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Sunday recs: Four poems

Published on by Sara Norja

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

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

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

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.

Sunday recs: My favourites from Interfictions #2

Published on by Sara Norja

So, there was a lot of awesome stuff in Issue #2 of Interfictions (my Orthography: A Personal History is in some great company!). Here are three pieces that especially struck me:

My Language, My Voice by Alexandra Seidel really resonates with me. Lovely so have such a bilingual exploration in Interfictions. My own piece had snippets of the sort, but Seidel approaches it from a different viewpoint. A familiar one. OK, so in creative writing I am mostly rather monolingually English, but when it comes to everyday being, it’s two languages in tandem all the time. (I should do a post on bilingualism at some point, actually.)

Peel by Maria Romasco-Moore is a great example of what you can do with poetry comics. It’s a form I’d love to explore properly at some point.

The Mechanism of Moving Forward by Nikki Alfar is historical fiction that feels like speculative fiction. Beautifully written, this story felt like perfectly brewed sencha drunk from a blue-patterned cup.

Sunday recs: Poetry for a frosty evening

Published on by Sara Norja

I’m drinking rooibos tea, all cosied up in a self-knitted shawl and wrist warmers. Mmm, knitted things.

I discovered some poem links I’ve been meaning to share for ages, so here’s a few brilliant poems to brighten your Sunday evening:

Foam, Braided with Teeth by Michele Bannister over at Stone Telling. I love Bannister’s poems and recognise a certain kinship in the way we use language – her Anglo-Saxonesque hyphenated compound words ring very familiar to me. I love this poem. Read aloud, it sings.

The next poems are apparently all from Strange Horizons. Not too surprising, I suppose, since it’s one of the magazines I read most regularly. (I have so much catching up to do with all the gorgeous zines, though!)

Three Visions Seen from Upside-Down by Alexandra Seidel. This is a strange one, but a good kind of strange. Like a lot of Seidel’s poetry, it has a creepy fairy tale vibe: awesome.

the houses of girl-ghosts by Cassandra de Alba. So gorgeous – what a word-painting!

The Loss” by Mari Ness. Short, piercing, beautiful: wing-loss and longing.

Sunday recs: Romance, domesticity and demons

Published on by Sara Norja

Long time no recs! So, here’s some stories I’ve read in the past few months but have not recced.

(On the Nanowrimo front, there is not much to report. I’ve been too lazy and tired to work on my novel edits, I’ll admit – but today I managed to get a bit done. Will try to pick up pace again.)

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The Bride in Furs, by Layla Lawlor, is from the issue of Plunge Magazine that also featured my poem ‘The Understanding’. This story is lovely, a refreshing fairytale-esque romantic fantasy.

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My next two recs are both stories by Rose Lemberg (both published in Strange Horizons, incidentally).

Teffeu is just wonderful. This is an awesome reminder of what diverse things speculative fiction can be. Teffeu is bibliophilic, lushly descriptive, quiet and introspective. Beautifully written: Rose Lemberg knows how to use her words.

Kifli is rooted in the everyday, with a touch of Jewish mythology and overseas longing. I love stories that feature food as an important element, too, even though they usually make me hungry.

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Stories that feature food made me remember a wonderful book I read this summer: Jo Walton’s Lifelode. I had to time my reading with my mealtimes because there was so much delicious food in that book. What a delightful book otherwise too! It’s been called “domestic fantasy” and I want more of that stuff, yes please. To my great delight, Lifelode also features unconventional relationship structures and conceptions of love. I wish more speculative fiction would ponder such things and not just default to Western society’s predominant models.

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To finish off, here’s another wonderfully inventive story: Brimstone and Marmalade by Aaron Corwin, from Tor.com. The main character Mathilde receives a demon for her birthday – and yes, this is a normal occurrence. Loved the subtly wonky world here, and the demon was just adorable (“NUM. NUM. NUM.” Read the story and comprehend the adorableness!).

Addendum

Published on by Sara Norja

Oh – in my previous post I totally forgot to say that you should definitely read all the other poems in the current issue of Through the Gate as well as mine! The other poems are by Bogi Takács, Rose Lemberg, Mari Ness and Sonya Taaffe, and they’re gorgeous pieces every one of them.

I’m incredibly happy to be part of an issue with such talented writers. I’ve enjoyed and admired the work of all four of these people for quite a while, so it’s rather amazing to be in such company in this issue of Through the Gate.

inkscrawl: the journey

Published on by Sara Norja

It’s half past midnight; I should be in bed. I can never manage this go-to-sleep early thing, even on work nights… *sigh* But before I rush off to brush my teeth and do my physiotherapy exercises (for my neck/back), a quick rec:

inkscrawl is a lovely poetry magazine, publishing speculative poetry of ten lines or shorter. I’ve liked the zine for quite a while – excellent minimalist poetry is such a sharp and direct joy.

The current issue, entitled the journey, is exceptionally wonderful. It’s such a beautiful whole that I really recommend reading all of it, in order – the structure is thought out and works very well.

Some pieces I especially enjoyed from this issue of inkscrawl:

– Alexandra Seidel’s The Adventurer Recalls Showing The Cartographer Her World.
– Genevieve MacKay’s Heptade.
– Peg Duthie’s Even an Empty Life Can Hold Water.
– Adrienne J. Odasso’s Fallout.
– S. Brackett Robertson’s Sowing Passage.
– Sonya Taaffe’s Larva.

…Just go and read the whole issue. It’s full of such beautiful word-magic.

Sunday recs: Zombies, gender fluidity, alternative families

Published on by Sara Norja

Time for Sunday recs! I’ve been reading some excellent stuff lately – poetry too, but let’s go for prose first.

Story recs
So, zombies are pretty much everywhere these days, but I haven’t actually read that much zombie fiction. (My consumption has been in the form of comics and films.) This story in Niteblade is a really good zombie story, though, told from an interesting perspective: Compassion, During and After the Fall, by Cory Cone.

My second rec is an SF story about spices, asteroids, and the fluidity of gender – Alex Dally MacFarlane’s Found, in Clarkesworld. Reading it, I could taste the spices in my mouth. Also, it’s wonderful to read stories with characters who don’t fit the gender binary! “I finally realized, two years later, chewing thyme on an outlying asteroid where six people stubbornly survived, that I was like Thyme: ill-suited to ‘boy’ or ‘girl.'”

Final story rec: Super Bass by Kai Ashante Wilson on Tor.com. This is really good – such lush language, really cool dialect stuff. I love reading stories where the writer has really thought about the language, and this is definitely one of them. Also in the story: different gender presentations and polyamorous family structures; and a non-conflict plot!

Finally, a book rec:
Kate Elliott’s newest, the final book of the Spiritwalker trilogy: Cold Steel. I’ve squeed about the trilogy before on this blog, but now that I’ve read the final book, I will squee once more. I haven’t been this excited about a book series for ages! I love pretty much everything about these books: the alternate-world ice age setting with its cultural and ethnic diversity; the living, breathing characters; the dialogue; and the fast-moving plot. I really admire Kate Elliott, and love what she’s done with her alternate Europa.

She describes the overall story (here) as:

an Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency fantasy adventure with airships, Phoenician spies, and the intelligent descendants of troodons.

Add to that a wonderful narrator, spirit courts, amazing characters (both female and male), shark-punching, and revolutionary politics. I mean, really, just go and read the series, you will not regret it!