The Elgin Awards are named for Science Fiction Poetry Association founder Suzette Haden Elgin. They are presented annually by the SFPA for books published in the preceding year.
As a reminder to active SFPA members: Votes are due by August 15th. It is ranked choice voting, so please remember to include your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice for book of the year.
There are two categories, Chapbook and Book.
Books must contain 40 or more pages of poetry. E-books are eligible, but self-published books are not. Single-author and collaborative books are eligible; anthologies are not. Books containing fiction as well as poetry are not eligible. Books must be in English, but translations are eligible. Here are this year's candidates for book-sized collections.
You can see the covers for this years' books here.
BOOKS:
Dangerous Dreams • Marge Simon and Sandy DeLuca (Elektrik Milk Bath Press, 2013)
Dark family secrets... Demon lovers.... Treacherous beauties... These are just some of the Dangerous Dreams you will find in the latest offering from Marge Simon and Sandy DeLuca. With illustrations by Marge Simon, each poem in this collection is penned by both Simon and DeLuca, making Dangerous Dreams a truly collaborative effort.
Dark Roads • Bruce Boston (Dark Renaissance Books, 2013)
Considered one of the leading genre/speculative poets for more than a quarter century, Bruce Boston has received the Bram Stoker Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov’s Readers Award, the Rhysling Award, and the first Grandmaster Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Dark Roads collects the best of his long dark poems from more than forty years of publishing. Strikingly illustrated by acclaimed artist M. Wayne Miller, these poems range from direct narratives to surreal explorations of time, memory, obsession and transformation. Includes two Rhysling Winners and three Rhysling Finalists.
DEMONSTRA • Bryan Thao Worra (Innsmouth Free Press, 2013)
In the depths, half-hidden under still waters, await strange and vicious creatures …. Cthulhu, Godzilla and nagas mingle in Demonstra, a speculative poem collection which assembles 20 years of work by Bryan Thao Worra. DEMONSTRA is a book of things glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. It is about a reality that can never fully be demonstrated, authenticated, dissected, for certain visions always remain in shadows.
The First Bite of the Apple • Jennifer Crow (Elektrik Milk Bath Press, 2013)
You know the old tales... Queens and lovers... Thorns and magic... Promises made but never fulfilled... Jennifer Crow's poetry ventures into that enchanted realm, exploring the fairy tales and myths you think you've always known. These poems will tempt you with their shiny-bright surface, but their taste has become delightfully unfamiliar... There is a new sharpness here-of secrets hidden below the surface-and like The First Bite of the Apple, their sweetness soon gives way to the darkness beneath.
The Gorelets Omnibus: Collected Poems 2001-2011 • Michael Arnzen (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2012)
The Gorelets Omnibus collects all the bloody little bits of Michael Arnzen’s poetry written in the past 10 years into one big volume. From the contents of the original Gorelets chapbook and his classic “refrigerator of the damned” online fridge poem experiment, to Arnzen’s latest flash fiction and brand new Zombie Haikruel series, this collection chronicles his revolutionary vision for the horror short form. He even received a Bram Stoker Award for Alternative Forms for some of the work included in this book. As one of the first writers to recognize the creative capacity of handheld devices, Arnzen’s pioneering work to deliver gory entertainment in as few characters as possible is still eminently relevant today. Thus, a “casebook of criticism”—a collection of scholarly analyses of Arnzen’s unique approach to the genre—is included alongside the poetry.
Grim Series • Kristine Ong Muslim (Popcorn Press, 2012)
A collection of distinctly dark poems by a distinct master of the genre. Cover design by Katheryn Smith
Hysteria: A Collection of Madness • Stephanie Wytovich • (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2013)
Asylums once used to confine those deemed mentally unfit linger, forgotten behind trees or urban development, beautiful yet desolate in their decay. Within them festers something far more unnerving than unlit corners or unexplained noises: the case files left to moulder out of sight, out of conscience. Stephanie M. Wytovich forces your hands upon these crumbling, warped binders and exposes your mind to every taboo misfortune experienced by the outcast, exiled, misbegotten monsters and victims who have walked among us. The poetry contained in Hysteria performs internal body modification on its readers in an unrelenting fashion, employing broad-spectrum brutality treatment that spans the physical to the societal, as noted in Stoker Award winner Michael A. Arnzen’s incisive introduction.
Letting out the Demons • Terrie Leigh Relf • (Elektrik Milk Bath Press, 2013)
Slipping between the realms of our pasts and our futures, Terrie Leigh Relf 's collection Letting Out the Demons offers more than 40 musings, crossing all boundaries of time and space. Here Relf uses her poetic skills to take on the familiar demons of love and death, fairy tale and myth, zombies and synths, and everything in between.
Luminous Worlds • David C. Kopaska-Merkel (Dark Regions Press, 2013)
We can only write what we know, whether that comes from communicating in broken French and broken English with a Parisian nurse, or staring in horror at the human effects of a geological calamity. Here are twenty years worth of dark poetry, representing a dark world, the very one we live in. These poems were written at home, at work, in the air, shipboard in the middle of the Indian Ocean, confined to a hospital bed in a foreign land, in other words, all the usual places. Influenced by Lovecraft, Zelazny, and Algernon Blackwood, among others, Kopaska-Merkel enlists his imagination and scientific background in service to poetic expressions of the wonder, horror, and magic that permeate our world.
The Monstrance • Bryan D. Dietrich (Needfire Poetry, 2012)
The Monstrance, Bryan D. Dietrich’s sixth book of poems, is a love story. Set in the world of James Whale’s 1931 film version of Frankenstein, these poems document the lives and loves of a monster and a gypsy, a huffy hunchback, a lame priest, and the not-so-mad scientist himself. What begins with test tubes and Tesla coils ends in grace and graveyard picnics. Heartwarming and horrifying, love itself is resurrected here and set striding, a lost creature, livid and longing, but never alone
The Offspring of the Moon • John W. Sexton (Salmon Poetry, 2013)
In the poems of The Offspring of the Moon, John W. Sexton speaks to a tradition deeply rooted in the Irish literary imagination: from the oral tales and myths of pre-Christian times, through the gothic horrors of Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, to the early science-fictional romances of Fitz-James O'Brien and M. P. Shiel. These are poems of the altered mind, the cosmic journey, the daemons and totems of the spirit world, the subversion of logic and science.
Our Rarer Monsters • Noel Sloboda (Sunnyoutside, 2013)
Featuring art by Marc Snyder.
Paranormal Romance • Denise Dumars (Sam's Dot [now Alban Lake Publishing], 2012)
Interacting with the paranormal used to involve mediums, seances, the Ouija board, tarot cards, and other familiar metaphysical devices. Today, we live in a world saturated with technology, yet simultaneously fixated on the paranormal. Ghost hunting is the new fad that seems to be ever-expanding, and so we now see the explosion of technological interaction with the dead.
Alas, times change, but the desire to make contact with the beyond, to span the gulf between our loved ones on the other side and us, has not. This book is a meditation of sorts on our myriad ways of contacting the dead, meeting them on their own terms as well as on ours. It is inspired by many individuals, both those on this side of the veil and those on the other. It is about a special kind of love that we have for those who are no longer with us in our plane of existence…unless you believe, of course, that they are with us still in non-corporeal form.
Phantom Navigation • Robert Frazier (Dark Regions Press, 2012)
23 chromosomes from one parent, 23 from the other. 46 inescapable parts to a recipe. In Robert Frazier's case, his father was a cryptographer at Bletchley Park during WWII, and his mother was a landscape painter who studied with Emile Albert Gruppé. Thus the mystical science of deciphering gibberish into plain text meshes with a penchant for impressionistic imagery in Phantom Navigation. Within his first poetry collection in ten years, Frazier maps half-a-hundred works collected from a long career in publishing. Join the 3-time Rhysling-award-winner as he explores the intersection of science and art with a vengeance.
The Receptionist • Lesley Wheeler (Aqueduct Press, 2012)
Gwyneth Jones, author of Spirit and The Universe of Things writes: Lesley "Wheeler's The Receptionist is a delight: a stirring narrative of fantasy and derring-do, set in the ivy-clad towers and poky offices of modern academia, in which the warrior princess of an ancient line returns to the fray at last and summons ancient powers to defend the right, all told in technically assured terza rima cantos, full of ingenious rhythms. The forces of evil are all too recognizable, the bad guys satisfyingly bad and the good guys not too goody-goody. The infusion of classic children’s fantasy, and other bedtime folklore sources, is wonderful too. In the bonus package of shorter poems, “Zombie Thanksgiving” (T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” retold) is stunning, an absolute tour de force."
Scenes Along the Zombie Highway • G. O. Clark (Dark Regions Press, 2013)
From the Bram Stoker Award nominated poet of Shroud of Night, Strange Vegetables, Bone Sprockets, 25 Cent Rocket Ship To The Stars and The Other Side of the Lens comes a new collection of 42 poems in the realm of the undead. Full of humor, charm and chilling imagery, Scenes Along the Zombie Highway by G.O. Clark strikes the perfect balance of levity, commentary and horror in the realm of the living dead.
Special Powers and Abilities • Raymond McDaniel (Coffee House Press, 2013)
Special Powers and Abilities is a futuristic, stunningly imaginative poetic exploration of superheroes, religion, and myth.Inspired by The Legion of Super-Heroes, a comic series about a group of teenage superheroes in the future, McDaniel’s poems morph superheroes into religious and mythological narratives. Using a range traditional forms—versets, kennings, and sonnets, his poems consider the history of how we look at the future and takes on an almost Talmudic complexity.
SuiPsalms • John Edward Lawson (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2012)
SuiPsalms is the follow up to Lawson's first, acclaimed poetry collection, THE TROUBLESOME AMPUTEE. Exploring the subject of suicide from all angles, this collection challenges pre-conceived notions and both poetry and suicide. Drawing on influences from Sylvia Plath to Ian Curtis this book is never quite what you expect.
Unexplained Fevers • Jeannine Hall Gailey (New Binary Press, 2013)
Jeannine Hall Gailey’s third book, Unexplained Fevers, frees fairy tale heroines from their glass coffins and towers while simultaneously looking at the traps that contemporary women encounter – body image, drug abuse, illness – and how to find power and freedom beyond these limitations. Gailey’s trademark wit, charm and energy fill these pages with stories of forests and seascapes, mythical creatures, and the allure of the forbidden.
What If What’s Imagined Were All True • Roz Kaveny (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2012)
Magic, aliens, nightmares, and dreams are among the many muses that have inspired Roz Kaveney’s poetry.What If What’s Imagined Were All True brings together a sampling of her poems with mythical, fantastical or science fictional concerns, and also features two sonnet sequences: one retelling the Orpheus legend and one exploring the worlds of Steampunk.
No comments:
Post a Comment