Speculative poetry travels winding roads leading to wondrous worlds, regions never traversed by mainstream verse. Fantastic poems range in the material they treat from the strange but explainable to the utterly fanciful, from horror to wonder, and from the rigidly verisimilitudinous to the purely surrealist. They may utilize traditional prosody or may avail themselves of the discontinuities and fragmentation of modernist free verse. They may use as setting the primary world, a secondary world, or a combination of the two. With roots planted firmly in the mythic and folkloric epics and ballads of yore, and branches reaching high into the endless skies of modern fantasy, science fiction, and horror, speculative poetry is a historic and vital poetic genre, the source of the most thoughtful, imaginative verse being written today.
Red Sky features over 100 years' worth of speculative poetry from yesterday's masters, modern award winners, and emerging stars. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, metaphysical encounters and startling futuristic speculations, these poems will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of speculative poetry.
"Enkindling dawns of memory,
Each sun had radiance to relume
A sealed, disused, and darkened room
Within the soul's immensity.
Their alien ciphers shown and lit,
I understood what each had writ
Upon my spirit's scroll;
Again I wore mine ancient lives,
And knew the freedom and the gyves
That formed and marked my soul."
Willy In The Nano Lab by Geoffrey A. Landis
Cybernetic Sestina by E.S. Wynn
Fatigue Of The Marionettes by Karen Neuberg
The Fate Of Worlds by William Cullen, Jr.
The Star-Treader by Clark Ashton Smith
On This Outlying Planet by J.J. Steinfeld
Close Encounters Of The Unique Kind by Adina Newman -
Redder Soil, Greener Grass by Sara Bickley
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
Lost And Found by Fanni Suto
To No End Death by Seth Frederiksen
Shine Down On Me by David Revilla
Rain Check: version 36 by Chris Fradkin
Songs From An Evil Wood by Edward Plunkett
Aerial Corps Enlistment by David S. Pointer
What The Robots Know by Alyssa Black
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
Flowing by Adrian George Nicolae
You by Nora May French
Pigeon Boy by Kyle Hemmings
Repairman by John Grey
Anastacia, Girl No. S10230 File: Insurgent by Carmen Tudor
Rise Of The Machines by Stephanie Rose
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
Fungi From Yuggoth by H.P. Lovecraft
The Landing by Matthew Wilson
The Green Hills Of Earth by Robert A. Heinlein
The Visitors by Ed Higgins
Locksley Hall by Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Stars Are Calling by Mathias Jansson
Discombobulation by Rami Sebai
Shadow Of Dreams by Robert E. Howard
Armageddon by M.A. Crawford
The Hosting Of The Sidhe by William Butler Yeats
The Centaurs by Rudyard Kipling
Lamia by John Keats
Queen Mab by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Hunting Of The Dragon by G.K. Chesterton
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