Out Now - The 3rd Annual SFPA Poetry Contest - 2008: Energy

The 3rd Annual SFPA Poetry Contest - 2008: Energy is now available from Spec House of Poetry and The Science Fiction Poetry Association. The top 25 poems from the 2008 Contest, edited by W. Gregory Stewart, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, and Scott Virtes, including poems from Colleen Anderson, Megan Arkenberg, Elizabeth Barrette, Elizabeth Bennefeld, Robert Borski, Marion E. Boyer, Scot Brannon, Nadia Chaney, William Copeland, Peg Duthie, M. Frost, Kacey Grannis, J.W. Heazlitt, Dev Jarrett, Lois P. Jones, Miranda Morley, Elizabeth Penrose, Frances Shi, & Rhian Waller.

New Bits And Pieces Review

Just passing along a new review of Greg Schwartz's Bits and Pieces that recently appeared on The Harrow. Schwartz's broadside Bird Ku is still available so buy it!


Bits and Pieces

Review © 2009 Dru Pagliassotti
Creative Commons License
This review is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Bits and Pieces
Greg Schwartz
©2007, Spec House of Poetry

Night Falls

night falls
like a curtain
on a quiet inn
deep in the woods.
the perfect setting
for a horror story
if only
the damn birds
would stop chirping.

(—Greg Schwartz, Bits and Pieces
reprinted with permission of the author)

Not too many poets turn their hand to horror, and fewer do it well enough to get published consistently, but Greg Schwartz's collection Bits and Pieces proves it can be done. The collection contains 15 snippets of the horrific that Schwartz sold to various venues over a five-year span, 2003-2007, including poems that run from the not-so-unusual love poetry to the undead to a quirkier, more original world of predatory trees and, above, cheerfully irreverent birds.

"Night Falls," a 2008 Rhysling Award nominee, is my favorite in the collection, as it confounds the reader's usual horror-collection expectations. Indeed, that's one of Schwartz's strengths as a horror poet; he's much like the birds he describes in "Night Falls," his dry sense of humor offering a humorous counterpoint to horror's oftimes drearily chilling atmosphere. We see Schwartz's humor emerge most notably in "Night Falls," "Danny, Danny," "Lying in Wait," and "The Monster in My Closet," as well as in other poems in this collection. These short, smile-coaxing works scattered amid the darker poetry add greatly to the chapbook's charm and undoubtedly contributes to Schwartz's success in getting his work published.

Bits and Pieces is a limited-edition chapbook with a cardstock cover illustrated by Cathy Buburuz. Schwartz blogs at Haiku & Horror . His poem "Under the Bed," not included in this collection, was published in The Harrow's anthology Midnight Lullabies.

Rhysling Award Nominations 2009

2 poems published this year by Spec House have received Rhysling Award nominations. Charles Gramlich's "[faint]", from Wanting the Mouth of a Lover, and Terrie Leigh Relf's "[eruptions]", from The Shantytown Anomaly #7.
Congratulations Charles and Terrie!

Schwartz on Gramlich

Spec House author Greg Schwartz (who has a new broadside out by the way, scroll down) has written a review of Charles Gramlich's Wanting the Mouth of a Lover. I thought I'd pass it along here...


Review: Wanting the Mouth of a Lover by Charles Gramlich
Wanting the Mouth of a Lover is a chapbook of 23 dark haiku by Charles Gramlich, a name well-known by the many fans of his Talera novels. The poems in this collection tend toward the vampirific (if that's a word), but there are some other just plain creepy ones, like this little gem:

faint
laughters
clowns
in
the
dark

Gramlich seems quite at ease writing haiku. Each poem is given its own page, which might anger tree-huggers, but I happen to think it's the best way to present haiku. They are also written in the vertical Japanese style, which you don't see very much of these days. I can only think of one other poet who uses that style consistently.

The chapbook was originally available in a regular and deluxe edition, but the deluxe edition (which came signed, hand-numbered, and hand-stitched) sold out within a week. The regular edition is still available, and it contains an introduction by the author that touches on both the poems in the book and the haiku form itself.

black
soul
aches
in
the
night
she
comes

Gramlich is a skilled speculative poet. His poems have appeared in Dreams & Nightmares and The Shantytown Anomaly, among other magazines, but Wanting the Mouth of a Lover is his first collection of poetry. Hopefully there will be more.

Copies are available from Spec House of Poetry for $5 plus shipping.


Reviewed by Greg Schwartz on his Haiku & Horror blog.

OUT NOW-- Greg Schwartz - bird ku

Greg Schwartz's broadside bird ku is now available. This is a super limited run of 16 copies, hand numbered, with individually hand painted envelope covers. $3.00.