Poetry in Intercity Illusions
Intercity Illusions has relatively few poems, compared to my other collections, and what’s more, most of them were previously published. But what’s represented here includes some of my favorite poems.
“Secret Gladiolus” originally appeared in the WLYA 2019 Anthology, alongside a few other pieces by me. It imagines an unusual tattoo and how it changes over time. It’s also a music-inspired poems, taking a riff on a line from a Smiths song.
“Radiance and Obscurity” is one of my proudest accomplishments, as it’s in the form of a paradelle, which is an absolutely bizarre poetry form that has a lot in common with magnetic poetry in that you get a bank of words to work with, and those are the only words allowed in the poem. This one originally appeared in Liquid Imagination. It’s the other music-inspired poem in this collection, referencing “Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing” by The Magnetic Fields.
“He Who is in the Place of Embalming” started with an image of a modernized Anubis, drew a bit from American Gods, and turned into a heart-wrenching poem about love and loss, a theme it shares with “Secret Gladiolus.” It originally appeared in The Weird and Whatnot.
“Motes and Morsels” appeared in Apparition Lit, and it was inspired by a prompt to use a couple of obscure words without defining them, but also making it clear what they meant within the context. This one is the most upbeat of the bunch.
Finally, the one unpublished poem in this collection was “The Adversary,” which, oddly enough, is connected (loosely) to Scenes from a Quiet Apocalypse. If you’ve read that book, you’ll likely spot the connection. And I probably should have included it in that book to begin with. But maybe that’ll be for a future edition.
You can find all these poems in Intercity Illusions, which is available in print and ebook formats!
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