Genre Poetry Round Up (Amazing Stories Mag)

April was National Poetry Month in the United States. I celebrated with a Poetry Round Up that focussed mostly on humorous poetry. I had a look at ChiZine Publications annual Shitty Poetry Month Contest and the April 1st edition of the normally serious poetry journal Stone Telling.

I also talked about a very important project for me, which was my first "print" (even if it was only online) editorial gig. I edited the 16th issue of the SFPA's quarterly online journal Eye to the Telescope with a theme of Music. It was a huge task for me, but one I did with pleasure. 

Genre Poetry Round Up - April 2015

Thanks for checking it out!

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Amazing Stories: Review - Come Late to the Love of Birds

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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