This month has seen the release of the latest editions of dozens of specpo-inclusive journals, both online and in print. Here’s a rundown of the handful that happened to catch my eye.
(tl;dr? Scroll down to the cut for a quick-and-dirty list of every Jan. 2019 poem available to read online for free that I link to in this post.)
Abyss & Apex rang in the new year with the publication of their 69th issue. Nine SFF poems (plus a lagniappe of sorts tucked into the introductory remarks by editor John C. Mannone) are featured this time around, comprising a pleasingly varied mix of topics, speculative genres, forms, and lengths. Anyone who has the time to sit and read the lot through in the order presented is in for an entertaining 45 minutes or so. Three pieces in particular stood out to me, though.
First off, there's Lauren McBride’s “How You Kept Saving My Life,” a tender sci-fi love story in 14 lines. Despite being set in the kind of galaxy where spacegoers are plunged into new varieties of nail-biting peril at every turn, McBride's poem is charming in its deliberate simplicity of plot, earnest tone, and direct style of narration. Then there's Mark Budman’s “MOAB,” a prose poem which, like "How You Kept Saving My Life," develops a fairly straightforward premise in effectively concise terms, though Budman takes a more sardonic approach to his material, weaving biblical and historical allusions together with reflections on modern warfare to create a dramatic monologue that runs gently satirical from start to finish. Perhaps surprisingly, considering the darkness of a number of the poem's quips and observations, "MOAB" as a whole conveys a sense of stolid optimism; the speaker's imperturbability in the face of humanity's worst destructive tendencies gives the final lines an oddly reassuring feel. And finally, there's Mary Soon Lee’s dry list of instructions on “How to Seduce Apophis,” a fun addition to the poet's whimsical “how-to” series of astronomic anthropomorphic free verse. (You can read three other poems in the series in last year’s Apex Magazine 111.)
The 31st issue of Eye to the Telescope is now up online for your reading enjoyment as well. This quarter’s edition is edited by poet and classicist Heather Moser and organized around the theme of “crossroads”; nineteen fantasy-flavored poems are included in total, most of them mythological or folkloric in imagery and contemplative in tone.
The ebook version of Uncanny 26 has gone up for sale and the issue’s contents have also started rolling out online, including two of four speculative poems. The first of these, “The Watchword,” is an elegantly otherworldly contribution from Sonya Taaffe, whose work (whether poetry or prose) is, in my view, always worth reading very carefully. It’s a testament to the strength of the second poem, Cassandra Khaw’s “A Letter from One Woman to Another,” that it's not in the least eclipsed by Taaffe’s; instead, the two pieces interestingly complement each other in tone and imagery. Where “The Watchword” quietly muses on shared adversity as an unignorable aspect of the speaker’s Jewish heritage, on art amid ruin, and on the bittersweet ache of remembrance and hope, “A Letter” defiantly roars to be heard, a bitingly-worded diatribe against self-important “princes” and “kings” whose manipulative demands Khaw’s speaker indignantly rejects in favor of freedom on her own terms.
The Jan/Feb 2019 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine includes four new SFF poems, too; the piece showcased on the magazine’s website is the latest installment in Robert Frazier’s rather melancholy series of short free-verse pieces featuring “your clone” as protagonist.
FIYAH 9 also has a little something for specpo readers, with two free verse narratives found at the end of the issue, both centering on black characters in settings that incorporate fantasy elements. While both are engagingly written, I’ve found myself returning to B. Sharise More’s “The Nest,” especially, for re-reads. A vivid first-person account of a zoological expedition gone horribly wrong, "The Nest" takes place in a slightly AU version of 21st-century Earth. Possibly due to its travelogue-style narration and exploration of themes like human hubris and the awesome, ineffable power of nature, however, it carries overtones of late 19th-century lost-world adventure novels.
Star*Line 42.1 is now in circulation as well. This quarter’s issue contains, as usual, over 35 pages of SFF poetry in forms both traditional and experimental, as well as a smattering of specpo book reviews and related news. Scrolling through my digital copy, I was particularly intrigued by D. A. Xaolin Spires’ translation from the Chinese of a haunting trio of SFnal couplets attributed to Shiyi Li. I’d never heard of Shiyi Li before now, and I’m grateful for the introduction—I’ll be on the lookout for more translations of this poet's work in future.
The 5th issue of Apparition Lit, available for purchase as an ebook, is another January spec publication that contains two poems. You can read Jessica J. Horowitz' "Taking, Keeping" online for free, a darkly triumphant tale that relates--in highly visceral terms--the struggles of a person who, marginalized and oppressed, is determined to maintain their identity by whatever means available. It fits the issue's theme of "resistance" very well.
And, finally, the Winter 2019 edition of Kaleidotrope includes a selection of five poems I think you'll want to check out. All contain imagery and concepts culled from the realm of the speculative, though in genre they shade from blatant sci-fi (David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s wry “Even Their Fish”) to more ambiguously fantastical takes on historical figures (Karolina Fedyk’s poignant, and rather jarring, “And Bagoas Danced”). With such variation in genre, and with narratives that range from the sweepingly mythopoeic to the intensely personal, the poems viewed side-by-side are a satisfyingly heterogeneous bunch.
So, it's safe to say that January has delivered on the specpo front. Amid all the new poetry on offer, though, one piece has managed to leave a truly unique impression: Holly Lyn Walrath’s “All the Glory of Her Earthly Shell." One of the "intensely personal" Kaleidotrope offerings I refer to above, "All the Glory" is an eloquent interrogation of blason poetry (and its myriad modern offshoots) that gives verse celebrating the body of the female beloved a startlingly thought-provoking SFF spin. The immediacy of the unconventional imagery braided through Walrath's meditative first-person narration makes for a poem that's entrancingly intimate and challengingly alien at the same time. It would be interesting to learn what reactions this poem provokes in other readers. I get the feeling responses may vary widely.
Quick Links (selected Jan. 2019 poems free to read online)
“How You Kept Saving My Life” by Lauren McBride “… you told me to take a breath, and work the problem.”
“MOAB” by Mark Budman “The Flood was a major inconvenience.”
“How to Seduce Apophis” by Mary Soon Lee “Even little guys dream of making an impact.”
“The Watchword” by Sonya Taaffe “… a song must outlive its singer or it dims bitter in a land of milk and honey …”
“A Letter from One Woman to Another” by Cassandra Khaw “You can be his maiden, if you like. I’ll be the dragon instead …”
“Your Clone Meets A Dopplegänger” by Robert Frazier “… her clues converge on a single secret …”
"Taking, Keeping" by Jessica J. Horowitz "When at last they took her tongue, she etched each letter into the tips of her fingers, across her ribs ..."
“Even Their Fish” by David C. Kopaska-Merkel “They rarely speak to aliens like us.”
“And Bagoas Danced” by Karolina Fedyk “‘My beautiful fool,’ the king sighed licking iron from his lips …”
“All the Glory of Her Earthly Shell” by Holly Lyn Walrath “Seen with her eyes the world is bottle-green and I let her harden to obsidian around me.”