I’m delighted that Pegasus Books will publish Ashes and Stones in North America. The hardback will be available on 3 October, 2023. Preorders are open now.
a moving reminder for us all to connect with what’s gone before
–The Stylist
My Fitcher’s Bird Sestina is up at the beautifully edited Sycorax Journal. It’s one of a collection of 13 poems, all new versions of traditional bird-lore fairy tales. Fitcher’s Bird is a Grimm’s Bluebeard tale, and I have set it to the music of the sestina form. I have long been obsessed with the fractal like structure of sestinas, with their intricate feeling of spiralling return.
My piece on the Maggie Wall monument, “The Cairn” will appear in issue 2 of Rituals and Declarations, now available for preorder here. (cover by Maria Strutz)
I’m delighted that a poem of mine will be included in the Monster Verse, Poems Human and Inhuman anthology, to be published by Random House on September 15th, 2015. The anthology is edited by Tony Barnstone and Michelle Mitchell-Foust.
About the anthology, from the Random House website:
Humans have always defined themselves by imagining the inhuman; the gloriously gruesome monsters that enliven our literary legacy haunt us by reflecting our own darkest possibilities. The poems gathered here range in focus from extreme examples of human monstrousness—murderers, cannibals, despotic Byzantine empresses—to the creatures of myth and nightmare: dragons, sea serpents, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, witches, and all sorts of winged, fanged, and fire-breathing grotesques. The ghastly parade includes Beowulf’s Grendel, Homer’s Circe, William Morris’s Fafnir, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, Robert Lowell’s man-eating mermaid, Oriana Ivy’s Baba Yaga, Thom Gunn’s take on Jeffrey Dahmer, and Shakespeare’s hybrid creature Caliban, of whom Prospero famously concedes, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Monster Verse is both a delightful carnival of literary horror and an entertainingly provocative investigation of what it means to be human.
Allyson Shaw, Author of Ashes and Stones 