My most recent review of SF poetry is up on Amazing Stories! You can find it here. This time I take an in depth look at a beautiful collection of poetry by Sandra Kasturi - "Come Late to the Love of Birds".
Here's a preview:
I first became aware of Kasturi when I joined the SFPA and began
receiving her posts via the groups Yahoo email list. I have seen several
of the poems contained in the collection up for review today in various
places on the web. Recently, they hosted a Shitty Poetry column as part of April’s National Poetry Month.
Come Late to the Love of Birds is a sizable collection – 41 poems
gathered into 4 sections (well, one is an additional sort of prologue
and another an epilogue): “Hieroglyphs of Wind”, “Cannibals of Love”,
“False Fossils” and “The Sorcerer at the Door”. Most of these poems
can’t be considered SF Poetry, but most of them do have a sort of
fantastical element, so that one could safely say it has a speculative
nature. And in fact, it had been nominated for the first annual Elgin Award,
which is a new award to be bestowed upon the best poetry collection (in
chapbook and full-length categories) published in a given year (in this
case 2012). It will be awarded at the same time as the Rhysling Award and the Dwarf Stars Award
– at WorldCon in Texas this fall. But I digress – Kasturi dedicates the
book to 3 people, Ray Bradbury, Neil Armstrong and Erik Stewart (who
I’m assuming is a person close to the author) who all flew in their own
fashion, and several of the poems are dedicated to various influential
SF writers, which, at the very least, demonstrates Kasturi’s pedigree.
Keep reading!
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