2023 read #21: Elegies of Rotting Stars by Tiffany Morris.

Elegies of Rotting Stars by Tiffany Morris

61 pages

Published 2022

Read February 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

Like Avra Margariti, Tiffany Morris is one of the current luminaries of speculative poetry. I’ve seen this collection widely praised across small-press and SFF Twitter, and have been looking forward to it for a while.

These poems pull us into the gristle of the Anthropocene, sharp with bloodied antlers and crushed violets. Highways are lined with the mausoleums of apocalyptic capitalism. Golden guillotines do their necessary work; coins dropped into rivers cut as deeply as any blade. Vultures regurgitate the livers of lovers, wildflowers twist free from the ashes of golf courses. Rot is a sacrament. Colonialism and capitalism, brutal predators wearing the same skin, decay into microplastics beneath cycles of burning and renewal, consumption and birth, ghosts and afterbirth. While the current order is doomed to fail in its own rapacious excess, the future is no sanctuary:

It isn’t [safe] here.          Or         there.

Back away          [slowly].

(From “This Is Where There Is Nothing.”)

This collection is every bit as stunning as promised.

A running list of particular favorites:

“We Are Born Devouring”

“Re-Wilding Under Those Conditions”

“Flag Burning Against Storming Sky”

“Ossuary Aria”

“If, Then”

“Cigarette Reliquary”

“Here, Have Some Ghost Stories” (easily one of my favorite poems of all time)

“Synonyms for Collapse”

“In Strange Gardens”

“Shutdown”

“In Death the House is Everywhere”

“How Softly The Earth Swallowed Us”

“Exhale // Exeunt”

2023 read #20: Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

521 pages

Published 2004

Read from February 10 to February 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

I’ve rarely read historical biographies. Many years ago I attempted Peter Ackroyd’s hefty The Life of Thomas More, but it proved so dense and abstruse that I gave up less than halfway through.

Ackroyd’s characteristic style (which assumes the reader already has a full understanding of the subject, eschewing any overview before stringing together obscure anecdotes, achieving a vibe instead of laying out the foundations and building from them) suited me better here. Somehow I’ve gotten through 40 years having read exactly one piece of Shakespeare’s writing—Hamlet. But Will Shakespeare pervades anglophone pop culture and general awareness far more than Thomas More. With that preexisting scaffolding in place, I learned a lot about the shape and texture of Shakespeare’s life and work from this book. Even better, Ackroyd takes pains to place the writer in the context of his time and culture. I was particularly drawn to the fleeting images of his fellow actors and the ways Shakespeare likely created his characters to suit their abilities.

Ackroyd’s tendency to just vibe makes for some strange sources. Twice he references what phrenologists concluded about Shakespeare’s cranium, apparently in all seriousness. Not the route I’d go with a 21st century biography.

2023 read #19: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black.

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World by Riley Black

293 pages

Published 2022

Read from February 10 to February 13

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

The extinction of the dinosaurs is, to me, far and away the least interesting thing about them. That's why I avoided this book last year, when I was speeding through the likes of Beasts Before Us and Otherlands. When I learned that this book devoted much of its length to what happened in the aftermath of Chicxulub, however, I had to get my hands on it. Not nearly enough books deal with the scraggly process of ecological recovery and strange new mammalian evolution in the Paleocene.

Unexpectedly, the bulk of The Last Days is told in a speculative, dino’s-eye-view style, placing it closer in tone and vibe to Raptor Red than I anticipated. Black’s prose is what I’d consider middling pop science journalism—an improvement over Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, but not nearly as poetic and evocative as Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands. Black’s best writing is also her most personal and vulnerable, exploring the parallels between the K-Pg extinction and her own personal transitions. As someone writing my own chapbook on the themes of paleontology, gender, and personal prehistories, I wish more of The Last Days had that same depth.

2023 read #18: A Psalm of Storms and Silence by Roseanne A. Brown.

A Psalm of Storms and Silence by Roseanne A. Brown

551 pages

Published 2021

Read from February 5 to February 10

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Over the last couple years, I read the first book (and only the first book) of quite a few SFF series. There was A Court of Thorns and Roses. Then The City of Brass. We can’t forget Cute Mutants; The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue; The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea; Gearbreakers; The Gilded Ones; The Gilded Wolves. You get the idea. (You could even throw in Witch World, if you wanted to get silly with it.) The point is, I began a lot of series, but haven’t progressed to any of their sequels. My days of speeding through trilogies -- or even finishing them -- seem to be behind me.

I read A Song of Wraiths and Ruin just last month. Finishing the duology now feels almost timely in comparison!

Like Song, Psalm mostly hits my personal YA sweet spot: fun and engaging without resorting to the ubiquitous tics of scoffing, quippy leads with chips on their shoulders. (Karina skirts close to the line in places, but overall it avoids the worst of, say, The Hazel Wood.) The characters are a delight. The setting remains superb. The themes of abuse, trauma, and breaking generational cycles were top-notch. The world's magic system, while it falls into the common fantasy trap of being whatever it needs to be to fulfill the next plot beat, is generally imaginative and satisfying.

My only real complaint is with Psalm's pacing. In her acknowledgements, Brown mentions that Psalm is "not the story I thought it would be" when she began the series. Perhaps that's why it felt like the first third of this hefty volume was spent pivoting its storylines (particularly Karina's) away from the direction set up by Song's coda. It took a while for this book to find its own footing; that clear sense of pivot felt awkward. The middle section was excellent. But the final third or so felt overlong, building toward a clear climax before again shifting gears and sending our characters to yet another location only to spin out the dénouement that could have just as easily transpired 50 pages before. I think you could have trimmed a good 100-150 pages from this book and improved the flow considerably.

The finale is satisfying, however, and overall I loved this series. I'm happy I finally finished one!

2023 read #17: Dreams & Nightmares: An Anthology, edited by Aura Martin.

Dreams & Nightmares: An Anthology, edited by Aura Martin

77 pages

Published 2022

Read February 5

Rating: N/A

This one, like HELL IS REAL, is an anthology curated by one of my writer friends, and contains one of my pieces (in this case, a word-search poem). Reviewing it with any semblance of objectivity is impossible, but that's okay, because all of my reviews are utterly subjective anyway.

Aura had the idea of doing a small anthology of poems centered around dreams and nightmares, and invited indie writers she knew to take part. A few also contributed short prose pieces. The end result is a lovely, lavish hardback volume, gorgeously illustrated by Kate Doughty.

The poems tend (as you might expect) toward the strange and ethereal. Bodies shift and become subsumed. Some are disembodied altogether, others ache and spill water and blood from too-real forms. There are many drownings.

Despite the loose, casual nature of this book’s selection process, I’m happy to report that everyone involved gave it their utmost. Not one piece feels phoned in. A running list of some of my favorites:

"I Dream of Water" by Kirsten Reneau

"Sue Dream" by Heath Joseph Wooten

"Passionfruit" by Anoushka Kumar

"Bangungot" by Keana Aguila Labra

"Pedagogy, or How My Father Taught Me to Drive" by Nova Wang

"Liminal Heat" by Kaitlyn Crow

"Confession in the Church of the Moon" by June Lin

"Last Day of Summer: A Reductive Triptych" by Tommy Blake

"Albatross" by Jack Apollo Hartley

“As Good as Fear” by Kate Doughty

“I Called the Moon ‘Mama’” by Carson Sandell

“Free-Falling to the Other Plane” by Laura Ma

2023 read #16: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi.

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
235 pages
Published 2018
Read from February 4 to February 5
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I first tried to read this book way back in March 2019. That was a different world, four years ago. A different place in my life, a ring of time now long gone. I had just packed up my life to begin a new one in Ohio, promising my kid that his new step-parent and I would prepare a new home for him in a new state, that this would all be for the best, my then-partner and I relying on our years of daydreams to scaffold our tender new future, our unfamiliar try at family. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for Freshwater back then. I read maybe a quarter of it on my phone, tucked away in a corner of a library waiting for the mud to harden outside while my then-partner took classes; it made my head swim with its baffling, blood-mantled beauty. I put it away and forgot about it while I went through the motions of that new life, one fated from the start to shrivel into nothing but another change, another loss, another disappointment. I’ve learned a lot about myself since then, and the world itself has passed away and been born into a harder, more jagged and fragile shape.

Freshwater made sense to me this time.

How to describe what it is? It is an autobiography as a fable, a religious documentation of the self and and its multiples and madness, a metaphysical Bildungsroman. It is a poem pulled and stretched wide while still soft. It is a catalog of anguish and horror spun with transcendent words. It is grief on top of grief, adrift. And then, finally, acceptance.

2023 read #15: Pet by Akwaeke Emezi.

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

204 pages

Published 2019

Read February 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

The community of Lucille got rid of its monsters -- the cops, the capitalists, and other predators -- in the revolution. The "angels" of Lucille, those who led the revolution and those who saw it through, had to do hard things and make the hard choices, but all that seems to be in the past. Now Lucille thrives, full of loving families and a tight-knit sense of community. But there's a danger in believing the monsters are all in the past, and in forgetting that monsters can emerge from within a community at any time.

Jam accidentally summons a strange creature from her mother Bitter's artwork; the creature tells Jam to call it Pet, and that it has come to hunt a monster. What follows is luminous, vulnerable, sometimes painful examination of what it truly means to be a community, and how to maintain utopia once it's been achieved. A wonderful book.

2023 read #14: A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee.

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

373 pages

Published 2021

Read from February 1 to February 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I don't think I can review this book without some substantial spoilers, so consider yourself warned. I'll do my best.

I expected this to be a book about dark magic, hauntings, and metaphysical mysteries. Most of what I read these days is fantasy, so of course that was my automatic assumption. The book's atmosphere is immaculate: set in a creaky old house at a girls' finishing school in the Catskills, famously founded by the daughter of a witch who escaped Salem and marked early by tragedies and legends of witchcraft. (I did my best not to let the book's hazy indifference toward the actual geography of the Catskills ruin my immersion in this atmosphere. Suffice it to say that the Hudson River and Esopus Creek are not the same thing.) Instead, it's a cleverly metafictional dark academia thriller, most closely aligned with The Girl on the Train out of anything else I've read in recent years.

Like The Girl on the Train, A Lesson in Vengeance is a story of gaslighting and manipulation. Vengeance has the added clever twist that our narrator, Felicity, is planning to write her senior thesis on the very same themes as the book itself. As Felicity sums it up: "Mostly how depictions of mental illness are used to build suspense by introducing uncertainty and a sense of mistrust, especially with regard to the narrator's perception of events, and the conflation of magic and madness in female characters." That thematic recursion was my favorite aspect of Vengeance.

As a whodunnit, Vengeance might have been a bit too easy to crack. Major spoilers here: The way Ellis was constantly manipulating and controlling Felicity made it too obvious that Ellis couldn't be trusted, and Felicity's own layers of false memories regarding the night her girlfriend Alex died also made it obvious that some degree of "darkness" existed in her characterization. But overall I found the ending satisfying. At least it avoided the trap Girl on the Train fell into, with its generic thriller standoff climax. The way Ellis and Felicity's stories wrapped up pulled everything into a tidy little circle.

2023 read #13: Banjo and Swift by Iacovos Le Du.

Banjo and Swift by Iacovos Le Du

Illustrated by Yoan Vezenkov

142 pages

Published 2021

Read February 1

Rating: 2 out of 5

As I've observed numerous times, the landscape of dinosaur fiction is bleak. Only a handful of good examples of dinosaur fiction have ever been written (or put on TV or in theaters, for that matter).

Nothing about the outline of Banjo and Swift is objectionable. It's self-published Raptor Red fan-fiction set in the Late Cretaceous of Australia, little different from the Raptor Red fan-fiction I wrote (but never published) when I was 16. Banjo and Swift, two young Australovenator males, grow up together, then part ways after one of them finds a mate. Swift, the displaced male, ekes out a living in a coastal environment, then wins a mate of his own. Then big brother Banjo comes with his family, somehow drawn across hundreds of kilometers, and just happens to stumble upon Swift's new hunting territory. Rather than a happy reunion, we're treated to a fight between brothers. Life finds a way. Le Du intersperses his narrative with snippets of the science he draws from, which was a nice touch.

I'm a bit of a prose snob, though, and Le Du's writing just didn't do it for me. It's clunky and never pulled me into the narrative, minimal as it was. His Cretaceous ecosystems rarely feel fleshed out; sticking to a sparse fossil record, Le Du populates his forests and coasts with a bare handful of species. I think in general we present-day people tend not to conceptualize how much life there was before farms and industry destroyed the natural world, and that paucity of imagination often crops up in Deep Time narratives despite our best intentions.

I can't bring myself to trash Banjo and Swift, especially when the self-published dino fic alternatives are so much worse. (D.W. Vogel's Horizon Alpha books, anyone?) But I also can't find much to recommend it, unless -- like me -- you have an insatiable itch for new paleontology fiction. At least Yoan Vezenkov's artwork is nice.

2023 read #12: Love in the Time of Dinosaurs by Kirsten Alene.

Love in the Time of Dinosaurs by Kirsten Alene

77 pages

Published 2010

Read February 1

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

It's not that I expected this book would be good, per se. But Love in the Time of Dinosaurs is an A+ title, an all-time banger of a thesis statement, and I had hoped, deep down, that maybe this bizarro fiction novella of gun-wielding dinosaurs, the monks who fight them with magic kung-fu, and the forbidden love that blossoms between two of them would at least be a fun time. Alas, the title is the best thing about this book.

In order to do it for me, bizarro fiction needs to have either outstanding prose, staggering creativity, or some other secret ingredient. Love in the Time of Dinosaurs lacks that special sauce. It reads like a transcription of a nine year old smashing their plastic dinosaurs against their action figures, and never gets much deeper than that. The titular love between a monk and a wise Trachodon doesn't really click the way monk-and-dinosaur love should click, you know?