Sunday recs: A bunch of lovely poetry from Goblin Fruit

Published on by Sara Norja Category: linkage, poetry

I had so many poems from Goblin Fruit marked as “rec this” that I thought I’d put them all in the same goblintastic post. They’re from the newest issue as well as a couple of the older ones.

The Vow of Frozen Time by Alexandra Seidel, from the Winter 2014 issue. The language in this poem is simply gorgeous. The French adds a layer of magic and the attention to word-magic gives me that special kind of shiver that only poetry can accomplish.

The Right of It by Seanan McGuire (also from the Winter 2014 issue) is a great feminist reimagining of Snow White.

Learning My Way Around by Neile Graham, from the Autumn 2011 issue. A gorgeous call to adventure.

Lexicon by Kristin Gulotta, from the Spring 2013 issue. More word-magic – a delicious dictionary-poem.

Lastly, fittingly for the month, there’s April by Nita Sembrowich, also from the Spring 2013 issue. Such a breathtaking evocation of the wonder of spring – and those last lines! “treading on dragons / that time has turned to stone”… Magic.

Whan that Aprill…

Published on by Sara Norja Category: creative on the blog, discussion, personal babble, poems on the blog, poetry

033I’m not participating in NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) in any official way, but I have set myself a writing goal for April: to write something new every day, whether it’s poetry or prose. Shitty or good, three words or three thousand – it doesn’t matter, as long as I write something.

The first three days, it’s been poetry. I’ve opened up something in myself again – poetry feels easy as breathing right now. It’s not always good poetry, of course not; but then again, not every breath you take is amazing. Sometimes you don’t breathe deep enough, sometimes you inhale someone’s cigarette smoke. But every breath means you’re alive.

Same with poetry (and other writing too): in first/zero drafts, there will be shitty lines, unfortunate word choices, ideas that just don’t work. Some of the problems can be eliminated when editing, and sometimes a poem just isn’t meant to go further than the initial word-blargh. But it’s all writing, and that makes it valuable. When I write, when I’m all a-flutter with word-wonder, it’s worth all the stilted sentences and unviable ideas, as long as I keep on going. All that is gold does not glitter in the first draft!

I’m going to share today’s poem here because it’s just a silly little thing, born out of my frustration at the changeable weather. It’s also a homage to those two famous April poets: Geoffrey Chaucer and T.S. Eliot. April invariably makes me start quoting The Canterbury Tales and The Waste Land to myself. 🙂

*

Fool April

April, you old trickster
pouring rain-sleet-snow
long after we thought
we were done with all that –
no shoures soote these!
You batter us with change,
teasing us with dreams
of sun-warmth and spring

and then, cackling,
you pelt us with winter’s
foulest leftover scraps.
Cruellest month, indeed.

*

Sunday recs: Mundanity, elephants, opera and a coffee shop

Published on by Sara Norja Category: linkage, short stories

This week’s Sunday Recs presents four very different stories – all of them awesome. (Well, duh, otherwise I’d hardly be recommending that you read them!)

Relentlessly Mundane by Jo Walton. This was published in Strange Horizons 14 years ago, but I only just found it while looking for, like, everything that Jo Walton has written ever. (I’ve enjoyed every novel of hers that I’ve read so far; should read the remaining ones too.) Anyway, ‘Relentlessly Mundane’ is a response to the question I’m sure a lot of us have had after reading the Narnia books: coming back home after saving the other world, how do you go back to ordinary life?

Njàbò by Claude Lalumière, in Expanded Horizons. Intriguing story with a warm strangeness to it. I’m actually not sure about the ending – it didn’t entirely work for me – but I really liked the story otherwise. The atmosphere is really unique, and there are polyamorous relationships that just exist as part of the background of the story, not as anything “edgy”. Refreshing and awesome.

The Suitcase Aria by Marissa Lingen, in Strange Horizons. The setting in this story isn’t something you see in every other specfic: it’s a weird eighteenth-century Berlin opera house. The strangeness in this nix story is nicely subtle.

Today’s final rec is Surprise Me by Andrew Knighton, in Daily Science Fiction. This story about a special sort of coffee shop is just adorable. Read it and feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

Niteblade Fundraiser 2014

Published on by Sara Norja Category: linkage, promotion

Niteblade is a great fantasy/horror magazine, with an awesome mix of prose and poetry in each issue. And now it’s time for the annual fundraiser.

If you want to help Niteblade continue doing its awesome thing, consider donating a few (or more) dollars at the fundraising campaign site here! In addition to feeling good about helping a magazine keep going, there are also some pretty cool perks, ranging from original art from the magazine covers to receiving a story critique.

Some things I’ve enjoyed, published in Niteblade:

Heaven & Earth, a poem (well, a duo of poems, really) by Adrienne J. Odasso.

Locket, a story by Kristi DeMeester (trigger warning: incest, abuse).

The Language of Flowers, a poem by Alicia Cole.

Sunday recs: Four poems

Published on by Sara Norja Category: linkage, poetry

Poems!

I’ve been writing a poem a day for the past week, so today’s recs are poetry too.

Tintagel, by Beth Langford (in Goblin Fruit). The language and imagery in this poem are just gorgeous!

Tesseract: A Parent’s Guide to Time Travel, by Kimberly Gladman (in Wild Violet). A lovely homage to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

Hands, by David Filer (also in Wild Violet). I have a thing for hands, and this poem captures part of why.

Finally, Asphalt Story #84 by my talented friend Kat Soini (in The Missing Slate). A raw, beautiful poem on the business of love.

Sunday recs: Speculative prose and two issues’-worth of poetry

Published on by Sara Norja Category: linkage, poetry, short stories

I was thinking of posting a rant about how difficult writing fiction in Finnish is for me (I was attempting such a thing last night), but I think I’ll go for Sunday recs instead. How my bilingualism comes across in my writing is a topic I want to write a more thoughtful post on.

So, on to other people’s writing:

Prose

Two stories I’ve recently read and enjoyed:

In the Greenwood by Mari Ness at Tor.com. I’ve always liked Robin Hood stories, and this was a nice take on the tale. When a tale is well-known, you can write around its edges. That often makes for intriguing stuff. (Also, the illustration is gorgeous!)

What Is Expected of a Wedding Host by Ken Liu at Daily Science Fiction. I love pieces that play with the forms a story can take – this list of instructions for a person accepting an alien parasite is a great example. Also, it’s quite funny too. Always appreciated. 🙂

Poetry

As for poetry – I’m going to rec two whole issues, because there was just too much intriguing stuff in them and they work so well as a whole.

February’s Snakeskin was a special issue featuring poetry comics – here. I was going to submit some stuff to it last autumn, but in the end I felt too busy and stressed out to work on anything “new” in terms of form. Sad. Anyway, poetry comics are a form I’m interested in, and it was great to see a whole collection of them in Snakeskin. It’s inspired me to do some of my own and not stress about it so much. The art doesn’t have to be perfect. It should be fun as well. Perhaps poetry comics could be a way of keeping up my old art hobby! (It’s mostly fallen by the wayside due to all the million other things I do.)

Stone Telling’s 10th issue, Body, is all-round amazing. I love the depth of thought that has gone into selecting the poems for this issue. They tie together so well. Read the whole issue! Some poems that especially hit me were The Honey Times by Cathy Bryant
and Trance for Insomniacs by J.C. Runolfson. C.S.E. Cooney’s And I’ll Dance With You Yet, My Darling is a great final poem for the issue.

Sunday recs: Two SF stories

Published on by Sara Norja Category: linkage, short stories

I’ve been reading some pretty awesome SF stories lately. Here are two favourites from Strange Horizons:

The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter by Damien Angelica Walters. This near-future (I assume!) story set in a space station orbiting Earth treads the borderline of speculative and mainstream pretty neatly. Also, Aliens references FTW. 🙂

The Long Road to the Deep North by Lavie Tidhar. Simply put: this story blew me away with its awesomeness. It has poems in a linguistically viable asteroid pidgin! I love it when people deal with language in stories (and I often do so myself – can’t help it, I did linguistics at uni and language has always been deeply fascinating to me). The atmosphere is lush, full of the kind of science-fictional future details that I love: strange quirky things that build the story-world into such a delightful creature that I wish there was more of it. And yet this is a brilliant story exactly the way it is. I almost cried at the end because of the sheer beauty of words and images. Please read this. It’s an unconventional story in some ways, but so gorgeous.

Sunday recs: Kate Elliott and Ursula Le Guin

Published on by Sara Norja Category: linkage, novelette, short stories

To my intense delight, Kate Elliott posted a Valentine’s Day gift for her readers on her blog on Friday: a coda to her wonderful Spiritwalker trilogy (Cold Magic, Cold Fire, Cold Steel). Since it’s a coda, this novelette obviously contains massive spoilers. So, it will only make sense if you’ve read the trilogy. (If you haven’t, why, go and get yourself those books! I’ve plugged them here before, but really, I haven’t had such a squee reaction to a series in ages, and they totally deserve all the love they can get.) Anyway, the novelette was lovely, it resolved some things I’d really wanted to know about. And I do love getting more glimpses of the world Elliott’s created even though the trilogy has ended. 🙂

And for all of you who have not read the Spiritwalker trilogy, go and read Ursula K. Le Guin’s piece Elementals over at Lightspeed Magazine. This is a wonderful secret history type piece – it’s not really a story, in the traditional sense, but it’s wonderful. It made me think about what a glorious, secret planet we live on despite the mundanity of daily life.

I’m high on writing and folk music and dance tonight, so just these two recs for now. I think it’s time for me to go and find something to eat, and then perhaps write some more.

‘Helsinki Love Song’ online in Wild Violet

Published on by Sara Norja Category: personal babble, poetry, publication

My poem ‘Helsinki Love Song’ is one of the featured works in Wild Violet’s Valentine’s Day week series.

‘Helsinki Love Song’

I don’t like Valentine’s Day much due to the focus on a very restricted type of love – Finland is better in that respect, because here it’s known as ystävänpäivä, ‘Friend Day’, and is marketed with less of an emphasis on the heteronormative syrupy give-her-roses type romance. Much more inclusive of all kinds of love. 🙂

‘Helsinki Love Song’ is described by the Wild Violet folks as “celebrat[ing] the emotion produced by a place”. Accurate. This city has its ups and downs, but I love it. At the moment I wrote the poem (in August 2012) I was feeling a particularly delirious love for Helsinki and the weird, wonderful things that can take place here.

Have a good Friend Day, and I hope you enjoy the poem! I love the picture chosen to go with it, too – very evocative of the late-summer beauty that inspired the poem.