Donald Sidney-Fryer / Wade German
The tenth issue of Spectral Realms demonstrates that this journal of weird poetry is going strong as it completes its fifth year of publication. Once again, this issue features the work of many of the leading voices in contemporary weird verse: Wade German, Adam Bolivar, Christina Sng, Frank Coffman, Ann K. Schwader, Chad Hensley, Thomas Tyrrell, and Ian Futter. Manuel Arenas, Liam Garriock, David Barker, and others provide vivid prose-poems. Jeff Hall’s “In the Garden of Thasaidon” is a tribute to Clark Ashton Smith, while Manuel Pérez-Campos’s “The Mirror of Arkham Woe” draws inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space.” The classic reprints feature a pair of scintillating haunted-house poems by the acclaimed American poets Lizette Woodworth Reese and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Marcos Legaria supplies the second part of his study of Clark Ashton Smith’s influence on Robert Nelson, quoting the entirety of Nelson’s vivid poem “Dream-Stair” (Weird Tales, April 1935). Among the reviews, Leigh Blackmore studies the October 2018 issue of Eye to the Telescope, the online journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and Donald Sidney-Fryer contributes a review-article on the brilliant work of G. Sutton Breiding. As a special bonus, a complete index of authors and titles to all ten issues of Spectral Realms is provided.
