davidkm

Unwelcome Guests is the newest full-length collection of dark speculative poetry from SFPA Grand Master and Rhysling winner David C. Kopaska-Merkel

There’s relatability and strangehood in the offerings, some miniature in haiku, a beautiful symmetry and ominous obscurity in the text, dread in the unspoken.
Where some poets hero the impact of the closing line, Kopaska-Merkel’s poems strike in the power between the lines. The reader can never predict what potency the text might disgorge
Unwelcome Guests is a spectral lover’s touch—tender, yet dooming. It’s a perfect marriage of poetry and prose, warm and chilling, starkly intelligent and reachable.
Ideal for anyone.

--Eugen Bacon, Aurealis

At turns disquieting and quirky, playful and poignant, the poems in Unwelcome Guests, like their titular subjects, will stay with you long after you've put the book down and gone to bed (perhaps leaving the light on). A welcome addition to any genre poetry lover's collection!

--Marsheila Rockwell, Rhysling Award-winning poet and author of the Scribe Award-nominated Shard Axe series

The first half of Unwelcome Guests slithers in and out of side-alleys in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, while the second strides avenues of science fiction. Gotta love “June Lockhart’s Recurring Nightmare”. And when “Medusa Buys a Car”. There’s so many environs of speculative poetry visited here, penned with a convincing voice and deft whispers of experimentation.

--Robert Frazier, author of Phantom Navigation

David Kopaska-Merkel’s poetry is like a twisted vein of black gold, with subtle tweaks of darkling humor. He brings to the fore other images that are like watching a glistening pool of oil, beneath which something moves. Whether disturbing sites near Carcosa, the unsuspecting traps of relationships, or unusual visitations, his poetry will inspire, entertain and make you think.

--Colleen Anderson, Rhysling Award winner

MERELY THE BUCKET LIST POEM (ON PAGE 79) IS WORTH THE ACTION ON MY MIND AND MY FUNNY BONES (MORE THAN ONE)

--Edward Mycue, Author of I Am A Fact Not A Fiction

To order a signed and numbered copy from the publisher:

https://weirdhousepress.com/products/unwelcome-guests-by-david-c-kopaska-merkel?_pos=1&_psq=kop&_ss=e&_v=1.0

You can get one directly from me, too ($18 postpaid). I also have PDFs for $3. PayPal to jopnquog [at] gmail [dot] com.

https://dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com/2025/01/dreams-and-nightmares-129.html

The latest issue of a magazine publishing speculative poetry since 1986. The makes it the second oldest such magazine afaik. Interested in submitting or purchasing? See below:

I print primarily poetry, but also publish a small amount of short short fiction. The genres of fantasy and SF are preferred. I am interested in experimental formats and content, and prefer fantastic horror a la Lovecraft or Blackwood to the blood and gore type. Any SF or fantasy is appropriate if it isn't sappy or trite. If your poem rhymes, be sure that the rhymes are not forced, and that the meter is consistent.
The magazine consists of 24 digest-sized pages with card-stock cover. Publication (dead trees and PDF) is thrice yearly, issues are numbered sequentially. Issue #1 was published in January of 1986. Print run 120 (plus about 25 PDF). Most-recent issue is #129. DN is distributed free to interested libraries. Maximum length for poetry or fiction is 2 single-spaced typed pages, but I prefer less than one page. I prefer e-submissions in the body of the message. Buying 1st N.Am. serial rights unless stated otherwise. Payment is $15 on acceptance + a contributor's copy. (You can request 3 extra copies instead of cash.) I prefer to pay using PayPal. DN is a tough market because of the high volume of poetry submissions I receive. Fewer than 5% of submissions are accepted. Response time ~ 2-4 weeks. Sample copy for $5 (print) or $1 (pdf). Print subscriptions are $25 for 6 issues inside North America and $30 U.S. outside North America. Lifetime sub., with available back issues, for $90. Pdf copies $1 each. A lifetime pdf subscription, with all back issues, is $39. Checks should be payable to me. Subscribe with PayPal to jopnquog@gmail.com.
Artwork should be line drawings; no half-tones (although any color will be visible on digital copies). Good photocopies OK, but I prefer to receive JPEG's as e-mail attachments. Art will be printed no larger than 4 1/2 by 7 1/2 inches, but I can reduce it. Payment $15+1 copy, but $30+1 copy for (color) covers. I always need covers, and small filler illustrations. Filler illos that are the right size and shape to fill up the bottom of a page are particularly useful.

https://dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com/2025/01/011525b.html

A few updates on writing and publishing. Latest Dreams & Nightmares is out!

Yolen, Jane, 2012, The Last Selchie Child, A Midsummer Night's Press (www.spdbooks.org; orders@spdbooks.org), Cover photograph by M. A. Mathews, ISBN-13:978-0-9794208-9-4, perfect bound, 66 pages, $14.95.

Jane Yolen is one of our venerable masters, both of fiction and poetry. She won the Rhysling award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1993, as well as many other awards, some far more prestigious. Yolen was named SFPA Grand Master in 2010. It is always a pleasure to open one of her books for the first time. The Last Selchie Child is a collection of fairy tales retold as poems, 36 of them, including Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and Little Red Riding Hood, just to name four.

I lied already. The first part of the book is a group of poems about stories and storytelling. From “Story”:

You shape a tale
To fit your mind.

And so it goes,
In re-creation,
Mouth-to-ear
Resuscitation,

Several poems deal with the legends of people who can be seals or seals who can be people. There is plenty of room for sorrow and betrayal in a situation like this. From “The Selchie's Children's Plaint”:

She leaves us then, without a word
wading into her future.
It hurts like a knife
skinning us as we watch her go.
We were the ones
who were to dive into another life.

Some of these poems look at fairytale stories from new perspectives. Instead of the omniscient narrator, we see things from the point of view of the woman, the child, the prince. This is indeed a fruitful kind of reversal, pointing out the dark underbelly or ludicrousness of the traditional versions of these stories. But sometimes the shift in perspective shows us more. “Knives” reveals more horror in Cinderella than the by-now familiar idea of what happens after the wedding. Cinderella might not have been the naïve young thing most of us thought.

I spoke to the prince in that secret tongue,
the diplomacy of courting.
he using shoes, I using glass,
and all my sisters saw was a slipper,
too long in the heel,
too short at the toe.
What else could they use but a knife?

Fair young things seem to wait so long for something to happen, in fairy tales. How long is too long? From “Tower”:

I have found
the small barred window,
where I sing each morning
to any passing prince.
Be he large or small, handsome or plain,
I will have him.

After a while, you wait your life away, and anything at all becomes enough. How much becomes plain, although unstated, in a clear-eyed reading of fairy tales? The most interesting thing about this book, for me, is that familiar fairy tales are re-imagined in several different ways in different poems. We don't end up with simply two perspectives, but three, four, and perhaps others that we can imagine for ourselves, now that the way has been shown.

The last section of the book consists of a group of poems about “truth,” which is to say that the stories we have been told are wrong, wrong, wrong. Indeed they are! From “Women's Stories”:

Job's wife had her own story.
Lot's pillar of salt cried tears
indistinguishable from her eyes.
Who invented a glass slipper
never had to dance.

It might be needless to say I think you should buy this book. But just in case, I'll say it. You really should buy this book. You won't be sorry.

Wiloch, Thomas, 2006, Screaming in Code, Naked Snake Press, 6 Rain Tree Lane, Pawleys Island, SC 29585, softcover, perfect bound, 56 pages. Artwork by Thomas Wiloch and Donna Taylor Burgess.

This is a very pretty chapbook: lots of illustrations, nice cover stock with lots of color; too bad it doesn't have an ISBN and the price is not listed in the book. However, there is a website: www.nakedsnakepress.com (the URL is not listed in the book either). Presumably, all is made clear at the website.

This is a book of prose poems that warns the reader against overdoses of its powerful medicine. There is always a risk when one indulges in hyperbole. The best of these stories are like western koans, but some are just not that profound.

Here are some snippets. I don't really want to quote more, because the individual prose poems, which total 34 in number, are generally shorter than half a page. "Tiny white skulls" can be our friends. "You can do anything you want with tiny white skulls." "Tell me I'm wrong": "the human body is composed primarily of empty space." "The locomotive museum" from which the locomotives escaped one day, "some rearing up like great wild horses... and still others as giddy as children."

On the one hand, some of the stuff was just silly, and not on purpose. In "the trunks" the protagonist opens a trunk in order to start packing for a trip, only to find a smaller trunk inside. He opens that trunk and, you can guess the rest. But here's my question. Why did he keep on opening trunks when they got so small he needed a microscope to see them? Why not just pack all of the smaller trunks inside the next larger one, and take the biggest, now empty, on the trip? Sure, there's a mystery to be solved, but you're going to skip a trip to Europe because of it?!

On the other hand, I like the idea of the man who lives in a box. It turns out he lives in a box so large that the entire universe fits inside. If the box is this big does it matter? I think it does.

On the gripping hand, this might be a good book to have on the bedside table for those mornings when you wake up two hours early and can't go back to sleep. You might learn something useful reading a couple of these.

Virtes, S. C., 2008, Improbable Jane: 3 odd odysseys: perfect bound, cover by Scott Virtes, www.samsdotpublishing.com, $8, 70 pages.

This book contains three long poems entitled "Jane Doe discovered," "The improbable notebook of Jason V--," and "Cougar village."

"Jane Doe discovered" is a story of secret hospital prisons, chemical torture, you know the drill. It is very well written and engaging. However, I wondered why. Why was Jane Doe stuck in her predicament? Maybe the explanation was in there, but I didn't see it.

"The improbable notebook..." is about a crazy inventor. Or maybe he's not so crazy. If you make a world-shattering discovery, should you tell people?

The last of this trio of poems is written in the style of a Native American folk tale.

Tentchoff, Marcie Lynn, 2007, Sometimes While Dreaming: Cedar Rapids, IA, Sam's Dot Publishing, 83 p.

Sometimes While Dreaming is a chapbook of poetry written by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff. Thirty-seven of the 48 poems in this collection are new. Eight ethereal illustrations by Marge B. Simon accompany them. At her best, Tentchoff is able to put the reader in touch with the souls of some pretty strange people and other beings. There is plenty of her best in this chapbook.

One of my favorites is "Fallen," in which a case of mistaken identity has more than casual significance.

Some other girl found him there,
And drew him down to her,
Gently freeing each limb from the thorns.
It wasn't me.

What I like best about this poem is that I was led to empathize with the protagonist (someone I could be, aside from the gender difference), but put in a situation I could never be in, and, while reading the poem, I felt that I was there.

I also enjoyed "Crow counting," with its mounting sense of impending doom for the naïve narrator.

The road grew long, I asked his name,
but he would only smile at me,
and stroke my cheek with feathers gleaned
from one of our last seven birds.

This poem has roots in the old ballads of betrayal and death that were so popular with folksingers of the 1960s and earlier.

From "Displaced":

Sometimes she remembers
coming from some other place
where song and dance
were food and drink

This poem is a short poignant view into the heart of someone lost who is forgetting that she is lost. Subtle stories, sketched in allusion, hints, and sly clues, these are Tentchoff''s hallmarks. One is sometimes left knowing the feel of what has happened, or why, when the specifics are uncertain.

"Other hungers" is another take on the Persephone myth, supposing, as others have done, that she's content or happy underground.

Do you miss the dim,
bone-filled freedoms
of the underworld

And what if she does? Would anything change? Tentchoff asks a lot of questions here and she hints at the answers, we are not sure perhaps if we interpret those hints correctly.

In other poems we explore the lives of werewolves, Cinderella, dryads, and others. In "Rootbound" (Clever title, by the way) a dryad shows us what her life is really like:

Away from this, the prison of my bark,
My anguish flows and rages through my sap,
And burns the brightest sun to bitter dark,
That they stride free while I rot in this trap.

Tentchoff reminds us that we are all prisoners, and I don't think she says this anywhere in Sometimes while dreaming, but it's implicit. Some prisons we cannot escape, but for many of us the bars are inside our heads.

When Tentchoff is dreaming, strange and wonderful things result. Myths are retold in enchanting and unexpected ways and new myths are created with their own history stretching out from them into the imagined past. Sometimes while dreaming contains many more poems I am tempted to excerpt for you, but come on. Just buy the book. I'm very sure you won't regret it.

Schweitzer, Darrell, 2008, Ghosts of past and future: selected poetry, The Borgo Press, an imprint of Wildside Press, www.wildsidepress.com, perfect bound. Cover by Thierry Vivies. 125 p, ISBN 978-1-4344-8204-4.

Poems in this book were first published between the years 1992 and 2008. A quick glance through the five pages of acknowledgments indicates that at least two of these poems are first published here. The original appearances of the remainder cover a lot of territory, ranging from Weird Tales to Asimov's, and many lesser-known venues. The book ends with explanatory notes about some of the poems. In the interests of full disclosure I should mention that I first published a few of these in Dreams and Nightmares.

I love the way the book is organized into thematic sections. By far the longest is called "Intimations beyond mortality." This is followed by "The matter of Britain," "Post-Homerica," and "Yesterday's tomorrows." All of these sound intriguing, don't they? They do if you are at all familiar with Darrell's work.

These are powerful poems. In each we find the personal immediacy of the best mainstream poetry, but in the context of our boundary-pushing literature. And who doesn't prefer a gripping and thought-provoking poem about death, and what comes after, to a similar poem about cracks in the sidewalk or spring flowers?

"We outnumber the living, you know.
For all you desperately try to outbreed us,
the fruits of your loins inevitably
switch sides in the end."

That is the beginning of "We dead outnumber the living, you know." Nothing we haven't heard before, but the poem takes off from there like a fighter jet from an aircraft carrier. By the time you get to the end, the aircraft carrier is at the bottom of the sea, if you will allow such a ridiculous metaphor.

From "Song of a forgotten god"

"With Moon-pale hair and beard grown dark,
I rage and run with the beasts,
the perilous father of all that I meet,
dancing, dancing against the Sun."

Many of these poems are imbued with the qualities of legend, even those that are not explicitly about the stuff of legend, as this one is.

From "Is their survivor's guilt in heaven?":

"a parent, with just one bad habit,
a little careless at the end,
now screaming in flames forever
while we, the lucky ones,
are supposed to sit back, strum our harps,
and enjoy ourselves?"

Do you suppose the entrance requirements are really as strict as we have been told?

I want to particularly mention the section about Britain, which is really about King Arthur. Schweitzer has been worrying at the question of Arthur like a dog with a very large bone. He has attacked the question of just what is the Arthurian legend all about from several different directions, and for all I know he's not done with it yet. Arthur has inspired a lot of writers and there is plenty to share. Still, there is insight here, worth reading even if you have read tons of what has been written before.

Moving past Arthur, perhaps our most famous legendary hero, Schweitzer is hard on heroes in general. This includes space opera heroes as well as legendary ones. It even includes those who make heroes. From "Near the end of the epic":

"the villainous bards,
who turned this enterprise into an epic,
left that part out, not deigning to mention
the thousands of lives washed away like ashes"

Schweitzer is good at seeing beyond the surfaces of the old stories. He turns them over and shows us the underbellies, moldy and raddled by bugs, that we should have known were there. But we didn't know, because we didn't think about it. Now it will be hard to forget.

You know, I really can't do justice to this book by quoting a few lines from this poem and a few lines from that poem. And it doesn't help to make the review longer. They are all so good I want to give them all to you. But that wouldn't be fair to the poet or the publisher. So, for the moment you have to make do with a few snippets. I suggest you visit Wildside on the web and limber up your PayPal account. You won't regret it.

Why hasn't Schweitzer ever won a Rhysling award? I could answer this question, but most likely all of my answers would be wrong, or at best half-truths. But he must get a winner someday. Quick! Buy this book and read it, so you can say you knew his work way back when.

Pollack, Rachel, 2009, Fortune's lovers: a book of tarot poems: A Midsummer Night's Press, www.amidsummernightspress.com, ISBN-13 978-0-9794208-4-9, $9.95, small-format perfect-bound paperback, 42 pages.

Most of Rachel Pollack's 30 books are nonfiction and half are about the tarot. I have not read any of them. She has won awards for both fiction and nonfiction books. No other poetry books are listed inside my copy of Fortune's lovers. This book contains 12 poems. No prior publication credits are given, so I'm guessing they are all new.

Of course the tarot includes more than 12 cards; there are more than 12 of the major arcana. "Fortune's lovers" samples the tarot, it does not encompass it. Most poems refer to particular cards, but the penultimate poem, "Tarot pi," is the result of an exercise in which words relating to major arcana are assigned to numerals and replace the first hundred digits of the irrational number pi. The result is interesting, but any meaning it contains is of the same order as the faces that our minds insist on finding in any complex nonpatterned image.

Another oddity about this book is that the first and last poems have the same title: "Fool." The last poem is a sort of postscript or conclusion in the form of a wise saying about "the gate."

This leaves poems 1 through 10, which refer to or spin off from major arcana, but do not describe them. In "Fool" a group of New York tarot devotees meet to consider the meaning of this card

of "fou," madness, how
the bright beautiful boy at the birth of the world
was once a schizophrenic homeless guy

As always, a demonstration is far more instructive than just talking. As this poem demonstrates.

"Magician" is not about Merlin, although there is a poem about Merlin in this book. Hermes, father of alchemy and grandfather of chemistry, is the magician here.

"High priestess" is about the job of high priestess, and poses the question: is that a job you want? (Trick question.)

She can only stare,
and look impressive,
and hope they don't expect
some blessing or curse or detailed instructions for
making candles or killing goats

In "Emperor" a lesson is learned. 'Do as I say, not as I do' is all very well, but how many children follow this dictum anyway?

Her father, the all-powerful King,
dropped his pipe and newspaper,
and set her on his lap, where he
wiped away her tears.

The place of the tarot in the modern world may be a small and dusty corner, but in this book Rachel Pollack has done her best to show how these ancient symbols are relevant still. You could do far worse than to take Fortune's lover as your companion on a journey to explore the mythic roots of everyday life.

Paper Crow, volume 1 issue 2 (Fall/Winter 2010), bi-annual, $5/issue or $8/year. Saddle stitched, card-stock cover, 32 p. ISSN 2152-9116. www.electrikmilkbathpress.com.

I don't often review periodicals, but this is not the first time. Paper Crow is a fairly new genre poetry zine, and it's very nice. In fact, about several of the poems in this magazine I thought "she should have submitted that one to me!" 26 poems by 25 authors in 32 pages and they are all good.

This is a passionate magazine. There are poems about love, lust, and death, and in no case are these subjects treated lightly. These poems have weight, and it's not ballast.

From "The diluted soldier," by Marge Simon

Sometimes he sees in perpetuity
memories of a lover,
returns to it again and again,
something that can't be soiled by words,
even those in confidence a moment or so

From "In the garden with my lover," Pam Marin-Kingsley

The tulip shoots emerge,
force their way upward.
Their tips in bud as straight
and pink as his.

There is a commonality among the poems in this magazine. Things are not always as they seem. In fact, they usually aren't. As Jane Gwaltney says in "The Lady and the Mirror"

Quietly, she punishes her knuckles,
not once, but twice – positive that
illusion is all it's cracked up to be.

One thing I find very interesting about Paper Crow is that the poems are all very personal. They seem so full of emotion, most of them are about relationships, and it certainly seems like they must have been very close to the hearts of their authors. Why, then, is the name of the editor printed nowhere in the magazine? Perhaps this is an oversight. If not, I can't make out the purpose, but it's certainly unusual.

Never mind all that, though. We don't really read poetry magazines for the editor anyway, we read them for the poems. If you're thinking about what to pick up next, Paper Crow is a good choice. You won't have to give up anything, except perhaps your equanimity.

From "Drinking," by Brian Rosenberger

Forget the cab, call the hearse
brunette blind dates the coroner now
Both running on empty

I've quoted a few poems; I can't quote them all. Other names you will recognize include Donna Burgess, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, James S. Dorr, Jaime Lee Moyer, and Bruce Boston. I think in every case Paper Crow has gotten close to the best these poets have to offer. But enough of this, go order the magazine already.