Posts tagged ‘Kristin Bock’

The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom

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About this book:

Edited by Joanne Merriam, The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom is an anthology of science fiction featuring blunt force trauma, explosions, adventure, derring-do, tigers, Martians, zombies, fanged monsters, dinosaurs (alien and domestic), ray guns, rocket ships, and anthropomorphized marshmallows.

The anthology contains work by 40 authors: fiction by Jim Comer, James Dorr, Aidan Doyle, Tom Doyle, Kendra Fortmeyer, Nick Kocz, David Kopaska-Merkel, Ken Liu, Kelly Luce, Tim Major, Laurent McAllister, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Jerry Oltion, Ursula Pflug, Leonard Richardson, Erica L. Satifka, G. A. Semones, Matthew Sanborn Smith, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Lucy Sussex, Mary A. Turzillo, Nick Wood, and K. Ceres Wright, and poetry by Khadija Anderson, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Kristin Bock, Alicia Cole, Estíbaliz Espinosa (translated by Neil Anderson), Miriam Bird Greenberg, Benjamin Grossberg, Julie Bloss Kelsey, Katie Manning, Martha McCollough, Marc McKee, Richard King Perkins II, Christina Sng, J. J. Steinfeld, Sonya Taaffe, Deborah Walker, and Ali Znaidi.

The actual Museum of All Things Awesome and that Go Boom is housed in the half-kiloSmoot-square, two-centuries-old dancing building, the Old Ptolemy, in the city of Draconis on the planet Epsilon Eridani b.

Table of Contents:

  • Khadija Anderson, “Observational Couplets upon returning to Los Angeles from Outer Space”
  • Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, “Photograph of a Secret”
  • Kristin Bock, “I Wish I Could Write a Poem about Pole-Vaulting Robots”
  • Alicia Cole, “Asteroid Orphan”
  • Jim Comer, “Soldier’s Coat”
  • James Dorr, “Bubba Claus Conquers the Martians”
  • Aidan Doyle, “Mr. Nine and the Gentleman Ghost”
  • Tom Doyle, “Crossing Borders”
  • Estíbaliz Espinosa, “Dissidence” (translated by Neil Anderson)
  • Kendra Fortmeyer, “Squaline”
  • Miriam Bird Greenberg, “Brazilian Telephone”
  • Benjamin Grossberg, “The Space Traveler and Runaway Stars”
  • Julie Bloss Kelsey, two scifaiku
  • Nick Kocz, “The Last American Tiger”
  • David Kopaska-Merkel, “Captain Marshmallow”
  • Ken Liu, “Nova Verba, Mundus Novus”
  • Kelly Luce, “Ideal Head of a Woman”
  • Tim Major, “Read/Write Head”
  • Katie Manning, “Baba Yaga’s Answer”
  • Laurent McAllister, “Kapuzine and the Wolf: A Hortatory Tale”
  • Martha McCollough, “valley of the talking dolls” and “adventures of cartoon bee”
  • Marc McKee, “A Moment in Fill-In-The-Blank City”
  • Sequoia Nagamatsu, “Headwater LLC”
  • Jerry Oltion, “A Star Is Born”
  • Richard King Perkins II, “The Sleeper’s Requiem”
  • Ursula Pflug, “Airport Shoes”
  • Leonard Richardson, “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs”
  • Erica L. Satifka, “Thirty-Six Questions Propounded by the Human-Powered Plasma Bomb in the Moments Before Her Imminent Detonation”
  • G. A. Semones, “Never Forget Some Things”
  • Matthew Sanborn Smith, “The Empire State Building Strikes Back!”
  • Christina Sng, “Medusa in LA”
  • J. J. Steinfeld, “The Loudest Sound Imaginable”
  • Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, “The Wanderers”
  • Lucy Sussex, “A Sentimental, Sordid Education”
  • Sonya Taaffe, “And Black Unfathomable Lakes”
  • Mary Turzillo, “Pride”
  • Deborah Walker, “Sea Monkey Mermaid”
  • Nick Wood, “The Girl Who Called the World”
  • K. Ceres Wright, “The Haunting of M117”
  • Ali Znaidi, “A Dolphin Scene” and “Australian Horoscope”

About the Contributors:

Butoh dancer, Muslim convert, and Pushcart nominated poet Khadija Anderson has been published extensively in print and online. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University LA and her first book of poetry History of Butoh was published in 2012 through Writ Large Press. Find her at khadijaanderson.com.

Neil Anderson is a translator and teacher living in Lubbock, Texas. His translations from Galician have been published in Asymptote, The Bitter Oleander, Shearsman, Absinthe, M-Dash, and elsewhere.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the 2013 Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner. She has work published in American Poetry Review, CALYX, and Acentos Review among others. A short dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Chicano activist and Hollywood director, Jesús Salvador Treviño can be viewed at latinopia.com. She curates the quarterly reading series HITCHED and co-founded Women Who Submit. Her debut poetry collection, Built with Safe Spaces, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications.

Kristin Bock holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts—Amherst where she currently teaches. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and journals, including VERSE, Columbia, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The Black Warrior Review, and FENCE, as well as the URB anthology Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days. She lives with her husband, artist Geoffrey Kostecki, in Montague, Massachusetts where they refurbish liturgical art. She is also a contributing editor to the literary magazine, Bateau. Bock’s debut collection of poetry, Cloisters, won Tupelo Press’s First Book Award and the da Vinci Eye Award.

Alicia Cole is a recent New Orleanian transplant by way of Atlanta, GA. She’s a professional writer, editor, and artist. Her sci-fi serial Blinded is currently being published by Rainbow Rumpus, and her work has recently appeared on PodCastle, and been reviewed in Dead Reckonings. You can find more of her work at www.facebook.com/AliciaColewriter and https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6470571.Alicia_Cole.

Jim Comer is an author and teacher who lives in Arkansas.

Indiana writer James Dorr‘s The Tears of Isis was a 2014 Bram Stoker Award nominee for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. Other books include Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance, Darker Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret, and his all-poetry Vamps (A Retrospective). For more, visit Dorr’s blog at jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com.

Aidan Doyle is an Australian writer and computer programmer. He has visited more than 90 countries and his experiences include teaching English in Japan, interviewing ninjas in Bolivia and going ten-pin bowling in North Korea. Find him at aidandoyle.net and @aidan_doyle.

In 2014, Tor Books published American Craftsmen, Tom Doyle‘s first novel in a three-book deal. The Left-Hand Way followed in 2015. He is a winner of the WSFA Small Press Award and a Writers of the Future Award. His short fiction has appeared in Aeon, Buzzy Mag, Daily Science Fiction, Futurismic, and the URB anthology How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens. Paper Golem has published his short story collection, The Wizard of Macatawa and Other Stories.

Estíbaliz Espinosa is a Spanish- and Galician-language writer, author of the books Pan (libro de ler e desler) (2000); -orama (2002); Número e (2004); zoommm. textos biónicos (2007); and Curiosidade (2015). Find her at estibalizes.wordpress.com.

Kendra Fortmeyer received her MFA in fiction from UT Austin, and is the fiction editor for Broad! magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, NANO Fiction, Forge, apt, Juked, Fiddleblack (under pen name Zoe Abramson), Corium and elsewhere.

Miriam Bird Greenberg is the author of the chapbooks All night in the new country and Pact-Blood, Fever Grass, and her work has been awarded fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the NEA. She lives in Berkeley and teaches ESL.

Benjamin S. Grossberg is Director of Creative Writing at The University of Hartford. His most recent book of poems, Space Traveler, was published by the University of Tampa Press in spring of 2014. His earlier collections include Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009), winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award.

Julie Bloss Kelsey writes speculative poetry and short stories from her home in suburban Maryland. Her work has been published in Scifaikuest, Seven by Twenty, Eye to the Telescope, Star*Line, and Mad Scientist Journal, among others. She is currently writing a scifaiku chapbook about an ill-fated alien romance. Visit her on Twitter @MamaJoules.

Nick Kocz‘s stories and essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Entropy, Five Chapters, Mid-American Review, and The Nervous Breakdown. He has an MFA from Virginia Tech and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, VA with his wife and three children.

An aether compactor by trade, David C. Kopaska-Merkel began writing poetry after witnessing the Ascension of Tim. He won the Rhysling award for best long poem in 2006 for a collaboration with Kendall Evans. He has written 23 books, of which one of the latest is SETI Hits Paydirt (Popcorn Press, 2014). Kopaska-Merkel has edited Dreams & Nightmares since 1986.

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, published his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, in 2015, and will publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in 2016.

Kelly Luce‘s story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, won the 2013 Foreword Review‘s Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. Her debut novel, Pull Me Under, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2016. A Contributing Editor for Electric Literature, she hails from Illinois and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Tim Major lives in Oxford with his wife and son. His time-travel novel, You Don’t Belong Here, will be published by Snowbooks in September 2016 and his horror novella, Carus & Mitch, was published by Omnium Gatherum in February 2015. His short stories have featured in Interzone, Perihelion, Every Day Fiction, and numerous anthologies. He is the Editor of the SF magazine, The Singularity, and also blogs at cosycatastrophes.wordpress.com.

Katie Manning is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman. She has received The Nassau Review Author Award for Poetry, and her writing has been published in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, PANK, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review, and she is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Find her online at katiemanningpoet.com.

Laurent McAllister is the symbionym of a duo of Canadian writers, Yves Meynard and Jean-Louis Trudel. Since 1984, they have published extensively in French and in English, penning under the McAllister identity one award-winning novel, Suprématie (2009), one collection, three young adult books, and several short stories. Writing separately, they have authored nearly 40 books, and many more short stories. Tor published Meynard’s fantasy novel Chrysanthe in 2012. Trudel’s short story “The Snows of Yesteryear” was included in the John Joseph Adams anthology Loosed Upon the World from Saga in 2015.

Martha McCollough is an artist and writer who lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Her videopoems have been exhibited at festivals and conferences internationally, and have appeared in Rattapallax, Gone Lawn, and TriQuarterly. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Small Po[r]tions, Cream City Review, and Salamander.

Marc McKee received an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. His work has appeared in several journals, among them Barn Owl Review, Boston Review, Cimarron Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, Forklift, Ohio, LIT, and Pleiades. He is the author of the chapbook What Apocalypse?, which won the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM 2008 Chapbook Contest, and two full-length collections, Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) and Bewilderness (Black Lawrence Press, 2014).

Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the Japanese folklore inspired story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (Black Lawrence Press). His work has appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, Lightspeed Magazine, Zyzzyva, The Fairy Tale Review, Tin House online, and Black Warrior Review. He is the managing editor of Psychopomp Magazine and an assistant professor of creative writing at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. More info at http://sequoianagamatsu.net.

Jerry Oltion has had over 150 short stories and 15 novels published over the last 30 years, and is still hard at it. He has become the most frequently published author in the history of Analog magazine, and has won the Nebula Award for his novella, “Abandon in Place.” He is mostly known for hard science fiction with a human, often humorous touch.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He has a wife, Vickie and a daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in hundreds of publications including Bluestem, December Magazine, Emrys Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, Roanoke Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Louisiana Review, The Red Cedar Review, The William and Mary Review, and Two Thirds North.

Ursula Pflug is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Green Music (Edge/Tesseract), The Alphabet Stones (Blue Denim) and Motion Sickness (Inanna; illustrated by S.K. Dyment). She penned the story collections After the Fires (Tightrope) and Harvesting the Moon (PS). She edited the anthologies They Have To Take You In (Hidden Brook) and Playground of Lost Toys (Exile; with Colleen Anderson.) A YA novella, Mountain, is forthcoming from Inanna. She teaches creative writing workshops at Loyalist College, Trent University (with Derek Newman-Stille) and elsewhere. She has collaborated with filmmakers, dancers, and installation artists and her short fiction has been taught at universities in Canada and India. Find her at ursulapflug.ca.

Leonard Richardson became a programmer because paleontology involved too much outdoor work. He writes prose and open source software from his home in New York. For more about him, go to www.crummy.com.

Erica L. Satifka‘s fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Shimmer as well as URB’s anthology How to Live on Other Planets.

Weaned on fairy tales and hero adventures, G. A. Semones remembers reading his first space opera when about nine years old. He began writing in his teens and writes primarily fantasy and science fiction. He is a Liberty Hall Writers denizen. A software engineer, he has built scary things that self-heal and self-organize. He is a devoted husband, dad and granddad who, when not writing, enjoys history, antique cryptography, fossils, reading, and gardening with his wife. His work has appeared on The Drabblecast, Ray Gun Revival, and Alternate Hilarities, among others.

Matthew Sanborn Smith is a South Floridian speculative fiction author whose fiction has appeared at Tor.com, Nature, Chizine, and Diabolical Plots among others. He is an occasional contributor to the StarShipSofa, SF Signal, and SFF Audio podcasts. His collection, The Dritty Doesen: Some of the Least Reasonable Stories of Matthew Sanborn Smith, is waiting patiently for just the right reader, and his podcast, Beware the Hairy Mango, is adored by dozens.

Christina Sng is a Rhysling-nominated poet, writer, and artist. Her work has received several Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She is the author of three chapbooks and her first full-length book of poetry, A Collection of Nightmares from Raw Dog Screaming Press arrives late 2016. Visit her online at christinasng.com.

Canadian J. J. Steinfeld lives on Prince Edward Island, where he is patiently waiting for Godot’s arrival and a phone call from Kafka. While waiting, he has published sixteen books, including the short story collections Disturbing Identities (Ekstasis Editions), Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized? (Gaspereau Press), Would You Hide Me? (Gaspereau Press), A Glass Shard and Memory (Recliner Books), and Madhouses in Heaven, Castles in Hell (Ekstasis Editions), the novels Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (Pottersfield Press) and Word Burials (Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink), and the poetry collections An Affection for Precipices (Serengeti Press), Misshapenness (Ekstasis Editions), and Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds (Ekstasis Editions). His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals internationally, and over forty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Interzone. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates an annual Art & Words Show, profiled in Poets & Writers. Bonnie is represented by Ann Collette at Rees Literary. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: www.bonniejostufflebeam.com.

Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand. She has edited four anthologies, including She’s Fantastical (1995), shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her award-winning fiction includes books for younger readers and the novel The Scarlet Rider. She has five short story collections, My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, Absolute Uncertainty, Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies (a best of), and Thief of Lives. Her latest project is Blockbuster!: Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

Sonya Taaffe‘s short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press), A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books), and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), and in various anthologies including The Humanity of Monsters, Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place, and Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror. She is currently senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons; she holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats.

Mary Turzillo‘s 1999 Nebula-winner, “Mars Is no Place for Children” and Analog novel An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl are recommended reading on the International Space Station. Her poetry collection Lovers & Killers won the 2013 Elgin Award for Best Collection, and she has been a finalist on the British SFA, Pushcart, Stoker, Dwarf Stars and Rhysling ballots. Sweet Poison, her collaboration with Marge Simon, came out from Dark Renaissance in 2014. She lives in Berea, Ohio, with her scientist-writer husband, Geoffrey A. Landis.

Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London, where she now lives with her partner, Chris, and her two young children. Find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration or on her blog, deborahwalkersbibliography.blogspot.com. Her poems have appeared in Dreams & Nightmares, Star*Line, and Enchanted Conversation.

Nick Wood is a South African clinical psychologist, with around twenty short stories previously published in Interzone, Infinity Plus, AfroSF, PostScripts, Redstone Science Fiction, Fierce Family, and How to Live On Other Planets, amongst others. His YA speculative fiction novella The stone chameleon was published in South Africa and his debut novel Azanian Bridges is due to be published in the UK in 2016 by NewCon Press. He has completed an MA in Creative Writing (SF & Fantasy) through Middlesex University, London and is currently training clinical psychologists in London, England. He can be found at @nick45wood or nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz.

K. Ceres Wright received her Master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, and Cog was her thesis novel for the program. Wright’s science fiction poem, “Doomed,” was a nominee for the Rhysling Award, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s highest honor. Her work has appeared in Diner Stories, Hazard Yet Forward, Genesis: An Anthology of Black Science Fiction, The 2008 Rhysling Anthology, Far Worlds, The Dark God’s Gift, and Many Genres, One Craft. Find her at www.kcereswright.com or on Twitter @KCeresWright.

Ali Znaidi lives in Redeyef, Tunisia, where he teaches English. He authored four poetry chapbooks including Experimental Ruminations (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems (Origami Poems Project, 2012), Bye, Donna Summer! (Fowlpox Press, 2014), and Taste of the Edge (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014). You can see more of his work on his blog at aliznaidi.blogspot.com.

About the Editor

Joanne Merriam is the owner and publisher of Upper Rubber Boot Books. She was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and lived thereabouts for her first three decades. In 2001, she quit her job as the Executive Assistant of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia to travel Canada by train, and then parts of the Northeastern and Southern United States. Her first book of poetry, The Glaze from Breaking, was written, in part, about those travels. In 2004, she immigrated to the USA, where she has lived in Kentucky and New Hampshire, and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee.

Joanne Merriam’s poetry and fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Fiddlehead, The Furnace Review, Grain, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, The Mainichi Daily News, Per Contra, Riddle Fence, Room of One’s Own, Strange Horizons and Vallum Contemporary Poetry, as well as in the anthologies Ice: new writing on hockey, To Find Us: Words and Images of Halifax and The Allotment: New Lyric Poets. She most recently edited How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens and co-edited Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good with H. L. Nelson. Visit her at www.joannemerriam.com.

Reviews:

26 July 2016

Signs coming tomorrow

I’m sitting here in the Dalek Pride t-shirt I got last week at Hypericon (a fun little science fiction and fantasy convention here in Nashville), pretty excited by all the stuff my peeps have done in the past month or so.

Also! We have a new book coming out tomorrow. Well, officially tomorrow, but actually it’s already up at Amazon and Barnes & Noble—which you’d already know if you followed us on Facebook or Twitter. Signs Over the Pacific and Other Stories is a collection of a dozen intertwined short stories by New Zealand author RJ Astruc, featuring airship crashes, Interpol agents, artificial intelligence, hologram cities, bioterrorism and psychic gamblers. Official announcement, naturally, tomorrow.

 

News for Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors:

 

And for 140 And Counting contributors:

23 June 2013

Apocalypse Now

How will the end come? What will we do when all the lights go out?

  • ISBN 978-1-937794-24-8 (print): used from Amazon.
  • ISBN 978-1-937794-23-1 (epub).
  • ISBN 978-1-937794-21-7 (mobi).
  • ISBN 978-1-937794-22-4 (pdf).
  • Out of print.
  • Discuss this book at Goodreads and LibraryThing.

Winner of the Nashville Scene‘s Best Literary Anthology 2013.

Every society and every generation has its version of the apocalypse: swine flu, genetic mutation, global warming, nuclear fallout, the second coming, peak oil, mass extinction, giant irradiated ants, zombies… Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days is the first anthology of its kind to bring together the poetry and prose of some of America’s finest (though not always most well-known) literary voices with an eye for the literary and the popular, for story and lyric, for the past and the future, for the psychological and the physical, for the real and the fantastic.

Missy, the single mother of Margaret Atwood‘s “The Silver Astroturfer,” spends her days in her basement of computers churning out copy under various aliases (“ExCodFisherman” or “LeglessVeteran” or “LadyDuckHunter”) in order to manipulate the daily news. Davis McCombs poems tell the story of a dying tobacco industry in the South and of the killing of the last gray wolf in Edmonson County, Kentucky.

Rodney Jones‘s “Apocalyptic Narrative” opens in a post-apocalyptic United States in which our hero survives via c-rations and government cheese in an abandoned cave. Joyce Carol Oates‘s “Thanksgiving” depicts a father and daughter who venture out to buy food for their Thanksgiving dinner because the mother is ill. This seemingly ordinary trip, however, becomes decidedly unordinary when our assumptions about their world quickly crumble.

Judy Jordan‘s poems examine humankind’s slow destruction of the earth while Paolo Bacigalupi‘s story, “The People of Sand and Slag,” looks at how we would live post-global warming via three explorers who utilize the environment itself to remake their decaying bodies.

Chet Weise‘s poems tell of the sorely under-reported floods that overwhelmed Nashville, Tennessee in May 2010 in which the Cumberland River rose twelve feet above flood stage and twenty-one people were killed. Pinckney Benedict‘s “The Beginnings of Sorrow” is a deeply disturbing take on metamorphoses as well as apocalypses both large and small, centering on a rural couple with a dog possessed by his master’s deceased and lust-sick father.

Authors include Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Brian Barker, Jenna Bazzell, Nicky Beer, Pinckney Benedict, Kristin Bock, Tina Connolly, David J. Daniels, Darcie Dennigan, Brian Evenson, Seth Fried, TR Hummer, Rodney Jones, Judy Jordan, Kelly Link, Alexander Lumans, Charles Martin, Davis McCombs, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, Marc McKee, Tessa Mellas, Wayne Miller, Simone Muench, Keith Montesano, Joyce Carol Oates, Ed Pavlić, Catherine Pierce, Kevin Prufer, Joshua Robbins, David Roderick, Jeffrey Schultz, Maggie Smith, Chet Weise, Josh Woods, and E. Lily Yu. Cover art by Jason Clark.

Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days is edited by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, and fiction was selected by Alexander Lumans.

Alexander Lumans graduated from the MFA Fiction Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Story Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Blackbird, Surreal South 2011, and The Book of Villains. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and he won the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from the Yalobusha Review. Recently, he was awarded a MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Fall 2011.

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum‘s poems, essays, reviews, podcasts, and interviews recently appear or are forthcoming in The Writers Chronicle, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Missouri Review, storySouth, InsideHigherEd.com, Eclipse, Copper Nickel, New Letters, Glimmer Train, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Potomac Review, and The Southern Indiana Review, among others. He writes a web-column, poetry=am^k, as a Contributing Editor for The Southern Indiana Review, and he is Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek.org, Managing Editor of AdHominem.weebly.com and Acquisitions Editor of Upper Rubber Boot Books. Andrew holds a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale and is an Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Colorado – Denver, Metro State College of Denver, Community College of Denver, and CCCOnline. He currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

What people are saying about Apocalypse Now:

The first short story The Adjudicator, by Brian Evenson is stark and bleak in a post-apocalyptic, terrifyingly realistic world with just enough strangeness to keep you wondering. I can’t wait to read more of this book.

—Diane Severson, “Various and Sundry Science Fiction Poetry,” Amazing Stories, 22 February 2013.

In the midst of this hyperbolic fun, Apocalypse Now is a startlingly serious contribution. Six sections encompass 98 stories and poems, which are fairly evenly across the breadth of the book in tone and topic.
Lured in by the promise of big names like Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi, I fell in love with the sheer variety in this book. Covering more than traditional apocalypse scenarios, it’s a collection of absolute endings.

A story about anarchistic bees sits alongside a poem which describes a woman committing quiet suicide. David J. Daniels nervously relates the ripple-effect of his own mugging in This is the Pink before his spotlight is stolen by a group of cheese miners who are stranded on the moon.

Kelly Link’s surreal, neo-traditional folktale about feuding witches follows a description of God as a lion on the hunt.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of the poetry, but the standard was generally high. Different writers aimed for different things – it was surprising how many plumbed for humour, in the face of all that could be.

—Sarah Dunn, “Apocalypse Now: Revisiting the Daydream,” Nelson Mail, 8 February 2013.

Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days is a treasure-chest of cataclysms. Lumans and McFadyen-Ketchum have ranged far across the landscape of contemporary English-language literature searching for glimpses of upheaval and ruin, and in doing so they have produced something unique: a survey of the present-day apocalyptic imagination in both poetry and fiction. If, like me, you’ve read much of the one and little of the other, you’re bound to make some compelling new discoveries here, and if you’ve read little of either, you’re in for one beautiful harrowing surprise after another.

— Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead and The View from the Seventh Layer

Warning: reading Apocalypse Now may result in side effects like chewed fingernails, heart palpitations, and paranoia so severe that you stockpile dried goods, fill the bathtub with water, hammer plywood over the windows, and oil your rifle.

— Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon, The Wilding, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk

Never before has humanity’s twilight shined so brightly. The poems and stories within Apocalypse Now glitter with a clarity and luster typically reserved for only the purest of gems or the most cutting of insights. The voices here have each taken their own, singular approach to a theme that is as ancient as humanity itself and, in doing so, created a unified theory of the apocalypse: a coming together of our fears, our hopes, our willingness to discover ourselves at the moment we have lost it all, the moment when we stand on the cusp of annihilation and, somehow, cannot look away… but can only sing. And this collection sings like no other.

— Jason Mott, author of The Returned

Table of Contents

(with links to works from the book available online)

Brian Evenson
The Adjudicator
Rodney Jones
Apocalyptic Narrative
Chet Weise
An American Prayer for the Second Coming
Jericho Trumpets
Joyce Carol Oates
Thanksgiving
Judy Jordan
At Winter’s Edge
Moon of Hunger, Moon of Coyote Howl
A Short Drop to Nothing
Ed Pavlic
From: Arachnida Speak
Margaret Atwood
The Silver Astroturfer
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
when the dark heads of sleep
Marysarias
David Roderick
Target
Kelly Link
Catskin
Marc McKee
& I Don’t Sleep, I Don’t Sleep, I Don’t Sleep Till It’s Light
We Are All Going to Die, and I Love You
I Love You and We Are All Going to Die
Electric Company
Darcie Dennigan
Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse
David J. Daniels
This Is the Pink
Alexander Lumans
All the Things the Moon is Not
Brian Barker
Visions for the Last Night on Earth
Gorbachev’s Ubi Sunt from the Future that Soon Will Pass
The Last Songbird
Lullaby for the Last Night on Earth
Maggie Smith
Eliza
Night of the Comet (1984)
On the Beach (1959)
The Quiet Earth (1985)
When Worlds Collide (1951)
Paolo Bacigalupi
The People of Sand and Slag
Simone Muench
Wolf Centos
Who will take the madness from the trees?
I watch my life running away
I have lost my being in so many beings:
The wolf licks her cheeks with
First frost blackens with a cloven hoof;
How long have I left you?—played the wolf
Joshua Robbins
Field Guide to the Second Coming
Tessa Mellas
Blue Sky White
Jenna Bazzell
Into the Damp Woods
Wet Field
Charles Martin
Taken Up
Kristin Bock
Oracle
Icescape
Dear Life Form
Early Gospel
Copilot
Seth Fried
The Siege
Keith Montesano
Love Song for the End of the World
Duet Near the End
Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” Finally Collapses the Radio Waves
Wayne Miller
The Feast
A History of Art
A History of War
VII.
The Dead Moor Speaks
Josh Woods
The Lawgiver
Nicky Beer
Rimbaud’s Kraken
TR Hummer
Post-American
Ooo Baby Baby
The Death of Neruda
Corrosive Lyric
Westbound: Little Cat Feet
Eastbound: The Book of Enoch
Terrorism
Adornment on an Ancient Tomb in Tibet
Fragment of a Perpetually Unfinished Field Guide
Rx
E. Lily Yu
The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees
Jeffrey Schultz
Weekday Apocalyptic
J. Finds in His Pocket Neither Change nor Small Bills
Tina Connolly
Recalculating
Kevin Prufer
Apocalypse
The Enormous Parachute
Army Tales
Who are our Barbarians?
suburbia
a poem of the museum
What We Did With the Empire
Catherine Pierce
Dear Atom Bomb,
Emergence
How it Ends: Three Cities
Fire Blight
Several Days Before the End of the World
Pinckney Benedict
The Beginnings Of Sorrow
Davis McCombs
Gnomon
The Sharecroppers Nightshade
Nineveh
First Hard Freeze Wraith
biomass: a genealogy lone
wet [weather] spring[s]
riddle:

2 comments 21 December 2012

“Nothing. I just punch you in the head as hard as I possibly can.”

The 2012 Strange Horizons Fund Drive is on! Lots of URB anthology contributors have been published by SH over the years, as well as URB’s editor. Authors may be interested to see that a $100 donation can get your book reviewed (though you might not like what they have to say). They have lots of other prizes as well, including a few anthologies from yours truly.

Speaking of URB anthology contributors…

News for 140 And Counting contributors: Chen-ou Liu‘s haiku is up at Issa’s Untidy Hut; and, finalists for the 2012 SFPA Dwarf Stars Award (for the best short-short speculative poem published in the last year) included a ton of my people: Elizabeth Barrette, Robert Borski, Jim Kacian, Julie Bloss Kelsey, David Kopaska-Merkel, Aurelio Rico Lopez III and Marge Simon.

News for Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors: Pinckney Benedict was interviewed recently for both Red Room and Pif, and Kristin Bock‘s OMG-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that-title poem, “I WISH I COULD WRITE A POEM ABOUT POLE-VAULTING ROBOTS” was published October 1st at Verse.

Finally, URB editor Joanne Merriam has a guest blog at Novel Conceptions on beginning a novel.

7 October 2012


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