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Why don't you get out of that boat, sailor, so I can watch you play Halo all day?
1. Ghost Signs has been reviewed by Liz Bourke at Strange Horizons! It is a very positive review:
The poetry here has the brilliance of a knife's edge, sharp and cuttingly clean, saturated with meaning and freighted with significance. And fittingly, given the title, every poem is a ghost. Every poem a katabatic descent to the underworld, a shade glimpsed at the corner of the eye, the whisper of something lost as it teases the edge of memory. If there is one word to describe this collection, it is elegiac.
I am especially honored by this assessment knowing that the reviewer is herself a classicist. It is also a fair call that I cannot expect all of my readers to know the Phoenician name of Carthage or Lesbian Greek. Next collection, endnotes?
2. Have three ghost poems, none of them mine: Pauline Stainer's "The Hangar Ghosts," Greg Delanty's "Another Time," and James Fenton's "Wind." The last may not be strictly a ghost poem, but I don't know how else to categorize the way these lines catch me:
This lord went east and found safety.
His brother sought Africa and a dish of aloes.
3. Courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks: Isabella Rotman, "Siren School." I adore everything about this comic. See the title of this post.
On all these good things, having been awake for nearly twenty-four hours now, I shall try to sleep.
The poetry here has the brilliance of a knife's edge, sharp and cuttingly clean, saturated with meaning and freighted with significance. And fittingly, given the title, every poem is a ghost. Every poem a katabatic descent to the underworld, a shade glimpsed at the corner of the eye, the whisper of something lost as it teases the edge of memory. If there is one word to describe this collection, it is elegiac.
I am especially honored by this assessment knowing that the reviewer is herself a classicist. It is also a fair call that I cannot expect all of my readers to know the Phoenician name of Carthage or Lesbian Greek. Next collection, endnotes?
2. Have three ghost poems, none of them mine: Pauline Stainer's "The Hangar Ghosts," Greg Delanty's "Another Time," and James Fenton's "Wind." The last may not be strictly a ghost poem, but I don't know how else to categorize the way these lines catch me:
This lord went east and found safety.
His brother sought Africa and a dish of aloes.
3. Courtesy of
rushthatspeaks: Isabella Rotman, "Siren School." I adore everything about this comic. See the title of this post.On all these good things, having been awake for nearly twenty-four hours now, I shall try to sleep.
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Thank you!
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Put me down for the footnotes ;)
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People have mentioned this series to me before! I should read it; I need a Carthaginian alternate history that is not Mary Gentle.
Put me down for the footnotes
Data point!
I actually published notes for the poem at the time, but since they were not reprinted in the collection, they did only a very small number of people any good.
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I found Book 1 very readable, but also very alternate history! Planning to go back for books 2 and 3 when there's slightly less of a virtual pile of unread stuff on my Kindle.
Ah, but Ash is more of a Visigothic alternate history ;)
Oh, thank you! Fascinating reading in their own right. Love the epithets for Sappho, including yours :)
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That would be part of the problem! [edit] Some previous discussion of Carthaginians in fiction.
Fascinating reading in their own right. Love the epithets for Sappho, including yours
Thank you!
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And "Siren School" is excellent--I really like (of all things) the instructor's sagging breasts. And this line: "Then make sure that thing that he has to show you happens at THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA"
Plus, all the things that need explaining. The plot of Star Wars, heh.
Bring me, from Africa,
The ash of aloes
... that wasn't the line you quoted? It's the line that came into my head.
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Thank you!
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Thank you! I'm really happy about it. I like that some reviewers enjoy the poetry and some enjoy the fiction and some enjoy both.
And "Siren School" is excellent--I really like (of all things) the instructor's sagging breasts.
It makes sense to me. She's not idealized.
... that wasn't the line you quoted? It's the line that came into my head.
I think that makes you responsible for the rest of the poem.
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I love "Another Time," especially the last lines: "The tragedy is not so much that nobody notices/ a god, but that the gods don’t even know they are gods."
And the comic is awesome.
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Nine
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So noted!
Thank you for your thoughtful and intelligent review.
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It made my Friday, which was otherwise marked mostly by exhaustion and nightmares.
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I really like that the collection is being reviewed well, a full year after publication!
(And yes, endnotes in the next collection would be terrific!)
This idea is gaining traction!
I love "Another Time," especially the last lines: "The tragedy is not so much that nobody notices/ a god, but that the gods don’t even know they are gods."
Yes. That's what got me.
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