Adam Bolivar / Donald Sidney-Fryer
Spectral Realms completes its eighth year of publication with an issue that displays the full gamut of expression in weird poetry. Aside from contributions by some of the leading exponents of terror in verse (Christina Sng, Adam Bolivar, Ann K. Schwader, Wade German, Frank Coffman), we have such distinctive items as Ngo Binh Anh Khoa’s adaptation of a Korean poetic form to the King in Yellow mythos; Adele Gardner’s evocative poem on Edgar Allan Poe; David Barker’s ongoing reinterpretations of Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth; Scott J. Couturier’s tribute to the inherent strangeness of cats ('Gray Grimalkin'); Carl E. Reed’s grim ballad of World War I ('We Met in No-Man’s Land'); Margaret Curtis’s paean to the 'Zombie Moon'; and Lori I. Lopez’s long poem on the whippoorwill. In addition, prose-poems by Maxwell I. Gold, LindaAnn LoSchiavo, Harris Coverley, Jay Sturner, and Manuel Arenas grace the issue. The 'Classic Reprints' include poems by two California poets of more than a century ago, Ina Coolbrith and Henry Anderson Lafler. Donald Sidney-Fryer reviews the correspondence of Clark Ashton Smith and Samuel Loveman as well as a new, expanded edition of Loveman’s collected poetry and other writings, Out of the Immortal Night. All in all, another rich feast for the devotee of the weird in poetry.
