Anthropomorphisms

by Bruce Boston, Marge Simon (Illustrator)

Anthropomorphisms brings together all of Boston's "people
poems"—cat people, ghost people, gargoyle people, werewolf people, etc. Most of these poems first appeared in Asimov's SF and Strange Horizons. Includes nine original illustrations by Marge Simon.

Titles within:
- Assassin (with illustration)
- Asteroid
- Beat
- Bird
- Bone (with illustration)
- Brick, Concrete, and Steel
- Can
- Cat
- Champagne
- Chess (with illustration)
- Cockroach
- Crow (with illustration)
- Dog
- Dragon
- Dream
- Fox and Chicken
- Gargoyle
- Ghost (with illustration)
- Golden
- Gray
- Harvest
- Holo
- Knife
- Lice (with illustration)
- Marble
- Mole
- Paper
- Parchment
- Puppet (with illustration)
- Rat
- Robot
- Sheep
- Star
- Sun
- Surreal
- Werewolf
- Wind (with illustration)

Genres: Fantasy, Poetry

76 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2012

About the author

I've published more than sixty books and chapbooks, including the novels Stained Glass Rain and the best-of fiction collection Masque of Dreams. My work ranges from broad humor to literary surrealism, with many stops along the way for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. My novel The Guardener's Tale (Sam's Dot, 2007) was a Bram Stoker Award Finailist and a Prometheus Award Nominee. My stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of publications, including Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase, and received a number of awards, most notably, a Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov's Readers' Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. For more information, please visit my website at http://www.bruceboston.com/

Reviews

[DivaDiane SM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this collection. Anyone can read and enjoy these poems. Please see my full review on Amazing Stories:

http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/03/...

[Eileen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars. Not complex, but approachable poetry with a speculative premise. (As reviewed on NewMyths.com. Review copy provided by the publisher/author.) Each poem in Bruce Boston’s collection Anthropomorphisms begins with a simple premise: what if the world was made up of a certain type of people? Asteroid people, champagne people, star people, gargoyle people, golden people, harvest people, mole people, rat people—the anthropomorphisms go on. As poetry often does, these pieces meander between the realms of the poetic-realism and the speculative without stopping to distinguish between the two.

The kind of poetry I’m used to delights in the elevated if sometimes overly-obscure vocabulary coupled with devastating personal truths—Anthropomorphisms isn’t that kind of poetry. Rather, the language of Bruce Boston’s poetry reads not as cadence-heavy phrasings, but as prosaic sentences seasoned with line breaks. The thoughts track without overmuch work on the reader’s part and build to short bursts of realization, never over-wrought odes.

Boston uses this simple language to interesting effect, sometimes taking us into the unsavory world of imagining life as bugs—“If lice people / were the world / we would cultivate / vast fields of flesh”—then skipping back to consider the world entirely peopled by man’s best friend, “We would bark fiercely at strangers as they / would bark back in return.” Even creating the shiny dystopia of “Golden People.”

In simplicity can lie great wonder. Bruce Boston’s poetry proves this. On one page his work contemplates the lives of "Dream People":

If dream people were the world
we would inhabit a singular
consciousness that would
be pulled through one
inexplicable scenario
after another
like a goat upon a rope.

And then uses that same simplicity of language to break our hearts. In “Puppet People,” Boston writes of lying helpless, waiting to be given voice and motion, but more devastating than that: “Most of the time / we would not dream.”

[Michael Brady · Rating 3 out of 5]

The other week I learned that I was the winner of a First Reads copy of Anthropomorphisms by Bruce Boston. Last evening I found my free copy of Anthropomorphisms in the mail. It's a slim volume; 70 some pages pages contain 40 some poems which have been published separately in a variety of SF, fantasy, and horror magazines. Many of these brief poems are simply whimsical, but more than a few of Boston's poetic turns of phrase made me say "Wow!" I am not usually a poetry person so I enjoyed stretching my horizons.