Category: Poetry

Articles, Poetry, SFF, Short stories

Reckoning 7

OJ

I have a new book out! Or, more honestly, I am one of a number of people who have contributed to a new book being out. Reckoning, which published creative work on environmental justice, was kind enough to let me sign on as fiction editor for their issue 7, along with Priya Chand (nonfiction editor) and Tim Fab-Eme (poetry editor). Together the three of us, with the help of a number of excellent editorial readers, put together this year’s issue of Reckoning, which we themed around oceans and the global water system.

Each of the several dozen pieces that we picked will be available to read for free online throughout the year. You can see the menu and the publication schedule here. If you’d like to purchase the entire wonderful issue, however, the ebook is available now, and the print release is scheduled for July; details are at the link. There’s over 250 pages of excellent writing there! And that cover, Drua, by Elsie Andrewes, is gorgeous.

Speaking of the fiction writers included in this issue… their work is incredible. From the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the local swimming hole, from dolphins and sharks and burials at sea, these are hopeful stories of people working to make our watery world a more just and sustainable place. Please take a look.

Papers, Poetry

The Ghosts of Coastlines Past

OJ

I have a new paper out! “The Ghosts of Coastlines Past: Eco-Poetry and the Oceanic Ecological Gothic” has been published in volume three of Gothic Nature, which was themed around “Haunted Shores.”

There’s a lot of ways for shores to be haunted. Shipwrecks, for example, and drownings. But I’d been reading a lot of poetry around about the time I sent in an abstract for this, and I was interested in the idea of hauntings that hadn’t yet happened… the hauntings we’re in the process of creating now. That haunting is rather more scientific than spectral. It came out of a news article, too – down in Wellington, where I used to live, are little blue penguins, and they’re lovely wee things. But in a recent breeding season, a third of the chicks died. The cause of death was starvation. The warming waters of the harbour had affected their food supply, and the penguins died. Awful, isn’t it? Climate change is affecting our oceans, so what are our future coastlines going to look like? What absences are we creating, what potential for ghosts?

Some of the poetry collections I was reading addressed this in one or more of their poems, such as Jorie Graham’s Sea Change. Some, like Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué‘s Losing Miami, took a cultural approach, addressing the future loss of entire cities.

The possibilities of future ghosts, I thought, were immense. So I wrote the paper, and the entire issue is free to read online here, should you be so inclined. Thank you to the editors and the poets for their incredible work!

Poetry, Science

Radioactivity

OJ

I have a new poem out! To be perfectly honest it came out a couple of months ago, but I’m behind on updating the website, so I suppose if you haven’t come across said poem yet it’s new to you. Anyway, “Radioactivity” is free to read in the wonderful Uncanny Magazine. I’ve sold to Uncanny before, but never a poem, so it’s lovely to be in there again, and in a different form.

“Radioactivity” is a poem about Marie Curie. She’s a scientist I have always admired, and let’s face it, when you think of the history of women in science she’s at the very top, or close to it. My favourite story about her is referenced briefly in the poem. It’s about her cookbook. Now, when Marie was researching radiation, it was the big new thing in science and no-one really understood that it wasn’t the best idea to shove highly radioactive material in your pockets and handle it with bare hands and so on. But Marie had her hands and her pockets, and when she finished working in the lab for the day she’d go home and cook her family dinner, and when she did the radioactive material that was smeared all over her fingers transferred to the pages of her cookbook, as she flipped through it looking for recipes. That cookbook still exists. It’s in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and to this day it’s so radioactive that it needs to be kept in a lead-lined box.

I love that story. It makes Curie seem so utterly human… as does, I hope, the rest of the poem.

Horror, Poetry

Mary Shelley nominated for a Stoker

OJ

This is exciting news for me – my collection, Mary Shelley Makes A Monster, has been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award! It’s up for superior achievement in a poetry collection, which is nice for me as it’s my first Stoker nod. So I’m very happy about that, and happy too to be sharing the category with the other nominated poets: Linda D. Addison, Alessandro Manzetti, Donna Lynch, Michelle Scalise, Marge Simon, Bryan D. Dietrich, and Stephanie M. Wytovich.

Voting’s going on now, but the final results won’t be announced until later this year at StokerCon UK. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend as I’ll be in the middle of my writer’s residency at Massey University here in New Zealand, but it’s still great to be nominated.

Poetry, SFF

Mary Shelley Makes A Monster

OJ

My second poetry collection is out! Mary Shelley Makes A Monster is published by Aqueduct Press. The title poem was originally published in Strange Horizons and was inspired by a biography of Shelley. And, of course, by Frankenstein…

All our monsters are mirrors. And when Mary Shelley’s second monster (built from her life rather than her pen, born out of biography instead of blood) outlives its mother, that monster goes looking for a substitute. But all the monster really knows of women is that women write, and so the search for a replacement takes it first to Katherine Mansfield, and then to other women who know what mutilated things can be made from ink and mirrors… Virginia Woolf. Janet Frame. Sylvia Plath. Grace Mera Molisa. Octavia Butler. Angela Carter. Murasaki Shikibu. The monster stares into each of them, has their words carved into its tongue, their nails drawn down its back, their toothmarks embedded in its heart.

When it goes out into the world, no-one can tell the difference.

Available in print and ebook.