Stephen McClurg's Blog

Soft Skills
What’s wrong with his teeth?
Perfect Euclidean squares
though rotten underneath…

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

Rebus
The book fell off the shelf
and I saw your name on the page
in sentences written a century before.

In the light late at night….

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

Saltings

Crawdaddy Emrick
was ladled and bathed
in swamps and rhetoric.
A life like a card trick…

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

The Kiss
What more can a kiss
do? Can it cure the insecure,
securing wedded bliss?
Are the half-parted lips…

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

Keeping Things Whorled

He asked if I knew any enduring truths
and the only thing that came to mind
was that no truths were enduring.
It wasn’t meant to be flippant or holier-
than-thou, but how I moved through the world
or how the world moved through me….

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

If anything, Pete Nickerson and Gary Gahan, the duo behind Spanned Canyons, should be proud that they nailed the premise of their new conceptual album. The Only Perfect Way for This to End is a nine-track expedition into icebound hell, echoing Dante Alighieri’s ninth circle, where the damned are trapped in a vast frozen lake. Instead of fire and brimstone, this is a soundscape of frostbite: synths, sax, spoken word, and field recordings conjure something between John Carpenter’s The Thing and a drone-ambient séance.

You can read the rest of the review at Horror DNA. The album is available on Bandcamp.

Inlapping 

Flicking tongues in time
against their slantern rhyme, 
a fable in hen’s teeth.

You can get the rest of the poem and the playlist at The Drunken Odyssey.

Another review from FrightFest for the re-release of Malpertuis.

There’s no subtlety in the opening of Malpertuis. The film begins with an image of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, while a child and an adult discuss their reading, offering the audience a set of instructions for what follows: “It’s pretty, but it’s difficult to understand.” “Somehow it makes me think all kinds of things,” the young voice continues, signaling the kind of surreal, dream-soaked cinema we are about to enter.

You can read the rest of the review at Horror DNA.

From FrightFest Uk, a root-scoped cosmic, folk horror vision from Latvia.

The movie opens spectacularly: a grizzled, blindfolded man drags a chain across the desert until he reaches the sea, where he casts it outward and parts the waters. Above him rise two immense legs, ending not in feet but in hooves. Carrying the chain forward, he castrates, presumably, the devil himself, later displaying his trophy as the “Devil’s Balls.” This is our Dog of God, a mythic figure of transformation and violence, heralding the strange journey to come.

You can read the rest of the review at Horror DNA.

In medias res 

Awake at two, and the old scars
still buzz like rooms full of sitars.

A twang in the ashes, brass knuckle radio,
a hundred untuned Dixieland banjos.

If it offends thee, then pluck it out….

You can get the whole poem and the playlist over at The Drunken Odyssey.