Today we're sending this little beetle out into the world. May it burrow into your hearts, in a nice way.
Congratulations to Mahaila Smith for this beautiful, innovative and tender collection of narrative science fiction poetry!
Now available everywhere!
https://www.stelliform.press/index.php/product/seed-beetle-by-mahaila-smith/
#poetry #canadianpoetry #narrativepoetry #speculativepoetry #sciencefictionpoetry #canlit #canadianliterature #debutcollection #publicationday #books #bookstodon
Hello, fellow travelers!
As of this morning, we all have just about eight weeks of reading to vote on the finalists of this year’s Hugo Awards—including the six finalist poems of this year’s 2025 Special Hugo Award for Best Poem category! Now, I can talk forever about each individual poem—they’re amazing, and each one is absolutely deserving of the honor of being nominated!
However, in lieu of conditioning your opinions with my own, our speculative poetry reading curriculum is going to make a minor detour. Let’s tackle the finalist list by putting some of these poems beside each other and asking meaningful questions about their themes and approaches in curious interconnecting ways.
Here’s one to start with: Some of these poems overlap in both their observations about pain and trauma, as well as lead those observations through fantasy imagery: specifically, the voices of gods and powerful unnamed forces of myth. What do those poems have to offer under closer watch?
Mari Ness’ “Ever Noir” is told from the perspective of an unidentified representative of the realm of fairy tales trading their services to those seeking to understand the stakes of their stories. Its persona’s pulp-detective tone underscores the curious theme at the heart of the poem, that the consistently tragic outcomes of many fairy tales seem to be as grim as they are mysterious, only searching for someone to unravel the reasons why:
Why the tower. Why the apple.
Why the slipper always breaks.
Why hate spirals around their skin.
What they did to deserve this.
Sadly, the persona can only offer their work:
Me, I got no answers. It ain’t my thing.
I’m no fairy godmother, no
youngest prince. I’ll hunt around,
I tell them, maybe even
dust for fingerprints. Find out
who’s behind this. Maybe.
“We Drink Lava” by Ai Jiang poses a very powerfully interesting image of gods who consume the amalgam of human suffering as literal molten liquid and let it take new shape within them, coming to terms with the meaning it can give them despite it being too bitter for those who made that pain itself.
It was clear why humans could not drink
lava like we, so unaccepting of their pasts,
so much fear for their futures, where we find
enjoyment experiencing both in the present.
Because to us, that is all that matters.
Angela Liu’s “there are no taxis for the dead” tells the story of someone’s lingering concerns for a loved one’s travel to and from the realm of those who have passed on, imagining a gloomy but vivid path on horseback as they return to their past home to be together. The persona expresses not only a kind of curiosity about the path itself, but also a sense of fearful longing about a future where this journey, or their meeting, will become less likely:
Each day
I forget you a little more
your shadow by the window like a
swath of birds taking flight
I know
this is a necessary migration,
but I worry
you won’t find your way next year
Fortunately, their returned loved one reassures them by reminding them of one of the truths of this journey:
you tell me to remember
the horses
how even grazing on the night field
they always know their way home
Here are some questions to consider when reading, to help you get a better sense of your own impressions and what these poems may be reaching out to you to say:
This also equips you to ask a similar question about the entire ballot that may be useful: What throughlines do you see between all of the finalists? What do you think they are all in conversation about, or what differences do you see in their approaches to their own individual stories? Of course each poem is different, but by watching them as a whole, you may also discover something intriguing about the poems that truly speaks to you!
Working your way patiently through these poems by asking questions like this will be helpful as you put them in their ranking orders for your ballots closer to the voting deadline! Even if the thing you are thinking or feeling right now feels intensely personal, a bit unserious, or distant, or if you are still trying to figure out how you feel about these poems, asking more questions and being truly curious as you read are ways through those lines and directly toward your best assessments of them.
Until then, may tomorrow and your good days always rhyme!
https://seattlein2025.org/2025/05/12/con-verse-tragedy-from-a-lens-of-myth/
Con-Verse: Tragedy From a Lens of Myth: Let’s tackle the finalist list by putting some of these poems beside each other and asking meaningful questions about their themes and approaches in curious interconnecting ways. … (#AiJiang #AngelaLiu #MariNess #SpeculativePoetry)
Full post: https://seattlein2025.org/2025/05/12/con-verse-tragedy-from-a-lens-of-myth/
Congrats to Terese Mason Pierre and Mahaila Smith (and many thanks to Perfect Books in Ottawa) for a wildly successful launch! And of course thanks to everyone who came out to support two amazing poets and their debut collections!
#poetry #canadianpoetry #canlit #canadianliterature #smallpress #booklauch #speculativepoetry #sciencefiction #fantasy #books #bookstodon
LitFest in the Dena was a blast this year! 💫📚
11:30am was time for our panel on speculative poetry with the Starlit Scribes. Everyone brought their A-game and had a fun time at the reading.
Our panelists: Wendy Van Camp, Bree Wernicke, L. K. Indigo, Pedro Iniguez, Denise Dumars
I closed out the day with a zine workshop. I'm feeling inspired to explore more about zines and their community. 🖤
#PoetryLife #SpeculativePoetry #ZineLove #PoetryCommunity #sfpoetry #poetryfestival #poetryreading
Eldritch Friday: by the waters of Sarnath
#Sarnath #HPLovecraft #Art #Photography, #EOS #EOS90D
#DigitalArt #TheDreamLands #Eldritch #EldritchFriday #Fantasy #Poetry
#Phantasmagoria #Weird #WeirdPoetry #WeirdTales #SpeculativePoetry #TheDoomThatCameToSarnath
https://impliedspaces.wordpress.com/2025/05/02/eldritch-friday-by-the-waters-of-sarnath/
Coming up for Ottawa folks! Terese Mason Pierre and Mahaila Smith will be launching their poetry collections MYTH and SEED BEETLE together at Perfect Books on Tuesday May 6 at 7pm! Don't miss it!
#ottawaevents #poetry #poetrycollection #speculativepoetry #canlit #canadianliterature #canadianauthor #books #bookstodon
Hello, fellow travelers!
I hope you’ve been having a wonderful time digging into the rich banquet of work on the finalist ballot of the Hugo Awards—including the best poem category finalists (but of course I hope you’re reading everything else, too)! Soon we will be tasked with casting our final ballots and determining which among these marvels will go home with its own rocket statue, but until then, I hope you’re also reading with curiosity and joy, and finding new things to delight in as you do.
In our continued chats with some of the brilliant minds in the speculative poetry space, today we’re talking to poet and editor Holly Lyn Walrath!
Holly Lyn Walrath is a writer, editor, and publisher. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Analog, and Flash Fiction Online. She is the author of several books of poetry including Glimmerglass Girl, The Smallest of Bones, and Numinous Stones. She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. In 2019, she launched Interstellar Flight Press, an indie SFF publisher dedicated to publishing underrepresented genres and voices.
How did you get into writing speculative poetry?
It’s not so much that I got into writing speculative poetry but that it was in me from the beginning. I’ve always loved anything speculative—from robots to fairies to slasher films. And I was always writing poetry, as far back as my teenage years, where most of my inspiration came from indie rock music. It wasn’t until I realized I could put the two together that I found my voice as a writer. Something about the speculative lens opened a hard place in my heart. Edward Hirsch says that poetry comes out of dark underground forces, and I’ve always thought of my love for dark poetry as a way of shining the light on those mysterious creative forces in our hearts that we don’t quite understand.
What do you enjoy about speculative poetry?
I like to say that speculative poetry is a poetics of the accessible. Which means that anyone can write a speculative poem. You don’t have to have any formal training. You don’t have to know that much about poetry. A ton of new writers start out writing poetry. There’s no one structure to learn; there’s no wrong or right way to write a speculative poem. When folks stop by my booth at book fairs and they say, “I don’t read much poetry,” I like to push a speculative poetry book into their hands and watch as their eyes light up when they read, realizing that everything they love as a fan can be put into an enjoyable, accessible format. But more than that, speculative poetry is a prime locus of access for marginalized voices. Whether its queerness, disability, race, or gender, the speculative poem can be a vessel for exploring the other.
As a publisher and poetry editor, what are your thoughts about the niche that speculative poetry collections occupy in the genre publishing space?
Most readers in the SFFH (science fiction, fantasy, horror) genre spaces encounter poetry as
individual poems, alongside fiction in popular magazines or anthologies. Most of the speculative poets I encounter haven’t thought about putting together a collection because the focus is on novels. There are no agents for speculative poetry. Writers get pressed into fiction because there are so few good quality speculative poetry publishers. I could talk about this all day, but I think primarily we really need more indie publishers and authors. That’s where the true transgressive work is happening. The works of poetry that are getting published are truly radical and fantastic books. As a whole though, the community needs way more support than it’s getting. I think one of the best things a poet can do for their work is start putting together a collection because books reach a much wider audience. It widens the scope and gives the poet something to hand to a reader. There’s a lot of value in the conversation between poems that happens in a collection, and having that book can be career-altering.
You regularly facilitate workshops about writing poetry of all forms, including erasure poetry. What do you wish more first-time poetry writers knew about writing and reading poetry?
My writing motto is “write what you love; love what you write.” I truly believe there isn’t a wrong or right way to write, there’s just the way that works for you. We are not here to write poetry as a money-making scheme. A poem is art distilled. The value is in the connection between the reader and the writer. So many new poets I meet are anxious about getting it right: Is this good? Is this too personal? Is anybody going to read this? I guess I want the new poet to know: Yes, you can do this; yes, you should do this; yes, someone is going to need to read your poem.
What is your favourite poem you’ve read recently?
I’m currently writing a Confessional Poetry workshop for April, and I’m revisiting some of the classics. One poem that always surprises me is Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind” from her first book of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, written in 1960 about her ongoing struggles with bipolar disorder. Sexton was a complicated figure, and I think this poem encapsulates how the speculative can be a lens through which to view complex ideas like sexism. It also shows how the speculative poem has a long history beyond just today.
Listen to Holly’s poem “Ghost in the Shell”.
That’s all for this week!
I hope some of you did last week’s homework and read some of the finalist poems aloud—and I hope you discovered something that has struck you even more powerfully in those poems from reciting or hearing them than they did from looking at them. Now, we put those together with emotion and thought, and find ourselves on the other side of journeying with their verse.
Until next time, may tomorrow and your good days always rhyme!
https://seattlein2025.org/2025/04/28/con-verse-chatting-with-holly-lyn-walrath/
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