Adrienne J Odasso likens gender identity and expression to being at the cusp of Sagittarius and Capricorn in “Parallax.” Each of these is effective, moving; I can groove on them, but I can’t find a place to comment.
Dominik Parisien in “In His Eighty-Second Year” tells the story of an elder who lived a life different than what might have been, about to transition from life to death. It is sad, but I can’t feel as though it’s a tragedy, for it seems clear to me that he has found, made, been his bridge, if only for his final hours.

This brings us to Lisa M. Bradley’s “we come together, we fall apart.” What can I say? It’s epic, it’s human, and harrowing.

Amal El-Mohtar brings us “Asteres Planetai,” which, traces identity, bridges what is, what changes and what does not fit into the minds of onlookers in the night sky. This one is full of heat and movement:

I have no fixed abode.
I make my home of motion—
I cannot stand still.

But rests in the liminal spaces, the horse still in motion, the rider still guiding the jump over the chasm. It’s a poem that tells a story, but does not give an answer.

Bogi Takács bridges back along the past and through identity as an oracle in “The Handcrafted Motions of Flight.” Like so many of the poems in this issue, this one draws together many elements, not just speaking in analogy, but in nested metaphors, and it’s around this time that I start to understand, that while the horse and rider is apt, it is not the whole story. There are gaps and precipices that cannot be readily apparent to the outsider, and that to bridge them is to move in many directions and many subtle ways at once.

Peer G. Dudda finishes the issue with “Sister Dragons,” a celebratory acknowledgement that though these gaps and chasms are deep and in places hard to see, that one who must cross them is forever going to be held back by those who don’t or can’t or won’t, there is no time too late, that there is no way to keep one from bridging the gap between what they seem to be and what they were born to be.

I’ve been back over this issue of Stone Telling many times, and I believe that this one must have been the most difficult, both in terms of the technical skill of putting it together and the emotional toll it must have taken on editor and poet alike. It’s a complex one, and I think if I were to wait another month and read it again (and I want to), I would have entirely different things to say and new things to see.

That impresses me. Inspires.

The Goblins always have a tell, a way of showing you what to expect, both so that you can’t tell them you weren’t warned when they hit you with what they’ve got. This time, the tell comes from the art of guest artist Rose Lemberg (of Stone Telling); crones and owls, foxes and wolves, a listening child; for me, it conjured the carpenter weathervane on the porch of my granparents’ house, sawing away in a late winter rainstorm. That tell only got clearer in the note from the editors, full of the cold damp of Cornwall. I was set to let this issue sink into my bones and throb, more raw chill than ice and snow.

It was a feint. The poems that comprise this issue are cutting icy gusts, utterly cold and utterly dry (do not take that word as a synonym for boring). The goblins fooled me, took my breath away.

Many of these poems begin after the end. Lynn Hardaker’s “The Tale’s End,” with its betrayed father, apple-murdered sister, crow-lost brothers and narrator maimed if not murdered comes cold as a sudden draft through the tiniest crack under the window, sharp enough to lacerate. Sandi Leibowitz’s “Sleeping, I Was Beauty” begins in the ever after of the eponymous heroine, but awkward and terrifying, with the most chilling lines in the issue:

and all the world rejoicing
at true love’s admittance.

But then Lori Lamothe’s “Happily” takes the other road after the end, to that altar and right on past, no vows, no look back, the pause after the first one-two, while the goblins ready another cold combination.

Persephone extends her lease on Goblin Fruit, and, should you remember my review of summer, there was an argument laid out so persuasive that none can gainsay her appearance in every Goblin Fruit from here to the breaking (or at least dramatic changing) of the world. Shweta Narayan shows her in a dead, chalky place, much like a broken world, dry and dusty, in “Persephone in Grey.” This is, again, a different Persephone than what I’ve seen before, handled by an expert and full of hurt.

Wendy Howe brings the first cold damp, in the form of a restless spirit migrating from snow-covered Japan to the coast of California in “From a Distant Shore.” The poem seems heavy with private meanings that I cannot decipher, so there’s not much more I can say about it.

Laura King attempts to make sense for the setup of the fairy tale in “Pregnant with Rapunzel,” and manages the deed. This one not cold so much as bitter, but there is still frost beneath the surface, a woman galled by the high cost of a compulsion that was not her will, but enforced on her, whether from without or (as she believes) within. Bitterness. The cold creeps back into the bitterness with the story of a woman made from a walnut tree in Kathrin Köhler’s “Woman of Wood.” For this one, I have to insist that you listen to each sound file in turn as it builds the hidden chills behind the words.

Larry Hammer’s “Winter Advice” continues on the theme of the bitterness in the cold and Ann K Schwader carries it off, with “Penelope Reweaves,” wherein an aged Penelope in an empty house watches Odysseus continue past, with an oar on his shoulder. Mari Ness follows with “Unmelted,” another after-end, a lover still enchanted, still cold, and the one promise of freedom from the unhappiness that follows, hidden in the quilts. F. J. Bergmann continues with the tale of a miracle, a goat or a satyr or some other wild thing who saves a boy and is murdered for its charity in “Hooves”

This is the most unrelentingly grim Goblin Fruit I have ever tasted, as if winter came in and the persimmons just got more tannic and harsh. When Joshua Gage’s warnings about the wanderings of dangerous Norse nymphs in “Huldre” feels like a reprieve. Thank gods, it’s only dangerous, not after-end, not bitter and cold.

Thank gods; it’s only a broken moon in Kelly Rose Pflug-Back’s “A Chorus of Severed Pipes,” somehow extending winter’s reach into a season full of crickets and bullfrogs, but something of an end, there, too, what with the moon broken, pieces in a sack.

C. S. E. Cooney brings us to an unbroken moon, with an unbroken crone, “The Last Crone on the Moon,” so we’re told. Shows her into age, into the space ship, the promise of youth, that maybe she turns aside. Maybe she doesn’t survive, but she doesn’t seem to mind; the lack of bitterness here, for that I am grateful.

From bitter, we seem to have jumped to the moon, and a monstrous tree that contains an “Elixer for Revival of Nocturnal Beasts,” by Brock Marie Moore, in a dead heat for my favorite of this issue with the poem that comes before it and “Woman of Wood,” but I am a sucker for spells, and this one is a good one.

Okay, make that a three-way tie for second. Sofia Samatar’s “Qasida for the Ferryman” takes the after-end across the winter in cities all over the world, a courtship from Charon,

For I’m a flood, a flash, a swan,
a tundra-wand’ring turjuman;
I’ve eaten souls with cinnamon
from Singapore to Samarkand.

While there is bitterness in it, it blends with the other flavors of experiences, the narrator losing a lover, but prepared to regain a heart at the end.

This was a hard, hard issue of Goblin Fruit, though it was full of good poems – the only one that didn’t speak to me at least let me know it had good reasons – it was full of hurt. Perhaps not something I should have reviewed after the runners high had faded and the first draft accidentally ate itself and reverted to an older document. I don’t suggest trying to read the middle poems in order all in one whack unless you are steeled for the experience. Don’t get me wrong, it was good, and all the cuts and chilblains you’re getting, they feel like what was intended and not more than you can handle, but be warned, these are not the playful Goblins of summer, spring or fall, these are hobgoblins who will mess you up if you aren’t aware.

So take Care.

In June of 2011, I was delighted to note the appearance of inkscrawl , a poetry venue dedicated to speculative poems of ten lines or less. I was excited to see a speculative poetry venue about which I knew nothing, edited by someone (Mitchell Hart) with whom I am not the least bit familiar; I was pleased to see a venue focusing exclusively on very short work, feeling that here would be a collection of poetic aperitifs, bite-sized bundles of complexity to savour in a context that would show them to best possible effect. I think very short poetry tends to get, well, shorter shrift in publications that showcase longer work; certainly in publishing very short poems in Goblin Fruit, I sometimes feel like short poems are best deployed as a kind of thematic punctuation in the overall narrative of an issue. So I very much welcomed inkscrawl.

Unfortunately, after only two issues, Mitchell Hart announced that he could no longer edit and produce the publication. Happily, however, it was announced shortly afterwards that inkscrawl would be up and running again, published by Rose Lemberg’s Stone Bird Press, and edited by Rhysling-award-winning Samantha Henderson. Issue 3 is the first issue under this new management.

It still looks as clean and sparse as it ever did: form follows content in a stark black-on-white minimalism that allows for undistracted focus on the small poems. My one quibble visually is that when clicking through to a poem from the Table of Contents the author’s name appears bolded above the poem’s title, which confuses me into reading the title as the first line.

Of the poems themselves, however, I found this issue to be a very mixed bag. Overall, I appreciated Henderson’s narrative crafting, which moves from renaissance through death-dialogues to an open-ended dissolution. But given that inkscrawl is a journal dedicated to minimalism, I was surprised to find this issue a little flabby; there were poems which, in addition to doing nothing for me, I did not feel contributing to the overall shape or power of the issue. That said, there were some truly gorgeous pieces as well.

Given how short these poems are, I will refrain from quoting lines in support of my views, but refer you to the poem as a whole to draw your own conclusions.

The issue is off to a strong start with Ann K. Schwader’s “Desert Protocol,” which is effective and clever tone-setting for a newly restarted zine, ending as it does on a promise of resurrection. It’s very matter-of-fact, but has a kind of solemnity to it that suits an opening poem, ritualizes it into invocation.

Regina Green’s “take from me anything you want” had some focused and startling images which I enjoyed, but seemed to require somewhat more of a narrative to bring those images together into an effective whole. As it is I found it ambiguous and interesting, but multiple re-readings haven’t kicked my experience of it up a notch beyond that.

In contrast, “The Familiar” by Kristine Ong Muslim emphasises narrative over imagery, to the point where it feels like a piece of a larger story with its own world-building and logic. I found it warm, touching, and sad, but felt myself wanting something more from it.

Melissa Frederick’s “Untitled” is a scifaiku, a category of poem which I find difficult to appreciate; if one of the principles of haiku is the immediacy of sensory experience, then the use of that form for speculative concepts seems like it must necessarily dilute the effect, as speculation requires at least one remove from experience. This isn’t to say that that dilution can’t be compensated in other ways—a great many scifaiku seem to attempt to do so by reaching for a comic effect—but it isn’t something that I seek out on my own to enjoy. That said, Frederick’s poem is about as enjoyable as I have ever found scifaiku to be.

Howard V. Hendrix’ “The Unseen Good Old Man” I found to be beautiful until the last line and a half, where all the carefully developed and articulated images of the first three and a half lines fall flat for me. But I think the first three and a half lines are perfect, and almost wish the poem had just ended there.

From tripping into heaven we move into Merav Hoffman’s “Zipcar in Heaven,” which is amusing, but the first two stanzas had me hoping it would be something more than that. The first line, “I met Elijah the Prophet on the commuter train,” has a mix of gravitas and whimsy that I usually find quite winning, but in this case the ending unbalances it, toppling over into a joking whimsy that doesn’t do much for me. The second stanza, where the speaker inquires into Elijah’s presence on the commuter train, reads quite prosaically to me, though I forgive that on account of it being interesting narrative-wise. One could argue that form follows function in this case, that the let-down of the speaker mirrors the let-down of the reader, but that sort of cleverness doesn’t really do it for me either.

The skies give way to more space in Greg Beatty’s “Three Alien Koans,” three three-line poems which do the wry-comic-scifaiku thing. They don’t move me in any way, and I keep reading them trying to find something to appreciate, but can’t. My (small and flawed and supplemented by Wikipedia) understanding of a koan is that it’s a story or statement of the “what is the sound of one hand clapping” variety, meant to startle you sideways into enlightenment. These pieces did not do that for me.

I found Alexandra Seidel’s “Binnorie” beautiful. A sparse, imagistic, experiential retelling of the “Cruel Sister” ballad from the perspective of the dead and dying sister in the process of being remade, it’s lovely.

Howie Good’s “Woof” I enjoyed more each time I read it, which is surprising, because works which purport to be prose poems are usually not my cup of tea. This, though, achieves an effective mixing of mundanity yielding to the surreal, and the language’s pace and flow keeps up with and directs that effect.

Rebekah Curry’s “La Mort et son puceau” (“Death and her virgin”) is interesting in that it gender-bends the story of Hades and Persephone, but it doesn’t do much else; the last line is perhaps more effective than the rest, but it doesn’t quite come together for me as a whole.

Banks Miller’s “Strata (two poems)” is intense and rewards re-reading; an opaque cluster of images leads into a startling last line that could suggest a number of potential narratives.

Mike Allen’s “Surcease” puts his characteristic horror-spin on things, and very vividly and evocatively describes a plague-ridden man in the last moments of his life. The rhythm and pace of it are extremely well-wrought, and I both wrinkled my nose and shuddered a bit at the last line, so well done Allen, well done.

The positioning of N. E. Taylor’s “Sarcophagus” immediately after Allen’s gives it an extra layer of zing: two simple lines that manage to tease out a whole complex of responses from me. The immediate image itself is very evocative, but I find myself in conversation with the poem’s speaker, wanting to say that is not what the magic was for and how can you be so sure? I appreciate this.

Dominik Parisien’s “Watch for that Horizon” is unequivocally my favourite piece of the issue. Its images are sharp and powerful, the kind that in describing a hand make me hold on to my own to protect it from words so potent. It takes a similar approach to the sea as Alexandra Seidel’s piece, blending and shifting body with landscape and speaker. It’s just beautiful, and I keep re-reading it.

Mari Ness’ “Ariadne” is another excellent piece: in ten well-sculpted lines it gives Ariadne’s account of what happened on the isle of Naxos. It’s elegant and heartfelt and powerful.

Jessica Wick once coined a phrase that has guided Goblin Fruit in our acquisition of haiku-length poems: she said “it has to sing to the gut.” When a poem is so dense and focused as to require ten lines or less (especially the ones in haiku range), I want the reading of it to be a memorable experience, if not an outright revelation. I want to be startled and shaken and left needing to read the poem again and again to absorb it and reconcile it with my experience of reality. Of the fifteen poems in this issue, only six or seven really gave me that, and a few provoked no reaction at all. All the same, I recognize that to have every poem in an issue speak to me on a visceral level is a pretty tall order; inkscrawl 3 has certainly ensured that I’ll return for inkscrawl 4.

I am not an editor. When I attempt to understand the editorial mind, either in the service of reviews or in the throes of rejectomancy, I have to speculate. I know editors, I have worked with them, but I have always been on this side of the big desk, as it were. Sometimes when I try to know the editorial mind, I guess right. This time, I did not have to guess. I read the introduction for Stone Telling, Issue 6 last, and it confirmed everything I knew to be true from reading what Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan selected.

As I read and listened, I knew this issue had an origin story with Cat Valente as its radioactive spider. Let me explain. Better yet, let Rose and Shweta explain; I will give you the very short version. When she was editor at Apex, Cat put out a plea, something that I know resonated with some of us out here in the SF poetry community, for a different sort of SF poetry than what she had been seeing. What she had been seeing is what you and I see: the principles and the Big Ideas of SF denatured, dissected and arranged in a format that looks like poetry. Sometimes it even is. Sometimes, it’s even good poetry; a large part of my education as a reviewer has been learning to appreciate these poems on their own terms. Cat wanted something more or something different. SF, by tradition, has its priorities fixed on the technical or on the abstract. In the prose world, how many articles, rants and posts have I read from people decrying the lack of Big Idea SF, hell, just in the last year? I’ve lost count. Valente, to my interpretation, was asking for a different set of priorities, looking for the human or the alien first, or looking at the language.

This was not a call to exterminate Big Ideas. The Big Idea is always going to be the engine that drives SF, but, let’s be frank, engines do nothing useful without the ship, or someone (or something) at the helm. I say the Big Idea as a subordinate priority to language, to humanity or alienation, makes better poetry. That is what I got from Valente’s call to arms.

It’s a spider bite that has been circulating in the bloodstream for a little while, now. Thing is, to drag this metaphor out longer than the too-long it has, it’s not the bite or the spider that makes the hero.

What I mean to say here is that Stone Telling has always held itself to Great Responsibility, and I think, in this issue, a little more than the others, it has grown into its Great Power.

Where to begin; this is the first time an issue of a magazine to which I have (disclosure) submitted and been rejected has come out where imagining what might have happened had I been accepted and someone else’s poem been rejected terrifies me. Which one would I not get to read? I very rarely find it difficult to see an editor’s reasoning in the choices they made that weren’t me and most of the time, I agree with them, but I always have that nagging feeling in the back of my head that I could have been there, I could have stood well with all the others. Not this time. Not even a little.

The rest of this review is going to include a lot of gushing. Just a fair warning.

First things first; ST6 does not exterminate the Big Idea. They act on the Big Idea, choosing several poems that experiment with form. Sofia Samatar’s “Girl Hours” begins with historical references, intercuts with prose poetry and a brilliant couplet:

brushed and buttoned, smelling of healthy soap,
    
and not allowed to touch the telescope.

Mary Alexandra Agner includes computer code in “Lovelace Nocturnes” to map family dynamics between creator, created and lovers. Lyn Coffin uses line length to capture the rhythm of a drawn out chase ending in victory and death in “The Chute.” Normally, I am skeptical of unusual formatting in poems, I had to work to think of a way not to call it formatting tricks, which is how I usually view them. These do not feel like tricks. They work.

J.C. Runolfson chronicles a historical trick, a hoax in “The Exposure of William H. Mumler” and makes of it a tragedy. I normally place my sympathies with the skeptics, but Runolfson exposes my allegiance:

Skeptics are always illusionists.

They want to know

how the trick is done.

There is a quartet of poems that I group together in my mind, though this is not how they appear, for the sake of understanding what I should look for in more traditional SF poetry. Maria Velasquez takes astronomical phenomenon to describe the actions of human beings, in this case, her parents creating her in “Gas Giants.” I’ve seen this before, but I don’t remember seeing it done better. Athena Andreadis speaks to the alienation of one human who travels interstellar distances and recognition between two bound to that fate. I’ve seen this before, but if I remember it being done better, then I am pretty sure it was done by Andreadis herself. Na’amen Tilahun chronicles a harrowing encounter with a cybernetic lover in “In Memory of Dreamt Clockwork.” I’ve seen this before, and I might have seen it done better, but I can count on one finger by whom. Finally, there is a thorough exploration of the human form from Alyza Tguilaso with “Three Movements of Anatomy.” I’ve seen this before, but I don’t remember seeing such a deft balance between essential humanity and alienation.

There are those I love for their voices; Alex Dally MacFarlane’s “Sung Around Alsar-Scented Fires” and its warrior’s account of triumph against alien invaders. There is Jazz Sexton’s account of monstrosity in “How to Eat Gourmet Crow on a Low-Fare Airline:”
remember weakness begets a lesser human.
Here we believe fear should taste satisfying.

Both the poems about Mars count in this last category: C.S.E Cooney’s “Postcards from Mars” features the narrator’s mother saving for a life on Mars and ends with my two favorite lines in the issue:

I finish the jam, wash out the jar.

Three pennies, a dime and a quarter so far.

Finally Tori Truslow takes the idea of terraforming Mars and turns it inside out, weaving a new identity that I hope will be what Martians we’ll one day be in “Terraunform.”

It wasn’t new Earth we wanted, but to be

double-mooned, double-dreamed, multiformed in

mix-matched parts; to put our bodies on

each day, in shapes to fit our hearts

So, yes, I think ST6 succeeds. I think it succeeds on the terms of Cat Valente’s call for SF poetry, I think it succeeds in Rose and Shweta’s commitment to the mission and tone and goals of Stone Telling as a poetry magazine, and I think it does a very good job balancing some of the best of what I expect to see in SF poetry and things that I didn’t expect at all. I like Stone Telling in general, for Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan’s vision and ambition, and the great responsibility they take with every issue, but this one I think has managed to find even greater power than I would have believed.