The Loss

My tiny poem, The Loss, is now up at Strange Horizons.

Enjoy!

Mountain

Another tiny little poem of mine, Mountain, popped up over at Through the Gate a few days back. This is another little zine that I love for its focus on words and beauty and subtle magic: the entire issue is well worth a read.

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At Worldcon I was asked for a definition of speculative poetry. As always when I’m asked this question — and it comes up more than you might think — I found myself struggling for an answer.

The way I see it, so much of poetry, outside of “greeting card” poetry and some poems deeply rooted in the agony of pain, is in some sense speculative, an attempt to see beyond the ordinary with the music and magic of words.  Even poems focused on the most ordinary of objects often attempt, in some way, to do this — William Carlos Williams leaps to mind, but he’s hardly the only poet to turn the everyday into extraordinaryday. In a sense this is the point of poetry.

Which perhaps is one reason why I tend to classify most of my poems a little bit more narrowly as mythic poems — poems that draw on myth and fairy tale, as Mountain does here, to sometimes talk about the everyday, and to sometimes talk about more.